T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L

JOURNAL
of THE
HUMANITIES

Volume 8, Number 8

What is a Classic According to T.S. Eliot and H.-G.

Gadamer?

Tansu Acik

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What is a Classic According to T.S. Eliot and H.-G.
Gadamer?
Tansu Acik, University of Ankara, Ankara, Turkey

Abstract: According to vanguard study of Raymond Williams by 1976 we owe almost every substantial
concept and institution of modern life to 19th century, such as democracy, culture, civilisation, educa-
tion, humanism, art, even literature . In this presentation we add to that list the concept of classic. The
semantic field of term “classic” in various European languages would be examined always regarding
to social context. Then the notion and criteria of classic in T. S. Eliot’s essay “What is classic?” would
be scrutinized in the light of contemporary researches. T. S. Eliot’s analysis of classic is among the
last comprehensive attempt of defining the concept. Then we examine the notion of classic in the
philosophical hermeneutics of H.G. Gadamer.

Keywords: Classic, Canon, Culture, Education, Literature, T. S. Eliot, H. G. Gadamer, Philosophical

Hermeneutics.

A Short Historical Perspective of a Classic Work

I
N EUROPEAN LITERATURE, qualifying a work of living language as a classic
began in France in the mid 18th century with a retrospective look at literary tradition.
Over the centuries certain authors writing in various languages have been regarded as
“great”, but until the 19th century no common concept existed to define the works they
had created. The adjective ‘classic’ was used for the first time to qualify a certain period in
French literature. Later, the question of whether there were similar classical works in other
languages would be raised. For example, in the second quarter of the 18th century Thoulier
d’Olivet commented that, “Italy has its classical writers we (the French) don’t”; Nietzche
posed the same question in relation to German literature and gave a negative answer in The
Wanderer and his Shadow (§125)1. It was not until the 19th century that Dante, Shakespeare,
and Goethe began to be considered as classic European writers2. Goethe and other writers
in his milieu were the first to use the concepts of classic and classicism in a sense close to

1
Hans Ulrich Gumbert, “Phoenix or Ashes: From Canon to Classic”, Trans. R. Norton, New Literary History, vol
20, No. 1, 1988, p. 141-163. The author also discusses a vital short text on the subject by Voltaire arguing that the
French classics mainly consisted of drama that was regularly staged in France in the second half of 19th century;
Gumbert discovered the concept of a classic that was close to the contemporary meaning, through the mediation
of the German romantics, in a book on Germany written by Madame de Staël in the 19th century. Among the con-
vincing arguments, there is one of crucial importance, that in the 18th century the term ‘literature’ meant massive,
diverse, deep knowledge, and erudition, became transcendental and autonomous through the concept of the classic.
Also Gumbert argues that 18th century literature shifted from writing towards reading and interpretation, because
it lost its function of socialization and gained an educational value in the 19th century.
2
E. R. Curtius writes that Dante had been long forgotten in Italy. He quotes Alfieri’s argument that there were
hardly thirty people who had read Dante’s Commedia in 18th century Italy, and Stendhal’s comment that Dante
was belittled in Italy in 1800, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, The Bollingen
Library, 1953 p. 348-350.

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the present understanding of the words. German thinkers from consecutive generations were
the determinants in the formation of the current meaning of classic as a concept from the
beginning of 19th century. To sketch a rough picture it is important mention those things
which are deeply interrelated for example, the seminal definition of classic in arts by Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, the reevaluation of the Ancient Greek with fresh eyes and its appro-
priation by German scholars of classical philology and by writers surrounding Winckelmann’s
friend Goethe; and for the first time in Europe, the establishment of the secular secondary
and higher education institutions by Goethe’s friend Wilhelm von Humboldt in Prussia.
Wilhelm von Humboldt played the crucial role of embodying the classical concept in
educational establishments and was the first to propagate the concept of culture being closely
related to the definition of a classic work. The overall taste for classical works of literary or
art was formed in 19th century through education institutions. Modern secondary and higher
education in the West has been heavily influenced by Humbolt’s work. In Berlin in the first
decades of the 19th century Goethe’s friend Humbolt developed the idea of Bildung, self-
formation, which had been put forth by Enlightenment thinkers since Herder, from this were
created the “gymnasium” a secondary school based on studying Greek-Roman texts in the
original languages, math and history; and in 1810, the University of Berlin, namely the first
modern university3. We are indebted to him for many key concepts and their applications:
PhD programs based on original research, academic autonomy and innovative scholarship,
and especially his conception of Bildung or cultivation. By the end of the 19th century every
European state had, more or less aligned its educational system to the Prussian model, even
in France where a rival model had been created. Many universities emphasized a version of
the Humboldtian Bildung and called it liberal education in English and culture générale in
French. That approach gave rise to many higher education models such as the Liberal Arts
College core curricula that aimed to impart general knowledge and develop general intellec-
tual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. According

