Classical Education in a Relativist World (excerpt)
Revisiting the Philological Approach to Language Study
by Gabriela Anderson
copyright 2009, revised 2025
‘To study the uses of a language not only in its past or its present forms, but as something that is continuously changing, continually moving from the past through the present and into the future, turns out to be a fundamentally interdisciplinary task.”
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(Philology of the Future, Futures of Philology, Helge Jordheim, 2004)
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“Real intercultural communication, understood as a dialogue between equal parties, presupposes highly developed linguistic competences and a profound knowledge of culture and history enabling ‘translation’ from one context to another.”
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(Foreign Language Studies and Intedisciplinarity, Hans Lauge Hansen, 2004)
I grew up hearing that “everything is relative.” These days, the direction that humankind seems to (re)discover is that not exactly everything — or, perhaps, nothing at all, really — is relative if one accepts and is knowledgeable enough to apply a thoughtful look to his or her surrounding universe.
One of the paradoxes generated by the pro-democratic re-orientation of traditionalist philosophies throughout the 20th century was the paradox of duplicity: the duplicity of Science with regard to what is indisputable and what is relative. Science has evolved as a vast field that, on the plan of spirituality and psychology, has been working assiduously to encompass all opinions, assumptions, extrapolations and disputes into the manageable matrix of (usually indisputable) “scientific knowledge”; and yet, simultaneously, in the social, political, and artistic spheres — fields that were once associated with “culture,” “humanities,” and “tradition” — the omnipotent Science field has been expanding tremendously seeking to promote Relativism as a bridge toward mutual agreement. Ultimately, relativism as a modus vivendi, has gradually infiltrated all the aspects of our lives under the aegis of the famed theory initially generated by an author whose odd sense of humour was made apparent by a frequently mediatized photo in which he comically stares — not tongue in cheek but tongue-stuck-out — straight into the eyes of a bewildered posterity since then until now expected to worship him for his wisdom.
Relativism, a movement that originally emerged under the umbrella of a much-praised revolutionary-scientific theory, has gradually spread its webs into our everyday thinking by means of mass-driven artistic productions and through increasingly licentious approaches to everyone’s life choices. At first, the idea of relativism reared its head during the Renaissance and is quite obvious in Shakespeare’s plays; it seemed to merely reassert some age-old wisdom that had become stifled by dogmatic religious and societal rules. Over the past two hundred years, and especially since Einstein’s decree, relativism has thrived beyond any anticipated limits, especially in the postmodern West-European and transatlantic cultures, as a propitious medium for multiple voices to come alive with equal strengths and rights to persuasion in the realm of social and cultural mores and in the interrelated sphere of politics. The democratic energies released through this process — and the new philosophy asserting that anybody could achieve any desired goals with the appropriate instruction under any circumstances — have raised Western civilizations’ level of material well-being to peaks that would have been impossible within the strict hierarchy of the aristocratic, pedantic societies of yesteryear.
Ultimately, it is common wisdom that relativism, this grandchild of the Enlightenment’s ghost, has empowered modern societies with channels for social and artistic expressiveness that have made us know each other as human beings — or, at least, it allowed us to fulfill our individual big or small potentials and egos — much more profoundly and on a much larger, global, scale than ever before. Despite the contemporary educational pundits’ self-bashing on topics like the lowering of standards in education, there should be no doubt that the West’s prosperity was built on the intrinsic value of relativism — a well-brewed recipe, believe it or not, without which democracy would not have been possible. Relative values have brought in the illusion of social equality and meritocracy on all levels, which quieted the ugly spectra of social envy and strife. A society in which all the citizens feel “relatively” satisfied with their status, are pushed to remain employed in some activity that is used by one or another on some plan; a society in which all the citizens over the age of 15 are encouraged to enjoy sentiments of self-accomplishment through a miriad of jobs and democratically-inspired buoyant social activities; such a society will always prosper like — the dazed utopia in Huxley’s Brave New World. The field of education expanded vastly in the Western world on the prerogatives of a globally-interrelated educational relativism and under the scrutinous nod of Science that dominated 20th century’s “scientifically-proven” routes of development.
