COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The content of this website, including text and images, is the property of The Nietzsche Channel. Reproduction in any form is strictly prohibited. © The Nietzsche Channel. Homer and Classical Philology. Excerpt from: Homer and Classical Philology.1
In our time there is no clear and consistent public opinion about classical philology. One senses this in learned circles in general as well as among the disciples of that science itself. The cause lies in its multi-fragmented character, in the lack of a conceptual unity, in the inorganic condition of an aggregate of various scientific activities that are connected only by the name "philology." Of course one has to admit honestly that, to a certain extent, philology has borrowed from several sciences and like a magic potion is concocted from the strangest saps, metals and bones, so that indeed it contains more of an artistic element, one that on aesthetic and ethical grounds is imperative, but is in questionable conflict with its purely scientific behavior. It is just as much part history as part science, as part aesthetics: history, insofar as it seeks to comprehend the manifestations of certain national individualities in ever new images, or the prevailing law in the flight of phenomena; natural science, as far as it tries to fathom the deepest instinct of man, the instinct of language; aesthetics, finally, because from among the antiquities it emphasizes the so-called "classical" antiquity, with the claim and the intention to excavate a buried ideal world and to hold up to the present the mirror of the classical and the ever-exemplary. That these altogether different [....] |