holquist, michael. the place of philology in an age of world literature
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The place of philology in an age of world literature
Michael Holquist
Published online: 31 July 2011 Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, Hungary 2011
Abstract A more globalized concept of culture and the tsunami of information madeavailable by the digital revolution call for new reading practices. The emerging discipline
of World Literature is an attempt to create such practice, but one that would seem to have
very little place in it for the highly specialized skills that define philology, the closest of all
close reading strategies. It is this tension that has sparked several calls for a return to
philology. A historical overview of the Golden Age of classical philology in Germany
(17771872) suggests that the skills that have defined the profession all over the globe
from earliest times are still valuable, but in future can best be employed only in cooper-
ation with scholars having other competencies.
Keywords Philology German Enlightenment Universities Reading World literature
Although a great cosmopolitan and visionary, even Goethe could not have foreseen the
surge in global economic interconnectedness that in the years since 1827 (when he coined
the phrase world literature) have transformed the definition of world; nor could he have
imagined the digital tsunami that is currently revolutionizing the meaning of literature.
World literature is an emerging phenomenon, so its study is predictably future oriented,
with titles framed as questions, such as David Damroschs What Is World Literature?1
A shorter version of this essay will appear in Damrosch et al. (2011).
M. Holquist (&)455 FDR Drive, B-1704, New York, NY 10002, USAe-mail: [email protected]
1 In what follows, I will essentially be using the understanding of what we currently mean by WorldLiterature as it is laid out in Damrosch (2003); I have also found Franco Moretti an exciting source of ideason the subject. He has written copiously on the topic, but see especially his manifesto-like essay (Moretti2000). An example of what scholarship based on a philosophy of distant reading might look like isMorettis Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005.
Another helpful anthology in shaping my own ideas has been the anthology (Saussy 2006). Haun Saussysessay (pp. 342), is full of good ideas, and raises serious issues about the viability of traditional philology in
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What is surprising, however, is that the ancient discipline of philology is also a topicthat currently finds itself hedged about with question marks.2 For instance, there is so little
agreement on the fields current identity that high-powered conferences are held to ask the
question, What is Philology?.3 The paradox here is that everyone agrees philology is
among the very oldest disciplines in those cultures where it has flourished, yet a hard-
edged, agreed upon definition has not emerged. Modern dictionaries provide a range of
vague definitions, often beginning with the literal love of words, then adding some
mention of languages and old texts, while ominously concluding, as does the OED, now
rare.4 It is generally understood that philology has somethingexactly what is usually a
little vagueto do with the study of both language and literature. So it is not helpful that
current specialists in these two areas are quick to deny such a claim. Among linguists,
philology is perceived to have been a primitive, long sublated concern with languages that
pre-dates the happy moment in the nineteenth century when the modern study of linguistics
is born as a grown-up science.5 Students of literature also find the relation of philology to
their own subject slightly embarrassing6: there is ample colloquial evidence that philol-
ogist is sometimes even a term of abuse applied to those members of the profession who
are perceived by their peers as theoretically naive or lacking in civic commitment. We
might say of philology in the 21st century what Kant said of metaphysics in the eighteenth
Footnote 1 continuedthe global future that any future attempt to blend the two disciplines will have to face. (cf. pp. 710) I regretto say I came upon Pascale Casanovas The World Republic of letters (2004) too late to engage in this essay.2 The eminent Indologist, Sheldon Pollock, has recently published the opening shot in what will be a moreextended battle he has initiated to bring philology back into the limelight. He is currently at work on ahistory of world philology (personal communication). See Pollock (2009, pp. 931961). A spate of booksdevoted to philology appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. Learned and well intentioned though they were, nonehas succeeded in establishing a clear-cut definition of the discipline, or its place in the university as it is nowconstituted. See Cerquiglini (1999), and Gumbrecht (2003) [but see the devastating review of this book {anda somewhat less abrasive consideration of Lerer (2002)} by Ziolkowski (2005, pp. 239272). See alsoPascale Hummel (2003), and also her more polemical (and ineluctably ironic) take on the same subject(2000).
Most of these books assume philology is essentially Classical Philology as it has been long practiced inEurope, the study of ancient Greece and Rome that begins in Peisistratus Athens but which has its goldenage in 19th century Germany. So all draw, implicitly or explicitly, on the 3-volume juggernaut account ofGreek/Latin scholarship published by Sandys (19031909). See History of Classical Scholarship (or themore digestible version of the same story published by Briggs, Jr. and Calder III 1990).
In the late 1980s, Romance medievalists in the United States sought to formulate (or, as they wereironically aware, to reformulate) a version of New Philology. See the special edition of Romanic Review (79,1), pp. 1248, edited by Stephen G. Nichols, and his essay Philology in a Manuscript Culture, theintroduction to a another special edition he edited (of Speculum 65, 1, pp. 110. Another essay of particularinterest is by R. Howard Bloch in the same issue: New Philology and Old French, pp. 3858.
