D.I.S.C.O.

The name of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff recurred time and again in the conference on Altertumswissenschaft and Historismus I was attending last week in London (one of the most intellectually stimulating conferences I’ve been to in recent years, despite my sleep deprivation); mostly only in passing, but his dominance in the field of classical philology in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, and still more his determined efforts in shaping not just the present state of the discipline but also its history in his own image, mean that even those who want to talk about other conceptions of the subject still end up discussing him. The great Jonas Grethlein focused his whole paper on Wilamowitz and his (implicit, possibly entirely naive) hermeneutic approach, and also offered extensive evidence of the purpleness of his prose. I especially liked this one:

The ultimate task of philological-historical scholarship is the revitalisation of past lives, sensations, feelings, thoughts and beliefs through the power of fantasy informed by scholarship, such that everything in the past which possesses invigorating force can continue to influenoce the present and future. For this to work, one must possess a cool head, but hot love must burn in one’s heart. Only Eros facilitates the beholding of truth and eternal life. (Erinnerungen, 1848-1914, 2nd edn, 1928: 104)

The power of fantasy informed by scholarship? One wonders if he kept a dream journal… Above all, of course, I was taken by the stuff about Hot Love, and couldn’t shake the image of Wilamowitz performing this as a funky disco number. “I’ve got a cool head/ And a critical method/ But what I really need from you/ Hot Love!”

A paper on Friday morning on Werner Jaeger’s conception of philology and history offered a slightly less overwrought quote, perhaps because it was a personal letter rather than a public lecture. It’s still over the top, but less conducive to being set to scratchy phased guitar and a conga rhythm.

The old poetry (and of course law and religion and history as well) is dead: it is our task to give it life, when one, for instance, explains Aeschylus and the language starts to ring and the rhythms to whisper… and the students then forget that there is a professor and a text full of vocabulary and corruptions…and now they have in front of their souls Aeschylus and Cassandra and the theatre of Dionysus with the Acropolis above then I feel that philology is something in itself after all… (letter to Usener, 1883)

I have genuinely mixed feelings about this quote. On the one hand, it’s a classic bit of positivism: the goal is direct communion between past and present, reader and text, ignoring all that nasty historicism and the essential mediating role of scholarship and interpretation. The text will speak to the students, the real past will become manifest to them. The choice of dead/living rather than past/present is a cliché, but an illuminating one.

And on the other hand, there is actually a lot to be said for the idea of the vanishing teacher; maybe not quite in the way Wilamowitz intended it, but I can imagine this fitting with my aspirations for teaching in at least two respects: the students feeling empowered to develop and articulate their own responses and interpretations, rather than waiting to be told what to think and reproduce, and the students forgetting about the formal context of education, the assessments and marks (the fundamental role of the teacher being to generate marks, obviously…) and just being immersed in the process of scholarship and critical thinking in the moment. Nothing to do with the deadness or otherwise of the material, which seems to be Wilamiwitz’s primary concern, but rather the dead hand of certain sorts of pedagogy…

And, yes, I do think this is one of my best ever blog titles.