3
David Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791-1810”,
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.44, No.1, 1983, s.55-73. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy published in
1869 is the most famous modern advocacy of high culture and high humanism. According to Arnold, culture is
“the best which has been thought and said in the world”. A generation before Arnold, the poet and writer Coleridge,
while translating German ideas into English, first used the term cultivation for the concept of bildung. In Coleridge’s
writing, the concept ceased to be a natural tendency for development and started to mean a certain state of general
consciousness in conflict with the concept of civilisation in the sense of general material progress: R. Williams
stated that the meaning of “culture” will gradually expand during a century, from individual perfection, to society’s
overall development, then to arts as a whole, and last to a way of life in both material and intellectual senses (Wil-
liams R., Culture and Society 1780/1950, Columbia University Press, 1958, p.49-70). The real issue for Arnold is
education reform; he discusses and criticizes the attitude towards education of almost every group, namely liberals,
aristocrats, middle-class bourgeoisie, in the context of current political events. He considers each group deficient
in terms of understanding education. He advocates the “Unification of Education” which was to be implemented
as late as 1902 in the United Kingdom, and the superiority of culture and criticism, seen as the individual’s efforts
for perfection in all aspects against narrow specialization. Arnold states that “Hellenism and Hebraism” are the two
main components of British thought. Humboldt is the only individual who is praised as outstanding in contrast to
the politics mentioned in current events, the abundance of people of religion, and there is absolutely no reference
to any writer new or old. The educational ideals put forward by Humboldt and continued by Arnold and others, are
in a way ideal and supranational in their content and purposes, despite otherwise defended opinions in Germany
such as the article by David Sorkin mentioned above. I will not deliberate here the connection of this education bill
with the ideal of a new citizen, and the training of public officials; I will just point that this education does not aim
to train experts, but focuses on a general education. Arnold’s “sweet light”, the common must-have that he attributes
to the educated, is based on acquaintances with “that which is thought and written in the best way”.

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 TANSU ACIK

to H.-G. Gadamer “ the concept of self-formation, education, or cultivation (Bildung), which

became supremely important at the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth
century, and it is this concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of
the nineteenth century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological justification of
it”4
Winckelmann (1717-68) was the founder of Art History, and developed the first definition
of classic in arts. He classified Greek statues as classical or archaic according to criteria that
he created. Winckelmann characterized the most common and distinctive features of Greek
sculpture masterpieces as “a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur” (edle Einfalt und stille
Grösse) in terms of stance and expression5, this was the only criteria in the field of classical
art for a long while. Here, Winckelmann used “Laocoon”, known today as a sculpture from
the Hellenistic era, as an example of the Greek masterpiece criteria. He found that these
criteria featured also in the prose in the Socratic era and identified the same features in
Raphael’s work. Winckelmann was the founder of modern scientific archaeology and had
first applied his categories of style systematically to art history. As H.- G. Gadamer succinctly
wrote in Wincklemann’s time a “classic” was a normative concept, it was a creative anachron-
ism transformed into a period label, along with such terms as Archaic and Hellenistic by
historicist scholars: “The concept of classical now signifies a period of time, a phase of his-
torical development but not a supra-historical value”. With the rise of historical reflection
in Germany that took Winckelmann’s classicism as its standard, a historical concept of a
time or period detached itself from Winckelmann’s sense of the term, it denoted a specific
stylistic ideal and, in a historically descriptive way, also a time or period that fulfilled this
ideal. So the normative side of the term and the historical descriptive side of the term fused.
When German humanism proclaimed the exemplarity first of Greek, then Roman antiquity,
the concept of classical came to be used in modern thought to describe the whole of ‘‘clas-
sical Antiquity’’ (TM 286-287).
The concept of classic and its correlative canon do not only have a meaning within their
modern literature contexts, but recently they have become scientific concepts carrying both
analytical and heuristic powers, emanating from the work of Jan Assmann and Adeila Ass-
mann.
Jan Assmann’s research that developed the normative and formal structures of the classic
and canon concepts in Antiquity provides important clues for the current paper6. Assmann
explored the concept of canon in contrast with that of the classic, in the high written cultures
of Mediterranean Antiquity. According to Assmann’s analysis the canon of text, or canon
in usual naming, is binding and official at the highest level. He established that the canon
originated independently and separately in the Buddhist religious texts and the Torah. Ass-
mann explained that the canonization of the Greek classics of secular nature in Alexandria,
and the canonization of Christian, Confucian, Taoist texts refer to those initial, original ex-
amples. He asserted that transition from ritual coherence based on repetition to textual coher-