A brilliant illustration of the Russian Formalist doctrine of perspective by incongruity is the cosmo-politan take on philology in general that emerges from the meticulous study of Chinese scholarship in theQing period (16441911) by Elman (1984).3 What is Philology? was the title of a conference held at Harvards Center for literary and culturalStudies in 1998. Two years later, the conference papers were published in a special edition of ComparativeLiterature (vol. 27, vol. 1, 1990; later that year, Ziolkowski (1990) republished the papers as a book with themore neutral title.4 As in the Oxford English Dictionary (1972, p. 778).5 For an intelligent account of Philologys relation to Linguistics, see Manczak (1990, pp. 261272).6 Even so smart and sympathetic a literary scholar as John Guillory finds philology protohumanistic. Seehis essay (2002, p. 28).
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(quoting Ovids Hecuba); Modo maxima rerum, Tot generis, natisque potens [...] Nunctrahor exul, inops (Greatest of all by race and birth, I am now cast out, powerless.).7
Philologys identity is now indistinct because the discipline is widely perceived to have
died at some point in the past. The presumed disappearance of philology is confirmed in a
number of recent calls for its return: Paul De Mans 1982 TLS essay, The Return toPhilology,8 spawned a small sub-genre of essays bearing the same title,9 all of which add
to the sense that philology is something that expired or was abandoned in the past, and
which thus requires resuscitation in the present.
Philology does, of course, have an ineluctable association with the past, and has so from
its birth. The appearance of philology heralds a cultures discovery that language has an
existence and a history of its own. Such alienation comes late in the life of civilizations. By
the time cultures achieve this sophistication, they usually have ceased to flourish: at the
moment of their decline, they come alive as philological subjects.
Since philology itself is now seen by many as moribund, the obvious question arises,
why bother with it at all, much less call for its return? And why invoke so relentlessly
antiquarian a discipline in a discussion of the still very new phenomenon of world liter-
ature? Like the dead body of Dostoevskys Father Zosimma, the revered corpse stinks. In
order to understand philologys nevertheless continuing power to fascinate, it is useful to
think of it as having two aspects: it was (and is) both a history and a practice. As a history,
philology is remarkable for its great age among the disciplines, arising as it did in the
Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago. It makes its first, rudimentary appearance only a
short timeas measured in the sweep of world historyafter the first invention of writing
itself. Philologys subsequent geographical scope has been enormous, with activity found
in the Mid East, China, India, Islamic Africa, and Europe. In the past, these widespread
centers of learning were unaware of each other.10 So it is all the more remarkable that the
practice of philology, the characteristic procedures and tools that define it as a profession,are surprisingly similar wherever it is found in the ancient world. Moreover, they have
remained relatively unchanged until recent times.
It generally assumed the first writing system is found in cuneiform tablets unearthed in
the city of Uruk11 dating roughly from 3200 BCE. Sumerian, the language represented in
these tablets died out as a spoken language early in the second millennium.12 If the
Akkadian speaking Babylonians and Assyrians who came after them were to maintain
contact with the religious myths, laws, the epics and histories of their ancestors, they had to
study the tablets and translate them into their own language, much as we now read Beowulf
7 Ovid, Metamorphose, xiii, 508510. Quoted and translated in Preface to first edition (Geyer and Wood1998, p. 99).8 Republished in Godzich (1993, pp. 2126).9 See Lee Patterson (1994, p. 241), and Harpham (2005, pp. 926). A particularly thoughtful piece is aposthumously published essay by Said (2004, pp. 5784) (a great admirer of Erich Auerbach).10 Just as world literature emerges when previously isolated literatures, locally conceived as unique,discover other centers where similar practices have evolved, so we might now speak of a world philology,insofar as a new self-consciousness is now emerging that will let us study centers and traditions previouslyunrecognized.11 Scholars debate whether Egyptian hieroglyphs might be somewhat earlier, or contemporaneous withSumerian cuneiform, but its clear that writing enters human history roughly at the end of the fourthmillennium. Uruk, appropriately, is the city that was ruled by Gilgamesh. Cf. Damrosch (2006, esp. Chaps. 5and 6, pp. 151235).12 Cooper (1996).
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(and even Chaucer) in our later English. The priests and scholars who kept the wisdom of
the Sumerian past alive in the second millennium BCE are the first philologists.