Successes, as always, come with (relative) drawbacks, and one of the minuses usually deplored by many experts nowadays is the depreciation of moral values and the lowering of intellectual standards in the field of humanities where a variety of interests — most of them political — have bypassed the traditional conservative rigors of meticulous learning typical of previous centuries in order to lead to superficiallity, hypocrisy, corrupt intellectualism, and chaos in the Western world and its affiliates.
As the famous 19th century tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Christian Andersen, goes: the beauty of the clothing, and sometimes even the clothing itself, is just in the eye of the beholder…. Genuine cultivation is a regal mantle that takes years after years of relentless study to weave, and it is utterly visible in its splendor when it exists; but merely pretending that it is there will cause it neither to come into being nor to adorn anyone who is deemed to have it. By analogy, a modern student’s habit of studying just “for the credits,” and paying a school for credits that are backed only by fleeting inconsequential knowledge, will never get that student far in his or her life — unless a system based on relativism establishes a creative non-meritocratic path of advancement (which is the path to social corruption identified by recent U.S. administrations). Therefore, despite the benefits that relativism has appeared to bring in some sectors (such as in fashion, where women and men were invited to believe that short skirts could be decent and ripped jeans could be impressive — which gave generations of anti-elegance individuals a chance to feel proper on their own terms), relativism in education creates seriously faulty approaches and conflicts with real intellectualism, and the results of such crookery could only resemble the fabled emperor’s invisible coat. Today so many shout “There ain’t any!’… but the root of the problem lies deeper than the offshoots they seek to cut off: it is in the relative, science-based nature of our long-time-forged common mentality.
It seems that nowadays in the United States little has survived from the classical approaches once decided by austere “founding fathers’ and honor-bound teachers whose only ambitions, throughout entire lives devoted to study, were to pass their Greek-Roman, Middle Ages, and Renaissance traditional values onto the open minds of their students who were raised with profound respect toward their elders. Gone are the times of wise teachers sworn to devote themselves to the noble task of refining new spirits who, subsequently, would prove capable of building on the achievements of prior generations of scholars and artists and, in their turn, create new cultural value blocks to build more of the same. Many critics of the contemporary methods of teaching Humanities (which include subjects like Creative Writing and Translation) claim that these methods miss the substance inherent to true cultivation and that we are deceiving ourselves into believing that a multiple-choice quiz or a standardized test will reveal more than superficial knowledge and perhaps a student’s degree of luck instead of true intellectual levels and value. Under such premises, the results of contemporary Western education are more likely to reflect the dogma of equalizing students to each other (and to the teacher!) and of minimizing the teacher’s educational role and personality-related contribution.
When applying this ever-spreading relativistic mindset to the field of translation, one will find nowadays that multiple-versions of literary translations (i.e. relative literary translations) are nothing more than creative ego-affirming approximations, after all. An insightful article by U.S. writer Lee Siegel reflects the experience of many avid readers (myself included), and it also summarizes a contemporary academic problem:
“Literature changed my life long before I began to study it in college and then, in a hapless trance, in graduate school. Born into modest circumstances, I plunged with wonder into the turbulent emotions of Julien Sorel, the young romantic striver of Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black.” My parents might have fought as their marital troubles crashed into divorce, but Chekhov’s stories sustained me with words that captured my sadness, and Keats’s language filled me with a beauty that repelled the forces that were making me sad. Books took me far from myself into experiences that had nothing to do with my life, yet spoke to my life. Reading Homer’s “Iliad,” I could feel the uncanny power of recognizing the emotional universe of radically alien people. Yeats gave me a special language for a desire that defined me even as I had never known it was mine: “And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun.” But once in the college classroom, this precious, alternate life inside me got thrown back into that dimension of my existence that vexed or bored me. Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes, a welter of clever and more clever interpretations. Books that transformed the facts were taught like science and social science and themselves reduced to mere facts.” (“Who ruined humanities,” Lee Siegel, The Wall Street Journal, 2013)
The contemporary educational impasse frequently captures the headlines in the United States, a Western society in which, fortunately, religion is still neither minimized nor denied in the manner in which it has been throughout Europe after the Age of Reason ushered in our “enlightenment.” Therefore, here the educational impasse can be solved more easily: reintroduce the classics, bring in gifted teachers, teach the students the “old school” rules of studying, respect, and wisdom — and, for God’s sake, end the fallacy of athletics-pride! … remember that it did not lead either the Spartans or the Amazons or that 20th c. Germans’ party to any respectable lasting achievements.