4
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., tr. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.Marshall
,New York, 1991, p. 8; this work hereafter will be cited as TM.
5
Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildbauer-Kunst, 1755 ;Thoughts
on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture , Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting
and Sculpture, trans. by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton , Open Court, 1987.
6
J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen ,C.
H. Beck, 2007, 87-129; 272-280.

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ence based on interpretation occurred in Antiquity within almost the same period; not because
of writing as a tool, but through the canonization of tradition, that disrupted tradition in a
refreshing way. Cultural memory is the all encompassing term and comprising all ramifica-
tions of Assmann’s species-genus criteria classification; he placed tradition and the canon
under the cultural memory, and within the canon branch are classic and canon. The feature
that distinguishes tradition from canon, is that the criteria for determining the canon is the
exclusion of other options, that is the deterministic nature of the boundaries of the chosen
option. The difference between classic and canon is that in the concept of classic, the excluded
is not worthless, and the classic choice is not binding. The discrimination between classic
and non-classic is based on the distinctions between authority, connectivity and measurability.
Assmann defines canonization as the emergence of a new teaching, and not as the strength-
ening of tradition or as the existing culture becoming sacred. Disruption and not continuity
caused the “ancient” to rise to the throne of unsurpassable excellence. The classic emerged
through the interruption that made it impossible for the traditional to continue to exist. On
the other hand, with the identification that transcended this interruption and which considered
the past as their own past and the ancient masters as their own masters, the relationship to
the ancient world was fixed. The past should remain in the past but not be estranged.
Since its emergence, poets and writers have been questioning the concept of classic. For
example, from the 20th century7: Paul Valery and Andre Gide are two leading modern clas-
sical authors who demonstrated their respect for classicism in their articles in newspapers,
journals and other publications. These writers who produced the most advanced, pioneering
works in French; radically changed poetry and prose at the beginning of the 20th century;
and according to literary historians were the creators of the movement of high modernism.
For example, Ezra Pound commented that “All criticism is an attempt to define classic”. In
1921, Gide considered himself to be the best representative of the classic. Although he
praised the classic he commented on its efforts to appear ordinary as “the art of shyness and
humility”, how classic works did not accentuate their originality, using lightness and litotes
in style. Albert Camus praised the “passionate uniformity”, knowing how to replicate appro-
priately, and the humbleness and timidity of classic. He stated “I only know one revelation
in arts: the strictly appropriate correspondence of forms and language to substance”. He
wrote “from this point of view, I cannot love anything but classical French literature with
all my heart” Italo Calvino, in his 1981 essay “Why Read the Classics?” made an assessment
of readers’ attitudes toward the classics8. In his progressively expanding essay, Calvino gave
fourteen definitions of classic, each deriving from the previous one. To this day, literature
scholars usually refer to these features in their writing considering the classic style to be
objective in the sense of object-orientation, intellectual control; containing as little local
color as possible, an ideal of impersonality, closed configuration; taking middle stance
between a rigid and scattered approach, creating a harmony of proportions, and undertaking
a quest for balance and competence.

