Great social upheavals have shattered traditional images of man. This is also evident in the current crisis. It will be interesting to see how it affects education and its curricula, especially in the philological subjects, from which one generally expects little optimism. There is particularly little confidence in the ancient languages and their humanistic tradition. There are all too well-meaning images of people that are written down here and that still affect many areas of our cultural and social life today. The exposure of these images of man and their criticism in the mirror of a textual tradition to be read anew is part of the extensive research projects of the Heidelberg philologist Jürgen Paul Schwindt.
Under the term “black humanism”, Schwindt sums up all the effects, reflexes, gestures and shadows cast by people that texts release when they are treated philologically. It is about nothing more and nothing less than the reconstruction of an as yet unwritten story, the “genealogy of the human subject”. How does it come about that when we read ancient texts we believe that we feel: “We are meant”? How do we get, how do people get into the text? And where is the exit, please?
We should, according to Schwindt, be aware that every reading is different and that consequently no one can rest on the catalog of values of a humanistically disguised tradition.
Even the Latin verb “trado” shimmers between “handing over”, “handing over and passing on” to “betrayal”.
That makes the encounter with tradition exhausting, but also a doubly enriching experience: Behind the imposing structures of tradition, people suspect the power of all the unwritten or, better yet, unread stories.
And if in the end he wins himself in dealing with the tradition, he can - with Schwindt, who turned sixty on Tuesday - say: "Trado, ergo sum."