- What was August Boeckh’s Encyklopädie?
This long awaited, first critical edition of August Boeckh’s famed lectures on philology is the result of a long and sometimes unlikely adventure in the preservation of rare material. The manuscript of which it is an edition is a highly complex “convolute” of notes upon notes upon notes, reminiscent of Talmudic commentary in its complexity and layeredness. The editorial work upon which the current critical edition relies was perilously close to being abandoned, stored as it was on so many floppy disks in a Berlin apartment, abandoned for many decades when the original edition was just nearing completion. The appearance of this book is a small miracle, made possible by the salvaging of prior editorial work and many helping hands. The text contains a theory of philology as the science of human culture – together with much documentation of how such a science was practiced in the first half of the 19th Century, when philology became an authority for the evaluation of cultural artefacts. Neither the critical edition nor the text it presents will be easily accessible to contemporary readers. But we hope to explain why studying this text repays the effort, particularly in this new edition.
First, context. August Boeckh (1785–1867) was an influential figure in the institutional architecture of German Classics in the course of his career in Berlin, which lasted until from 1810 until 1865. As founder of the Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum and member of the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (from 1814 on), Boeckh straddled a period in the development of philology from the paradigm of the individual researcher to the period of “big science” in the latter half of the 19th century. He was also a self-reflective philologist; and his reflections on the role of philology as a humanistic discipline are a valuable document for the history and theory of the humanities in the 19th century. We find these reflections recorded in his course on Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften [EMpW]. The only previous edition of this text was Bratuschek (1886), a posthumous, non-critical edition which integrated the notes of several auditors of Boeckh’s lectures together with Boeckh’s further published material.
EMpW was repeated every second year 26 times between 1809 (when Boeckh was still professor in Heidelberg) and 1865 (when Boeckh ended his teaching at the University of Berlin). The lecture course was based on notes that survive today as a “convolute” in the archive of the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. The lecture course was in German but bore various Latin titles in the Vorlesungsverzeichnisse of the time: Encyclopediam antiquitatis litterarum exponet easque recte tractandi viam ac rationem monstrabit (from 1809), Encyclopediam philologicam ex suis schedis docebit (1816), Encyclopediam et methologiam disciplinarum philologicarum ex schedis tradet (from 1818/1819 on), and Encyclopediam et methodologiam disciplinarum philologicarum tradet (from 1841 on) (Bratuschek 1886). Bratuschek heard EMpW as a student 1862–1866 and states that Boeckh’s lectures were extemporaneous and conveyed “only extracts from the rich material” of his manuscript. Bratuschek prefaced his edition with the wish to present Boeckh’s System der Philologie (Bratuschek 1886: iv), together with the admission that, in order to do this on the basis of the existing manuscript of EMpW, considerable revisions and supplementary material were required. Bratuschek’s further sources were notes from other students in the lecture as well as notes of Boeckh’s from other lectures on Greek antiquities, the history of Greek and Roman literature, Plato, Pindar, Demosthenes, and Terence (Bratuschek 1886: iv). Bratuschek updated the bibliographical information in his text of his first edition; further bibliographical information was provided by Rudolf Klussmann for a second edition (cited here), which was in press when Bratuschek died.
Bratuschek’s text of Boeckh’s lectures consists of an introduction and two “main parts” (Haupttheile). The first main part is entitled Formale Theorie der philologischen Wissenschaft and divided into two further parts: Theorie der Hermeneutik and Theorie der Kritik. The second main part contains the Materiale Disciplinen der Alterthumslehre, in particular treatments of the public and private lives of Greeks and Romans, ancient religion and art, and the history of ancient knowledge (which interestingly encompasses philosophy, science, and literature). The division of the “formal theory of philological science” into a theory of hermeneutics and a theory of critique bears the mark of Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of Boeckh’s teachers.
- The value of the current edition
The text we now have in Hackel’s edition is not a reconstruction of the lectures but a critical edition of the notes upon which they were based. It is a core text, not an Urtext, but a diplomatic documentation of the manuscript which Boeckh used as notes. Hackel is a historian who has also edited material of Gustav Droysen; she brings to the project the further qualification of being able to read Boeckh’s famously difficult handwriting. As Hackel herself notes about the Bratuschek project, its aim was to represent Boeckh’s systematic thinking in a comprehensive way (Hackel 2023: Band 1.1, 12). Of course this objective had to lead to an elision of the development of Boeckh’s project over its long lifespan. The Grundtext of Hackel’s edition now emerges as what it actually was, a script for a continually evolving performance. The first volume of Hackel’s three-volume edition documents the Grundtext with marginalia from it given on the facing page. The second volume documents the various Anlagen, longer and separate, self-standing additions and insertions, also with marginalia on the opposite page. The third volume presents Hackel’s own commentary on these texts together with a substantial bibliography, documentation of Boeckh’s teaching, and indices. The focus of the commentary is on providing the reader with supplemental information which facilitates the highly compressed expression in Boeckh’s manuscript and references. The commentary is not written with a view to reconstructing Boeckh’s entire system of philology (that was Bratuschek’s aim); it also is not aiming for an intellectual contextualization of Boeckh’s project as given in the Grundtext. Readers will find in the commentary volume helpful chronological indicators for the various layers of Boeckh’s text and valuable supplemental information on the web of scholarship in which it was situated.
