Chang Che writes for SupChina about the Latin and Greek courses proliferating in China, focusing on Leopold Leeb, a professor of literature at Renmin University:
Every weekday during the summer, from nine a.m. to noon, Leeb holds a public class in a marble white church just a stone’s throw away from Beijing’s central government. […] In the halls of China’s elite universities, Leopold Leeb is sometimes known as “the legendary Austrian.” His friends affectionately call him “Leizi” — Lei from his Chinese name Léi Lìbó 雷立柏, and zǐ (子) an ancient honorific reserved for esteemed Chinese intellectuals, as in Confucius (孔子 Kǒngzǐ), Mencius (孟子 Mèngzǐ), and Lao Tzu (老子 Lǎozǐ). For Leeb, a pioneer of Classics education (the study of Greco-Roman antiquity) in China, the sobriquet is apt: Leeb’s textbooks and dictionaries form a rite of passage for nearly all Chinese who wish to embark on Western Classical study. He has written several monographs on Greek and Roman history, 13 Classics dictionaries, nine textbooks, and over two dozen comparative works, giving Chinese readers access to Western ideas and texts. At 54 with no family and no hobbies, he displays an almost religious devotion to his work. “Obviously,” one colleague wrote of him recently, Leeb is “more concerned about China’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow than many Chinese.” […]
At first blush, China looks like an improbable place to find “new perspectives” in the Classics. But in the past few decades, its universities have grown into bastions of curiosity about the West and its traditions. The irony is palpable. Across China, patriotic fervor is growing, and nationalists are more confident and dismissive of Western critics. But enter a humanities classroom and one is as likely to find students reciting speeches by Cicero as reading lines of Marx.
He discusses the reform era after Mao’s death:
Reforms took hold gradually, then suddenly. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the most gifted students studied the sciences or were funneled into vocational training and sent out to the hinterlands to become teachers. But in 1999, the Communist Party made the strategic decision to expand higher education enrollment. The number of new college students increased by 47% the following year, and it has continued to soar ever since. From 2010 to 2013, the number of books released in China increased by 35%. By 2015, China had become the second-largest market for books behind the United States, a coming-out party for a new scholarly elite. “It’s a generational shift,” said T.H. Jiang, a philosophy lecturer in an elite U.S. university and a former humanities student at Peking University in the early 2000s. “Now, Chinese students are studying Medieval theology, the ancient Middle East, and ancient Near Eastern studies,” he told me. Jiang believed part of the intellectual curiosity came from a renewed confidence. “[Chinese students] started to think, ‘Oh, those other cultures are accessible to us. And because China is also a great civilization, why don’t we study other civilizations too?’”
The Communist Party had once actively encouraged the study of foreign civilizations. In the early years of reform, when it came to funding for the Classics, the Ministry of Education was as spendthrift as a Renaissance noble. It sponsored projects on Catullus, reprinted translations of Classical poets, and erected institutes dedicated to serious scholarship on Western civilizations. Bilingual editions of Greek and Roman texts began appearing in bookstores. (Translations of the complete works of Aristotle were completed in 1997.) Strong Classics faculty members began to proliferate throughout the country. The Chinese Journal of Classical Studies, established in 2010, produces scholarly work on ancient Rome and Greece. Since then, more than 250 Greek and Latin texts have been translated. Conferences are being held every year, and job postings for Latin teachers can be found in Nankai University in Tianjin, Fudan University in Shanghai, Southwest Normal University in Chongqing, Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, among others. The Center for Western Classical Studies was established in 2011 at the prestigious Peking University, and, in 2017, Leeb’s Renmin University established its own Classics institute. “I could only ascribe it to magic,” observed a Chinese Latin professor, “that all of a sudden we came to have our own organization and the attention of the whole nation.” […]
When Leeb arrived in China in 1995, China’s Classics appetite had just been whetted. Latin classes were offered at universities, but they were used to train specialists in fields like zoology, botany, and medicine. After completing his postdoctoral work in 2004, Leeb was told that the best way to secure a job was to teach German, his mother tongue. Philosophy departments were growing, and German was in high demand as Chinese scholars devoured the works of Kant, Hegel, and Husserl. But Leeb didn’t want to help specialists specialize, so he took a leap of faith. He applied to three Beijing universities as a Latin teacher. Two got back to him with only part-time offers, not enough to secure a visa. Then he received an email from Renmin University’s literature department. “Yes, you can teach Latin,” it read, “but you have to teach ancient Greek too.” He accepted. […]
Leeb’s current and former students, now more than 2,000 strong, are part of a generation of Classics scholars studying and teaching in Chinese universities. Many of them, who studied overseas, are helping shape China’s universities in their bicultural image. “The chair of my department told me I’m the only Chinese graduate student in Classics since the founding of the university 160 years ago,” said Luó Xiāorán 罗逍然, one of Leeb’s former students, who completed his Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Washington last spring. Luo began teaching at the Chinese Academy of Arts in Hangzhou University last fall. “I’m going to be the first Classics major to teach there,” he told me two months before his posting. […]
Despite the West’s efforts to retain such talents, Luo is returning to China. When I asked him why, Luo told me that American students were simply less interested in their own Classics than the Chinese. “There just aren’t as many curious students in the Classics in the U.S.,” he said. “I taught at the University of Washington for over six years. I tried all kinds of stuff to keep it engaging — they just didn’t care.” Last year, by contrast, he gave a lecture in Hangzhou to a crowd of Chinese on the character of the Cyclops in Greek mythology. “I could see sparks.”
All of this is new and surprising to me. I can’t help but think of the reqirement for classical languages as a reactionary element in Russian schools during tsarism, despised by the students (“Latin was universally hated by all“); it’s interesting that Chinese students (obviously in utterly different circumstances) find it enticing. There’s much more in the linked article, including a discussion of “Strauss Fever” (referring to the German classicist Leo Strauss), and towards the end there’s a remark about the word for cheese, lào 酪, likely coming from Latin lac ‘milk,’ which arouses my automatic scepticism (it’s discussed in the comments at the Log post, where I got the link).
a very interesting article! i will say that this sentence:
“At first blush, China looks like an improbable place to find “new perspectives” in the Classics.”
struck me as rather odd. a place with a long literary history, a strong educational system, & a culture thats not as historically enmeshed with the Classical tradition as those that have offered earlier perspectives: that is exactly the place i would expect to find new perspectives on the Classics! & it’s heartening to hear theyre being acknowledged for it, tho i’m not very knowledgeable on the existing scholarly work about the Classics, and will probably not be getting much from the newer work either
When Leeb arrived in China in 1995, …
A little after the Tiananmen protests/massacre.
The students are going to know more about the Trojan or Punic Wars than the Cultural Revolution.
Is Leeb allowed to teach about the ‘birthplace of Democracy’?