The subsequent history of philology has had its ups and downs across the globe. In the
great learning centers of Nalanda and Taksashila, where knowledge of the formal features
of Sanskrit was employed in studying Hindu, and later Buddhist texts, for both of which
Sanskrit is the liturgical language (as it also is for the Jain religion). In the seventh and
eighth centuries CE, the rapid spread of Islam meant that a uniform administrative lan-
guage and script were urgently required, unleashing a storm of philological activity. What
resulted was classical Arabic as we still know it. Study continued in the great learning
centers of Fez13 and Al Azhar in Cairo, where the Islamic classics were pored over for
centuries.14 Confucius organization of ancient texts into the five classics in 6th century
BCE China was continually studied and debated by great scholars such as Su Shi
(10371101); and in the early 17th century when the Qing dynasty scholar Hao Ching
(perhaps under Jesuit influence) used philological methods to demonstrate once again that
the old text Documents [most important of the Classics] was a forgery.15
Sheldon Pollock, whose authority derives from his expertise in both the European and
Indian classical heritage, has recently proposed a definition of philology that can cover
most of these appearances at different times and in different places across the globe:
Philology is the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory oflanguagethats linguisticsor the theory of meaning or the truththats philos-
ophybut the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning. If
philosophy is thought critically reflecting upon itself, as Kant put it, then philology
may be seen as the critical self-reflection of language.16
What would the global history of a discipline so defined look like? It would first of all
threaten to be immense, as J. E. Sandys acknowledged when he apologized for the length
of his standard history of classical scholarship in the Westwhich is, after all, only one
strand of philologyby remarking,
I confess that the work has grown under my hands to a far larger bulk than I had ever
contemplated; but when I reflect that a German History of Classical Philology,
which does not go beyond the fourth century of our era, fills as many as 1900 large
octavo pages, I am disposed to feel (like Warren Hastings) astounded at my own
moderation.17
13 Site of the Qarawiyyin Mosque, where Gerbert of Auvergne (9301003), later Pope Sylvester II, wasonce a student, and who, according to legend, introduced the use of zero and Arabic numerals to Europe as aresult of what he learned in Fez.14 However, since the Koran was the central document for these scholars, they often hesitated to practicecritical philology out of piety or fear. Cf. Kopf (1956, pp. 3359). The particular problem that religious textsraise for philology is a red thread running through other traditions as well, of course, none more so than theChristian. It is precisely this ancient, heteronomous, faith-based reading practice that begins to be resisted inEurope after 1650. For a less optimistic account of the role of religion in philology after Sir William Jonesdiscovery, see Olender (1992). Olenders important book demonstrates how the discovery of Sanskritsrelation to European languages created new myths about Aryans and Semites that were secretly fueled byreligious and racial prejudice.15 Elman (1983, p. 200). As in the case of Lorenzo Valla, here is another example of how philological toolswhen brought to bear on a societys key texts can have far reaching consequences that affect the wholeculture.16 Pollock, p. 934.17 Sandys (1909, p. vii).
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In an effort to gain a clearer (and more economical) vision of what a possible future
relation between philology and world literature might look like, it will, I hope, suffice for
purposes of this short essay to limit the example of philology to what is widely conceded to
be its Golden Age: from April 8, 1777 (when the first student matriculated for an academic
degree in the subject) to 1872 (the year in which the young philologist Friedrich Nietzsche
effectively renounces his profession in The Birth of Tragedy).18
Philologys golden age: The rise of a new paradigm in education and society
While this tale is essentially a Europeanand even more narrowly, a Germanstory, and
involves only the study of ancient Greek and Latin, it is a narrative that nevertheless has
international cogency insofar as the model(s) of philology that reached fruition in those
years became the near numinous paradigm for most later scholarshipno matter where
practiced on the globethat has since aspired to the name of philology. When essays are
now written calling for a return to philology, it is usually the professional austerity and the
worldly importance the profession achieved during those yearsa particularly powerful
example of what William Clark has called academic charisma19that subsequent
authors have in mind.
The tale of philologys Golden Age has been told many times, so in what follows I will
concentrate only on those aspects of its history that are relevant to the potential future
relation it might have to world literature. The central role philology played in the invention
of the modern research university is an important part of the story, if we are to speculate
about the future role philology might play in the global academic network that is now
emerging and where the study of world literature will have its home. And the history of
philologys break up into a myriad of new disciplineslinguistics, the academic study of
modern vernacular literatures, cultural studies, programs in literary theorymay help us
conceive ways to put the Humpty-Dumpty of philology together again in a new configu-
ration adapted to the fresh realities of World Literature.
As everyone recognizes, the greatest challenge of World Literature is its vast scope and
variety: the world now presents us with material so varied as to call into question anylogic of representation20 No one can be an expert on all the differing texts, languages,and cultures that now sweep over us in the digital empire of Googlevania. Clearly, any
student in this new world of roiling literacies must have an appetite for the unfamiliar. If,
then, a key aspect of World Literature is that it is not a set canon of texts but a mode ofreading, a detached engagement with a world beyond our own,21 then philologysbirthdaythat fateful day in April, 1777 when young Friedrich August Wolf insisted he
be identified in the Matriculation Book of Gottingen university as studiosus philologiaeis simultaneously a milestone in the evolution of World Literature as well.
It is not by chance that Wolf makes his move when and where he does. His aim was to
redefine philology during the German late Enlightenmentin other words, at the same
18 Although he did not resign his professorship at Basle until 1879.19 Clark (2006).20 Damrosch (2003, p. 281).21 Ibid., p. 296.
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time and place22 that his contemporary (and admirer) Goethe begins to speculate about
world literature. Both the Golden Age of philology and the first steps to conceive World
Literature are deeply implicated in the great changes that transform Germany during the
eighteenth century. Both evolve out of the particular shape that Enlightenment secularism
assumes in the German lands during these years. Each is a version of the new sensibility
Schiller called the sentimental,23 but which is perhaps more recognizable at our remove as
a profound sense of alienation that arises in the decline of religiously-based authority.
