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Jan‘Hominaticum’ - In honor of whom?
I think it was yesterday when I received an invitation to participate in a homage to a colleague and professor, whose name, for now, must remain concealed (he does not know that such a homage is being prepared in his honour).
It is not a commonplace to say that the real honour falls onto the ones who are asked to participate in the volume. It actually is the truth, at least in my case. Our names will appear under his patronage, for we have had the chance to have fruitful conversations with him, which have changed, even entirely reshaped our perception of the fields we work on. In this particular case, it's been already twenty one years. Conversations, and debates, galore. Galore.
I have already started planning the subject I would like to treat. I have even thought up the first paragraph of my contribution. Immediately. I even have the title: "Genealogy of Chivalry according to X". Until now, I have only participated in two different homage volumes. One was in honor of Alan Deyermond (University of London); the other one, in honor of Michel Garcia (University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle). In both cases, I understood that I had to explain, in a very practical way, the theoretical problems these masters helped me to reshape. I myself understood, upon writing those articles, many a thing I had not become aware until that moment; problems that would lie as mere impressions printed as such back in the hypomnesic archive of my memory.
More or less, the first paragraph would state that writing an article for a homage is not only a public matter, it is also a private one, a new conversation between the professor and his pupil, and represents, to a certain degree, a recapitulation of the entire set of agreements and debates throughout a given period and in a certain field. It is, at the same time, the acknowledgement of all the traditions represented by the master and the individual resistance to them. Honoring somebody, and, as it is in this very case, somebody so important in one's life, is, above all, being able to claim the independence from the master's thought, to let him know that our affection toward him is not a mere (and, therefore useless) affectus officialis, but rather a sincere acknowledgement that his main contribution is a real act of enlightenment in the way Kant claimed as unique (Was ist Aufklärung):
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage s man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"- that is the motto of enlightenment."