Someday, perhaps sooner than we may think, political orientations toward a reconnection with the wisdom of older European epochs and personalities — a reconnection with times that preceded the Theory of Relativity and other modern, post-modern, hubristic theories that have failed to advance Western humanity — could reoccur. Such orientations could “unearth” and reactivate those plain inexpensive tools that our ancestors used to successfully use in order to create their treasure of intellectualism that we nowadays admire only in museums and on the “Classics” shelves. That day we will have to acknowledge once more that the majority of those great works were at first inspired by nothing more – and nothing less — than the harmonious art of words. Yes, for any little human being, in the beginning there has the be the Word … the words, the feelings, the emotions that the words evoke, the connectivity that the words can spread, and the happiness of the mutual cohesion which can exist only under the rule of the spoken, understood or inferred words. Expecting children to “experiment,” “do science projects,” and “discover hands-on” — or, as an old saying goes, to rediscover the wheel — instead of teaching them poems by the time they start speaking, as generations before them used to do; and instead of teaching them to feel beautifully and live the beauty of their young years unhampered by worries — such an unkind educational path could only lead to the results everyone sees and deplores these days.
Today, just as for millennia before, just as in the Beginning, words matter because they are used not only to pass messages that reflect our mundane experiences — they are like vessels of electrical, magical, magnetic content that we release into this world through our mouths (some would say that even our eyes and hands, too), sometimes with consequences that we, humble human beings, are still in wonder about, and with intricate impacts that brainwave science is unable to account for. Moreover, the refined, elegant and poetic words — with their sounds, shapes, and intricate links — still continue to matter for the same reasons for which they were once held to be more sensible and justified than basic or coarse words (although for a few decades now entire “civilized” societies worldwide, from pauper to president, have chosen to obliviously promote the latter in their popular cultures in an attempt to relativize social relations and obtain popular votes).
At their best, true words become alive on pages according to the description of this celebrated writer:
“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, human beings and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings, and think back to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that used to begin so strangely with a number of deep, solemn transformations; to days in withdrawn quiet chambers and to mornings by the sea; to the sea itself, to seas, and to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars – and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must also have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbeds, their bodies closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is still not about the memories themselves –not until they have turned into blood within us, into glance, into gesture, nameless memories that can no longer be distinguished from our own selves – not until then can it happen that, in a rarest hour, the first word of a verse would arise in their midst and go forth from them.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel)
From the viewpoint of a teacher and language expert, I feel confident to affirm that what Rilke implies here, with his poetic description of the act of writing, is an inflexible position in the act of choosing words: a plea for accepting the unicity of the speaker (poet, writer, common person) and ensuring a proper understanding of his or her personal choice of words. This language-oriented position has been held by men and women of letters for most of humanity’s history…. His position is that the mere one verse, once finally born (inspiration allowing) — after having undergone a painful pearl-like growth out of the myriad of personal memories and feelings inside the soul of a writer — would be absolutely unique, so unique that it would certainly deserve only the most faithful translation and comprehension into another language. No relativism here, one could conclude….