I think it would be fairly easy to spin the classics as, if not positively anti-democratic, at least not very enthusiastic about democracy at all (though I’ve no idea on Leeb’s own take.) The Athenian democracy was quite often held up as an Awful Warning rather than a shining beacon by classical authors (with some justice, in fact.) Even Pericles can easily be presented as having overcome the defects of democracy by his personal authority and charisma.
And the Roman Republic was in no sense a democracy in our terms, of course (let alone the Empire.) And Maecenas’ coterie of Imperial apologist poets sing the praises of strong central government under a Great Helmsman who dealt firmly with secessionists and foreign schemers …
Cicero’s ideal of an enlightened administrator-magistrate would be pretty easy to square with Chinese tradition too, I dare say.
The image of Chinese students reading Latin and Greek classics is oddly heartening: not because the content is character-improving or something – Boris Johnson is a convincing counterargument – but because it’s mind-expanding, showing them a different world sufficiently irrelevant to their present to be considered somewhat dispassionately. China seems to be going through a very dark period at the moment; maybe, for some students, classics can serve as a refuge.
What does he know of his own heritage, who only his own heritage knows?
Exactly! And that’s why I’m glad my grandsons have gotten a Chinese-immersion education — the same phenomenon in reverse. (And I’m glad the older one got to visit China and Taiwan before covid hit.)
because it’s mind-expanding, showing them a different world sufficiently irrelevant to their present to be considered somewhat dispassionately
This is what I always most appreciated about the classics myself, even culture-internally (so to speak.) A culture in some respects recognisable as ancestral to our own, but very profoundly different. Perfectly kind and decent people thought that chattel slavery of people who looked exactly like themselves was completely normal and morally quite unproblematic, for example …
(Same with language: Latin was much the most un-English-like language most people ever got exposed to; pity that its value was usually claimed to be in its supposed influence on English, rather than in its striking difference from it.)
Occidentalism…
dravsi: exactly! David Eddishaw: I suppose you mean most English-speaking people in England? dravsi: your cultural outlook also seems very self-contained.
A more expanded (but not more informative) version of the above: I wonder if some time later a random Chinese student will normally know Old Irish and ǃxóõ and find Nicole Oresme interesting.
And same about Korea. Obviously the two (groups of) cultures are different, but both were seen as somewhat self-contained.
@V:
Well, I said most people for a reason, though yes, I did have the UK in mind. I imagine the same is (or was) true of much of western Europe, though. Classical Latin is not SAE …
What I was thinking of with Latin exoticism was not so much morphology and syntax as semantics and general ways of saying things; a lot of learning the lost art of Latin composition properly was learning that, yes, you could put it that way and it would be comprehensible Latin, but no Roman writer ever actually expressed the thought like that.
In some respects Welsh (say) is even less like English than Latin is, but not in that kind of way. Perfectly good and natural modern Welsh often seems almost calqued from English sometimes, for all the differences of word order and so forth; nobody could say the same of good Latin.
It used to bother me in Latin examinations that if I translated the Latin into anything at all like idiomatic English, the examiner might think I had missed the actual Latin construction and was guessing at the overall sense, whereas translating in a way that made it obvious that I had understood the Latin structure completely resulted in abominable English. No such problem really arises with most western European modern languages.
@DE, modern Welsh or any Welsh?
(I think there is a certain point where Proto-Welsh becomes Proto-Breton, making Breton the only language in the world that does not descend from Proto-Welsh – an excellent reason to study this unique language)
It’s less true of Middle Welsh, though even that (despite some quirks of its own) is pretty SAE (at least compared with Latin.) Surviving Old Welsh is (a) pretty much all poetry and (b) has mostly been copied by Middle-Welsh-speaking scribes to the point where it looks like Middle Welsh anyway. So who knows?
You’re right about Breton: the explanation is that the Breton people come from Alpha Draconis (as their own secret traditions tell.) However, the language was much influenced by the Proto-Welsh spoken by the first humans whom they assimilated.
“It used to bother me in Latin examinations that if I translated the Latin into anything at all like idiomatic English, the examiner might think I had missed the actual Latin construction” I know very well what you mean. I also have native speaker of Breton as a former friend. his daughter has a Breton name.
The conservative effects of the study of the classics can be clearly seen in the lives of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Thoreau, who were all classicists. Rimbaud hated his Latin studies the same way St. Augustine hated his Greek studies, with similar results — St. Augustine went through a nihilist period like Rimbaud, but he grew out of it whereas Rimbaud just died.
“Of all the things the German academic high school did, the most valuable was its training in Latin style, for this was an artistic exercise, while all the other activities were aimed solely at knowledge. To put the German essay first is barbarism, for we have no classical German style developed by a tradition of public eloquence; but if one wants to use the German essay to further the practice of thinking, it is certainly better if one ignores the style entirely for the time being, thus distinguishing exercise in thinking and in describing. The latter should be concerned with multiple versions of a single content, and not with independent invention of content.
Description only, with the content given, was the assignment of Latin style, for which the old teachers possessed a long-since-lost refinement of hearing. Anyone who in the past learned to write well in a modern language owed it to this exercise, (now one is obliged to go to school under the older French teachers); and still further: he gained a concept of the majesty and difficulty of form, and was prepared for this in the only possible right way: through practice.”
“One vanished preparation for art”, #203 in Menschliches Allzumenschliches, vol. I.
https://haquelebac.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/ressentiment-and-schooling/
That’s the title of an interesting book. Subtitle: “The West in the eyes of its enemies”.
We were actually told, though only in the last year, that a translation is best if it isn’t recognizable as a translation.
When I lived on the outskirts of Taibei (still often spelled Taipei, I find), I found I was quite near the Taiwan institute for American Studies, whose exact name I forget. I think we can assume that there is one of these on the mainland too. By now they may well understand us better than we understand them.
One of the major streets in Taibei/Taipei has the romanized name Hoping Road, Wade-Giles for Heping road (= “Peace Road”). A nice bilingual pun, “hoping for peace”. I believe that there was patriotic resistance to using pinyin up to a certain point. There also was a third system , popularly called bopomofo used to teach children, I think, which I found very useful because it is easy to use alongside the Chinese text.
their own Classics
was actually the line that raised my hackles, grateful though i am for the (english-medium) classical education i got. i don’t think i stand in a very different relationship to greek & latin writings than chinese students do, aside from the effects of having gotten that classical education (which most of my peers in the u.s. did not, and even fewer do now). we all live in an economic/political system that was built by colonizing christians fixated on greece & rome, whose state and supra-state norms & structures justify themselves through those bodies of writing and endlessly repeat their rhetorics (while particular state structures admit of a range of relationships to their concrete local sources: loud insistence in the case of china, equally loud dismissal in the case of the u.s.). cicero and pericles aren’t any more “my own” Classics than they are a chinese student’s, or a rwandan student’s: those would be haudenosaune and wendat literatures/oratures (on a definition based on regional influence) or an odd assortment including elye bokher, RaShI, and the Beowulf poet (on a lineage-based definition).
