Table Of Content

the game of probability Cultural Memory in the Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors THE GAME OF PROBABILITY Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist Rüdiger Campe Translated by Ellwood H. Wiggins, Jr. stanford university press stanford, california Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist was originally published in German under the title Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2002. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campe, Rüdiger, author. [Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. English] The game of probability : literature and calculation from Pascal to Kleist / Rüdiger Campe ; translated by Ellwood H. Wiggins, Jr. pages cm. — (Cultural memory in the present) “Originally published in German under the title Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8047-6864-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-6865-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. European literature—17th century—History and criticism. 2. European literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. Probability in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural memory in the present. PN744.C3613 2012 809'.93384—dc23 2012010489 Contents Introduction 1 part i. games for example: modeling probability 1 Theology and the Law: Dice in the Air 15 2 Numbers and Calculation in Context: The Game of Decision—Pascal 37 3 Writing the Calculation of Chances: Justice and Fair Game—Christiaan Huygens 73 4 Probability, a Postscript to the Theory of Chance: Logic and Contractual Law—Arnauld, Leibniz, Pufendorf 97 5 Probability Applied: Ancient Topoi and the Theory of Games of Chance—Jacob Bernoulli 118 6 Continued Proclamations: The Law of logica probabilium—Leibniz 147 7 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, or, The Improbability of Survival 172 part ii. verisimilitude spelled out: the appearance of truth 8 Numbers and Tables in Narration: Jurists and Clergymen and Their Bureaucratic Hobbies 195 9 Novels and Tables: Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Schnabel’s Die Insel Felsenburg 220 viii Contents 10 The Theory of Probability and the Form of the Novel: Daniel Bernoulli on Utility Value, the Anthropology of Risk, and Gellert’s Epistolary Fiction 248 11 “Improbable Probability”: The Theory of the Novel and Its Trope—Fielding’s Tom Jones and Wieland’s Agathon 273 12 The Appearance of Truth: Logic, Aesthetics, and Experimentation—Lambert 305 13 “Probable” or “Plausible”: Mathematical Formula Versus Philosophical Discourse—Kant 338 14 Kleist’s “Improbable Veracities,” or, A Romantic Ending 369 Conclusion 391 Notes 399 Bibliography 465 Introduction The term “probability” implies the notion of reality. In Europe from antiquity to the early modern era, at least, this was long held to be the case. Speaking of probability—of what approaches or appears simi- lar to truth—meant making a statement or assumption very different in its stance toward the actual world from the truth of science and philosophy. The standards of reliability and mutual understanding that politi- cians adhered to in their debates and people used in everyday life, as well as those attributed to poetry and the rhetorical arts, were not supposed to meet the criteria of truth. Instead, probability was thought to provide a kind of reliability and mutual understanding that did not owe its existence to criteria for true knowledge and efforts to define and establish them. With probability, orators and writers presupposed the existence of a reality that philosophy and science had to take into account. With its universal claims and rational imperatives, science had to prove and justify itself before reality. “Probability,” then, was the password for access to this real world that set up camp around the fortified city of the sciences. This claim admittedly presents a partial view of what probability meant in antiquity and the persistence of this meaning into early moder- nity. It was not reality itself, but rather a watchword that opened the door to reality. With the term “probability,” one assumed reality and made use of this assumption. Only under the aegis of probability could reality become a subject of knowledge, whether in philosophy, science, or history. When lawyers produced probable arguments before the court, when