And how could that be achieved when Rilke’s own words are likely to reach even his German-speaking readers under a plethora of meanings according to criteria indeed as relative as levels of education and poetic sensitivity, personal experience, intellectual disposition, and momentary subjective mood…?
To give an answer to this question, one would have to peruse once more into the past. Underlying the humanities field is the ability to comprehend words and their origins (etymologies). The art of translation is as old as that of writing, and contemporary translators would find it useful to remember that the classical tradition that sought to promote ultimate accuracy in translation actually sprang from ancient religious texts’ exegeses in which scholars devoted their lives to identifying the most appropriate words. The study of words for the love of words and undestanding, otherwise known as philological study, represented, and should still constitute, an indispensable tool to anyone who would contemplate the job of translating even one literary paragraph in a manner that would honor the author of that paragraph.
Thus, the presence of significant variations among several versions of teh same translated text must raise analytical questions about the reasons underlying each translator’s semantic choices. In addition to that, comparative analyses between several translations of one text into a few languages (especially into languages sharing the same linguistic family with the original text) can shed light not only on the way in which the respective translators employed certain etymologies, but also on their diverse interpretations of the author’s psychological profile (his/her creative genius) as sensed instinctively as well as intellectually by each translator according to often-subjective cultural backgrounds. Nowadays, just as in the past, the question that will eventually linger on the back of most readers’ minds after reading a literary translation will be: which translation version – if any – is the most compatible with the original work. And it is doubtless that only an exceptionally-eloquent answer could assuage foreign readers’ regrets at not being able to comprehend the original text on their own…. It is also reasonable to accept the fact that genially-accurate translations have often been produced, and that a philologically-initiated translator passionate about a writer, and fluent in the writer’s language, would ultimately be able to distinguish, based on classical criteria of linguistic and emotional appeals, the best version of a translated text among several diverse, relative, translations….
Ensuring that students receive the most accurately-translated texts (whose meaning has not been corrupted by contemporary political goals) is a component of a teacher’s duty; it is also a mission in which the translator should relentlessly search for the tools that can demystify – de-relativise — the contemporary translation practices.
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Within the classical field of humanities education, the field of philology also deals with the concepts of symbolism and multi-level meanings in linguistic expression; therefore it combines the study of languages with the study of literature, history, grammar, lexicology, psychoanalytic criticism, and politics (philologists have customarily been recruited for diplomatic jobs in Europe). Classical philology has been studied in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, etc, and it is particularly important in the Hebrew exegesis, but it started to be promoted as a scholastic subject under the European Renaissance when the first European philological traditions were established in various countries. The 20th century developments in linguistics initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure and Chomsky have had the effect of diminishing the importance of antique, lexically-intuitive, “word-power”-oriented approaches that one can find in Homer and Cicero for instance. Instead, these postmodern scholars and their followers focussed on another (medieval, e.g. esoteric) tradition: an exegesis that emphasized the importance of quantifiable associations, thus of syntactic patterns meant to reveal the inner structure of texts through mathematical logic. With regard to the field of translation, their work paved the way to various trends including our Western postmodern enthusiasm about the future of computerized translation and the current tendency of some to see translation as an unpretentious rendering of words into other languages. (To underestimate the importance of a translator’s level of philological education is frequently a mistaken path, even when a translator — nowadays usually a basic-certificate holder — has to translate just administrative documents, as seen in the cases when tiny translation errors caused diplomatic war-stirring catastrophes).