and if u.s. history is any guide, no matter how much of a liberal gloss gets put on those classics, they remain the same blueprints for oligarchy structured by inherited caste, inherited wealth, and pervasive misogyny that they’ve always been. athenian “democracy”, of course, being the oligarchy of all the men considered to be human enough to have rights* (a class as self-selected and self-perpetuating as any other oligarchy, junta, or corporate board of directors). and even that breadth of oligarchy being completely unacceptable to most of the leading lights of the classical canon, from plato on down.
which is to say: the greek & roman classics serve the needs of chinese state capitalism’s leaders just as directly (and for exactly the same reasons) as they served a bismarck, a jefferson, a louis-phillipe, a lenin – so it makes sense that they’re making room for them in the curriculum.
and that, in turn, is why i’m grateful to have had fairly early direct (if translated) exposure to them: my profit on’t is that i can recognize their traces to wish the red plague on them.
.
* not to say that there’s nothing to be learned from it! i’m quite fond of c.l.r. james’ classic Any Cook Can Govern, and his against-the-grain reading of athenian methods of sortition and rotation as a model for assignment of responsibilities in collective self-organization structures. but i do wish he’d been ready to say that the liberatory possibilities in what he was describing needed another name than “democracy” to distinguish them from the use of that word for electoral systems that even athens had rejected as too oligarchic.
@rozele
Lot of anger here 😊. Are the authors of the Classics really responsible for the way their works were understood and used? You could read Greek thought as promoting free inquiry and questioning of authority. Also collection and interpretation of facts and curiosities, dissection of rhetoric, etc. They had to start somewhere and maybe starting from 21th C biases and (understanding of) past experience would result in political theories and practices which would be just as stupid as those modelled on Greek writings.
Quite a number of interesting books.
As an exotic Westerner (or Westernly clad exotic Northerner peekign through the keyhole) I am curious to know what exotic Iranians and exotic others have to say about those exotic Westerners. I read about it while having my morning bottle of vodka amidst of Russian beauties in Taiga. Just no “power relationships”, please. Only expotic people and beauties and taiga.
Actually, one of the top Chinese leadership (I don’t remember who) in the first decade of the century was a fan of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.
I don’t feel anger like rozele; you could probably say I have a slightly jaundiced view of all this. I’m not that impressed by the narrative outlined in the post. I find no irony at all in the fact that this is occurring at a time when “across China, patriotic fervor is growing, and nationalists are more confident and dismissive of Western critics”. The Chinese have always felt a burning desire to become equal with the West that subjected them to such humiliation. With their newfound confidence they can study the Classics of the West without feeling that it is being rubbed in their faces. The Chinese now feel quite comfortable — no, entitled — to study the Western Classics as equals because of renewed confidence in their own tradition and its place in the pecking order. As equals with the West, they are interested in learning from another ancient civilisation — indeed, it is part of their fascination with glorious ancient cultures just like their own. In the end it is intimately related to their fascination with their own ancient past.
As an example of this mentality, I will cite this sentence from a Chinese travelogue The Greater Middle East: Travelogue and Reflections, written by H. K. Chang (born in Shenyang, raised in Taiwan, educated at Stanford):
Whenever I see the Han era beacon towers in Xinjiang, I marvel at the fact that the Han Empire extended so far west. When I saw the imposing and exquisite remains of ancient cities in Morocco, the Roman Empire’s westernmost territory, I realized once again that each of these 2nd-century great empires had its own merits.
I hope you don’t mind if my first impulse is to say “Yuk!”.
a lenin
Actually, Lenin was born in a society that did have inherited castes. He was not particularly into those. But privileges to working class can be interpreted as reversal of castes… I am sure, Lenin learned from Classics something else, though.
“Any Cook Can Govern” – a quotation ascribed to Lenin. They say that Lenin actually did not say that. DeepL:
We know that any laborer [unskilled_labourer] and any cook [kithchen_maid] is not capable of taking over the government [managing state] right now. In this we agree with the Cadets, with Breshkovskaya, and with Cereteli. However, we are different from these citizens because we demand an immediate break with the prejudice that only rich or from rich families are able to manage the state and carry out [routine, ] everyday work of managing
the state. We demand that the training in public administration [state managment] be conducted by conscious workers and soldiers, and that it be begun immediately, that is, that all the workers, all the poor, be immediately involved in this training.In the original “cook” is “kitchen maid”, the word for “governing, managing” is the same,
the statewas added by DeepL. In early Soviet time it was ascribed to him, in the form “every kitchen maid should learn to govern the state“. Actually, if Lenin said something similar, it does not mean that he did not say “every kitchen maid should learn to govern the state” in any of his speeches.Later it was simplified to “every/any/even kitchen maid can govern the state”.
“… Xinjiang, I marvel at the fact that the Han Empire extended so far west. When I saw the imposing and exquisite remains of ancient cities in Morocco, …”
Yesterday I discussed similarities between Morocco and Central Asia and also Uyghur flamenco (in 90s someone brought cassetes with flamenco to there – soon copies became very popular and since then Uyghur pop is flamenco:)). If Uzbekistan is Morocco and al-Andalus is Kashgar, we have a funny topology.
Eureka!!!
Topologist Fomenko already equated different events and kings in time. In space and time.
But we just need to roll the globe in a similar fashion….
Oh. It seems Uyghur flamenco has become even more influential!
flamenco Uyghur in Google:
“On any given weekend in China you can find a Uyghur band playing flamenco. It has not always been this way. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a young man from Qarghiliq in Kashgar prefecture discovered Turkish variations of Spanish flamenco.”
“Erkin Abdulla is an Uyghur musician music style is contemporary folk, Uyghur pop and flamenco. ”
…
——
I think I read about it in Rachel Harris’ articles on this site: this site.The exact linked article is Cassettes, Bazaars and Saving the Nation: The Uyghur Music Industry in Xinjiang, China. Sadly the site is only accessible on archive.org, and the buttons “Play” and “Watch” do not seem to work:((( The book version of this chapter, in turn, does not have buttons “Play” and “Watch”:/
The clock Saturday, Apr 28, 2012 7:29:56 pm and then 29:57 and then 29:58 and then 29:59… is surrealistic:)
She also has Reggae on the Silk Road: The Globalization of Uyghur Pop. Fuck, such stuff is much more interesting to read when you can play it:(
was actually the line that raised my hackles
Wow, that really did push your buttons! While I admire the eloquence of your spleen, I do think you’ve (uncharacteristically) let your feelings rule your analysis. Of course you “stand in a very different relationship to greek & latin writings than chinese students do”; as you yourself say:
we all live in an economic/political system that was built by colonizing christians fixated on greece & rome, whose state and supra-state norms & structures justify themselves through those bodies of writing and endlessly repeat their rhetorics
Which Chinese students do not. QED (to go all classical on you). And I agree with PlasticPaddy that the authors of the Classics aren’t responsible for the way their works have been understood and used. They were doing their best with what they had, just as we are, and I’m pretty sure in a millennium or two our writings will look just as ignorant and unhelpful as theirs do to you.