7
These examples are from the lemma “classicisme” , Encyclopaedia Universalis ,Paris, 1985 .
8
I. Calvino Why Read the Classics, trans. M. McLaughlin, Random House, 1999. This essay discusses the reader-
oriented literary theory data brought to the fore by U. Eco in 1960 on another level.

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 TANSU ACIK

A Classic According to T.S. Eliot

The poet and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) belongs to the set of pioneer writers
who focused on the issue of the classic in the first half of 20th century and his work is actually
the most comprehensive on the subject. Together with Ezra Pound he was the founder of
modern British poetry. In the Criterion magazine that he published between the two world
wars, he advocated a European wide culture and was also the leading critic of his time9. He
fundamentally changed literary thinking; at the same his early writings helped to create
modern literary studies as an autonomous field of inquiry and gave that discipline a certain
authority, tradition and rigor.
In 1944 as President of the Virgilian Society Eliot delivered an address entitled “What Is
a Classic?”10. In the address Eliot claimed that “our classic, the classic of all Europe is Virgil.”
He did not mean that Virgil was the greatest European poet; he meant that his work showed
a maturity of mind, manners and language with a perfection of the common style to such
degree that it provided us with a criterion by which to judge our living poets: a “classic can
occur only when language and literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature
mind.”
Twenty-seven pages of the text of his lecture are devoted to an argument designed to show
that Virgil possessed these qualities, however it is only in the last five pages that Eliot refers
to Virgil’s particular relationship to the Roman Empire and to its spiritual continuation
throughout European history. Frank Kermode seems to assume that Virgil’s importance for
Eliot lay mainly in his significance as the propagator of an “imperialist myth” of Latin and
Christian cultural continuity11.
At the beginning of the text Eliot gives extensive assessments of European literature, es-
pecially English literature; of these what is most interesting is the criteria that he developed.
He considers defining a classic as outside the opposition romantic-classic enumerating certain
qualities that he expects a classic to display. He distinguishes between universal classic and
the classic within a language, in his own words “in relation to other literature in its own
language, or according to the view of life of a particular period. A classic can only occur
when a civilization is mature...It is the importance of that civilization and of that language,
as well as the comprehensiveness of the mind of the individual poet, which gives the univer-
sality.” It is easier to detect that a language attained a certain level of maturity through prose
rather than poetry. In his words “one of the signs of classic approach towards a classic style
is a development towards greater complexity of sentence and period structure” He also states
that manners and maturity of vision have to be expressed through language that is not rude

9
Louis Menand locates his literary criticism between the series of non-academic critics that preceded him and the
New Criticism movement of academics that succeeded him: “T. S. Eliot and Modernity” New England Quarterly,
Vol. 69, no.4, 1996, 555-579; Critical companion to T. S. Eliot: a literary reference to his life and work, ed. Russell
Elliott Murphy, Fact on File, 2007.
10
Eliot .T.S., “ What Is a Classic? ,London: Faber & Faber, 1945; also published in the following books, On Poetry
and Poets, Faber & Faber 1956; Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, Harcourt, 1975 p.115-131.
11
Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, , Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 13-46,
in Chapter I he gives a learned account of Virgil’s influence during the middle ages, with special reference to the
imperial myth as it appeared to Dante and others. Kermode reminds us that Eliot’s claim for Virgil had been anti-
cipated by Sainte-Beuve and rejected in favor of Homer by Arnold in his Oxford inaugural lecture of 1860. More
recently Judith Perkins focusing on the underlying assumptions of Eliot treated his argumentation concerning the
classical more favorably in the light of Gadamer’s guiding concepts, “Literary History, H. G. Gadamer, T.S. Eliot,
and Vergilius,” Arethusa 14 (1981), p. 241-49.

