Markus Asper
In my fiftieth year, I feel it is time for a confession: In a zombie-esque fashion, dead men have taken control of my life. What is more, they have created what one could call my biography. I am not well-versed in horror or science-fiction genres, but what comes to mind are trashy plots of aliens eating out the brains of human beings and usurping their inner life. I am a professor of Classical Greek at Berlin, thus my aliens are, paradoxically, dead and ancient.
Ulrich von W., one of my impressive predecessors here, famously compared our profession with Odysseus offering blood to dead souls and thus making them in effect come alive again. We classicists have all gladly adopted that allegorical imagery, because besides many interesting parallels it offers the impression of control. Odysseus performs a ritual and thus controls these ghoulish souls. I am not sure, however, whether I still command control over my Greeks or ever did. I have realized that they have taken over already decades ago. Von W. told us where that blood comes from: straight from the heart, of course. To be fair, my vampire-Greeks have given me things in exchange for my blood: They have made me give some talks, they have pushed me towards publishing some papers, they have gotten me some decent jobs. They have made my modest reputation. I can’t complain, those zombie-ancients have treated me well. However, I am waiting for the day, chicken-livered, when I fall out of their favor.
My family and friends pursue healthy professions: for instance, they are architects, businessmen, or managers; they teach school or science writing, surgically remove appendices, or think about the space of culture. Two years ago, I invited the pre-school class of my twin kids into our university and to our department. The child-care workers left with the impression that I ‘make books’ -- and the kids? What impressed them most was the candy machine on my floor. My wife and children sometimes wonder what I do for a living, I suppose. I can’t tell them that I converse with zombies. As long as money comes in and I don’t end up in jail, they are okay, I think.
Oh yes, I do something about my sorry condition. I attempt to preserve my autonomy and to save my wits by telling myself and my students that our ancient Greeks are allelopoetic transformations, that is, our own constructions of a semi-fictitious past that is essentially meant to serve our own purposes. As I lecture, we are surrounded by Prussian neo-classical architecture which seems to back my case. Often, however, when I have almost succeeded in persuading myself and my students, from somewhere gentle laughter arises. That chuckle is that of Callimachus, an old Alexandrian patron without whose favors I’d be someone else. He was the first to take hold of me. I know him by the voice, at a slightly lower pitch than Aristotle and in a less bullying manner than Galen usually guffaws. Just as Hesiod knew his Muses, I only know my zombies by the voice. At least, the Muses told Hesiod some essential things; my ghosts mostly laugh at me.
Help has come from unexpected corners: Recently, German academic bureaucracy has almost managed to save me from the grip of the Greek past: administration leaves less and less time for academic pursuits, my students submit more and more theses that sit on my desk and block my mind. There were a few years when I felt like a grant-o-mat, a machine that converts coffee into grant applications (sorry for stealing your joke, Paul). But all those diversions have not deterred my ancient Greeks from controlling my intellectual desires, impossible, as they are, to grasp. As in Homer, when Achilles dreams of embracing Patroclus’ soul, but failing, I have spent the larger part of my life by trying to hug some ancient Greeks. As Achilles in his dream, I have failed. However, Achilles did not pay off his mortgage by dreaming of hugging souls. At one point I even grew a ponytail, hoping that at some day Empedocles, maybe, or Euclid would come up at me from behind and grab me by it, as Athena used to in the old days, pulling me towards something important. Nothing happened for a decade, then the tail had to go.
To be just, I owe much to my Greeks. I do repeat that I am not complaining (repetition is part of the ritual, though). Of those many gifts, the most helpful turned out to be the one that emerged the last from the notorious P-box: auto-fiction.
Published in Greek in: www.tanea.gr, 6-8.4.2018
Ulrich von W., one of my impressive predecessors here, famously compared our profession with Odysseus offering blood to dead souls and thus making them in effect come alive again. We classicists have all gladly adopted that allegorical imagery, because besides many interesting parallels it offers the impression of control. Odysseus performs a ritual and thus controls these ghoulish souls. I am not sure, however, whether I still command control over my Greeks or ever did. I have realized that they have taken over already decades ago. Von W. told us where that blood comes from: straight from the heart, of course. To be fair, my vampire-Greeks have given me things in exchange for my blood: They have made me give some talks, they have pushed me towards publishing some papers, they have gotten me some decent jobs. They have made my modest reputation. I can’t complain, those zombie-ancients have treated me well. However, I am waiting for the day, chicken-livered, when I fall out of their favor.