As an example of what one can learn from this documentation and commentary, take Boeckh’s famous slogan that philology is Erkenntnis des Erkannten. This could be rendered as “understanding what is known”[1], provided one preserve a capacious sense of “known” which includes cultural practices such as state finance and poetic production. An interesting finding from this edition is that the slogan occurs in the Grundtext in an annex which references Boeckh’s Römische Litteraturgeschichte, a lecture he gave in Heidelberg as early as 1807 (Hackel 2023: Band 1.2, 386). In an excerpt from that lecture which Hackel gives in her commentary, we find that this concept was already well developed at that possibly earlier date (Hackel 2023: Band 2, 150–153). For Boeckh’s programmatic thinking we find a trail of evidence leading through several iterations of his lecturing activity on various types of material. The Boeckh of this edition is sharper, more humorous, but also more self-critical. Boeckh says of himself for example: “In philology you cannot be too pedantic; I do not consider myself a pedant, and so I often neglect detail and therefore go astray” (Hackel 2023: Band 2, 21). In a marginal note to the Grundtext we find this acidic remark: “Most interpreters are no Mercury, and lack the fine and cunning sense of this god, but are just heavy-handed, dwarfish travelers, for whom the vessel of the hermeneutic spirit is hermetically sealed” (Hackel 2023: Band 1.1, 134 lines 16–21).
- Philology as a science of cultural expression
The heroic effort which went into making this edition elicits the question: What can we learn now from August Boeckh, and why should we read his text in this highly annotated format, or at all? The reason is, simply, that Boeckh’s conception of hermeneutics and philology were not just influential, having been translated (partially) into English, and (completely) into French and Italian.[2] These ideas have retained their freshness. They embody a conception of philology as an open-ended and theoretically ambitious study of human culture. Boeckh is concerned with the Greek and Roman world as providing ideal forms of cultural expression, but he is actually less animated by shoring up the canonical status of this expression than by finding transdisciplinary philological means to study cultural heritage across time and place. His famous determination of philology as Erkenntnis des Erkannten exemplifies his capacious understanding of this endeavor. Not only Greeks and Romans had knowledge: not only Classicists can know knowledge’s past.
“This recognition [of the known] is nothing other than historical understanding, as opposed to speculative understanding, and therefore, strictly speaking, philology is not essentially different from history, except insofar as it is customary to take history in a narrow sense to concern the treatment of the state. Philology all together is just the historical construction of given human knowledge; insofar as this historical construction reveals evidence of ideas, it becomes scientific and attains, as we have said, the same goal as philosophy, but from the opposite side” (Hackel 2023: Band 1.1, 9 lines 11–19, our translation).
And so philology as the study of cultural expression on this conception is both scientific and idea-driven, a systematic study of historically situated universals. Of course there is still the epistemic optimism of a universal-driven project of inquiry, which hopes to reconstruct the particular and partial data of ancient transmitted culture into an original whole. One can challenge the more general background assumptions of such a mode of inquiry on many grounds: as presupposing a hierarchy of cultural production, or serving to justify such a hierarchy. But one still finds hardly a better and more serviceable theoretical reflection and conception of that project than the one developed by August Boeckh, or one more self-consciously open to critical expansion.
Notes
[1] “Erkenntnis des Erkannten” is, as you can imagine, quite a nut to crack for rendering into English. Our discussions over the years with many Boeckh specialists of the slogan yielded the realization that the wordplay is based in part on the fact that the words with the same root have a different meaning in this juxtaposition of [abstract noun nom. sing.][abstract noun based on participle gen. sing.]. We fear that if you try to just follow the etymological kinship of the words by translating them with the same word… then, as they would say in German, geht der eigentliche Witz verloren.
[2] August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism, translated by John Paul Pritchard, Norman, Oklahoma 1968; August Boeckh, Encyclopédie et méthodologie des sciences philologiques, ed. et tr. par Marie-Dominique Richard, Sankt Augustin 2013; August Boeckh, La filologia come scienza storica. Enciclopedia e metodologia delle scienze filologiche, ed. Antonio Garzya, Neapel 1987.