Nowhere was the pathos of this challenge felt more deeply than in Kants Copernican
Revolution, which engendered a new conception of the nature of thinking itself, and thus
impelled a fresh interrogation of how thoughts relate not only to the world, but to words.His work would have enormous consequences for bonding the fate of philology to the new
institution of the research university that came into existence in the first decades of the
nineteenth century.
Roughly speaking, it may be said that prior to the nineteenth century, language had been
conceived as expressing thought so naturally that it was for all intents and purposes
transparent, and thus did not exist as a phenomenon separate from thought; it was, in other
words a subset of ones subjectivity. Or, if one did see it as an object, as in rhetoric, it was
available to the knowing will of the speaker. Beginning in the 17th century, all this
changed. Language was increasingly seen as a topic for examination in its own right: therearose a different way to think of the relation between thoughts, things, and words. A spate
of works now appeared devoted to the subject of how languages came to be in the first
place (Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, Condillac, Rousseau, Herder).24 No matter how
abstruse or bizarre such theories might have been, in retrospect they do truly reflect a
discovery of language: language as such. By 1865 Muller could already speak of the
science of language, which Chomsky would nominate Cartesian linguistics, arguingthat Wolfs friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was its culmination.25
The questions that Kant raised about our epistemological distance from things as they
are in the world beyond our senses and reasonthe world-in-itselfand Wilhelm von
Humboldts paradoxical new vision of language as something in its own rightlanguage-
in-itself, independent of any particular speaking subject or national languageeffected a
qualitative difference in how both philology and literature were perceived. Call it what you
willa Kuhn-ian crisis that initiates new paradigms among the disciplines,26 a Bachelard-
ian epistemological rupture,27 or the emergence of a new Foucauldian episteme28
philology during the Golden Age is not just another historical instantiation of a set of
practices going back to the dawn of history.29 The philology that comes into being in
22 Although there is a span of 50 years between Wolfs matriculation (he was 10 years younger thanGoethe) and Goethes use of the word Weltliteratur, both men and events were very much shaped by thesame cultural currents.23 Schiller (17941795).24 The number of theories about how language originated was so great, that finally, in 1866, the LinguisticSociety of Paris famously included in its bylaws a provision that it would not accept any communication onthe subject.25 Chomsky (1966, p. 2).26 Kuhn (1962).27 Bachelard (1947).28 Foucault (1970).29 These different versions of radical discontinuity in the Enlightenment assign what is perhaps an undueweight to events in the West. For a critique of Eurocentric intellectual history of science, see Bala (2006).
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eighteenth century Germany appears as something novel and different. Unlike so many
postmoderns, Wolf was not returning to philology, he was part of a movement that re-invented it. By refusing to matriculate in the Theology faculty, Wolf chose not only toembrace the alterity of another peoples culture from the distant past. In so doing, he at the
same time made a decision about method, about the principles that would guide his textual
study. Golden age philology is grounded in a new epistemology: in Kants famous for-
mulation, Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.30
The mode of reading Wolf chose to abjure was characteristic of scholarship in the
Faculty of Theology, still guided by confessional faith.31 Wolf instead opted for a secular,
critical stance toward texts grounded in scholarship and rigorous method, as opposed to a
mode of reading governed by faith and ecclesiastical authorityconvictions held prior to
examination of the text.32 Later in life, he refused to admit into his seminar students who
studied Greek as part of their preparation for going into the ministry (Predigerstand),accepting only those committed to pure philology (Schulstand).
He is at the end of a transitional period in the history of reading sacred texts in the West,
marked by increasingly critical study of the Bible. In 1536, Tyndale could be garroted and
burnt at the stake for his translated edition of the Bible. But 200 years later, there arose a
New Criticism that treated holy works as texts written in languages that could be studied by
means of technical procedures derived from classical philology. The fact that there was no
degree in Philology did not mean that the disciplines of philologydeep study of ancientlanguages, establishing grammars and editionswere not practiced in Germany in 1777: in
fact, the Rektor with whom Wolf argued about his matriculation status was none other than
Christian Gottlob Heyne (17291812), himself a great scholar of ancient Greek and editor
of definitive classical editions, whose name was awful through all the schools of North
Germany33 The problem was not the study of ancient Greek as such, but rather whatyou would do with the knowledge of the language thus gained. That is, ancient Greek was
taught at Gottingen, and had been since the universitys founding in 1737. But if you
studied Greek, you did so in order to get a degree in the Theology Faculty, Greek being the
medium of the New Testament.
