Postclassicisms by Postclassicism Collective

Author:Postclassicism Collective [Collective, Postclassicism]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

First come I. My name is J–W–TT.

There‘s no knowledge but I know it.

I am the Master of this College,

What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

That ditty may take aim at Jowett’s personality, but in fairness to the scholar his writings show an awareness of the difference between process and goal, between knowing how and knowing that (to introduce another distinction, though one related to the distinction between “knowing” and “knowledge”). It was Jowett, after all, who also said, “We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?”

This brings us back to the opposition between knowing and knowledge with which we began. For, unless it is posed and considered with delicacy, the question whether or not classics is a science runs the risk of reducing the value ascribed to that discourse, as to any other, to its purely scientific credentials in a narrow sense—that is, of imagining that any part of classical “knowing” that cannot be subsumed within classical “knowledge” is merely arbitrary and subjective and can safely be ignored. After all, the propositional “knowing that” involved in scientific knowledge is only one form of knowing, and the technical “knowing how” is of no less importance for society and the individual: human beings know not only with their heads but also with their hands and hearts, as Woolf had intimated in her inimitable style. The enormous importance and high prestige of philological studies in Greco-Roman antiquity, which continued unabated through the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, were not due to any notion that philology might be a science but instead to what was seen as its indispensable culturally formative role. In that regard, the crisis that classics is experiencing in our own time is partly the fault of the nineteenth-century attempt to justify its prestige by trying to define it as a Wissenschaft. For more than two millennia, philology might not always have been thought to transmit sophia and could not ever claim to be an epistêmê, but it certainly played a central role in paideia, for most people were convinced that it taught its students to know how to do all sorts of useful things.

We have learned to be distrustful of the often uncritical and inflated claims for the value of classical paideia that have so often been made in the past. Werner Jaeger’s Third Humanism, enshrined in his three-volume Paideia, has vanished from collective memory not so much because of its alleged political complicities or because of the banality and fulsomeness of so many of his individual interpretations but because of the uncritical circularity of his whole project of retrojecting into the intentions of classical antiquity itself the effect of pedagogical cultivation that this antiquity had upon its later tradition. The frequent collusion between the traditional institutions of classical pedagogy and the practices of the exercise of power in such asymmetric relations as those of gender, class, race, and imperialism have made us suspicious of the lofty claims to an ideal of human perfection

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