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or rough. In his own words: “Development of a classic prose is the development towards a
perfection of common style...What we find, in a period of classic prose is not a mere common
convention of writing, like the common style of newspaper leader writers, but a community
of taste.” Eliot thinks of language maturity in terms of the qualities related to conception of
time such as a critical sense of the past, a confidence in the present, and no conscious doubt
of the future. In his own words “Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except
when there is another history than the history of the poet’s own people...There must be the
knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people, and of a people whose
civilization is sufficiently cognate to have influenced and entered into our own”. This is a
consciousness of history that the Romans had in regard to the Greeks. In this respect, the
Elizabethan period cannot be considered classic despite the existence of Shakespeare further-
more, Eliot, unlike Pope does not consider that 18th century English Literature qualifies as
a classic. He also states the irrelevance of searching for a difference in value between great
works and classic works. “The great poets, such as Shakespeare or Milton, may exhaust not
a form only, but the language of his time, as used by him, will be the language in its perfec-
tion.” At this point, Eliot introduces another characteristic feature that the great classic poet
will ultimately “express the maximum possible of the whole range of feelings which represent
the character of the people who speak that language.” In this a work maybe be called classical.
Even though he is not the greatest author he fulfils many of the criteria related to the definition
of the class, Eliot attributes Virgil’s uniqueness to his central place in European literature.
This last argument of can be seen as an example of circular reasoning, where the thing to
prove is used as evidence or petitio principi. As a matter of fact, the criteria Eliot develops
seem to be derived from Virgil’s own attributes. Towards the end of the text he makes a
further distinction between the relative and absolute classic: that which is a classic in relation
to its language, and that which is classic in relation to a number of other languages. Goethe
for example, does not represent the entire European tradition; he is as provincial as 19th
century British writers. However, he is a universal author in the sense that every European
ought to be acquainted with him. Unfortunately Eliot does not shed further light on the idea
of the universal classic but he adds that the classic becomes the new standard of quality and
excellence among the literature of various languages. The fact that Eliot does not consider
Virgil only through his literary characteristics was revealed at the end of his speech, in two
instances when he mentions that the Roman Empire and the Latin language are not any empire
or any language, because they determined Europe’s fate. Eliot comments that Virgil “must
have significance for us which cannot be expressed wholly in terms of literary appreciation
and criticism”. In the last sentence of his speech, immediately preceding his quote from
Dante’s Purgatoria, he states that Virgil led Dante towards a vision he could never himself
enjoy, and led Europe towards the Christian culture which he would never know. This is the
only occurrence of the adjective ‘Christian’ apart from a passing remark concerning a certain
English poet. Thus, Eliot implicitly makes Virgil with a sleight of hand the unconscious
precursor of Christianity12. Although this argument is historically flawed, this follows a very
old tradition of seeing Virgil as an unconscious pioneer of Christianity.
12
Eliot’s fervent Catholic opinions that could today appear to be zealously dogmatic, interestingly, can never be
perceived in his poems or his writings apart from his essays that directly concern religion and Christianity. In
Vergilius and Fate (1951) he exalts the Roman Empire and Virgil with regard to Christianity. He asserts in “Modern
Education, and the Classics” (1932), that there are only two tenable assumptions about life, Christianity and mater-
ialism. In the same essay, he comments that “ if it wasn’t for Christianity, I wouldn’t mind the lack of Greek and

58
 TANSU ACIK

The title of Eliot’s address was ‘What is a classic?’, however, he presented a single ex-
ample, the work of Virgil. There is a logical aporia in his exposition: the common name by
definition should contain a cluster of entities but in his instance it has a single member. Using
an analogy with geography, consider that there is only one peak in a given world, the name
of that peak in geography would be a proper noun, not a generic name, thus, the geographical
term ‘peak’ would not exist. On the other hand there is indeed legitimacy through heritage
behind Eliot’s reasoning; Virgil’s text is the single example from antiquity that has been
subject to continuous transmission and interpretation in Europe. This feature is not considered
alone since Eliot introduces a Christian understanding of time. However, this aspect of his
thought is revealed in an allusion in the last sentence, which connects him to all his prede-
cessors. However, referring to matters outside the text, to its future repercussions instead of
its literary qualities, and even relating the text to the representation of a future civilization,
can be seen as a drawback when looking at it through the understanding of criticism that he
pioneered. Eliot’s criteria and his judgments on comparative literature although sometimes
eccentric can offer fertile clues concerning the definition of a classic work. There are curious
hints of Assmann’s distinctions between classic and canon, even though the concept of
canon had not yet been introduced in literary studies at the time he posed his question to the
Virgilian Society.