Thus, by insisting on having the novel status of Philolog, Wolf was not only making agesture toward an emerging discipline. By doing so, he was turning his face against the
30 Kant, Preface to first edition (Geyer and Wood 1998, pp. 100101).31 One reason why Wolf was able to matriculate so eccentrically is that Gottingen was the most liberal ofGerman universities in 1777. Founded only 40 years previously, it was self-consciously designed to be amodel of Enlightenment learning in Germany, remarkable among other reasons because all the facultiesincluding the Theologicalwere put on the same footing. Its nominal patron was the Elector PalatinateGeorg August (also George II of Great Britain and patron of Kings College [or, after the Revolution,Columbia University] in New York). But the actual architect of the reforms for which Gottingen becamefamous was the Hanover Minister Gerlach Adolph Baron von Munchhausen (16881770)not to beconfused with that other Freiherr von Munchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus (17201792), who becamethe legendary teller of tall tales in Raspes famous Adventures and, since 1951, an eponym for a factitiouspsychiatric disorder. http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/90607.html. Accessed September 2, 2010. As furtherevidence of how far philology has fallen since the eighteenth century, this official account of the universityshistory fails to list Wolf among its famous graduates. For a more detailed history, see Ziolkowski (1990,pp. 218308).32 At an earlier stage in the evolution of German universities, Johann Winkelmann (17171768), whoseadulation of the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur in ancient Greek art inspired later generations ofGermans (including Wolf) in their Grecophilia, also wished as a student to eschew the koine of theSeptuagint Bible and New Testament in order to study the ancient Greek classics. But, unlike Wolf, he hadto matriculate in the theology faculty while a student at Halle.33 Pattison (1889, p. 344).
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existing profession of Theology.34 In other words, he wished to make official, as it were,
the increasing secularization of study that was already animating Biblical scholarship. He
opted for a different mode of reading: he wished to use his knowledge of Greek not to
study the Bible as the word of god, or to qualify him for appointment as a schoolteacher.
He just wanted to read the pagan classics. He was in love with ancient Greece, another
people in another time, and he was not alone in his passion. The great majority of eigh-
teenth century German intellectuals felt not just admiration for, but a deep kinship with, the
Greeks. There were many reasons behind what E. M. Butler called the tyranny of Greece
over Germany,35 not least the checkered political reality of the imperial cities, dukedoms,
and other small political units that comprised the soon-to-expire Holy Roman Empire.
Ancient Greece was both a cause and a result of Philologys Golden Age.
But Wolfs break with tradition is not only an iconic moment in German grecophilia. It
is as well a key index of the rejection of blind faith as a way of life and of theology as the
watchdog of that faith,36 a decline in which philological technique had already by 1777
played a significant role, arguably beginning as early as Erasmus (14661536), who
published the first version of the New Testament in its original Greek (1516). Spinozas
famous equation of God or Nature, that eternal and infinite being that we call God, orNature [quod Deum, seu Naturam appellamus]37 was part of the new attitude towardscriptural authority that underlay his philological forays into examining the language of the
Bible in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1670. Twelve years later, Richard Simonpublished his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, which advanced the principle ofclassifying manuscripts in generic families and argued that in reading the Bible believers
should be guided by paradosis (tradition, meaning Mother Church) not noesis
(rational knowledge), because philologically speaking, there was no version of scripture
that was definitive.
This tradition of studying the language in which biblical texts were written as if they
were the words of men and not of God was nowhere stronger in the eighteenth century than
at Gottingen, where the great scholar of Semitic languages, Johann David Michaelis
(17171791) was longtime professor and the teacher of a man who was to have a large
influence on Wolfs 1795 masterpiece, Prolegomena to Homer, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn(17531827). After graduation, Eichhorn became Professor at Jena, but returned to Got-
tingen as replacement for Michaelis in 1788. He is generally considered to be the founder
of the Higher Criticism (or New Criticism), the philological study of biblical texts in their
original languages. Wolfs English translator and editor, the American philologist Anthony
34 Taking a degree in the Theology Faculty did not necessarily mean you became a pastor; the Theologydegree was also a kind of license to teach in the school systems that were blossoming throughout theGerman states in the eighteenth century. Before finding a place as a Classics Professor, Wolf, too, taught atthe government school in Ilfeld.35 The classic here is: E. (Eliza [or Elsie]) M. (Marian) Butler (1935). A good short account of the samephenomenon can be found in the first chapter of Holubs book (1981).36 As a leading student of the secular break has summarized it: During the later Middle Ages and the earlymodern age down to around 1650, western civilization was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition,and authority. By contrast, after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, wasquestioned in the light of philosophical reason and frequently challenged or replaced by startlingly differentconcepts generated by the New Philosophy and what still may be usefully termed the Scientific Revolu-tionWhereas before 1650 practically everyone disputed and wrote about confessional differences, sub-sequently, by the 1680s, it began to be notedthat confessional conflict, previously at the enter, wasincreasingly receding to secondary status and that the main issue now was the escalating contest betweenfaith and incredulity. Israel (2001, pp. 34).37 Spinoza (1925, vol. IV, Praef, p. 206). My emphasis, MH.
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Grafton,38 has shown the enormous influence that Eichhorns methodology (history of
alphabets and writing implements, changes in language use, etc.) exercised on Wolfs
analysis of Homeric textology.39 This symbiotic relation marks the emergence of philology
as a science in its own right, independent of the claims made on the technical study of texts
by institutionalized religion.
