The Recuperation of Humanism in the Context of the Martial Society: Homer, Anton Schneeberger, Kurt Lewin, and Narrative Medicine Katarzyna Jerzak* Many years ago, as graduate students, my then-husband and I spent a year of research at the University of Heidelberg. While living in Germany, we went to visit a friend in the Teutonic town of Bad Mergentheim, where her father, a gastroenterologist, ran a private sana torium. Entertaining us in his library, Dr. K. asked my husband about the subject of his dissertation. Since at the time Stephen was working on Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, he thought it would be better to say simply that he was working on German intellectual history, but the gastroenterologist insisted. As it turned out, he was famil- iar with Creuzer’s opus and with its reverberations in Geistesges- chichte. A long discussion followed, not unlike a Princeton Univer- sity graduate seminar with professor Anthony Grafton. I have no reason to assume that all the while, Dr. K. was not a good physician. Even further back, in the 1970s, our own family doctor in Sopot, Poland was an amateur expert on the kabbalistic elements in Adam Mic kiewicz’s oeuvre and would travel to Copenhagen where he dis- cussed the topic with Jewish scholars. In the twenty-first century, in my Children’s Literature undergra- duate course at the University of Georgia in the United States, I dis- * Pomeranian Academy in Slupsk, Ul. Arciszewskiego 22A, 76-200 Słupsk, Poland; katarzyna.jerzak@apsl.edu.pl. doi: https://doi.org/10.4312/clotho.2.2.89-100 THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9190 covered that no matter what methodology I employed, the majority of my students cried during class presentations. While reading basic canonical texts – Brothers Grimm’s folk tales, Hans Christian An- dersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” Janusz Korczak’s King Matt the First, and others, less canonical for that field but all the more potent in the context, such as Albert Cohen’s Book of My Mother, Henryk Grynberg’s Children of Zion or Tove Jansson’s Summer Book – they experienced something that until then had not been expressed in their American lives. Sub- sequently, during oral presentations, they inevitably brought tears to their own and everyone else’s eyes. Later I observed the same phe- nomenon in my Honors Literature and Medicine seminar, whose existence the University of Georgia owes to pre-med students star- ved for a humanities course that would complement their science curriculum. The two vignettes, that of a humanist physician conversant with philosophy and literature, and the oddly deprived modern-day uni- versity student, reduced to tears in front of a text that inadvertently mirrors the readers’ traumas and scars, serve here as an introduction to what I call the recuperation of humanism: a consideration of the imperative place of humanist thinking in the age of stem – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.1 For the contemporary society to function not on a dystopian model described by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Andrei Platonov, but instead as a huma- nist enterprise, it is imperative to reconsider the importance given in the present era to the sciences at the detriment of the humanities. I seek to demonstrate that humanist thinking does not go against science, neither does it exist in a separate sphere; on the contrary, just as in the original Renaissance project, it is the humanist in- sight that can inform, replenish, and sustain science, especially me- dical science. “Renaissance humanism was not, and probably could never have been, permanently confined to the restricted company that had once created it,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland in her “Abacus and Humanism.”2 “Even its most esoteric branches – Neoplatonism, magic, cabala, alchemy – had their practical side, for they had been conceived and continued to operate in a world of practical needs.”3 1 For the purpose of this article I will draw a broad connection between the humanist enterprise as it originated in the Renaissance and the humanities as such, the vestiges of which we witness at present. 2 Rowland, Abacus and Humanism, 695. 3 Ibid. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9190 The last notion – that of the successful combination and implemen- tation of humanist notions in the real world, is what interests me the most. Humanism, in its purely theoretical aspect, is not worthy of its name. It is through a return of ideas in print to life, of ensuring that ink is also blood, that humanism matters because it does not remain contained in books. What Rowland identifies in the original humanist drive, is the continuity of thought and action, a salutary blending of the intellectual and the social spheres that we badly lack nowadays: By the first two decades of the early sixteenth century, fundamen- tal concepts of Neoplatonism, though they may have retained their esoteric charm for self-conscious cognoscenti, had also become common coin, the imagery in which merchants, professionals and technicians couched their own philosophical yearnings. At the same time, humanistic patterns of thought had come to govern actions in the political and financial sphere no less than they governed the progress of letters and art. Humanism had in effect become