I am curious to know what exotic Iranians and exotic others have to say about those exotic Westerners.
Read Jalal Al-e-Ahmad.
I hope you don’t mind if my first impulse is to say “Yuk!”.
I don’t mind it, but I don’t really get it. If you take off your “Chinese imperialism sucks” glasses, it seems pretty unexceptionable. What, we’re not supposed to be impressed by the extent of ancient empires?
What, we’re not supposed to be impressed by the extent of ancient empires?
The bit that excited yuk-feeling in me was specifically the word “merits” in “I realized once again that each of these 2nd-century great empires had its own merits.” On this basis, Putin is currently attempting to make the Russian state more meritorious.
It reminds me of Auden’s criticism of his own poem “Spain”, and specifically the lines “History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon”:
I pretty much agree with rozele. I don’t see much evidence in the works I’ve read (in English, about half of Plato, some Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and long ago, scattered others) that any of the Greek and Roman classics objected to the things about their nations and empire which horrify us, such as slavery and military aggression. As far as I can tell they took them for granted as a starting point and didn’t discuss them much, with maybe an occasional muted quibble. I don’t see a lot of room to separate them from “the uses to which they’ve been put”. .
Not unique to Greece and Rome. The one man one vote idea even in principle isn’t 200 years old, and one person one vote (in the US) only 103. Rule by tight aristocracies, oligarchies, and military groups is the historic norm.
Different topic: Marcus Aurelius is a Western thinker who is easy to put in dialogue with Confucians and other Chinese classic philosophers.And likewise Lucretius and other Hellenistic and Roman authors, with their concentration on ethics, politics, and self-governance. And Heraclitus, who survived only in fragments, really harmonizes with Laozi. But Plato and Aristotle with their attempts to ground these practices on metaphysical Truth are pretty alien to Chinese thought, at least before Buddhism became important after 500 AD or so, and probably still then.
AC Graham tried to assimilate the later Mohists to Western rationality, but he recognized that that was a pretty long stretch and that his attempt was minimally successful. And in any case the later Mohists are more obscure than even the Presocratics, whose fragments are at least read, while the later Mohists’ haven’t been..
I don’t see much evidence in the works I’ve read (in English, about half of Plato, some Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and long ago, scattered others) that any of the Greek and Roman classics objected to the things about their nations and empire which horrify us
Of course they didn’t, any more than most of us object to the things that will horrify our descendants (should there be any) in a millennium or two. I deprecate in the strongest terms the current soi-disant “progressive” tendency to 1) reduce everything to politics and 2) throw overboard anything whose political statements or implications don’t exactly suit our current ideals. (When we change our ideals, we throw our own previous statements overboard.) This is the Khmer Rouge approach to life, and it sucks. Do you really think the only thing that matters about Plato is his attitude to slavery? I hate that kind of reductionism. On MetaFilter Thomas Jefferson can’t be discussed except as a slaveowner, and if you object you get “Oh, so you think owning slaves is OK?” Bah.
“Of course they didn’t, any more than most of us object to the things that will horrify our descendants (”
In terms of freedom of individual beings (if we assume that more freedom is better) two blind spots are
(1) children
(2) concept of property
But we extended social mobility to gender and indeed lack of criticism of slavery suprises us. Though WP says circumcellions were freeing slaves. I wonder if it per se meant “extremists”. Like: “kill people and free slaves”.
The blind spots that are obvious to me, because my own understanding of these two differes from the norm.
Let’s not pretend that it’s about “the uses to which they’ve been put”, though. They were very comfortable with most things about the world they were in (except when things got overly democratic). They all wrote their class system into their works, which were highly political. Plato designed an idealized class system with political rights reserved to the philosophers and their military subordinates. Marcus Aurelius actually joked about the victims of his system (he was Emperor) squealing pitifully like pigs being led to the slaughter, instead of maintaining their equanimity as he did.
I was recruited by the Straussians in my youth and I read quite a bit of Strauss, and Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind”, pretty carefully. It was all well-done, but evasive. The Straussians worked with a theory of double truth, but I’m pretty sure that their actual goal, as was Plato’s, is an antidemocratic system. They only twisted his words to make it seem that he wasn’t and they weren’t. Given the weak spots of our actual oligarchic democracy, that challenge is pretty forceful.
I don’t cancel anyone. I’ve spent a lot of time on Plato and even admire the writings of the Nazis-to-be Celine and Hamsun. But when you look at these people (or Jefferson) you have to look at what they actually were. For a long time Jefferson was the holy man of freedom and democracy, but how can we maintain that view now?
I do object to a lot of things about our way of life, for the very very little that’s worth.
But when you look at these people (or Jefferson) you have to look at what they actually were. For a long time Jefferson was the holy man of freedom and democracy, but how can we maintain that view now?
Absolutely. As time goes by and mores change (and we simply learn more about the past through various means), we can achieve a more nuanced view, acknowledging things we swept under the rug before. I have absolutely no problem pointing out Jefferson’s slaveholding, and I would emphasize it to anyone who still maintained the idea that he was a “holy man of freedom and democracy,” but that doesn’t change the fact that he had important and interesting ideas. Same goes for, say, Herder and other anti-Enlightenment figures. You can be wrong about important things without becoming a non-person, and people who are so proud of having memorized all the things historical figures got wrong and insist on trotting them out on every occasion, whether they’re to the point or not, irritate me.
Somewhow I am remembering Meinhof again:-E
The ultimate point of studying the dead Greco-Roman pagans on their own terms is to learn how brutal and barbarous the supposedly posh civilizations of the Mediterranean littoral were before Christianity came along (despite being good at geometry and/or roadbuilding), and then already be able to read the Scriptures and the Fathers in Greek, the language mysteriously chosen by God as the instrument for enlightening the nations because come on you can’t reasonably expect people to learn Hebrew.
Not sure that that’s how the CCP wants things to play out, though.
There are many classical texts that are not about politics. Geometry, poetry… When you say “Classical Greece”, democracy is not the first thing that comes to my mind, really.
And modern assholes wil certainly find what to read anyway.
But if the idea is that veneration of classics influenced our modern society negatively, may be it did. I do not know.
Before the sixties the antidemocratic views of Plato, Aristotle, Jefferson, and many others were just not mentioned. It was pretty complex because a lot of teachers shared those views and their not mentioning them was part of the evidence that they shared them. They knew that at that time they could not be openly professed. I think that the present
A lot of the people now cancelling Plato, Aristotle, and Jefferson are people who never would have read them anyway. They’ve just come up with a reason for not reading them.
