Marie-Rose Logan - Is Zarathusra No Loger a Scholar

boundary 2 37:3 (2010)DOI 10.1215/01903659-2010-018 2010 by Duke University Press

In Critical Humanism

Is Zarathustra No Longer a Scholar? The Future of Philology

Marie-Rose Logan

As George Huppert notes in The Idea of Perfect History, Renais-sance historians did not add notes at the bottom of the page to ensure the veracity of their quoted material.1 The practice developed in the nine-teenth century among German historians who followed the lead of practi-tioners of classical philology, a discipline also known in English as clas-sical scholarship and in German as Altertumswissenschaft (the science of antiquity). Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Altertums-wissenschaft had become the leading field in the humanities, as well as in the then burgeoning social sciences. In some ways, the momentum has never been lost. Scholarly publi-cationsbe they books or articlesmake their way into press only if they are appropriately footnoted. These notes guarantee that the author has done the necessary homework and that the published work promises to

1. George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Phi-losophy in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 4. See also Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1997).

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be a valuable element in the development of the discipline. The quest for sources (Quellenforschung) remains deeply embedded in academic writ-ing as a testimony of the long-lasting impact of a methodological and peda-gogical framework that was and still is the hallmark of classical philology. This preamble is necessary when one attempts to tackle the role philology might play in the future of criticism. Indeed, the question of the range of inquiries associated with the notion of philology has never been clearly defined except when it became so positivistic that it left little room for any foray into the kind of heuristic interpretation that opens new intel-lectual horizons. Incidentally, the same observation could be made about some manifestations of formalist theory as they blossomed from the late 1950s into the 1970s in America and in Europe. For instance, the Lige Group, also called Group , proposed, in A General Rhetoric, an assess-ment of the epistemological potentialities of figurality in order to formulate an all-encompassing system of tropes and figures.2 The authors devised objective paradigms that left little room for social, psychological, or cultural elaboration. In other words, philological and/or theoretical practices of a text must remain somewhat open-ended in order to profit the academic community at large. So why did Paul de Man and Edward Said advocate a return to phi-lology toward the end of their career? The answer to the question proves to be at once obvious and puzzling. For de Man, close readingattention to the use of words, to tropological ambivalencewas a prerequisite with-out which no theoretical scaffolding could or should be erected. Hence, a demanding and sophisticated reader, like Reuben Brower, is capable of theory and can lead students into theoretical discourse because he hadsometimes in uncritically accepted ways (de manire impense)a keen grasp of the rhetorical and symbolic quality of all language. De Mans call for a return to philology stemmed from both his vested interest in the pri-macy of language and his attempt to break the resistance to theory, which still prevailed during the 1980s in many comparative literature departments. De Mans own project relied heavily on metadiscourse, as evidenced, for instance, in Rhetoric of Tropes, one of the best essays in Allegories of Reading. In that essay, de Man explores Friedrich Nietzsches assump-tions about literary and philosophical language as they emerge from notes

2. Jacques Dubois et al., A General Rhetoric: By Group , trans. Paul B. Burnell and Edgar M. Slotkin (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). For more details on this group, see Marie-Rose Logan, In Search of a Cosmic Rhetoric, in Papers on Language and Literature 18, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 45962.

In Critical Humanism/Logan/Future of Philology81

for a course on rhetoric taught during the winter term of 18721873, at the time of the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. In doing so, de Man high-lightsalbeit uncriticallythe connection between the earlier and the later Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche was well-versed in the study of rhe-toric as a technique pertaining to eloquence and persuasion. According to de Mans course notes, Nietzsche moved away from these traditional patterns and suggested that rhetorical techniques depend on a previous theory of figures of speech or tropes.3 If one assumes that all language is trope, then one should be able to manipulate it, either to strengthen or deconstruct established paradigms. This is exactly what Nietzsche did in The Birth of Tragedy, where Apollo and Dionysus function in binary oppo-sition; the former sustains the dominant ideology, while the latter reverses it. Hence one might posit that there is some affinity between philology and theory, since the love of languagethe literal meaning of the Greek word involves in the work of Nietzsche and de Man a process of reading in which rhetoric is a disruptive intertwining of trope and persuasion orwhich is not the same thingof cognitive and performative language.4 In his own essay on The Return to Philology, Said is quick to point out that Nietzsche trained as a philologist and taught classical philology at Basel. In coupling the word philology with the name Nietzsche, Said means to add cachet to a term that is just about the least with-it, least sexy . . . of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism. Some twenty years after de Man, Said reiterates that a true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of language going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us.5 However, in the nineteenth-century Germany of Nietzsche, true philological reading as described by Said was not exactly welcome. In more ways than one, Nietzsche turned out to be one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. De Man, Said, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derridato name only a fewwere at one point or another inspired by Nietzsches philosophical works.

3. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 105.4. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 9. See also Paul de Man, The Return to Philology, in The Resistance to Theory (1986; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2126.5. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 57.


In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), his most popular book, Nietz-sche quips, As I lay asleep, a sheep ate the ivy wreath on my browand said, Zarathustra is no longer a scholar. Said it and strutted away proudly (part 2, The Scholars).6 This passage is a barely veiled reference to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Nietzsches former classmate at the prestigious gymnasium Schulpforta. As is the case throughout the narra-tive, Zarathustra stands for Nietzsche himself. So why did the sheepthe one who, like Panurges sheep, follows the herdeat from Zarathustras ivy brow? Before publishing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Zarathustra/Nietzsche was known as a rising star among German classi-cists for his work on the sources of the Hellenistic writers Diogenes Laer-tius, a philosopher, and Suidas, a lexicographer and encyclopedist, as well as for his studies on the Greek lyric poets. The book brims with professional scholarship, philosophical insight, and aesthetics, but it hardly conforms with the historico-critical method championed by classicists. So Wilamowitz seized the opportunity to write a vitriolic pamphlet, The Future of Philology! A Response to The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, Professor of Classical Philology at Basel (Zukunftsphilologie! Eine Erwidrung auf Fried-rich Nietzches Geburt der Tragdie), in which he writes, His [Nietzsches] solution is to belittle the historico-critical method, to attack any aesthetic insight which swerves away from his own, and to misunderstand completely the study of antiquity to the age in which philology in Germany has reached unprecedented height.7 Interestingly, in 1872, Wilamowitz did not yet hold a teaching posi-tion, whereas Nietzsche had been a professor of classical philology in Basel since 1869. By 1891, Wilamowitz, now an ordinarius (a title equiva-lent to that of full professor) at the University of Berlin, was a correspond-ing member of the Prussian Academy of Science. Two years before, Nietz-sche had voluntarily resigned from his professorship at Basel. Ill health was a factor, although Wilamowitzs claim on The Birth of Tragedy, a claim endorsed by the entire institutional establishment, had affected his profes-sional standing. In her introduction to Nietzsches Philosophy in the Tragic

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 124.7. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukunftsphilologie! Eine Erwiderung auf Friedrich Nietzsches Geburt der Tragdie (Berlin: Gebrder Borntrger, 1872), 89. The exclama-tion point at the end of the first part of the title underscores the scornful tone of the pam-phlet. The translation is mine.


Age of the Greeks (the title of the second edition, published in 1886), Mari-anne Cowan notes that students were discouraged from attending Nietz-sches lectures and colleagues avoided him; in short, everyone made his life miserable.8 In a letter to fellow classicist Erwin Rohde, a fine scholar of ancient religious consciousness, whoalong with Richard Wagnerhad launched a counterattack against Wilamowitzs pamphlet, Nietzsche wrote, The establishment has condemned me to death.9 At some point, he thought of obtaining a chair in philosophy, but he abandoned the idea. Subsequently he became a prolific and itinerant author. The Birth of Tragedy had not been intended as the sensational piece it became. The book was the fruit of a scholars questioning of the aims and goals of his own discipline as well as of the role of that discipline in the formation of young minds. Nietzsche himself was well aware that his intellectual journey was taking him on a road yet untrodden, as well as one that would lead him to swerve away from modernity, a word he used according to the Latin usage: modo hiernus (according to todays mode [of thinking]). In the years that followed the publication of the first edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche jotted down some two hundred entries into eight notebooks, which he gathered under the heading We Classi-cists (Wir Philologen). The latter, along with four other studies, make up a volume titled Unzeitgemsse Betrachtungen. Within the past two decades, two editions and translations of this volume have appeared under differ-ent English titles: Unmodern Observations (1990), translated and edited by the classical scholar William Arrowsmith; and Untimely Meditations (1997), edited by the philosopher Daniel Breazeale and translated by R. J. Holling-dale, which unfortunately does not include We Classicists. In the foreword to the edition and translation, Arrowsmith, a savvy translator and classicist, justifies his choice of title in the following passage:

Nietzsche chose his titles with scrupulous care, and these pro-grammatic essays untranslatably entitled Unzeitgemsse Betrach-tungen are no exception. Unzeitgemsse because they contain an explicit disavowal of the Zeit, the age, the present, now. They are not untimely, which means inopportune, nor unseasonable, nor out

8. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. and intro. Marianne Cowan (1962; repr., Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1998), 4.9. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 312. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as UO.


of season, which means little more than untimely. Unfashionable, uncontemporary, indeed defiantly unmodern, they are not there-fore reactionary or merely antimodern. They aim at transcending the present, at superseding conventional notions of past, present, and future. . . . Nor are these essays meditations or thoughts, but rather perspectives, observations, views, betrachten in German means to look at, observe, eye, or view; only by extension to consider, medi-tate or reflect. (UO, ix)10

As de Man points out in Literary History and Literary Moder-nity, Nietzsche was not concerned about a conflict between modernity and history, at least not in the way de Man and his contemporaries view modernity.11 What Nietzsche deplored is the mirroring of the present and the past as if both had no flaws. The Nietzsche/Wilamowitz quarrel is far from unique in the annals of academe. Yet it makes us pause and reflect about the ongoing gap between scholarly practices which are geared to uphold a hegemonic dis-course that strengthens institutional structures at the expense of the value and challenge of articulating what Said calls dynamic reading. The world of academe as we know it has been racked for the past thirty years or so with quarrels that pit conservatives against innovators: historical critics versus formalists, et cetera. The consequences are perhaps less dire than they were in Nietzsches timeat least on the surface. There is certainly good will, but also a good dose of irony in David Bromwichs Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (1992). Bromwich, since he writes from within the establishment and perhaps with a certain amount of unconscious irony, compares and contrasts what he calls group thinking (again, the sheep?) with independent thinking (one chooses courses and teachers in a way that is consonant with ones personality). Yet who has not heard a former PhD candidate complain about having to bend their thoughts in order to fit within the mold of a given dissertation director? It takes a swift mind to discern the thin line between conformity and discovery. According to Arrowsmith, Nietzsche characterized his love for the ancient world as backward inference (UO, 315), for which he claimed a special talent. It is precisely that talent that Wilamowitz could not swallow,

10. Arrowsmith comes across as an enlightened classicist in the introduction to the entire volume, as well as in the introduction and notes to We Classicists.11. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 14546.


because talent more often than not stands in opposition to any form of hegemonic discourse. In We Classicists, one of the essays gathered in Unmodern Obser-vations, Nietzsche records his progressive disenchantment not with his chosen field but with the kind of pedagogical and methodological climate in which he had to live. What emerges from We Classicists is a picture ofat least by most classicists standardsan eclectic reader with an aesthetic bend: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hlderlin, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, Empedocles, and, of course, Wagner and other composers. Several entries include outlines for lectures, even syllabi for classes. Nietzsche also expresses his outrage at what he looked upon as a reductionist approach to the ancient world in order to make it fit with a so-called modernity: In school graduation programs speakers actu-ally compare our age with the age of Pericles, they congratulate themselves on the reawakening of patriotism. As I recall a parody of Pericles Funeral Oration by G. Freitag, in which that pompous prig of a poet described the happiness now felt by men in their sixtiesall but caricature! This is the effect of the classics. Deep sorrow and scorn and seclusion is all thats left to those who have seen more than this (UO, 335). By the same token, Nietzsche advocates, The criterion of the curriculum is this: we should study only what incites us to imitation, what we understand with love, and what demands to be passed on. The most appropriate would be a progres-sive syllabus of exemplary models . . . (UO, 382). As he envisages the future of philology, Nietzsche looks back at the freedom that prevailed during the period of the Renaissance: Out of the very imperfect philology and classical scholarship [of the Renaissance] there issued a new freedom. Our own highly developed philology enslaves men and serves the idols of the state (UO, 383). As a matter of fact, the humanists, especially the French scholar Guillaume Bud (14681540), aimed at creating new intellectual paradigms through what I have called elsewhere the philological imagination.12 In De Philologia, a two-volume