a social phenomenon as much as an intellectual stance.4 Nowadays, neither humanism nor science seems to be a social phe- nomenon. We make daily use of most advanced scientific disco- veries without the slightest notion of how they come about, and at the same time, most of the population has ceased to read the belles lettres. The trouble seems to be so much graver than in 1959 when C.P. Snow delivered his famous Rede lecture entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” He outlined the “dan- gerous divide between the ethos, outlook, and practices of the sci- ences and those of the old humanities.”5 Speaking about his lecture in 2010 at the University of Cambridge, Lisa Jardine called the goal of integrating arts, sciences, and humanities “yet unachieved.”6 The work, then, is up to us. Justin Stover, in a recent statement publi- shed on 4 March 2018 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, expo- unds a clear credo of the humanist role both in the university and in today’s world. Stover compellingly argues that the humanities do not need to be justified because, without the humanities, there is no university: 4 Ibid. 5 Jardine, “Snow’s Two Cultures,” 49–57. 6 Ibid. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9392 The humanities have always been, just as their critics complain, self-contained, self-referential, and self-serving. Those tendencies are exactly what enabled the humanities to create a class that conti nued to demand them. People have read Virgil for two thousand years, and people have built institutions designed to facilitate the reading of Virgil. For reasons high and low, people long believed that the one qualification truly necessary — for civil service, for foreign service, for politics, for medicine, for science, for law, for estate ma nagement, for ecclesiastical preferment, for a life of aristocratic leisure — was the ability to compose good Latin hexameters. They were not look- ing for skills or creativity or values. They did believe that conjugat- ing irregular verbs would mysteriously produce moral improvement (perhaps it did), but they were not too concerned about how. They simply believed in the humanities and knew from experience that the disciplines would bring students above the categories of nation, vocation, and time to become members of a class constrained by no such boundaries.7 While well supported in a diachronic perspective and altogether convincing both in its modest and hubristic aspect, Stover’s argu- ment is nonetheless somewhat complacent. Let the humanities culti- vate the minds that flock to them for their own sake, says Stover. Let us forget the other, more technical and vocational areas of civilizati- on, and just read the Classics. As Rowland and Grafton demonstrate, that is not what the humanist enterprise was in the Renaissance, and Snow and Jardine argue that neither should it be the case now. The area in which it may be possible to combine the two cultures for the benefit of all involved is the one that affects humanity across disci- plines in a very immediate way, that is, medicine. Anthony Grafton notes the following: The humanists did not confine themselves to strictly literary areas of study. After 1450 they often analyzed scientific texts and produced results of interest to specialists in medicine and astronomy as well as to general readers. The scientists, for their part, often did work of great penetration and originality in the humanist fields of textual exegesis and cultural history. The two cultures, in short, were not locked in a battle […]; they coexisted and collaborated.8 As an inspiring and still little known example of a genuine Rena- issance man who combined erudition in the humanities with exper- 7 Stover, “No Case for the Humanities,” 210–224. 8 Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 5. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9392 tise in medicine let us consider the figure of Anton Schneeberger – born in 1530 in an upper-class Zürich family, died in 1581 in Cracow – the Swiss doctor and botanist who studied medicine in Basel and Cracow. He traveled extensively, as a modern European might, visi- ting Vilnius, Königsberg, Paris, Montpellier. Schneeberger wrote the first scholarly work in botany to be published in Poland: a catalog of wild plants in Latin and Polish (Catalogus stirpium … 1554), as well as the first modern manual of health – both physical and mental – for the military, dedicated to the Polish King Sigismund ii Augustus, De bona militum valetudine conservanda liber, a landmark work ba- sed mostly on a sophisticated reading of the Ancients. According to Stanisław Ilnicki, Schneeberger’s work, published in 1564 in Cracow, is the oldest modern textbook of military hygiene. It predates other such works by over a hundred years (Janusz Abraham Gehema, 1684) or even by two hundred (John Pringle, 1754; Maurice Saxe 1757; Jean Colombier 1775; and the American Benjamin Rush 1777).9 The Polish edition, with the original Latin and a facing-page translation by Robert A. Sucharski, appeared in 2008. It is in De bona militum valetudine conservanda liber that Anton Schneeberger elaborated an early definition of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd) and described the possible ways of preparing for trauma and assuaging its effects. To heal sorrow and mourning, he recommends the