And all of those guys were politicos. Politics is not peripheral for any of them.
“the present situation is better”.
Plato’s views are hardly difficult to discern when one reads about his loathsome Republic. (Some have attempted to claim that Socrates is merely winding his fellow-conversationalists up there, I believe … it would be nice to think so …)
It was pretty complex because a lot of teachers shared those views and their not mentioning them was part of the evidence that they shared them. They knew that at that time they could not be openly professed.
Russians do not normally discuss the fact that Pushkin owned serfs (all Russians of his time owned serfs).
Because he’s a poet.
But Plato’s views can only be ignored in a discussion of Plato views when you try really hard not to discuss Plato’s views.
Yes, that’s what Putin is doing. This is why we say “meritocracy”!
All right, i do not know why he is doing this. But that is why poeple usually start wars….
To put in a plug for one of my favorite composers: when Musorgsky’s serfs were freed, it destroyed most of his net worth (and his brother probably stole the rest), but he never complained. He wrote all his music with very minimal support and I would drink a lot too in that circumstance.
Also, the plot conceit of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” makes you think of contemporary “financial instruments”, and Melville’s “The Confidence Man” has to remind you of thousands of contemporary con men, TV preachers, self-help authors, financial advisers, natural medicine charlatans, NYT editorialists, and political leaders.
I have to say that reading Marcus Aurelius induces in me a strong desire to go and sack Rome.
(Much as reading Seneca makes me feel quite sympathetic towards Nero.)
Melville’s “The Confidence Man” has to remind you of thousands of contemporary con men, TV preachers, self-help authors, financial advisers, natural medicine charlatans, NYT editorialists, and political leaders.
Yes, anyone who wants to understand America should read that book. I wrote about it here.
The ability to appreciate the “merits” of empires other than one’s own can perhaps, optimistically, be viewed as a step on the path towards realising the merits of peoples other than your own, and ultimately even of those subjugated by your preferred empire. It’s a small crack in the collective solipsism of true jingoists.
It’s easy to be stoic when you are an absolute monarch.
Huh. I turned on the radio just now and they’re playing Musorgsky (Pix at an Ex). All things cohere.
Управлять государством. Yet another of these instrumentals that hit me out of nowhere.
Thread won!
The historic one, but not the prehistoric one, if “history” begins once there’s a bureaucracy. The prehistoric norm seems to be consensus democracy: the whole village sits down together and discusses till everyone agrees.
Fomenko
The man has a Klein bottle for a brain …
Also, the Russian Horde cannot have spoken KONGO, thus vitiating his entire theory.
I am reading Graeber’s latest now. He’s gathered a lot of basic information that is well-accepted within prehistory studies but almost unknown outside it. I also got Lohontan’s book, with the eloquent Huron Adario’s criticisms of Western Civ. I confess though, that all this just makes me sad: What Might Have Been.
Musorgsky’s two opera’s show powerful men who are doomed by fate. Just plug in Putin for Godunov or Golytsin and sit and wait.
Khovanshchina is an extraordinarily dark portrayal of the early days of the Romanov dynasty, told from the point of view of Peter the Great’s victims. The Russian censors must have been extraordinarilt stupid to let it pass, though I’m not sure that it was ever performed during the Czarist era.
We were taught in school that everything began with первобытно-общинный строй which was Communistic (Urkommunismus). I kept wondering why did we get out from our caves then and why can’t we just return back to hunting and gathering, because Communism is what we were trying to build….
Which Chinese students do not. QED (to go all classical on you).
ah, this is where we disagree! to my eye, capitalism (in its more & less state-managed forms) and westphalian-mode nation-states – both christian european innovations – are no less the structuring elements of life in the PRC than they are in the USA (at the state and supra-state level, as i said). these days, the PRC loves to emphasize its roots in confucius et al just as much as the USA loves to pretend its institutional structure isn’t adapted from haudenosaune & wendat models, but that doesn’t make either one less westphalian or capitalist at heart, or less seamlessly integrated into the post-WWII institutional networks based on (and designed to enforce) those specific models of being a polity.
and while i wasn’t talking about how classical authors’ works have been used, but about the explicit content (and often, stated purpose) of their writings, i certainly don’t think there’s any kind of firm line between that content and the uses to which their writings are put. it’s certainly possible to use writing with a liberationist bent for hideous purposes (christianity is always my favorite example, but they abound), but with the greek & roman classics the lines are very direct.* they were canonized because of that content, not despite it.
finally: sure, plenty of well-meaning contemporary writing will look appalling in another fifty, let alone 500, years! but the idea that what the men canonized as “classics” believed was ‘the best thinking available at the time’ holds up about as well for them as it does for a jefferson, calhoun, or buckley. “doing their best with what they had” is quite different from taking a specific, appalling, position in a field that included vigorous proponents of equality, liberty, and solidarity. one of the most useful things in graeber & wengrove’s The Dawn of Everything is its documentation that ideas like plato’s (i keep ragging on him because he gets trotted out as an examplar of democratic athens, whose institutions he loudly opposed) have never gone unchallenged from (as el sup says) below and to the left.
i’m not at all insensible to the beauty of plenty of the writing in the greek & roman canon, and the wonders that have been done by translators to convey it (kaveney’s Catullus is at the top of my to-read pile as i write, and will end up sharing a shelf with davenport’s Seven Greeks), but i focus on the politics of these works because they are so constantly presented as apolitical literary/intellectual masterpieces, as transcendently valuable, as beyond contemporary concerns. including, oddly, the huge number of them, from the Republic to the Aeneid to the City of God, that are explicitly political works.
.
* and people certainly do try to read explicit apologia for oligarchy, slavery, wars of conquest, &c – like plato’s writings, for example – as having some kind of liberationist use, despite crystalline analyses by izzy stone and others (not to mention what those books actually say).
i focus on the politics of these works because they are so constantly presented as apolitical literary/intellectual masterpieces, as transcendently valuable, as beyond contemporary concerns.
Totally understandable. I, on the other hand, can’t remember when I last saw someone seriously maintaining that sort of thing, whereas I am constantly running into people who want to cancel everything and everyone before last week (except, say, Mr. Rogers) because of political incorrectness, and it pisses me off.
people certainly do try to read explicit apologia for oligarchy, slavery, wars of conquest, &c – like plato’s writings, for example – as having some kind of liberationist use
Why shouldn’t people read anything they like for some kind of liberationist use, even if it’s reading against the grain? Isn’t that how political culture works, just as people borrow words from other languages and distort them phonetically and semantically for their own purposes?
