Why Premodern

Objects in Speculum Are Closer Than They Appear
[in response to the question, ‘Why study the premodern?’]

by Professor Nicola Masciandaro (English)

“Remember the present in the frame of the past and the future.”[i]

“‘Our culture’s form of intellectual cognition is that of critical scholarship’: this assertion by a great medievalist of the past—Johan Huizinga—may seem quixotic now, sixty-five years later [now more like one hundred]. Yet before we brush it aside, contemporary academics, and especially medievalists, would do well to consider what else we possess to put in its place.”[ii]

“‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’—thus asks the last human being, blinking. Then the earth has become small, and on it hops the last human being, who makes everything small.”[iii]

Why study the premodern? Why premodern? Why study? Why why? In asking why, what are we asking for? Not to belabor the birth of the question. More that I think the hermeneutic halting is healthy, happy, that it somehow simply helps—to alliterate!—to dilate the discourse by holding in head and heart for a moment the question (of the question (of the question)), swing the heft of its happening in a contemplative hand before hammering anything home with it. Not to mention the “whylessness” of life, the intrinsic nature of true values, the inseparability of ends and means, the suspiciousness of all justifications, and the sense that we never actually do things for reasons—well, maybe some things but even then it’s not the reason exactly (I trust)—but more as if to find the question which our doing is answering. Study the premodern to discover why we are, and who is, studying the premodern.

Dante in the De Monarchia: “In all action what is principally intended by the agent […] is the disclosure or manifestation of his own image. Whence it happens that every agent […] takes delight.” Nietzsche in Daybreak: “All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.” Gadamer in Truth and Method: “We can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption: “when a form of the world dies . . . it is made eternal.”  Lispector in The Hour of the Star: “Do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.”

Dead and living, past and present, all remain active, in interdependent communication as question and answer, in the boundless sphere of this commentarial cosmos. See! It is your own image, our image with the face of a question, emerging from the reflecting pool of your premodernist desktop, looking to us with familiar strange eyes, clearly still through all the beautifully distorted ugliness and grotesquely distorted beauty of the liquid medium, the deep swirl of contexts.

How we treat the dead, talk to them, play with them, argue with them, love them, has much to do with how we mediate utility and meaning. And as Arendt says in The Human Condition, “utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.”

“The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead . . . The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective . . . Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.”[iv]

Remember the present in the frame of the past and the future.

Notes

[i] Meher Baba, Not We but One, p. 52.
[ii] Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 12–13.
[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 10.
[iv] John Berger, On the Economy of the Dead.