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ETHNOGRAPHY OF CONNOISSEURSHIP

This section, dedicated to the various branches of connoisseurship, its various tribes, customs and practices, and especially to the interchange of ideas between various branches, i.e. the mutual inspiring and the challenging transposing and transmitting of ideas from one branch to another, opens with my essay on Friedrich Nietzsche. Entitled

The Professor And His One Student or
Friedrich Nietzsche On Connoisseurship

(Picture: chechar.wordpress.com)

(Picture: DS)

(Picture: Basel-virtuell.ch)

›Haven’t you heard‹, his fellow professors might have whispered, in the corridors of the now so-called Alte Universität of Basel, in 1876, ›Collega Nietzsche has had just one single student in his lecture (and that one did even arrive too late). But he was very dignified, our Collega Nietzsche, and we heard him giving a »philosophical intermezzo« instead of going on with his regular lecture, accompanied by the organ tone of the rushing river Rhine. And he did speak, beautifully, of Heraclitus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus) to that one student.‹

View from the Alte Universität building upon the Rhine (picture: DS)

Yet before we go into that story, I have to tell another one that I have experienced myself. Not in the Alte Universität, but in the newer building at Petersplatz. And it must have been in the early 1990s when one professor of history introduced another one, a guest professor from East Germany, and had the guest professor announce the lecture and seminary that the guest professor was planning to present and to hold, respectively, since, as was becoming clear, despite the early morning hour and despite of everyone being rather still kind of asleep (I believe it was around ten), that the guest professor from East Germany had yet not enough students (or even one single student) in his lecture and seminary.
I recall the fresh and openly inviting manner with which the guest professor invited everyone of us to his lecture and seminary about the history of East German mining and metallurgy at the times of Luther, and when the guest professor from East Germany ended by asking if some of us (the lecturing hall was actually very crowded) wanted to join this lecture and seminary on the history of mining and metallurgy at the times of Luther (the professor did ask individually as to the lecture and as to the seminary) not one single hand did rise. Actually nobody did move at all, as everyone seemed to be frozen or petrified. Upon which the guest professor, if it was in shock or not, did mumble some note of thanks and left the lecturing hall very swiftly (and the other professor started his own lecture as if nothing had happened).

I remember this scene quite vividly as one example of self-humiliating in front of an audience that I have stored in my memory, but I am not quite sure anymore if it was this at all. At this early morning hour, however, not one soul reacted to the kind invitation, and one particular detail of the whole scenery that I recall very in particular (and maybe this image is the actual carrier of my own recollection) is that one female student’s turning to her neighbor (she sat in the row in front of me), a turning to her neighbor because of feeling uneasy with the seen and heard, a bodily gesture as if saying: we did not want this to happen at all, but (this is now my interpretation) this way of confronting us was, giving our standards, far to direct, and in adressing us as an audience, i.e. as a collective, you cannot expect us to react immediately and individually to your kind offer of joining the lecture and seminary on the history of mining and metallurgy, you have to give us time to think about it, and maybe the one or other student will find his or her way into your lecture and seminary.
This interpretation may sound somewhat too rational, but the gesture, the turning to her neighbor with an expression of pain in her face, in any way, was certainly a gesture of compassion.
At any rate: I do recall also a student who actually did join the seminary speaking, later, very positively about that professor’s knowledge as to the history of mining and metallurgy, and this professor from East Germany must have been a real expert (or connoisseur) as to that branch of knowledge). And in the end I am not quite sure if this collegue of mine was actually the single one student in that particular seminary. He might have been, but I do not recall. And the history of mining and metallurgy does sound more interesting to my ears today, as it sounded then, at that early morning hour at Basel university.

Back to the Alte Universität (picture: Basel-virtuell.ch)

»The rushing of the Rhine was the only sound, when we both, stricken, for some moments, kept silence.« Thus Ludwig von Scheffler, in his account of being the one student that Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1876, presented his »philosophical intermezzo« on Pre-Socratic philosophy and especially on Heraclitus to. Spoken into the loud rushing of the river Rhine, and since this is hardly imaginable today (be it for the modern windows, or for the river that is not rushing anymore), probably almost at water level.
»Then, however, something strange occured. Nietzsche did not keep his mood, as usual, in keeping silence, but, in a cheerful tone, explained to me that he was going to accompany me to my apartment. He had business to do with my landlord who was his insurance agent, and beyond that he was tempted of getting to know of how one lived at ›Blumenrain‹ […].«

And thus the professor and his one student did walk down the Rheinsprung, with Nietzsche complaining about the permeable paving, and the student, who was obviously feeling a trifle uneasy while holding his professor’s arm, drawing his teacher’s attention to the cumulative white summer clouds:
»›As Paul Veronese is painting them!‹ I passed the remark, half to him, and half to myself. Nietzsche looked up there, stopped in musing; ›and they are drifting!‹, he added like in a soliloquy. But then, all of a sudden, he unclasped my arm, only to clasp it, equally fiercly with both hands: ›I am going to travel soon… Holidays are almost here… Will you come with me?! Shall we see the clouds drifting in Veronese’s home country?!‹«
This did not happen though, since the student, rather being shocked by this unexpected invitation, started to beat around the bush, making some excuses, upon which Nietzsche, for a brief moment, showed a distorted face, a mask, but found back to his professoral dignity, and the trip apparently did end at Blumenrain.