The Example of Classical in Philosophical Hermeneutics of Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) whose training was in classical philosophy and classical
philology and who took refuge in philology in the Nazi period of the 1930s, developed a
distinctive and thoroughly dialogical approach, grounded in Platonic-Aristotelian as well as
Heideggerian thinking (he states that he owed everything to Heidegger). He rejects subject-
ivism and relativism, abjures any simple notion of interpretive method, and grounds under-
standing in the linguistically mediated happening of tradition13.
Gadamer compares understanding to a conversation. Not only is the dialectical movement
of a conversation like the hermeneutic circle, but a conversation is also a fusion of horizons
between oneself and someone else. The conversation is also a useful model for the way
audiences think about art. His major work Truth and Method is not meant to be a program-
matic statement about a new ‘hermeneutic’ method of interpreting texts. Gadamer intended
Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things. His
real concern is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us
over and above our wanting and doing.
Gadamer points to the inadequacy of the natural science model in the functioning of human
sciences and in understanding art. Now I would like to lend my voice to Gadamer, fusing
my horizon of interpretation with his voice in Truth and Method, all quotes being from TM,
because I have nothing to add to or extract from his discourse that features another operational

Latin texts” On the other hand, in the 1942 presidential opening speech “The Classics and the Man of Letters”
presented to the Classical Association, - the largest group interested in the Greco-Roman world at all levels, he
considered Greek and Latin in the light of their importance in the history of English Literature and defended the
necessity of their instruction for the continuity of English literature.
13
The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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definition for “classic”14. Gadamer says: “It is clear that the human sciences cannot be ad-
equately described in terms of this conception of research and progress. This is shown by
the fact that the great achievements in human sciences almost never become outdated....
Obviously the value and importance of research cannot be measured by a criterion based in
the subject matter…. Obviously, in the human sciences we cannot speak of an object of re-
search in the same sense as in natural sciences, where research penetrates more and more
deeply into nature...The theme and object of research are actually constituted by the motiv-
ation of the inquiry” (TM 284).
In the “Afterword” to Truth and Method that he wrote years afterwards, he states ‘It was
not defining some canon of content specific to the classic that encouraged me to designate
the classical as the basic category of effective history (wirkungsgeschichte). Rather, I was
trying to indicate what distinguishes the work of art, and particularly the eminent text, from
other traditionary materials open to understanding and interpretation. The dialectic of question
and answer that I elaborated is not invalidated here but modified: the original question to
which a text must be understood as an answer has, as suggested above, an originary superi-
ority to and freedom from its origins. This hardly means that the “classical work” is accessible
only in a hopelessly conventional way or that it encourages a reassuringly harmonious con-
ception of the “universally human.” Rather, something “speaks” only when it speaks “origin-
arily,” that is, “as if it were saying something to me in particular.” This hardly means that
what speaks in this way is measured by a supra-historical norm. Just the reverse is true: what
speaks in this way sets the standard. And that is the problem. In such cases the original
question that the text is understood as answering claims an identity of meaning which has
always already mediated the distance between its origin and the present. In my Zurich lecture
of 1969, “The Being of the Poetical,” I indicated the hermeneutic distinctions necessary for
such texts.” (TM 579)
His discussion of the concept of the classical claims no independent significance, but
serves only to evoke a general question, namely: Does the kind of historical mediation
between the past and the present that characterizes the classical ultimately underlie all his-
torical activity as its effective substratum? Whereas romantic hermeneutics had taken homo-
geneous human nature as the unhistorical substratum of its theory of understanding and
hence had freed the congenial interpreter from historical conditions, the self-criticism of
historical consciousness leads finally to recognizing historical movement not only in events
but also understanding itself. Understanding is to be thought of less as subjective than as
participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission which past and present are
constantly mediated.” (TM 290-291) We might say that is exactly in the vein of the romantic
hermeneutics T. S. Eliot assumed towards classical.
Gadamer attempts to demonstrate that the truths of history cannot be discerned by scientific
observation because these truths are only revealed through a kind of dialogue. The interpreter
of a text from a past culture belongs to and is conditioned by his own different culture, so
he is, to use a term that Gadamer borrows from Heidegger, wirkungsgeschichtliches bewusst-
sein (historically affected consciousness) who views the past and its remnants from a partic-
ular horizon, involving a particular “pre-understanding.” Self-understanding comes up against

14
For example Murray McGillivray adds nothing to Gadamer’s handling of the classical “Creative Anachronism:
Marx’s Problem with Homer, Gadamer’s Discussion of “The Classical” and Our Understanding of Older Literatures”
New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Writers on Writers ,Spring, 1994, pp. 399-413.