I also found it funny to read the sentence about American students studying “their own” classics. I think I understand what’s meant, but the Greek and Roman classics don’t belong to the US (or the Americas) the same way Confucius or Mencius belong to China. I guess on a belonging scale, Confucius and China would be one end, Plato and China would be another end, and US and Plato somewhere in between.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The past is a foreign country as people say.
I think people may be underestimating the degree to which classical Greek and Roman culture underlies the taken-for-granted preconceptions of all “Western” culture (even American), and Islamic culture too, for that matter. This is a lot more subtle and a lot more pervasive than whether you agree with Plato’s politics or whether you can read Latin.
I suspect that this would be more readily apparent to somebody from outside that tradition. A fish can’t see the water …
the Greek and Roman classics don’t belong to the US (or the Americas) the same way Confucius or Mencius belong to China.
Arguably not any more, but they certainly did up till, say, WWI. American education was steeped in the classics, and everyone from Washington on down took their rhetoric from Cicero et al.
Also what DE said.
Plato’s views are hardly difficult to discern when one reads about his loathsome Republic. (Some have attempted to claim that Socrates is merely winding his fellow-conversationalists up there, I believe …
But, but! Plato changed his views: having tried to implement The Republic in Syracuse and failed, he went away with his tail between his legs, and wrote The Laws, which is more pragmatic and more humanitarian.
To the extent The Republic is merely echoing His Masters Voice, we can say Socrates lived too much in his own head; and should be rightly criticised for corrupting the youth with no thought for the consequences.
Plato changed his views
True.
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As a Russian I would be tempted to answer “how did Greeks influence the world?” with “physics, mathematics, sculptures”. It is a simplistic answer, inspired by theorems of geometry in school and my own interests. “Art of Ancient Greece” alongside with “Art of Ancient Egypt” were my first books (there are my drawings there….).
I would be tempted to answer “why do people learn Greek and Latin” with “…poetry”. Because people interested in philosophy usually do not learn Greek.
I am aware that spontaneous answers by students of the Classics are different. I guess it also depends on your country and your professor. Russians do not read Augustine, Catholics did.
We are not usually interested in political theories in exotic literatures. We like mysticism and poetry.
How many know anything about Indian (apart of maybe Bhagavad Gita) , Persian, Japanese, Arab political ideas? We know some Chinese names (Shang Yang) but again, poetry and mysticism are more popular.
—
Some comments in this thread that started the discussion were about Greek politics. Also perhaps it plays a large role in Leeb’s course. It would be better, maybe if we said we are discussing Greek political writing or that Greek political writing is likely to affect students instead of equating Classics with politics.
And China. It is too not just “the regime”.
Bhagavad Gita
Krishnaites covered metro trains with advertisments of Bhagavad Gita in Moscow in early 90s:)
Actually Krishna wanted to kill as many people as possible, because there are way too many humans … So maybe someone can write a novel where Krishna advises modern political leaders to do ugliest things all in order to start a nuclear war.
“there will come soft rains”.
When “classical education” was more of a normative thing I daresay students spent more time reading the likes of Thucycides and Livy and so on than Plato/Aristotle. In other words, political theory as implicit in narratives about how things went right or wrong in particular circumstances with some suggestions as to why.
And perhaps a few got tired of narratives of war and politics and learned the pleasure of just opening up the Anthologia Graeca at random and coming across e.g. this epigram by Eutolmius Illustrius (#587 in Book IX):
Βάκχῳ καὶ Νύμφαις μέσος ἵσταμαι· ἐν δὲ κυπέλλοις
αἰεὶ τόνδε χέω τὸν παραλειπόμενον.
(“I stand between Bacchus and the Nymphs, and ever pour into the cups that of which there is too little.” – tr. W.R. Paton and said to have been inscribed (or at least intended to be described) on “a Vessel for pouring Hot Water or Wine”)
Or perhaps the scions of the Maoist-turned-plutocrat CCP elite should hear this and wonder about future plot developments: ἐνεπλήσθη γὰρ ἡ χώρα αὐτῶν ἀργυρίου καὶ χρυσίου, καὶ οὐκ ἦν ἀριθμὸς τῶν θησαυρῶν αὐτῶν· καὶ ἐνεπλήσθη ἡ γῆ ἵππων, καὶ οὐκ ἦν ἀριθμὸς τῶν ἁρμάτων αὐτῶν· καὶ ἐνεπλήσθη ἡ γῆ βδελυγμάτων τῶν ἔργων τῶν χειρῶν αὐτῶν, καὶ προσεκύνησαν, οἷς ἐποίησαν οἱ δάκτυλοι αὐτῶν·
(“For their country has been filled with silver and gold, and there was no numbering their treasures; and the land has been filled with horses, and there was no numbering their chariots; and the land has been filled with abominations, the works of their hands, and they have worshipped what their fingers have made.” — tr. Ephrem Lash)
“And as the world descended from balkanised militarism into outright gibbering lunacy, the bombs fell like a cleansing rain, and the story was over.”
“Chinese imperialism”? What are you talking about? I am referring to the Chinese belief in the superiority of their own culture/civilisation.
Sorry, rozele, Chinese classics have their own share of ugly Machiavellianism.
And the current situation in Xinjiang has its roots in a mid-Qing takeover of the Manchu empire by the Chinese intellectuals, which led to aggressive Confucianist policies in Xinjiang.
I don’t know what the original Chinese was for “each … had its own merits”, but I suspect it was 各有各的优点 Gè yǒu gè de yōudiǎn, where 优点 (優點) yōudiǎn means something like “advantage, merit, virtue, strong point, good point, strength”. It’s actually rather formulaic — in a context like this to the point of meaninglessness. If this is in fact what the original said, I suspect that the translator struggled to put it into decent English.
For me this wasn’t the source of the yuckiness, though; it was the “we were both glorious” sentiment.
@Bathrobe, but “glorious Roman empire” (destroyed by Barbarians because Romans were corrupt) is pretty much Western mainstream.
It is not irritating because Europe is not an empire now (though both EU and Rome are “big”). And I do not think all people who like Rome exactly like conquests (just like not all people who like Barbarians support violence).
I do not share it, but this stereotype is not necessarily disgusting.
It’s not the stereotype, it’s the comparison. And it’s not disgusting…. it’s just a bit yucky. I put that up as an example of a certain Chinese mentality which I see as lying behind the popularity of Western classics. You don’t have to agree with my view, which reflects some of the vibes I personally felt while living in China.
I don’t see the interest in Western classics as being quite the same as you might get in other countries. For example, the Japanese view is more likely to be coloured by the earlier perception that studying the Western classics is part of “catching up with the West” or “becoming more cosmopolitan”. I have no idea what might motivate Indians, or Africans, or Arabs, or Persians, or any other group, but I’m pretty sure it will be slightly different in each case.
@Bathrobe, sorry. For some reason I thought that you were quoting a European author in China (like Leeb).
