Exploring Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism

An interview with Prof. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer

Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University Chicago. A Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the British Academy, she has authored and edited some 12 books on antiquity.  Her book Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit in 2016 and a translation of Vergil’s Aeneid was published to acclaim in 2022. Her most recent monograph is an account of the reception of the Classics in contemporary China, Plato Goes to China.  From 2015-2024 Bartsch was the founding Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

How did you first become interested in Philosophy?

I become intrigued with studying the reception of the Greek political and philosophical classics in contemporary China after I realized that the fortunes of these texts had waxed and waned over the 20th century in accordance with the political changes in China herself. They reached a peak of influence after the fall of the Qing dynasty and again in the 1980s, when Chinese intellectuals wanted exposure to western concepts, and yet this audience, unlike ours, had not been exposed to these texts and concepts for thousands of years, but to very different ones.  How did they read Plato? What did they think of Aristotle? How were concepts such as citizenship, democracy, and rationality received?

What are the most important concepts or ideas that you teach others?

Each culture has concepts that it thinks are “natural,” and therefore true. In the US, for example, democracy has reached the status of almost a religion, and we also find it natural that the history of our philosophy from Plato onwards tends to privilege the notion of the rational as a tool for self-discovery. In China, the long influence of Confucianism has led to different “natural” ideas such as filial piety and the stratification of society.  We can’t really know each other until we understand these internal formations that shape both us and our environment.

Do you have a favorite quote that you use?

I like the fact that both Socrates and Confucius voiced the same idea: that it’s an important part of knowledge to know what you don’t know. Without knowing that, your assumptions can lead you deeply astray. We all need a little humility in the face of the knowledge of others.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about what you do?

I have an academic website at https://classics.uchicago.edu/people/shadi-bartsch and a personal one at https://classics.uchicago.edu/people/shadi-bartsch .  For nine years I led an initiative bringing together the humanities and sciences (the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge), and my current interests are around this endeavor: I feel the siloization of knowledge in contemporary universities has a chilling effect. There was no such hard distinction between different fields  in the history of knowledge, or else our Plato and our Aristotle would look very different indeed, and who knows if we’d even have had a Leonardo da Vinci?  

Suppose you were able to give a talk or workshop at the original location of Plato’s Academy, in Athens. 

I’d feel excited, as long as I didn’t have to speak in Ancient Greek! Freud has a wonderful essay about the magic of being in a place laden with the presence of history–for him it was the Acropolis–and I completely agree. That ancient grove, and the ruins of the Academy, would be a wonderful place for a talk.

What question would you like to leave us to think about? 

Which quality seems more “human” to you, rationality, or humaneness? Be aware that you are aligning yourself with thousands of years of human thought on one side or the other!