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limits: the “historically affected consciousness,” which is “more being than consciousness.”
People inherit forms of consciousness through their education, but these are only alienated
forms of their true historical being.
It is for this reason that Gadamer’s example of “the classical,” intended to illuminate the
idea of “tradition,” is particularly valuable. Although the example of classical is not recounted
with reference to concrete and specific instances, the concept of tradition, which Gadamer
is attempting to explain using this example, is in a way, a pivot argument in his book. Briefly
put, for Gadamer tradition is our link to the past. What makes it possible for us to achieve
understanding of the text from the past is tradition, which links our horizon to the horizon
of the text, and permits us to begin the work of understanding, which if we do it properly
will “fuse” our horizon to that of the past. “The concept of classical antiquity and of the
classical—which dominated pedagogical thought in particular since the days of German
classicism—combined both a normative and a historical side. A particular stage in the his-
torical development of humanity was thought to have produced a mature and perfect form
of the human. This mediation between the normative and historical senses of the concept
goes back to Herder.” (TM 286) “… Hegel systematically justified the historicization of the
concept of classical, and he began the process of development that finally changed the clas-
sical into a descriptive stylistic concept—one that describes the short lived harmony of
measure and fullness that comes between archaic rigidity and baroque dissolution. Since it
became part of the aesthetic vocabulary of historical studies, the concept of classical retains
the sense of a normative content only in an unacknowledged way. Symptomatic of renewed
historical self-criticism was that after the First World War classical philology started to ex-
amine itself under the banner of a new humanism, and hesitantly again acknowledged the
combination of normative and historical elements in “the classical.” In so doing, it proved
impossible (however one tried) to interpret the concept of the classical —which arose in
antiquity and canonized certain writers—as if I expressed the unity of a stylistic ideal.
On the contrary, as a stylistic term the ancient concept was wholly ambiguous. Today
when we use classical as a historical stylistic concept whose clear meaning is defined by its
being set against what came before and after, this concept has become quite detached from
the ancient one. The concept of classical now signifies a period of time, a phase of historical
development but not a supra-historical value. In fact, however, the normative element in the
concept of classical has never completely disappeared. Even today it is still the basis of the
idea of liberal education….If we try to see what this implies, we might say that the classical
is a truly historical category, precisely because it is more than a concept of a period or of a
historical style, and yet it nevertheless does not try to be the concept of a suprahistorical
value. It does not refer to a quality that we ascribe particular historical phenomena but to a
notable mode of being historical: the historical process of preservation (Bewahrung) that,
through constantly proving itself (Bewahrung), allows something true (ein Wahres) come
into being. It is not at all the case, as the historical mode of thought would have us believe,
that the value judgment which accords the status of classic was in fact destroyed by historical
reflection and criticism of all ideological construal of the process of history. Rather through
this criticism the value judgment implicit in the concept of classical acquires a new, special
legitimacy. The classical is something that resists historical criticism because its historical
dominion and the binding power of the validity that is preserved and handed down precede
historical reflection and continue in it…..The classical is fundamentally something quite
different from a descriptive concept used by an objectifying historical consciousness. It is