My family and friends pursue healthy professions: for instance, they are architects, businessmen, or managers; they teach school or science writing, surgically remove appendices, or think about the space of culture. Two years ago, I invited the pre-school class of my twin kids into our university and to our department. The child-care workers left with the impression that I ‘make books’ -- and the kids? What impressed them most was the candy machine on my floor. My wife and children sometimes wonder what I do for a living, I suppose. I can’t tell them that I converse with zombies. As long as money comes in and I don’t end up in jail, they are okay, I think.
Oh yes, I do something about my sorry condition. I attempt to preserve my autonomy and to save my wits by telling myself and my students that our ancient Greeks are allelopoetic transformations, that is, our own constructions of a semi-fictitious past that is essentially meant to serve our own purposes. As I lecture, we are surrounded by Prussian neo-classical architecture which seems to back my case. Often, however, when I have almost succeeded in persuading myself and my students, from somewhere gentle laughter arises. That chuckle is that of Callimachus, an old Alexandrian patron without whose favors I’d be someone else. He was the first to take hold of me. I know him by the voice, at a slightly lower pitch than Aristotle and in a less bullying manner than Galen usually guffaws. Just as Hesiod knew his Muses, I only know my zombies by the voice. At least, the Muses told Hesiod some essential things; my ghosts mostly laugh at me.
Help has come from unexpected corners: Recently, German academic bureaucracy has almost managed to save me from the grip of the Greek past: administration leaves less and less time for academic pursuits, my students submit more and more theses that sit on my desk and block my mind. There were a few years when I felt like a grant-o-mat, a machine that converts coffee into grant applications (sorry for stealing your joke, Paul). But all those diversions have not deterred my ancient Greeks from controlling my intellectual desires, impossible, as they are, to grasp. As in Homer, when Achilles dreams of embracing Patroclus’ soul, but failing, I have spent the larger part of my life by trying to hug some ancient Greeks. As Achilles in his dream, I have failed. However, Achilles did not pay off his mortgage by dreaming of hugging souls. At one point I even grew a ponytail, hoping that at some day Empedocles, maybe, or Euclid would come up at me from behind and grab me by it, as Athena used to in the old days, pulling me towards something important. Nothing happened for a decade, then the tail had to go.
To be just, I owe much to my Greeks. I do repeat that I am not complaining (repetition is part of the ritual, though). Of those many gifts, the most helpful turned out to be the one that emerged the last from the notorious P-box: auto-fiction.
Published in Greek in: www.tanea.gr, 6-8.4.2018
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Papers by Markus Asper
a view toward connotations, and some of their implications in four different fields of
theoretical Greek knowledge (mathematics, rhetoric, medicine, and belopoeics). In each
case, ‘rich’ terminologies exceed the purely functional ones, which I call ‘lean’:1 e.g.,
they can tell us something about the field and the actors involved. In addition, the chapter
argues that certain aesthetical aspects, connotations perhaps, of the terms adopted
add to their significance. These aspects are fragmentary self-descriptions of the activities
they are meant to designate and, in some cases, even contribute toward reconstructing
the perspective of the actors onto their own practices. To some extent, a
notion of field memory emerges. In short, rich terminologies can present additional aspects and perhaps do always imply certain associations that go beyond purely functional concepts of terminology.
ABSTRACT When it comes to science writing, narrative has attracted little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting a brief pilot survey on narrative in the Aristotelian Corpus. My main concern here is to understand the workings of narrative in the process of knowledge creation. Aristotle, apart from his paradigmatic role in the history of knowledge, offers a broad and varied corpus. The paper proceeds in three steps: After a few introductory remarks on the concept of ‘narrative’, I will give a brief overview of narrative in Aristotle. Then, there follow a few examples for the main epistemic functions of narrative in Aristotle. After that, five epistemic grand narratives, actually ‘stories’, told by Aristotle, demonstrate that he has a method of narrative construction, that is, of epistemic storytelling, which has been very successful. I attempt to cast this method in a poetics-style list of rules. The paper shows that Aristotle skillfully uses different forms of narrative in order to produce knowledge.
