Once the truth of the ancients is revealed, philology is doomed

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 26 appears to be Nietzsche's writing plan for an unfinished work. By breaking down the text into four parts (corresponding to the four chapters in the writing plan), we can restore Nietzsche's sense of inquiry and narrative logic: contemporary philologists create a cultural niche for themselves by catering to and deceiving the masses, forming an enormous chain of interest; by exposing the lies of contemporary philologists and revealing the harsh truth of the ancients, the philology fraud industry will perish. This is also the primary task of future philologists.

PLANS AND THOUGHTS RELATING TO A WORK ON PHILOLOGY (1875) 

26 

Of all sciences philology at present is the most favoured · its progress having been furthered for centuries by the greatest number of scholars in every nation who have had charge of the noblest pupils. Philology has thus had one of the best of all opportunities to be propagated from generation to generation, and to make itself respected. How has it acquired this power?

Calculations of the different prejudices in its favour.

How then if these were to be frankly recognised as prejudices? Would not philology be superfluous if we reckoned up the interests of a position in life or the earning of a livelihood? What if the truth were told about antiquity, and its qualifications for training people to live in the present?

In order that the questions set forth above may be answered let us consider the training of the philologist, his genesis: he no longer comes into being where these interests are lacking.

If the world in general came to know what an unseasonable thing for us antiquity really is, philologists would no longer be called in as the educators of our youth.

Effect of antiquity on the non-philologist likewise nothing. If they showed themselves to be imperative and contradictory, oh, with what hatred would they be pursued! But they always humble themselves.

Philology now derives its power only from the union between the philologists who will not, or cannot, understand antiquity and public opinion, which is misled by prejudices in regard to it.

The real Greeks, and their "watering down" through the philologists.

The future commanding philologist sceptical in regard to our entire culture, and therefore also the destroyer of philology as a profession.

"We Philologists", Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

Nietzsche titled section 26: "PLANS AND THOUGHTS RELATING TO A WORK ON PHILOLOGY." It seems like a single chapter. Judging from the writing style, it is far from a finished draft, especially the last two paragraphs, more like notes or an outline. The best way to understand this section might not be as a writing plan for a book, but as a preface to a book, or at least part of a preface. (Although, only someone who has written a book would know that, unlike a writing plan, a preface is a part of the book that is written after the entire book is finished. But since the vast majority of readers do not have the experience of writing a book, what they ultimately read is just the preface, which is the information that the author wants the reader to have before entering the main text, so the preface is easier to understand than the writing plan.)

This section can be divided into several parts: ① philology currently has disproportionate resources and influence, relying on computing and exploiting biases; ② once these biases are clarified, once the tricks and interests of philologists are exposed, philology will perish; ③ what these biases are, what the true face of the ancients is, and how philologists "dilute" and exploit these biases; ④ the future of philology.

Writing a book is basically so and so. You start with a rough central idea and some inchoate thoughts revolving around it. Then, you make observations with your questions in mind, gather materials, gradually clarify your thoughts, give them structure, and eventually organize them into chapters, and a book is completed. (This applies equally to fictional works. Mature novelists are driven by ideas.) The text we see now is a preliminary, vague impression of a book.

The above four parts can be seen as the four chapters of this book, the views of which have been touched upon many times in the previous text: ① The word "calculation" reminds sensitive readers of the "reason" mentioned several times in Section 1, and "utilization" brings to mind the "need for many helpers" in Section 6; ② The word "interest" is related to the "livelihood" in Sections 2 and 7, and the valuation problem raised in Section 8; ③ Public prejudice includes metaphysical schemes of religion (3, 9), the objectification of history and the view of progress (7, 15, 23), the "existing for others" and the morality of modesty (12, 21), and the necessity of experts (10, 16); As for the "true face of ancient people," it is evil, utilizing, worshiping martial spirit, symbolical, and enslaving others for their own sake (5, 6, 14, 19, 20, 22); Finally, regarding the future of philology, it includes limiting the number of practitioners (7), shifting from detail-oriented work to valuation (8), understanding the symbolic world (19), taking Goethe/Schopenhauer/Wagner as examples and foundations to explore the pre-Socratic era (24).

If read not from the perspective of problem awareness (which requires too much attention) but from the perspective of narrative, Nietzsche's unfinished book tells a story like this:

In the 19th century, classical philology or classical studies received unprecedented social resource inclination. Why was this the case? It turns out that philologists learned to analyze social prejudices and designed "marketing strategies" to dominate the market based on these prejudices. The strategy was simple: to cater to social prejudices. Whatever the public wanted to hear, philologists or classical scholars would interpret ancient texts in that manner. If the public loved romance, they would strive to interpret Homer's epics and ancient Greek tragedies in a romantic light; if the public favored democracy and the republic, they would depict ancient Greece and Rome as paradises of democracy and the republic. In a word, they aimed to please the masses. (Here, the philologists are the precursor of Nietzsche's concept of the "prophet personality," i.e., people who lack the strength of a warrior and manipulate the masses through persuasive rhetoric. Warriors, prophets, and the common people—these are the only three types of people Nietzsche saw in the world.)

In this way, philology found its niche in an era of rising populism, forming an enormous chain of interest. But the entire industry is built on a lie: the interpretations of ancient texts by philologists are false. Once the truth of the ancients is revealed and the lies of this entire industry exposed, philology is doomed. (Just as today, once someone stands up to reveal the hypocrisy and emptiness of Chinese language education, the vested interests in this industry will definitely be unable to sit still, because this is a threat to their livelihood.) It's very simple to prove this: once the interests of this cultural industry called philology is taken away from below, how many people would still be willing to work for free in the field of philology? (Just as today, once the benefits and social status of the subject Chinese are lowered to that of History, not being one of the three main subjects, nor having any competitions, being incompatible with physics and not conducive to university major selection therefore even worse than politics and geography, how many people do you think would still be willing to be Chinese language teachers?)

But the question now is, how to expose this massive fraud? The answer is to remove the ancient veil, revealing how different the ancient world was from the modern one, and how opposed the values of the ancients were to those of the moderns. In other words, to expose this fraud, one must shatter all the modern illusions about the ancients, forcing moderns to choose between ancient and modern. The true ancient world was unequal, cruel, evil, valuing warriors and despising weak scholars, a battlefield where the strong pursued "to exist for their own sake" and fought each other to the death. Contemporary philologists have "watered down" these stories into romantic heroic legends, concealing the cruelty and ugliness behind the legends.

In the wake of shattered illusions, those who continue to revere the ancient while opposing the modern are the true lovers of philology, the philologists of the future. The philology of the future will be created by such individuals, at which point philology will no longer be a discipline but a novel value proposition, a radical lifestyle, and the name "philologist" will then be, not a profession, but a label, a title, a faction, surpassing all other professions. Only then will the ancient unleash its true power.