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a historical reality to which historical consciousness belongs and is subordinate. The “clas-
sical” is something raised above the vicissitudes of changing times and changing tastes. It
is immediately accessible, not through that shock of recognition, as it were, that sometimes
characterizes a work of art for its contemporaries and in which the beholder experiences a
fulfilled apprehension of meaning that surpasses all conscious expectations. Rather, when
we call something classical, there is a consciousness of something enduring, of significance
that cannot be lost and that is independent of all the circumstances of time—a kind of timeless
present that is contemporaneous with every other present. So the most important thing about
the concept of the classical (and this is wholly true of both the ancient and the modern use
of the word) is the normative sense.” 15 (TM 287)
“…. It speaks in such a way that it is not a statement about what is past -documentary
evidence that still needs to be interpreted- rather, it says something to the present as if it
were said specifically to it. What we call “classical” does not first require the overcoming
of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself.
The classical, then, is certainly “timeless,” but this timelessness is a mode of historical being.
Of course this is not to deny that works regarded as classical present tasks of historical un-
derstanding to a developed historical consciousness, one that is aware of historical distance.
The aim of historical consciousness is not to use the classical model in the direct way, like
Palladio or Corneille, but to know it as a historical phenomenon that can be understood solely
in terms of its own time. But understanding it will always involve more than merely histor-
ically reconstructing the past “world” to which the work belongs. Our understanding will
always retain the consciousness that we too belong to that world, and correlatively, that the
work too belongs to our world.
This is just what the word “classical” means: that the duration of a work’s power to speak
directly is fundamentally unlimited.” (TM 290)
Since one could hardly add anything to Gadamer’s handling of the concept, instead of a
sham conclusion I would like to end the paper with a few remarks. The discussants of the
concept of classic from every generation, nourished by the traditions of great art, thought
and literature, are all the more relevant to this day. On one hand, there is an ever growing
gap between natural science, humanities and social sciences; while on the other hand, there
is a secondary and higher education system modeled after specialized labor force which has
lost its unity and common base. Teaching and research have become so specialized, fragmen-
ted, and incoherent. In this context, the strongest option against the attacks of market in the
field of education is humanistic education meaning an education on both art and ideas; fur-
thermore it has been opening to other cultures besides Greek, Roman and Western classics.
Liberal education, which can be termed as humanistic education as well, has its roots in
Greco-Roman antiquity. Inside the texture of this tradition two threads were identified16.
Broadly speaking, one can be called the civic ideal, the responsible participation of citizens

15
I totally agree with Irmgard Wagner when he opposes Hans Robert Jauss views regarding to Gadamer’s treating
the notion of classic, by the way Jauss’ teacher was Gadamer: “Hans Robert Jauss and Classicity” Modern Language
Notes, Vol. 99, No. 5, Comparative Literature , December, 1984, pp. 1173-1184. Gadamer, Jauss argues in the ex-
plication of his fourth thesis, takes over Hegel’s classicist definition of the classical work as always immediately
accessible (“that which signifies and interprets itself”) and therefore not in need of hermeneutic mediation between
present and past. Bymaking classicity the prototype of historical mediation, Gadamer, according to Jauss, contradicts
himself. The above mentioned quotes show the weakness of this argument.
16
Ilsetraut Hadot , Arts Liberaux et Philosophie dans la Pensee Antique , Paris 1984.

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in the public life; the other can be called the philosophical ideal, which at the same time has
got to do with perfection, be it in ethics or arts; both aspects persist today and they are espe-
cially relevant in the pluralist democratic society.

About the Author

Dr. Tansu Acik
University of Ankara, Turkey

63
EDITORS
Tom Nairn, The Globalism Institute, RMIT University, Australia.
Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Patrick Baert, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.
David Christian, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA.
Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Joan Copjec, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA.
Alice Craven, American University of Paris, Paris, France.
Michel Demyen, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.
Elizabeth DePoy, University of Maine, Orono, USA
Mick Dodson, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Oliver Feltham, American University of Paris, Paris, France.
Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., Oxford College/Aletheia University, Tamsui, Taiwan.
Stephen French Gilson, University of Maine, Orono, USA.
Hafedh Halila, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Souad Halila, University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Hassan Hanafi Hassanien, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt.
Ted Honderich, University College, London, UK.
Paul James, Globalism Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Moncef Jazzar, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Eleni Karantzola, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece.
Krishan Kumar, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA.
Ayat Labadi, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Marion Ledwig, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA.
Greg Levine, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Harry R. Lewis, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
Fethi Mansouri, Institute for Citizenship & Globalization, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
Juliet Mitchell, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.
Nahid Mozaffari, New York, USA.
Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Robert Pascoe, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
Scott Schaffer, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Stanford University, Stanford, USA.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, New York, USA.
Bassam Tibi, University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany and Cornell University, Ithaca,
USA.
Giorgos Tsiakalos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA.
Cheryl A. Wells, University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA.
Zhang Zhiqiang, Nanjing University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China.
Chris Ziguras, Globalism Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

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