From his home above Lake Maggiore, Karl Kerényi reflects on language, landscape and classical scholarship. He recalls Eranos, Walter F. Otto, C. G. Jung, Leo Frobenius, Wilhelm II’s circle at Doorn and Thomas Mann, defending mythology as faithful retelling and scholarship as an inward expansion.
Karl Kerényi — 1 recording in the archive.
Professor Kerényi, in 1935 you published some aphorisms that I find so remarkable—particularly because you are a classical philologist, a subject we shall have much more to discuss—that they might provide the best opening to our conversation. — Please do. Before quoting them, I should explain why I think they matter. You wrote them in 1935, when you were thirty-eight. On January 19, 1962, you will turn sixty-five. That was, so to speak, the middle of your life—not as a scholar, but as a human being. The thirties were also very important for you: the entire period beginning in 1929, when you met Walter F. Otto; 1934, when you met Frobenius; later your correspondence with Thomas Mann, beginning in 1937; and then your acquaintance with Carl Gustav Jung. You must have formulated very deliberately what you considered the programme of your scholarship. The other reason will become clear as I read a few of your sentences. “Intellectual art and artistic intellectuality: do they not belong together by their nature, like Goethe’s unity of the writer’s and the poet’s existence? Mind and form, criticism and plastic expression: in this context these are the words of an artist of the mind. Why should we not admit that here too, in the humanities, the artist of the mind has preceded its scholar?” You continue: “In the artistic intellectuality of scholarship, mind and criticism have primacy. But must this mean formlessness, rather than a distinctive plastic expression? A work may be life that has become fixed, but it is not activity that has become fixed. Have we not always known that activity characterizes the scholar?” “It is as though this had always been said to the disadvantage of the work itself: as though the scholar’s nature required him to remain at the preliminary stage of creating an artwork, an embryonic artist; as though the essence of scholarship were never to enter its final form, because final form would itself run counter to scholarship.” “As though suspension possessed no plastic expression, and Heraclitus no form. Or is the form of Heraclitus and Nietzsche already too definitive for scholarship? May the scholar do nothing but endlessly approach his goal? Yet if he consciously throws his life into that approach, does he not finally come very close to the artist?” Forgive me, Professor, for directing your own questions back at you. What do this aphorism and these…