12. Marie-Rose Logan, Gulielmus Budaeus Philological Imagination, MLN 118, no. 5 (December 2003): 114051. I use the Latinized form of Buds name in that essay as it was common practice among the Northern humanists. On the general scope of Buds contribution in the context of Northern humanism, see Marie-Rose Logan, Writing the Self: The Poetics of Scholarship, in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 13148.


work published in 1532, Bud uses philologia in a very idiosyncratic way: I dont think that life will be bearable from now on unless I grow old next to my mistress Philology since I have decided to die in her company. To take her along with me, to toss her around, is not impossible, but it is useless and painful if I dont have her luggage in my trunks, i.e, the belongings I need to entertain myself with her: what good would it do for me to embrace her naked unless I have at my disposition some books and a place where I can consult them?13 The word imagination derives from the Latin verb imaginor, to pic-ture oneself, as well as to fancy or imagine. In personifying philologia, Bud fashions a notion that is both an embodiment of himself and of his modus vivendi. In so doing, he empowers with dynamic potential the literal meaning of philologia as love of words as well as love of meaning. Further-more, Bud seizes the opportunity of fostering the creation of a philologo-rum natio (a nation of philologists). Parts of De Philologia still strike a chord in any reader bent on the love of learning. Bud deplores the fact that those who pursue philological studies are not held in the same esteem as those who study law or medicine. With the help of King Francis I, Bud will be able to establish the College of Royal Readers, an institution that survives to this day, as the Collge de France, where, as Roland Barthes put it in his inaugural lecture at that institution, the professor is free to dream his research aloud.14 In 1973, the classicist Jacqueline de Romilly, the first woman invited to join the faculty of the Collge de France, reaffirms in her inaugural lecture15 that very freedom when she outlines her interest in exploring the semantic modalities of Greek words such as philanthropy and the Roman notion of clementia, a field overlooked by most nineteenth-century clas-sicists but very much in step with the humanistsfor instance, Erasmus wrote a treatise on peace, The Complaint of Peace (Querela Pacis, 1521)and with our own hunger for peace as we move into an increasingly global culture. As Nietzsche writes in We Classicists, what cant be exhausted

13. Guillaume Bud, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, ed. C. S. Curiol (facsimile repr. of 1st ed., Basel, 1557; Farnborough [Hants.]: Gregg, 1966), 138. The works of Guillaume Bud have not been translated into English; the translations that appear in this essay are my own.14. Roland Barthes, Inaugural Lecture, Collge de France, trans. Richard Howard, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 458.15. Jacqueline de Romilly, Leon inaugurale (Nogent-Le-Rotrou, France: Impr. Daupeley-Gouverneur, 1974), 28.


