Jacob Burckhardt: History and the Greeks in the Modern ...

Jacob Burckhardt: History and the Greeks in the Modern Context

by Anthony D. Rhodes

Portland State University ?2011

i ABSTRACT In the following study I reappraise the nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). Burckhardt is traditionally known for having served as the elder colleague and one-time muse of Friedrich Nietzsche at the University of Basel and so his ideas are often considered, by comparison, outmoded or inapposite to contemporary currents of thought. My research explodes this conception by abandoning the presumption that Burckhardt was in some sense "out of touch" with modernity. By following and significantly expanding upon the ideas of historians such as Allan Megill, Lionel Gossman, Hayden White, Joseph Mali, John Hinde and Richard Sigurdson, among others, I am able to portray Burckhardt as conversely inaugurating a historiography laden with elements of insightful social criticism. Such criticisms are in fact bolstered by virtue of their counter-modern characteristic. Burckhardt reveals in this way a perspicacity that both anticipates Nietzsche's own critique of modernity and in large part moves well beyond him.

Much of this analysis is devised through a genealogical approach to Burckhardt which places him squarely within a cohesive branch of post-Kantian thought that I have called heterodox post-Kantianism. My study revaluates Burckhardt through the alembic of a "discursive" post-Kantian turn which reinvests many of his outr? ideas, including his radical appropriation of historical representation, his non-teleological historiography, his various pessimistic inclinations, and additionally, his nonempirical, "aesthetic" study of history, or "mythistory," with a newfound

ii philosophical germaneness. While I survey the majority of Burckhardt's output in the course of my work, I invest a specific focus in his largely unappreciated Greek lectures (given in 1869 but only published in English in full at the end of the twentieth century). Burckhardt's "dark" portrayal of the Greeks serves to not only upset traditional conceptions of antiquity but also the manner in which selfconception is informed through historical inquiry. Burckhardt returns us then to an altogether repressed antiquity: to a hidden, yet internal "dream of a shadow."

My analysis culminates with an attempt to reassess the place of Burckhardt's ideas for modernity and to correspondingly reexamine Nietzsche. In particular, I highlight the disparity between Nietzsche's and Burckhardt's reception of the "problem of power," including the latter's reluctance ? which was attended by ominous and highly prescient predictions of future large-scale wars and the steady "massification" of western society ? to accept Nietzsche's acclamation of a final "will to power." Burckhardt teaches us the value of history as an active counterforce to dominant modern reality-formations and in doing so, his work rehabilitates the relevance of history for a world which, as Burckhardt once noted, suffers today from a superfluity of present-mindedness.

iii Table of Contents

Abstract .............................................................................................................................. i

Chapter I Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter II Contextualizing Burckhardt's Historiography .............................................................................................................................. 14

Chapter III Elements of Heterodox Kantianism: Aesthetics and a New "Objectivity" .............................................................................................................................. 39

Chapter IV The Greek Lectures .............................................................................................................................. 53

Chapter V The Problem of Power: Burckhardt Contra Nietzsche .............................................................................................................................. 76

Notes .............................................................................................................................. 93

Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 111

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Introduction

Nothing is more sacred than history. It is the great mirror of the world spirit. - Franz Gerlach1

All human knowledge is accompanied by the history of the ancient world as music is by a base-chord heard again and again; the history, that is of all those peoples whose life has flowed together into our own.

- Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization Every great human being has a retroactive force: all history is again placed in the scales for his sake, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hideouts ? into his sun. There is no way of telling what may yet become history some day. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still required!

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science ...it is only to the extent that I am a pupil of earlier times, especially the Hellenic, that though a child of the present time I was able to acquire such untimely experiences. That much, however, I must concede to myself on account of my profession as a classicist: for I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely ? that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come?

- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life

The growth of the reputation of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in recent

intellectual-historical appraisals is largely due to the rediscovery of the scathing and

prophetic views of modernity propounded in his Reflections on History as well as his various allusive prefigurements of structuralist and postmodern theories.2 Much of

Burckhardt scholarship attempts to situate his ideas in relation to those of the

presumptive sine qua non of the modern shift, Friedrich Nietzsche ? indeed, such a

comparison is inescapable. Yet, in my view, prior attempts to unravel the "Nietzsche

question" for Burckhardt have failed to consider in full the ethical-dynamic views of

history shared by these two figures or the centrality of their iconoclastic, perspectivist

historiographies ? specifically in the case of their respective conceptions of the

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