So a first indication that philology might have a role to play in a new age of world
literature is that in its Golden Age, it found a way to connect to the most vital tendencies
characterizing its own period with the traditional skills and methods of the ancient science
whose name it bore. That is, Wolf demonstrated a deep knowledge of ancient languages, a
curiosity about the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages, a command of technical,
grammatical detail and vocabulary that allowed judgment of historical precedence based on
linguistic usage. But in addition he brought to bear information gained from ancillary
disciplines such as archeology, numismatics, etc. In this he was still deploying many of the
techniques used by ancient philologists. What is revolutionary in eighteenth century phi-
lology is the vast new importance these narrowly disciplinary skills acquired in an era when
language, the topic at the heart of all philologies, was in the process of being recognized as
the primary means by which human beings organized their profoundest thought.
Wolf taught for many years at Halle, the first of the modern German centers dedicated to
transforming the medieval model of the university. From its founding in 1694, Halle was a
center of intellectual exploration and institutional innovation, the institution, for instance,
where instruction in the German (instead of Latin) language was first introduced. While at
Halle, Wolf, a charismatic teacher, produced an army of students who spread out all over
Germany to preach the gospel of Altertumswissenschaft. In his 1807 textbook of the subject(Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft) he broadened the conception of philology toinclude virtually all aspects of life in ancient Greece and Rome.
Wolfs student, August Boeckh, took this intellectually imperialist tendency to an
insupportable extreme. More than any other single figure, including Wolf, Boeckh may be
regarded as the man who made philology for a brief period the Queen of Sciences in Germany.
During his long life (17851867) he published what became the Bible of philology at the time,
his great Encyklopdie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften40 As opposedto Boeckhs Sachphilologie focused on objects, scholars such as Leipzigs Gottfried Her-mann (17721848) proposed a Wortphilologie, a word based philology, grounded in thedeepest understanding one could achieve of the language one was studying.41
38 Working with Glenn Most and James Zetzel. See Wolf (1985).39 In the Introduction to the English translation cited above, pp. 2026.40 This enormously influential book was a compendium of lectures Boeckh (Bockh) gave over a periodstretching from his 2 years at Heidelberg (18091811) through his 54 years as Professor at Berlin, where herepeated the seminar on the definition and methodology of philology twenty six times over the span of54 years. The reverential editors of the second edition give the exact number of students who took Boeckhscourse during these years (an astounding 1696 auditors did so)! The final version was published only afterhis death by a student (Ernst Bratuschek), in 1877. A second edition was immediately called for, butBratuschek died during its preparation, and Rudolf Klussman completed it in 1886 (published by TeubnerVerlag in Berlin). The best known parts of the Encyclopedia, its first sections on the idea of philology, andtwo chapters on theory of hermenutics (Boeckh was influenced by Schleiermacher, who encouraged hisstudy of Plato) and theory of criticism, have been republished, but a new edition of the whole is badlyneeded, and there are rumors such an edition is being prepared. The earlier sections of the 1886 edition havebeen translated into English (and abridged) translated and edited by Pritchard (1968).41 The opposition between these two poles continues to be a major consideration in modern classicalstudies, as witness the tension between two French schools of classicists led by Jean Bollack of Centre derecherche philologique in Lille and the recently deceased Jean Pierre Vernant of the Ecole des hautes etudes
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Hermann, a Formalist avant la lettre, attempted to achieve a more precise semantics andmetrics by invoking Kants abstruse logic. But for other philologists, most notably Wolfs
friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), Kant was significant as ground for a new
sense of the category of personhood and the novel theory of human developmentthe
famous doctrine of Bildungthat flowed from such a view.Kant had posited knowledge as always having two aspects, one that derived from the
categories (Kategorien) and concepts that order human thinking and are a priori; a secondaspect of knowledge consists in intuitions (Anschauungen), messages that come to us fromempirical experience in the present. In order to think at all, the individual subject must
combine the abstract and the concrete in an act of synthesis. Synthesis or Verbindungis arguably the key to Kants whole system in the first Critique, since it is cast as thefundamental activity of the human mind. Kant defines the distinctiveness of human beings
precisely in their ability to synthesize: it is the basis for transcendental logic, the logic that
yields synthetic a` priori knowledge through the synthesis of concepts and intuitions.
The great question left unanswered was this: if the subject is constituted as a work site
where concept and intuition come together to form pictures of the world, what are the toolsby which such labor gets accomplished? What is the glue that binds concept and intuition
together? The obvious answer, of course, in Kant, is Reason, the very Vernunft he criticizesin order to defend. But even hedged about with the limitations Kant assigns it, naked
Reason still struck most readers as too abstract to provide the actual means required for
synthesis to come about.