is the always new adjustment every age makes to the classical world, mea-suring itself against it (UO, 339). The vigilance of classicists over their all-encompassing disciplinethey studied not only texts but also history, political institutions, coins, art, and all other cultural artifacts of the Greco-Roman world that they wanted, in the words of Thucydides, to preserve as a treasure of truth foreverdid not abate easily. It is striking that the Romance philologist Erich Auerbach writes, a few years after the publication of his book, Mimesis: The Repre-sentation of Reality in Western Literature, I expected that the most seri-ous objections against the train of thought in the book would come from the direction of classical philology, for ancient literature is treated in my book above all as a counter example.16 In other words, Auerbach is aware that the less than perfect ancient world he presented in his essay Odysseus Scar might meet with objections on the part of those Nietzsche called puerile classicists. After dismissing the comments of two classicists, Otto Regenbogen and Ludwig Edelstein, who thought that Auerbach had watered down Homeric realism, Auerbach then turns to the more general comments made by other colleaguesErnst Curtius, in particularwho had objections about the broad scope of the book. Most interestingly, Auer-bach emphasizes in his rebuttal that Mimesis attempts to comprehend Europe, but it is a German book not only on account of its language. . . . It arose from the themes and methods of German intellectual history and philology.17 In his introduction to the 2003 edition of Mimesis, Said reminds the reader that Auerbach wrote Mimesis during World War II while he lived in exile in Istanbul. Said judiciously adds, And even though the book is a calm affirmation of the unity and dignity of European literature in all its multiplicity and dynamism, it is also a book of countercurrents, ironies, and even contradictions that need to be taken into account for it to be read and understood properly.18 In pointing to the countercurrents, ironies, and contradictions, Said appears to suggest that the scholar exiled from his traditional environment is moved to rethink the premises of the culture he has been familiar with since childhood as well as the culture he acquired through his academic training when that scholar is confronted with yet

16. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, intro. Edward Said (1953; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 559.17. Auerbach, Mimesis, 571.18. Auerbach, Mimesis, xvi.


another culture. There is a real, albeit tenuous affinity between Auerbach and Said, an affinity rooted in the exile they both experienced at some point in their life for different reasons. One can only imagine that writing about European literature in Istan-bul, a city where East and West at once collide and merge, would prove to stimulate dynamic and active reading. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk sees East and West as the two spirits of Turkey as one. He also views the eternal fight between East and West, that takes place in Turkeys spirit, not as a weakness but as a strength. In turn, he dramatizes that force by making something literary out of it.19 In 1985, Pamuk wrote The White Castle, a novel based on a manu-script found by the narrator in the forgotten archives of a governor. The nar-rator leaves the reader alone with the transcribed manuscript, which relates the adventures of an Italian sailor capturedmost likely in the sixteenth century, although no precise date is givenby the Turkish fleet somewhere between Venice and Naples. Soon the captive improves his status, thanks to his knowledge of astrology and medicine. He gains the protection of the Pasha, who introduces the sailor to Hoja. Hoja resembles the sailor in a striking way. The sultan says, I could tell from the clever questions he asked, from his shrewdness, that ever since hed received the books we presented to him the sultan had been speculating how much of Hoja was me, and how much of me was Hoja.20 Needless to say, the reader is left in a similar quandary throughout the rest of the novel until it becomes obvious that the blurring of identities, voices, and places is a deliberate attempt to erase, subsume, and transcend the East/West antagonism, an antagonism that includes linguistic and hence also philological discourse. In a postscript to the 1986 Turkish edition of The White Castle, Pamuk further teases the reader as he hints that he himself does not know whether the Italian captive or the Ottoman master wrote the manuscript. In so doing, Pamuk challenges the reader to enter into a renewed conscious-ness that obliterates oppositional constructs. The Apollonian and Dionysian philosophical and literary dichotomy devised by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy found its reconciliation in the Wagnerian impetus. Nietzsches philological imagination has prevailed over

19. Orhan Pamuk, Turkeys Divided Character, New Perspectives Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 20.20. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (1985; repr., New York: Ran-dom House, 1990), 114.


the exacting approach of his opponent. Conversely, Pamuk ushers us into the dialogical process of overcoming the ironies, countercurrents, and contradictions of what Said brilliantly defines as Orientalism (1978). Saids book reminds us that linguistic communication is always a matter of geo-politics, and for this reason the future of philology may lie in an ongoing willingness to engage the imagination in our love of learning or discovering the power of languages and tropes that inhabit our inner self as well as our ever-more global surroundings as they unfold in diachronic and synchronic time.

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Marie-Rose Logan - Is Zarathusra No Loger a Scholar