It is a very short walk from the Alte Universität building down to Blumenrain. The Rheinsprung that leads you downwards to the bridgehead is rather narrow, and the more narrow the space, the easier to imagine that the atmosphere of this walk, the student and his one professor walking arm in arm, must have been rather remarkable, if somewhat tense. To recreate this walk we use photographs, taken on September 20 (the other pictures are taken earlier), a day with particularly impressive formations of clouds, and also a rather crowded Saturday afternoon to walk across a cityscape. And Scheffler, who actually was a student of art historian Jacob Burckhardt, did not only compare the clouds of that summer day in 1876 with the clouds rendered by Veronese, he also compared the way Nietzsche had just had mental images of the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers appear in front of the student’s inner eyes with a »shimmering cloud«.
If anything is invented or stylized in Scheffler’s account – it is well invented or stylized. Because this account, originally published in 1907, brings out much. I image that Scheffler’s respect for Nietzsche had grown over the time, and that the somewhat refractory young student had found his professor’s behaviour even more strange that the later account reveals (although, according to his own testimony, it had been the student who had offered his arm to the professor, and although the student seems to have felt already then that Nietzsche had identified to some degree with the solitary philosopher Heraclitus).
To recreate the atmosphere, however, we cannot rely upon images alone. Scheffler, who was very observant on how Nietzsche did speak and therefore for his carefulness with words (and this is something that the text of 1907 brings out very well), was obviously impressed also by the lecture’s content. And this is why we quote the very passage that Nietzsche might have read to the one student, who did feel so well that his professor was a connoisseur of words – and had the highest respect for the connoisseurship of words: in one word: for the discipline of philology, a discipline that Nietzsche was to compare, some years later, with the »art and connoisseurship of goldsmithery«.

»Von dem Gefühl der Einsamkeit aber, das den ephesischen Einsiedler des Artemis-Tempels durchdrang, kann man nur in der wildesten Gebirgsöde erstarrend etwas ahnen. Kein übermächtiges Gefühl mitleidiger Erregungen, kein Begehren, helfen, heilen und retten zu wollen, strömt von ihm aus. Er ist ein Gestirn ohne Atmosphäre. Sein Auge, lodernd nach innen gerichtet, blickt erstorben und eisig, wie zum Scheine nur, nach außen. Rings um ihn, unmittelbar an die Feste seines Stolzes, schlagen die Wellen des Wahns und der Verkehrtheit: mit Ekel wendet er sich davon ab. Aber auch die Menschen mitfühlender Brust weichen einer solchen wie aus Erz gegoßnen Larve aus; in einem abgelegnen Heiligtum, unter Götterbildern, neben kalter, ruhig-erhabener Architektur mag so ein Wesen begreiflicher erscheinen. Unter Menschen war Heraklit als Mensch unglaublich; und wenn er wohl gesehen wurde, wie er auf das Spiel lärmender Kinder achtgab, so hat er jedenfalls dabei bedacht, was nie ein Mensch bei solcher Gelegenheit bedacht hat: das Spiel des großen Weltenkindes Zeus. Er brauchte die Menschen nicht, auch nicht für seine Erkenntnisse; an allem, was man etwa von ihnen erfragen konnte und was die anderen Weisen vor ihm zu erfragen bemüht gewesen waren, lag ihm nicht. Er sprach mit Geringschätzung von solchen fragenden, sammelnden, kurz »historischen« Menschen. »Mich selbst suchte und erforschte ich«, sagte er von sich, mit einem Worte, durch das man das Erforschen eines Orakels bezeichnet: als ob er der wahre Erfüller und Vollender der delphischen Satzung »erkenne dich selbst« sei und niemand sonst.«

(Picture: DS)

This is where they, professor and student, might have stopped to watch the clouds. On the right the building of the Alte Universität is still in frame.
The building is, as can be seen, in restoration as for the lowest level, where Friedrich Nietzsche must have given his lectures.
The year of 1876 was, by the way, a year of floods in spring. In the background the ›tower of Basel‹, under construction, can also be seen (picture: DS).

We have left the Alte Universität building with a photocamera at hand, in case we would come across a philosopher and his one student. The pavement is not that bad in our days, many construction sites, however, bother any Basel (late) summer. But, next to the views, it is the shopwindows that draw any tourist’s attention.
In walking down, we immediately come across the first goldsmith’s or jeweller’s shop window. And it would be worth to find out if the city of Basel was as crowded by goldsmiths at Nietzsche’s times as it is today. Pens and inks, in many varieties, follow a few steps further down Rheinsprung, as we are walking down towards Blumenrain, with Heraclitus’ sayings in mind: ›No man ever steps in the same river twice‹ (because it is not the same waters again, for there is constant change; a saying, according to modern scholars only attributed to Heraclitus) and ›Donkeys prefer garbage (or strewing, as Nietzsche has it) to gold‹.