use of storytelling, arguing that memory and hope are reconciled through the creation of an interpersonal narrative. It is a tale as old as time. In his Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Tra- uma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay, a doctor and cli- nical psychiatrist, has shown how the soldiers in Homer’s Iliad suf- fered moral injuries not unlike those borne by Vietnam veterans.10 Later on, he explored the pitfalls awaiting them on the road back to civilian life in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.11 Despite its ostensible state of peace, contemporary Western society is plagued by disorders frequently encountered in combat zones: ptsd and other anxiety disorders, depression, suicide. The lucid direction of humanist medicine and medicinal humanities must be to study the role of literature in the overcoming of these di- sorders. Arnold Weinstein, in his book A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life, opposes the medici- ne cabinet to the bookshelf, pointing out that in the United States, 9 Schneeberger, De bona militum valetudine conservanda, xxv. 10 Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, passim. 11 Shay, Odysseus in America, 11–148. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9594 one is more likely to turn to the former than the latter. In twenty years of university teaching, I have seen that novels and memoirs focusing on traumatic events, be it individual (King Matt the First by Janusz Korczak, Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Brothers Lionhe- art by Astrid Lindgren) or collective (Jewish War and Child ren of Zion by Henryk Grynberg, Comet in Moominvalley by Tove Jansson), can have a therapeutic effect on the readers, as if literature allowed for an expression of their own traumas. In a culture in which Walt Disney supplanted both the Bible and Greek tragedies, the lack of a humanist education deprives individuals of a meaning ful way of addressing their moral injuries outside of psychiatry proper. In a society such as that of the contemporary United States, i.e., one in which most basic human needs are met for the majority of its mem- bers, there is nonetheless a humanist lacuna which contributes to the current psychological crisis. In Europe, the situation is nearly equ- ally alarming. According to data from 2010, one third of American college students suffered from depression that made them dysfun- ctional, as if they were in a combat zone. A dramatic in crease in the number of suicides has been noted both on us college campuses and among us troops at home and abroad. In Poland, only 38 percent of people read at least one book in 2009. At the same time, increasing numbers of the population participate in long-distance running, tri- athlons, decathlons, and paramilitary sports such as paint ball and airsoft. Soon the warfare model might be applicable in Poland as well, even though the Poles’ identity is still shaped by the long sha- dow of World War ii. Under what guise does the issue of trauma appear in classical twentieth-century literature? In the opening paragraphs of I and Thou, the Jewish thinker Martin Buber proposes that the object of human relation affects the subject. “For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that in the basic word I-It.”12 In other words, the object of my relation makes me into a different person. If I have an It as my object, I am necessarily limited. In contrast, “[W]hoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever there is something there also another some- thing; every It borders other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others.“13 Buber foresaw the unstoppable progression of our modern society from the I-You to the I-It. The gaping discrepancy between medical sciences focused on the purely technical, laboratory orien- 12 Buber, I and Thou, 53. 13 Ibid., 55. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9594 ted medicine on the one hand and the disappearing modes of culti- vating humanist interests that overlap with medicine in the center of which there is always the human being, on the other hand, means that it is ever easier to slip into what Buber defines as the continuum of Its. There is a connection between literature and the meaningful na- ming of the disorders plaguing contemporary martial society. No- vels and memoirs focusing on traumatic wartime memories, be it individual (Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, Ota Pavel’s Death of the Beautiful Deer) or collective (Henryk Grynberg’s Jewish War as well as his recent Memoir, Memoir 2, and Memoir 3), work both to heal and illuminate the abiding martial state in which we must function. Acts of war that punctuate the twenty-first century may not correspond to the propaganda rhetoric of the ‘war on ter- ror’ but nonetheless deal real enough psychic wounds that literature dutifully marks (e.g., “Photograph from September 11” by the Po- lish poet Wisława Szymborska). When I taught Henryk Grynberg’s Jewish War at the University of Georgia, the students who chose to do oral presentations were an Iraq war veteran (shot down over Karbala) and a criminal justice major who could not eat for three days after he had watched Paweł Łoziński’s 1992 documentary film Birthplace. Both could speak only when literature breached a crack in their traumatic