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, Renaissance 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 nineteenth century among German historians who followed the lead of practitioners of classical philology, a discipline also known in English as classical scholarship and in German as Altertumswissenschaft (the science
of antiquity). Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Altertumswissenschaft 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 publicationsbe 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 Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 4. See also
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
boundary 2 37:3 (2010)DOI 10.1215/01903659-2010-018 2010 by Duke University Press

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be a valuable element in the development of the discipline. The quest for

sources (Quellenforschung) remains deeply embedded in academic writing as a testimony of the long-lasting impact of a methodological and pedagogical 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 intellectual 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 assessment 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 philology 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 without 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 had
sometimes 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 primacy 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 assumptions 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 highlightsalbeit uncriticallythe connection between the earlier and the later
Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche was well-versed in the study of rhetoric 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 opposition; 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.

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In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), his most popular book, Nietzsche 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 narrative, 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 classicists for his work on the sources of the Hellenistic writers Diogenes Laertius, 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 Friedrich 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 position, whereas Nietzsche had been a professor of classical philology in
Basel since 1869. By 1891, Wilamowitz, now an ordinarius (a title equivalent to that of full professor) at the University of Berlin, was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Science. Two years before, Nietzsche 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 professional 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 exclamation point at the end of the first part of the title underscores the scornful tone of the pamphlet. The translation is mine.

In Critical Humanism/Logan/Future of Philology83

Age of the Greeks (the title of the second edition, published in 1886), Marianne Cowan notes that students were discouraged from attending Nietzsches 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 Wagner
had 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 Classicists (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 different 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. Hollingdale, 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 programmatic essays untranslatably entitled Unzeitgemsse Betrachtungen 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.

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of season, which means little more than untimely. Unfashionable,

uncontemporary, indeed defiantly unmodern, they are not therefore 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, meditate or reflect. (UO, ix)10

As de Man points out in Literary History and Literary Modernity, 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 discourse 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.

In Critical Humanism/Logan/Future of Philology85

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 Observations, 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 actually 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 progressive 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.

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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 picture 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. Furthermore, Bud seizes the opportunity of fostering the creation of a philologorum 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 classicists 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. DaupeleyGouverneur, 1974), 28.

In Critical Humanism/Logan/Future of Philology87

is the always new adjustment every age makes to the classical world, measuring itself against it (UO, 339).

The vigilance of classicists over their all-encompassing discipline
they 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 Representation of Reality in Western Literature, I expected that the most serious 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, Auerbach 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.

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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 Istanbul, 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 manuscript found by the narrator in the forgotten archives of a governor. The narrator 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 consciousness 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: Random House, 1990), 114.

In Critical Humanism/Logan/Future of Philology89

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 geopolitics, 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.