*

Two basic concepts of how to think connoisseurship we find in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. The very positive view of connoisseurship, as mentioned before, is associated with philology (and finds its metaphor in goldsmithery). But at the time Ludwig von Scheffler walked down Rheinsprung, arm in arm with Nietzsche (and maybe looked also into the one or other goldsmith’s shopwindow), the latter had not yet published the before mentioned metaphorical passage, nor his praise of the poet Horace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace) that was to follow in 1889 and bears testimony to Nietzsche’s love of poetic structures of language.
Yet Ludwig von Scheffler, the student, who later, as a man, recalled that vividly how Nietzsche had spoken, on that day in summer of 1876, might have known the other basic thought that Nietzsche had, at that date, already published. And this thought relates to the per se conservative nature of connoisseurship:

»[Die Kunstkenner] wollen nicht, dass das Große entsteht: Ihr Mittel ist zu sagen, »seht, das Große ist schon da!« <> sie handeln jedenfalls so, als ob ihr Wahlspruch wäre: Lasst die Toten die Lebendigen begraben.«

*

We see Schifflände ahead of of, the bridgehead would be to our right, and we would have to cross the street to walk up Blumenrain. But no, we have to stop and think. And after that we will have to take a detour. We have to walk the Drei-Königs-Weglein, because for one, with Heraclitus on our mind, we have to stay close to the waters, and for two: we have to think and must not end our walk that swifly.

*

Even if we do not fully agree with Nietzsche, his questioning (of connoisseurship, besides of praising it), raises some basic questions: how is connoisseurship dealing with the new?
With Heraclitus we might say that, on the very bottom of things, there is nothing new, but on the level of different waters, there is also constant change. This by the way, might even apply as to the image of Heraclitus itself (and one may mention here that another Basel professor of philosophy has critized Nietzsche‘s image of Heraclitus).
One might also ask whom Nietzsche has actually in mind, if speaking of connoisseurs (of art) that allegedly think that the greatest things have already been created. Is he thinking of the 19th century‘s general tendency, or is he thinking actually of Jacob Burckhardt (who is, invisibly, and as Scheffler’s other professor, also present at our walk)?
But Nietzsche, who is also praising the ideal of being observant, of being careful (and appreciative) like a goldsmith, invites us only to think further, to differentiate various ways of connoisseurship. Those ways that are attentive as to the change, the new, the upcoming things. And those that are attentive, careful and observant in looking back. And one might apply this differentiation also to the individuals in connoisseurship and ask for example: did Roberto Longhi think that all great things had already been created? Longhi, the advocate of Futurism?
And what about Giovanni Morelli and others. And we see that we have also to differentiate as to the individual age of the individual connoisseur, because, for example, Morelli showed very attentive as to contemporary art when being young, and lost that interest for the new to some degree, when coming of age.

*

On our right a fashion store, and now we have almost reached the bridgehead, where we have to cross the street to reach the Blumenrain (picture: DS).

Looking back once more (picture: DS)

It is German Hip Hop that ends our musing. German Hip Hop that seems to be also very careful with words. I hear the word »Welle«, and they rhyme with »Das gibt es nicht bei Quelle«. We have passed a group of teenagers; he have also passed some members of the grand hotel’s staff, and we arrive now at Blumenrain, as it were, from the other side and just walk back to Schifflände.

*

The year of 1876 was, on some level, frustrating for Nietzsche, but he did travel to Italy, to stay with Malwida von Meysenbug, in the fall (which, yet later, ended with another desaster). In summer he had also corresponded with his friend Rohde (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rohde), who was going to marry (and Nietzsche, who was declaring that he was not a poet, sent him a poem about a wanderer, all the same).
He had also been thinking, as another letter to Rohde shows, on the Greek’s concepts of love between men and boys, and this on all levels (and Scheffler’s uneasiness with Nietzsche had obviously to do with feeling uneasy about what the philosophical eros, that was obviously present on some level, was all about, and where it would lead them to).
Nevertheless it was Scheffler, who, in a way, excused for his suspicions, in portraying Nietzsche as a lecturer in retrospect, and in recalling that they had been united in their being stricken by words of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (as quoted in Greek and in German by Nietzsche, and thus as heard being quoted by Nietzsche’s voice).
And it is also Scheffler, recalling how Nietzsche did speak of Heraclitus, who points us to the very core of connoisseurship, of knowing something, of knowing something well, because, in passing by, Scheffler also explains, why Nietzsche’s voice had been that impressive to him: because Nietzsche had spoken with inner participation (»innerer Anteilnahme«) of Heraclitus, the solitary. In other words (and with more pathos): Nietzsche had spoken from the bottom of his soul. And in that, indirectly and implicitly, Nietzsche did touch and evoke a third basic question as to connoisseurship: the question if not this inner participation is the very basis of all actual knowing, whatever branch of connoisseurship we may speak of, and in that the invariant nature of real connoisseurship, as opposed to the superficial knowing, to the merely suggestive appearing to know of the old or new, and, in very particular, as opposed to any ›dead knowledge‹ of things passed, be it in art or in the history of philosophy and learning.