Why don’t I appreciate computerized translation/interpreting (there is no computerized “interpreting” job worthy of appreciation, I’d say). Computers are supposed to avoid the relativism of translation processes — just as they are expected to do impartial paper grading in schools — and the outcomes have been less than stellar. Often enough I have had friendly debates on this topic with science fans without reaching successful conclusions, their answers being always “the computer science will progress and take over all our communications.” I have few scientific arguments against that scenario…. One emotional argument I like to offer is this story: in the 1990s, while performing simultaneous English interpreting at an international conference conducted in a small room with no other equipment than a microphone, I noticed a couple of Australian female experts listening intently to my Romanian sentences, an unmistakable expression of disapproval on their faces. The conference was about children with cerebral palsy who had lived secluded in East-European orphanages; having had the opportunity to study extensively the topic, I was sure that my translation was accurate. During the break I ventured to make an inquiry: I friendly greeted the two ladies, then discretely asked if indeed they were concerned about my translation and, if so, why — given that they acknowledged they could not understand any Romanian (in fact, on previous days, some Romanian listeners who were fluent in English had congratulated me for my irreproachable interpreting). The ladies’ equally friendly response was prompt: I was not projecting to the audience “the heated spirit” of the Australian biologist whose lecture I had been interpreting….
Now that was a surprise! As every conference interpreter knows, simultaneous interpreting contractual conditions require — under the mark of professionalism — that the translator should display at all times an impersonal voice to avoid shadowing the voice of the lecturer so that the spotlight should remain constantly on the lecturer so far as emotional appeal is concerned. But these ladies’ observation spoke volumes, too, with regard to what the translator’s duty still remains, despite official prescriptions on what a translator’s demeanor should be. A translator’s duty is to maintain faithfully the original “spirit” of the translated words by emulating the speaker/author’s own emotions with the readers. This human expectation remains valid whether the work were a piece of prose, a poem, or a scientific lecture delivered with pathos for the sake of raising funds.
It was not that I had been expected to falsely sound as loud as the lecturer, or to copy her voice, or to mimic her gestures. However, by attempting to remain (computer-like) “professional” in my accurate translation of words and sentences, I had overlooked the simple fact that the spirit or soul of that entire lecture that was dedicated to orphan children ultimately relied on my ability to transfer the emotional appeal of the ordinary English words into an equally electrifying Romanian words appeal. It was not a matter of intonation, voice or facial expression (which an AI subject can deliver too); it was about a humanly heated atmosphere generated by people’s truly caring about that topic; the act of literally putting in my inner human energy to support their cause made all the difference in the world… During the next session, I gave up the agency-recommended impersonal style, and emulated the emotional drive of the dedicated biologist as if I had written the biologist’s lecture myself, all along never missing or altering one word of her carefully prepared text. It worked like a team, with successful fund-raising results.
This is only one example from a career that taught me how much the human energy of words matter … because, in truth, words are used not only to pass messages that reflect our mundane experiences — they are indeed vessels of electrical, magical, magnetic content that we, with Almighty God’s help, can release into this world for purposes that should always be good….
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This chapter started by singling out one paradox of the 20th century: the relativist approach to modern life, education, and translation or words usage. As a teacher and language expert, I disagree with this approach; I believe contemporary societies should eliminate relative pathways and, instead, strive for the classical and universal values of goodness, standards of clarity, and educational trends that uphold only decent and sophisticated verbal expression as models in society.
I am optimistic about the future of education, literary creation, and translation being won by human minds in the AI age; my conviction relies on another paradox of our time: namely that, while language — a volatile body animated by its users — is fragile, fluctuating, and perishable, it is also extremely resilient in its ability to preserve and revive insidious meanings, and in its amazing versatility for cross-border enrichment and past memories of its own glories… If alive today, the democratically-inclined genius of a Shakespeare, a Boccaccio, or a Twain would surely bask in the vast avenues of lexical riches that the British, American, and Australian English dialects have spun for us — between the heights of academic jargons’ finesse and the lowest edges of slangs’ vulgarities — and out of this liberal concoction of linguistic possibilities such a genius would bring forth works of profound philosophy, poetry, and fiction in new tapestries of words able to challenge and balance again the general mentality of our vexing world that nowadays is as mired in self-defeating relativities as it once was in self-conscious rigidities.