Humboldts great work was to turn Kant on his head, but to do so very respectfully. He
posited representation through signs as the means by which humans could simultaneouslyexperience and think the world. He sought to solve the riddle of the I think by trans-posing the problem into an investigation of the I speak. In other words, Humboldt put
forward language as not just representation of experience to the mind, but as the activitythat first of all enables access of the mind to experience itself. Humboldt began by sup-posing, together with Kant, that the gap between the categories that ruled perception in themind on the one hand and the existence of the world outside the mind could not beovercome absolutely. But by negotiating the simultaneity of sign and signified in language,
something very like a parallel negotiation of mind and world could be accomplishedwithin the mind. In other words, it was von Humboldt who understood that the gap opened
by Kant might be both admitted and at least partially overcome if the assumption were
made that language and thought are inseparable.
In his lifework on the differences and similarities between human languages (published
posthumously, 18361840 by his admiring but not always understanding brother, Alex-
ander) von Humboldt sought to understand the relation between universality and partic-
ularity by conceiving language as a constant interaction between external sound forms andinternal conceptual forms (inner speech). The secret to overcoming the gap between reasonand experience lay in the strategies language made available for bridging the distance
between a thing and its representation as a sign. Such negotiation was precisely the workthat language does when it is conceived as an activity. Humboldt argued this in a theory
that conceived thought as inner speech, and language as the means by which combinations
Footnote 41 continueden sciences sociales in Paris. Vernant was heavily influenced by Levi-Strauss whose theory of myth plays alarge role in Vernants picture of the Greeks (See Vernant 1974). Bollack (1997) has argued that theanthropologically oriented approach missed the mark because it did not pay sufficient attention to ancientGreek language.
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between abstract concepts and immediate intuitions were joined in the synthesis of signs
and their referents.42 He says quite unambiguously Language is the formative organ of
thought. Intellectual activity entirely mental, entirely internal, and to some extent passingwithout trace, becomes through sound, externalized in speech and perceptible to thesenses.43
The new conception of thinking that results from Kants revolution had immediate
repercussions in education. If knowledge resulted from enlightened criticism exercising its
judgment through language-enabled thought, how students were taught to think needed to
be reformed so as to take these discoveries into account. Both Kant and von Humboldt thus
became actively engaged in educational reform, Kant in his attempts to reform the
structure of authority at Konigsberg described in his Conflict of the Faculties (1798), andvon Humboldt through his activity as minister in charge of Prussian education, culminating
in the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. Key to the educational philosophy of
both men was the concept of Bildung, an ideal that derived from Kants famous 1783 essayon Enlightenment, which he defines as mans emergence from his self-imposedimmaturity (Unmndigkeit). Immaturity is the inability to use ones understanding withoutguidance from another.44
Humboldt took from this injunction the idea that education is essentially the act of
gradually taking responsibility for ones own knowledge. The term Bildung is closelyinterwoven with Urbild and Abbild, an original and its reflection, the idea being that theindividual increasingly makes what he has learned his own. The University of Berlin was
founded precisely to enable such autonomy, conceived as a kind of semi-religious trans-
formation of the Greek ideal of paideia: some idea of the utopian excitement aroused canbe gathered from the numerous poems and even cantatas that Berlin occasioned when it
opened. In one of these, by Clemens von Brentano, the opening chorus (sung by a group of
ministers and other government officials) proclaims, To teach is sacred work (Es ist ein
gottlich Werk zu lehren).45
Berlin famously became the model for the majority of subsequent research universities
across the globe. In each case the meaning of research was different, but for most it was a
term confined to the natural sciences. But in Berlin in 1810, the heart of this enterprise was
not research in physics or chemistry, areas that have since monopolized the concept.
42 It could be argued that Herder was first to perceive the relation between thinking and speakingevenbefore the publication of Kants first Critique (although not before Kants completion of his Inauguraldissertation). In 1771, Herders prize-winning essay On the Origin of Language had argued, languageappears as a natural organ of reason, a sense of the human soul, as the power of visionbuilt for itself theeye and the instinct of the bee builds its cell. Two Essays on the Origin of Language: Rousseau and Herder,trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (1966, p. 128).
The reason why Humboldt plays such an important role in Kantian linguistics and Herder does not is thatHerder never developed his 1771 insight into a systematic account of how language might serve to connectconcept and intuition, as von Humboldt magisterially did. In fact, very soon after publication of the essay onthe origin of language by the Berlin Academy, Herder tried to back away from the views he had expressed inthe essay. In a letter to his future wife, he went so far as to say of the essay, It is a disaster, I wish it did notexist. Today I would not write it for anything and never again will write anything like it. Cited in Aarsleff,p. 342.43 von Humboldt (1999, p. 54).44 Aufklarung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmundigkeit. Unmundigkeitist das Unvermogen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet istdiese Unmundigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Ents-chlieung und des Muthes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! HabeMuth dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklarung.45 Quoted in Ziolkowski, p. 295.
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Rather, Humboldt put classical philology, the study of ancient Greek civilization at the
center of Berlins effort to encourage autonomy. The royal road to Bildung wound its waythrough the ancient classics: amassing knowledge of the ancient world and making it ones
own in the present was the key to personal enlightenment. Such a course overcame the
conundrum of how to teach masses of students how to become individually responsible for
their own thought.