I was mistaken. There is still a problem: distinguishing between a feeling (e.g. a feeling evoked by ancient monuments) and its interpretation provided by the context (Europe is not an empire today) can be difficult.
Ruins do evoke a feeling, and then there are also “similar ruins found in many distant places” (cf. the Precursors in space operas). But no, I know too little about China to say what the guy could have meant. Superfically, “have their own merits” sounds like a cliché.
Of course it’s a cliché, and one has to have a collection of personally felt vibes to take it as a source of yuk. Nothing wrong with that — we all have our vibes — but to me it seems an odd thing to take against. Better to mock it a la 1066 and All That.
“Have their own merits” is a cliché (‘formulaic’ is the word I used).
To reproduce the Chinese world-view in a cliché’d nutshell: the Chinese are extremely conscious of their long history, which has left a vast amount of written records. This they see as setting them apart from their surrounding countries, which are regarded as newer and often derivative of China. 3,500 years is the original time span, but you can see how important it is to have a superior length of history from the fact that Mao “rounded it up” to 5,000 years. The Chinese are extremely proud of this history. It is marked out into dynasties; ancient writings and stories are the source of thousands of set Classical-style expressions in modern Chinese; and the ability to work in a reference to an ancient source is a mark of good writing. It is common in China to ‘prove’ that something that has come in from the West was actually found in China first. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
The sentence I quoted is from a travelogue of the Middle East by a Chinese writer. With their very strong sense of their own history, it is a kind of mental habit that a Chinese encountering ancient monuments in the West will try to fit them into Chinese periodisation. (This is similar to the habit of situating events in other civilisations to Western history, but the Chinese view is arguably more compact and consciously self-contained.)
In the last century or more the Chinese have developed ambivalent feelings about their history. There was a crisis of confidence in the early twentieth century, and the habit of harking back to their glorious past was mocked by Lu Xun. Still, they never really lost their fixation on their own past (Mao loved history and profited from it in his strategy to defeat the KMT.)
In more recent years Xi Jinping has again been pushing Chinese history and culture as a central part of the Chinese identity. He is also actively trying to obliterate the cultures and languages of the ‘minorities’ as he sees little value in them and they interfere with his dream of a powerful, united, Han-centred China. The Chinese Dream is one of reviving the pride and power of China as a historical entity.
My argument is that Chinese reverence for their own historical tradition and literature, and the great pride they feel for their newly resurgent nation, allow them to approach the Western Classical tradition from a position of strength. They are not studying it to find how to remedy their own backwardness and catch up with the West; they are studying it from the point of view that ‘we’ve got our own amazing tradition; let’s see what treasures this Western tradition has to offer’. I’m not sure they’d accord the same respect to a newer civilisation with less historical credibility. While there is obviously huge respect for the US (since it is so powerful), it certainly wouldn’t be studied from the same point of view.
At least that is my interpretation. I’m sure you could poke holes in my characterisation but I feel that my interpretation is superior to one that sees it as ironic that Chinese universities have grown into bastions of curiosity about the West and its traditions.
(I find the quote a source of yuck because it is shallow, stereotypically Chinese, and embodies so much of the ‘proud’ Chinese world-view. It is this world-view and its peculiar motivations that lie behind Chinese interest in Latin or Greek Classics. As I said, I don’t think other cultures would have the same approach.)
one has to have a collection of personally felt vibes to take it as a source of yuk. Yes, I’ve lived in China and I’ve had plenty of exposure to its world-view (often slanted by propaganda, of course). And I came to it from one of the derivative surrounding cultures, which made me much more conscious of the status thing that Chinese have about their history.
I don’t think other cultures would have the same approach.
It seems to me that all cultures with a sufficiently long history take pride in it and use it as a benchmark for world events, and I don’t see the harm in that. Furthermore, China is far from alone in using its power to bully surrounding countries. I appreciate your indignation but I think it’s misplaced in being directed at China in particular. The Brits do pretty much the same thing, for example.
I wasn’t talking about bullying surrounding countries (that imperialism thing again). I was talking about a mentality.
I’ve been led to understand the ancient Egyptians also had proud and arrogant attitudes to other cultures. (I think the British example will prove to be a blip in history.)
I think the British example will prove to be a blip in history
Already happened.
The British-Empire groupies currently forming our incompetent government are the blippiest of them all, steadily undermining yet further what remains of the UK’s geopolitical influence by stoking xenophobia at home and betraying allies abroad.
@bathrobe
I think you need to make a distinction between at least the following groups: (1) elites who create myths (but do not let their belief or non-belief in these myths influence their decisions and actions), (2) “influencers” who spread the myths (usually believing them when young, less so when older) and (3) the man/woman in the street who, lacking meaningful autonomy in many facets of his/her life, clings to the myths for consolation and as a source of self-esteem. I find yukky inapplicable to the elites (words like irresponsible or monstrous would be applicable, depending on the results and the timeframe) and to the man/woman in the street (here I would say unconsidered or shallow). For the group in the middle I would say yukky is just right.
My argument is that Chinese reverence for their own historical tradition and literature, and the great pride they feel for their newly resurgent nation, allow them to approach the Western Classical tradition from a position of strength. They are not studying it to find how to remedy their own backwardness and catch up with the West; they are studying it from the point of view that ‘we’ve got our own amazing tradition; let’s see what treasures this Western tradition has to offer’. I’m not sure they’d accord the same respect to a newer civilisation with less historical credibility. While there is obviously huge respect for the US (since it is so powerful), it certainly wouldn’t be studied from the same point of view.
The article says this in so many words: ‘Oh, those other cultures are accessible to us. And because China is also a great civilization, why don’t we study other civilizations too?’” I don’t see why that’s a bad thing; indeed, I consider it unequivocally good that they’ve got the self-confidence to do that, and wish more countries could take that approach, instead of getting stuck in an unproductive binary of rejectionism vs. star-struckness. “Backwardness” is emphatically not China’s problem any more; moral bankruptcy is, and its principal manifestations – one-party dictatorship, forced abortions, cultural genocide, etc. – are thoroughly modern ones.
Yeah, that’s how I feel too.
There’s a whole long story about the function of the classics in Wester culture that has hardly been mentioned yet. Just going back to the 19th c., both Germany and Britain made classics central to their educational systems, but as I have been told, the British tended toward Latin and the Germanys toward Greek. (About 40 years ago a German I knew said that the classics were still much more important in German education than in American education). IIRC the switch from classic-centered to science-centered education in the US happened around 1900.There were then movements to restore the classics to their former importance, but in translation: The Oxford Classics and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western Worlds. My mother participated in one of these popular education groups and I picked up on some of it,
A lot of continental philosophy is rooted in classical Greek writings (Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida), whereas American and British philosophy is positivist and anti-historical and the classics are shoved in a corner.
And finally, a major tendency in political philosophy (Leo Strauss, Karl Schmitt, et al) is classicist. And I would call them reactionary.