silence. While in the trenches of World War i – on the German side, because he had been born in Moglino, near what was then called Posen, and studied in Berlin – Kurt Lewin, the Jewish-German topo- logical psychologist developed his theory of “war landscape” which he then wrote up in an extraordinarily clear and compact essay en- titled Kriegslandschaft (published during a furlough in 1917).14 Lewin puts forth a distinction between the landscape of peace that extends indefinitely in all directions and that he describes as “round, without front or behind,”15 and the landscape of war, which is directed and bounded. “The danger zone changes depending on the combat situ- ation. The general character of danger increases or diminishes with the intensity of combat; furthermore, the danger points shift, new 14 Kurt Lewin, after his World War i experience, became a Gestalt psychologist and worked in the United States (most notably at mit), both as a clinician and theoretician. His work, just like that of Mikhail Bakhtin, is used in organizati- onal studies and in psychology. 15 Lewin, “The Landscape of War,” 201. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9796 ones are formed and old ones disappear.”16 Thus in the landscape of war, the line of combat is everpresent, however changeable or even invisible it may be. Lewin makes several points that both harken back to Schneeberger’s categories of fear and terror and at the same time pertain to modern war. For instance, he recounts an incident in which his fear – as a field artilleryman – was diminished by his perception of the place of combat as an ordinary, peacetime village: “While we were halted on the road after a lengthy march as army re- serves, the battle for a nearby village suddenly escalated. The village remained a normal “village in the landscape.”17 The battle as a whole did not seem to me to be particularly serious, and the reminder to take cover seemed somewhat pointless despite the relatively high level of danger, clearly because the combat landscape had not yet taken the place of the peacetime landscape.” Such difference in per- ception is attributable to the changed aspects of the war landscape that contains “things of combat,” Gefechtsdinge, while in the peace landscape, the same things are “peacetime things,” Friedensdinge. A village, a farmhouse, a forest appear differently to the observer depending on their status in a given landscape. Things of combat do not contaminate peacetime things if those are clearly distinct from them by their purpose: “Thus, for example, in mobile warfare a tent or even an exposed sleeping spot next to a cannon has the character of being removed from the war, a virtually homely character, which is particularly striking precisely on account of its being alongside pure things of combat.”18 Inversely, when over a century after the publication of Lewin’s wartime essay one travels by air and is forced to surrender a bot- tle of water to the security agents at the airport in order to be able to board a flight, it is because the ostensible landscape of peace is at any moment subject to a disturbance. On September 11th 2001, passenger airplanes were deftly transformed from peacetime things into things of combat. Lewin concludes his essay with an analysis of combat things in time. A trench position “filled with death and war” is left behind not as something meaningless but rather as a “war forma tion,” a tangible trace that speaks of what has taken place there. Lewin calls burnt villages “Kriegsinseln” im Friedensland. The modern landscape is, even to this day, dotted with these “islands of war,” and, after 9/11, they also appear in Manhattan, Paris, or Brus- 16 Ibid., 202–203. 17 Ibid., 204. 18 Ibid., 206. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9796 sels. It takes a humanist of Lewin’s stature to render the soldier’s perspective meaningful: the space in which the human person mo- ves, his or her environment, is significant precisely because it is per- ceived in a certain manner. In the contemporary society the purely peacetime landscape has ceased to exist. If modern Western society functions in a surreptitious land- scape of war, becoming a kind of martial society, i.e., a society whose members are exposed to psychic and moral injuries comparable to those sustained in battle, how does literature help in the recovery from those injuries? One answer was offered by Joseph Brodsky, who himself had grown up in a totalitarian system that attempted to erase the human person from the heart of society. In “The Condition We Call Exile,” the Russian poet wrote: Since there is not much on which to rest our hopes for a better world, since everything else seems to fail one way or another, we must somehow maintain that literature is the only form of moral insurance a society has; that it is the permanent antidote to the dog- eat-dog principle; that it provides the best argument against any sort of bulldozer-type mass solution—if only because human diversity is literature’s lock and stock, as well as its raison d’être.19 Applying Brodsky’s insight even further, let us state that literature shall have a chance to function as a form of moral insurance only if it is, as it were, returned to life. A relatively new discipline of health care, narrative medicine, that has developed along the lines fore- seen by doctor Anton Schneeberger in the sixteenth century places storytelling at the heart of its practice.20 It is not an exaggeration to consider the therapeutic value of storytelling as a homeric insight.21 Thus, in narrative medicine, patients and health professionals are 19 Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, 23. 