Mark
Buchan Homer Redivivus
It would be strange to discuss
a revised role for classicists as public intellectuals
without recognizing that one manifesto for that project
has already been written: Hansen and Heath's 'Who killed
Homer'? For the book tries to use ancient wisdom (their
'Homer') to solve a very modern dilemma &endash; the role
of the humanist intellectual in the era of experts, in an
an increasingly commodified and class-riven social world.
Indeed, the Hanson/Heath program is a modification - and
intensification - of the old Gramscian demand for
'organic intellectuals'. Gramsci called for intellectuals
to meld into communities and work places, to refuse,
through their actions, to let any division between
intellectual and manual labor take hold. Hanson and
Heath's project goes further, seeking to bring the public
to the intellectuals. It breaks down barriers between
students and faculty by creating a world of intellectual
generalists. It demands a vast expansion of secular,
public education, funded by a huge increase in teaching
loads and a channeling of money away from arcane
humanities research programs. It demands an end to any
intellectual cant and pretension that cannot defend
itself before its broader community. Should not such a
project be openly embraced?
A frequent criticism has been
to question the content of this intellectual program, and
the version of 'Homer' that solders it together. Is not
its final cause the propagation of a US cultural
imperialism? But this merely begs further questions. What
is the precise nature of this contemporary imperialism,
and what are the pragmatic political alternatives to it?
To map Athens versus Sparta onto the cold War is not
quite the same thing as mapping them onto the US /NATO
versus Al Qaeda/The Taliban &endash; though one gets the
sense that at times both Hanson/Heat (with their
'unchanging core' of Western values) and the academic
left (with their unacknowledged 'unchanging core' of
current US imperialism) would have it so. At least the
Heath/Hanson project has the merit of posing the
political question &endash; in their terms, to raise
without apology the question of relevance. And at least
the building block of their vision of the human as a
communicative and social animal is grounded in a worthy
tradition, spanning Aristotle, Marx in his Paris
manuscripts, up to Habermas.
Perhaps this is why 'Who
Killed Homer?' finds a surprising fellow-traveller in
Terry Eagleton's 'After Theory', a work that also seeks
to ground contemporary ethics in the idea of the good
life shared by Marx and Aristotle. Both share an
intellectual impatience with contemporary humanist
academic work. Eagleton explains this poverty from our
unenviable status as epigones of the grand theorists.
Hanson and Heath vacillate &endash; at times, pointing to
toward the cultural pedigree of such theorists (say, the
classical roots of their intellectual ancestors Marx and
Freud), at other times seeking to sweep all obstacles to
Greek wisdom away. But the cure is the same: a populist
intellectual/cultural effort, grounded in a return to
ancient ethics in order to reinvigorate a mercenary and
moribund academic and political sphere.
In this paper, I would like to
take this common ground between Hanson/Heath's'Homer',
and the leftover ethical thrust of theory, seriously. For
Hanson/Heath's ethical 'Homer' is full of unacknowledged
contemporary theoretical concerns &endash; their secular
reflections on the fragility of the self, and hatred of
therapy-culture, finds a counterpart in the
psychoanalytic project, their economic populism in the
efforts after Marx to find forms of non-market-determined
value. But perhaps more important, a return to the basic
tenets of critical theory can help populize their utopian
Gramscian project.