I wonder if there is a similar tradition among primitive cultures—boy, do I hate this term—of longing for a glorious past, where a youth had to take on singlehandedly a lion/tiger/bear/buffalo, armed with just a spear or something, as part of a rite of passage. I bet there is, but is it sufficiently well described? Bedouins, Caucasian natives, Andaman Islanders, New Guinea tribes, Torres Strait Islanders, Australian aborigines, Yahgans and other South American tribes? I feel there is something to mourn the loss of.
I for one am glad I never had to had to take on a buffalo armed with just a spear.
I am, too!
But still, from the point of view of a proud tribe leader, we’re all a lot of pathetic weaklings!
@PlasticPaddy
I’m sure that is true. However, I’m not sure it’s so easy to distinguish among the three.
@Lameen
I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I was specifically referring to the observation in the piece that it was “ironic”.
Perhaps it would be easier to understand my point if you think of the Chinese as imagining themselves as belonging to an elite club of “top-of-the-line Classical cultures”. I am not saying that Chinese interest in Classical Western culture is a “bad thing”. But it should be seen in terms of possible deeper identities and motivations.
The Germans have been given a bad rap for their distorted historical interest in Classical Greek culture. Surely their interest was also a “good thing”. Wasn’t it? I think you should be prepared for some pretty slanted views on Classical Western culture to come out of China. Some will have merit. Many will not.
“primitive cultures—boy, do I hate this term”
Primitive means primal, though. Original. Cf. Primitive Baptist Church.
The development primal > simple and primal > derogatory can be modern (and reflect modern arrogance rather than the arrogance of 19th century).
Which does not mean, of course, that modern hunters-gatherers are primitive (primal, primeval, …) in this primitive sense of the word.
Once in Kentucky I saw a handmade sign, PRIMITIVE FUDGE. Still thinking about that.
Primitive Fudge don’t hold with infant baptism, musical instruments in church, and Sunday School.
In Russian we have
первобытный – a calque, but I am not sure what is the source. I am not even sure what the second part means. “First-being”?
быт also now means daily life/way of life, often the material component of it, often routine (whether you have a washing machine) and первобытный is likely understood as “hides and stone tools rather than clothes and metal” but I am not sure of the word was derived from быт “way of life” rather than быть “to be”.
I do not feel any negative connotations here. It is about the Stone Age (it is commonly used in metaphors, often referring to feelings and instincts, often powerful* and sexual – often positively and with fascination. cf. Basic instinct). We usually do not apply it to modern peoples (though первобытно-общинный строй refers to the social formation of hunters-gatherers).
примитивный primitivnyj – a borrowing. This one, conversely, does not mean “original”, just simple. I think its connotations are worse than in English (can even be an insult). It is also used in mathematics, but I am not sure if Russian mathematicians and students understand its original meaning.
We do not apply it to any peoples (only to your dumb classmate). Basically, we do not apply to modern peoples either word.
—
*rawr
первобытный – a calque, but I am not sure what is the source.
Yes, it’s an interesting word. Vasmer says перво- often represents ἀρχι-, but the Greek equivalent is ἀρχέγονος, which doesn’t work as a source. If only there were a Russian OED!
How deep does the sectarianism in Kentucky fudgemaking run? Can you get OLD REGULAR FUDGE if you go to a different vendor?
There was apparently circa WW1 a school or faction of Russian painters who called their approach Неопримитивизм.
Primitive and Old Regular Fudge don’t have sprinkles.
Yes, “primitive” exists in Russian in specialized terms in science and art (Primitivism, Rousseau).
But until recently I missed the reference. “Simplistic” I believed, but now I think “первобытный”.
(I wonder if Henri Rousseau saw Altamira…)
I think they all get high on their own supply after a decade or two at the most.
“until recently”
It was DE adding [sic] to Meinhof’s “primitive languages”. I am afraid I will keep remembering Meinhof on every second occasion. But in this case I learned something useful.
There was a lot of nostalgia in Classical mythology for the days, not necessarily of fighting man versus predator, but a simple style of one-on-one elite dueling. In spite of The Iliad‘s ambivalence about warfare in general, there is clearly quite a bit of nostalgia for the primality of Bronze Age combat, when matters were settled by one petty ϝάναξ facing off against another, with just a spear and perhaps a chariot. The same must have been true of the war epics of the Theban Cycle as well as the Trojan Cycle; just from their titles, we know that the songs of the “Seven Against Thebes” and the “Epigones” were mostly about the heroic nobles fighting one-another.
Of course, the Classical Greeks were by no means unique in their idealization of this kind of simpler elite-dominated warfare. It also shows up among the Romans, Hebrews, Irish, and countless other peoples. The Greek epics may be the clearest exemplars in the “Western” tradition however.
Can’t say that this element is absent form modern cartoons, films and video-games.
(but wihtout glorious past)
As my father put it, “How does defeating Sting in a duel make you emperor of the universe?”
Oh. Not Baader Meinhof.
Or is it?
A great-uncle of hers. The fact that I am remebering him often is related to the frequency illusion.
And the fact that you feel like you just started remembering him often is related to the recency illusion.
Of course, the Classical Greeks were by no means unique in their idealization of this kind of simpler elite-dominated warfare. It also shows up among the Romans, Hebrews, Irish, and countless other peoples.
The Japanese (Tale of the Heike among others) and the Mongols (Epic of Janggar among others). But Heike was underlain by Buddhist sadness at impermanence while Janggar had quite a lot of the supernatural.
There are stories about Icelanders though. They were so few until recently, that someone (I mean, one of Russian Scandinavists) said that basically there was a story about every Icelander, and I still do not know whether I should tale it literally (that is: there was such a tradition but many were not interesting) or as an exaggeration (that is: given that many stories were lost, the overall number of stories must be comparable to population).
Nothing prevents one from composing such a story about Pushkin or Galois (and the Three Musketeers is also this sort of a story). Except that this all is somehow suspicious. “Let’s kill each other, it is cool!”? This way stories about knights start to recemble another genre.
My favorite Icelanders were Grim and Glum, two brothers who left the house one morning and were killed more or less immediately for one reason or another. Basically the minimal Icelandic story.
Genghis Khan’s army was tightly disciplined and individual heroism was discouraged. In the Secret History Temujin (Genghis Khan) was an organizer, disciplinarian, and deal-maker and there are few stories about his own prowess.
organizer, disciplinarian, and deal-maker
Top three habits of outstanding world-conquerors …
There are stories about Icelanders though.
The Old Norse World
This site is very much in progress but documentation is underway.
https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/m.php?p=onw
“And the fact that you feel like you just started remembering him often is related to the recency illusion.”
!!!
I am not sure if is “thread won” or “hats off” or 0:1 or 73:458, but it did not occur to me:/