20 To name just a few examples, Narrative Medicine has been taught at Columbia University since the 1980s, and Medical Humanities are a part of the Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, while in the United Kingdom, re- search in Medical Humanities is conducted both at Oxford and at the Univer- sity of Glasgow. 21 Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, chapter 11: “The ancient Greeks revered Homer, the singer of tales, as a doctor of the soul. In the Odyssey, Homer paints a (self-) portrait of the epic singer whose healing art is to tell the stories of Troy with the truth that causes the old soldier, Odysseus, to weep and weep again. (Odys- sey 8:78ff)” [Why and how does narrative heal?] THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9998 encouraged to tell and listen to stories of illness. The key to humanist medicine is the human being at the center of care – not an indi- vidual part or organ, but the entire sentient person, with memory and traumas, but also with resilience. Narrative medicine, humanist medicine, and medical humanities confirm the value of humanist training for both disciplines. The Renaissance humanists did not limit themselves in their inquiry and neither should we. BIBLIOGRAPHY Brodsky, Joseph. “The Condition We Call Exile.” The New York Re- view of Books, January 21, 1988; later published in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995). Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Touchstone, 1970. Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholar- ship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1994. Jardine, Lisa. “C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures Revisited.” Christ’s Colle- ge Cambridge Magazine, no. 235 (2010): 49–57, available online. Lewin, Kurt. “Kriegslandschaft.” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psycho- logie 12 (1917): 440–447. ——— , and Jonathan Blower, transl. “The Landscape of War.” Art in Translation 1:2 (2009): 199–209. Rowland, Ingrid D. “Abacus and Humanism.” Renaissance Quar- terly, vol. 48, no. 4, 1995, pp. 695–727. Schneeberger, Anton. De bona militum valetudine conservanda liber, edited by Stanisław Ilnicki, translated by Robert A. Su- charski. dig: Warsaw, 2008. Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Un- doing of Character. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Shay, Jonathan. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York: Scribner, 2002. Stover, Justin. “There is no Case for the Humanities.” American Affairs 1, no. 4 (2017): 210–224, available online. Weinstein, Arnold. A Scream Goes Through the House: What Lite- rature Teaches Us About Life. New York: Random House, 2003. THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 9998 ABSTRACT The humanist tradition developed in the Renaissance that not only cultivated the human spirit but applied its knowledge for the pur- pose of improving society across various humanist and scientific dis ciplines is not altogether extinct. Using the erudite Swiss physici- an and botanist Anton Schneeberger (1530–1581) as a founding father of sorts of modern humanist medicine confronted with war, I dis- cuss the recuperation of humanism in the twentieth century, first in the thought of psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) who, under war circumstances, produced a work whose analytical acumen can still be used today, and subsequently in the creation of the discipline of narrative medicine that, unwittingly perhaps, echoes Schneeberger’s insight into the imperative of inserting storytelling into the prac- tice of both patient- and physician-centered medicine. In the back- ground of the argument is the existence of a new society, a martial society that functions as if there were war despite its ostensible state of peace. KEYWORDS humanism, narrative medicine, psychology, war, martial society, storytelling THE RECUPERATION OF HUMANISMKATARZYNA JERZAK 101100 IZVLEČEK Krepitev humanizma v kontekstu borilne družbe: Homer, Anton Schneeberger, Kurt Lewin in narativna medicina Renesančna humanistična tradicija, ki ni le vzgajala človeškega duha, temveč je znanje v različnih humanističnih in znanstvenih disciplinah uporabljala za izboljšanje družbe, ni povsem izumr- la. Izobraženi švicarski zdravnik in botanik Anton Schneeberger (1530–1581) velja za nekakšnega ustanovitelja sodobne humanistič- ne medicine, soočene z vojno. S pomočjo njegovega primera članek razpravlja o oživljanju humanizma v dvajsetem stoletju. Najprej v zapuščini psihologa Kurta Lewina (1890–1947), ki je v vojnih raz- merah ustvaril delo, katerega analitično ost je mogoče uporabiti še danes, nato pa v luči nastanka narativne medicine, ki morda nevede odraža Schneebergerjev uvid o nujnosti, da se pripovedovanje zgodb vključi v medicinsko prakso, naj bo osrediščena na pacienta ali na zdravnika. V ozadju tega argumenta je obstoj nove družbe, borilne družbe, ki se obnaša, kot da je v vojni, dozdevnemu miru navkljub. KLJUČNE BESEDE humanizem, narativna medicina, psihologija, vojna, borilna družba, pripovedovanje