(This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.)
which make it possible to posit a connection between certain modes of presentation and institutional context. Among the texts looked at are the Hippocratic Epidemics, Aristotelian discourse, Hellenistic mechanics, and theoretical mathematics. While historical reconstruction of the institutional contexts involved is impossible, each of the cases leaves room for observations concerning an interdependence of knowledgepresentation and ‘setting’, understood as standard social context of reception. The paper describes resulting modes (collective, epideictic, school mode, how-to mode, analytical, and esoteric modes) as responding to and possibly emerging from certain contexts, but also as registers that later became per se possible choices for science
writers, each catering to specific functions within the transmission and presentation of knowledge. With respect to Greek science, it remains an open question, whether and how one can separate a style of reasoning from a mode of presentation, that is, separate epistemic from rhetorical structures.
special case of tradition, and finally knowledge texts as a special case of texts. The most significant section of the paper is the second half, where we sketch out two complementary methods of constructing or representing authority in such texts, one personal and one non-personal. Ancient Greek, religious studies, theology, church history, ancient history
and Chinese studies are our areas of expertise, so most of the examples we have chosen come from those fields. But our intention is to draw broad conclusions that could also apply to other traditions as well.
a view toward connotations, and some of their implications in four different fields of
theoretical Greek knowledge (mathematics, rhetoric, medicine, and belopoeics). In each
case, ‘rich’ terminologies exceed the purely functional ones, which I call ‘lean’:1 e.g.,
they can tell us something about the field and the actors involved. In addition, the chapter
argues that certain aesthetical aspects, connotations perhaps, of the terms adopted
add to their significance. These aspects are fragmentary self-descriptions of the activities
they are meant to designate and, in some cases, even contribute toward reconstructing
the perspective of the actors onto their own practices. To some extent, a
notion of field memory emerges. In short, rich terminologies can present additional aspects and perhaps do always imply certain associations that go beyond purely functional concepts of terminology.
ABSTRACT When it comes to science writing, narrative has attracted little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting a brief pilot survey on narrative in the Aristotelian Corpus. My main concern here is to understand the workings of narrative in the process of knowledge creation. Aristotle, apart from his paradigmatic role in the history of knowledge, offers a broad and varied corpus. The paper proceeds in three steps: After a few introductory remarks on the concept of ‘narrative’, I will give a brief overview of narrative in Aristotle. Then, there follow a few examples for the main epistemic functions of narrative in Aristotle. After that, five epistemic grand narratives, actually ‘stories’, told by Aristotle, demonstrate that he has a method of narrative construction, that is, of epistemic storytelling, which has been very successful. I attempt to cast this method in a poetics-style list of rules. The paper shows that Aristotle skillfully uses different forms of narrative in order to produce knowledge.
(This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.)
which make it possible to posit a connection between certain modes of presentation and institutional context. Among the texts looked at are the Hippocratic Epidemics, Aristotelian discourse, Hellenistic mechanics, and theoretical mathematics. While historical reconstruction of the institutional contexts involved is impossible, each of the cases leaves room for observations concerning an interdependence of knowledgepresentation and ‘setting’, understood as standard social context of reception. The paper describes resulting modes (collective, epideictic, school mode, how-to mode, analytical, and esoteric modes) as responding to and possibly emerging from certain contexts, but also as registers that later became per se possible choices for science
writers, each catering to specific functions within the transmission and presentation of knowledge. With respect to Greek science, it remains an open question, whether and how one can separate a style of reasoning from a mode of presentation, that is, separate epistemic from rhetorical structures.
special case of tradition, and finally knowledge texts as a special case of texts. The most significant section of the paper is the second half, where we sketch out two complementary methods of constructing or representing authority in such texts, one personal and one non-personal. Ancient Greek, religious studies, theology, church history, ancient history
and Chinese studies are our areas of expertise, so most of the examples we have chosen come from those fields. But our intention is to draw broad conclusions that could also apply to other traditions as well.