This is not the place to go into a history of German universities, but a few facts will help
us to grasp the rise and fall of philology as a unified subject in the modern period. In barest
outline, before 1779, philology as such was not taught; Greek and Latin were studied, of
course, as was Hebrew at most places, but their study was in the hands of professors and
students in the Theology Faculty. There was no separate philological faculty divorced from
the study of the Bible. A century later, Philology was not only well and truly established in
Germanys universities, it was the major reason those universities enjoyed the highest
reputation all over the world. Giants such as Friedrich August Wolf, Jakob Grimm, August
Boeckh, Gottfried Hermann, Karl Otfried Muller, Hermann Diels, and Ulrich von Wil-
amowitz-Moellendorff insured that Germany absolutely dominated the study of classical
philology, from which all other versions (such as Romance philology) derive. No German
university, whether Catholic or Protestant, was without its powerful representative of
Alterthumswissenschaft. No other nation could compete with the Germans in this area.The importance of the university as an institution during these yearswhich we today
can only envyis explained by the goal it was thought universities could achieve: Bildung
was the royal road to creating a race of subjects who would be, in the Kantian sense, both
free and responsible. The reformers were attempting to solve the paradox of how to
institutionalize autonomy. It was in wrestling with this apparent contradiction that at a
crucial moment in German history, philology came to be conceived as more than merely
one more discipline among other subjects of study. It came to occupy a central place in
education because it was perceived as the best means for realistically objectifying the
vision of a vast unifying science, a secular alternative to the former regina scientiarum,theology.
At a critical initiatory point in German university reform, then, philology becomes
dominant because it was seen as the subject best able to dramatize and instill newly
emerging Enlightenment ideals, thus making it a model for what all other forms of edu-
cation should be.
The end of the golden age
Wolfs matriculation as a student of philology in 1777 heralds the beginning of philologys
Golden Age. Its apogee is no less certainly marked in the opening of von Humboldts
University of Berlin in 1810. But very soon after this, the hope that philology might
integrate all the sciencesable to instill the autonomy that Kant had argued was the
hallmark of Enlightenmentimplodes. It fragments into new disciplines that challenge its
formerly central role. There are many reasons for the collapse, some deriving from the
internal history of the discipline, others from changes taking place in German society
outside the academy. In retrospect, it was symbolic that a Prussian governmentrecovered
from the shock of French invasion and occupationnow determined to re-impose a more
conservative government. Von Humboldt was deposed as Minister of Education in the very
year his university opened. The academic study of Greek and Roman classics would
continue to flourish in German universities, but philologys central role as a universal
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educational ideal was lost. Its decline was dramatically made public in the defection of a
young man considered to be one of its brightest future stars.
The publication of Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy in 1872, aroused disputes amongphilologists that made public the disciplines loss of its former magic promise. The books
dithyrambic style was at odds with the stately prose that characterized the style of aca-
demic philologists up until that time. But what aroused the anger of Nietzsches fellow
scholars was his celebration of the Dionysiac aspects of ancient Greece, a slap in the face
of their dignified profession as it was then practiced. Nietzsche essentially redefined the
subject of the discipline in which he then held a chair. Instead of a paradise of noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur, he posited a Greece where bacchantes and unreason had
their home. Although the books title is the birth of tragedy, it really tells the tale, as
Nietzsche sees it, of the death of Greek tragedy. In celebrating the Dionysian qualities in
Aeschylus and Sophocles, Nietzsche attacked the demise of real tragedy among the Greeks
in their later turn to apollonian Euripides, who was, Nietzsche charged, sympathetic to the
rational worldview of Socrates and Plato: metaphysics replaced music in Athens.
Nietzsches argument aroused the ire of another, even younger philologist, Ulrich
Wilamowitz-Moellenmdorff (18481931), who, was already famous for his encyclopedic
knowledge of classical culture. But Greek tragedyand especially Euripideswas a
specialty of his, so he found Nietzsches book particularly offensive. He published a review
of The Death of Tragedy (Philology of the Future!),46 a withering and factually detailedcritique of Nietzsches scholarship. Having written so eccentric and factually unsound
book, he implied, Nietzsche should get out of the profession. The majority of scholars
agreed with Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. The following seven years were hellish for Nietz-
sche, scorned by his peers and avoided by students at Basle; he finally gave up his Chair in
1879.
The dispute Nietzsche initiates may be read as an outward sign of the problems facing
philology as a discipline in the years following its triumph in the first decades of the
nineteenth century. Already ten years earlier, when as a precocious twenty-four year old
Nietzsche assumed the Chair of Classical Philology at Basle University, he had made clear
that philology was already in trouble due to its all-encompassing ambition. He opened his
inaugural lecture by recognizing the parlous state of the discipline he had been called to
profess:
At the present day no clear and consistent opinion seems to be held regarding
classical philology. We are conscious of this in the circles of the learned just as much
as among the followers of that science itself. The cause of this lies in its many-sided
character, in the lack of an abstract unity, and in the inorganic aggregation of
heterogeneous scientific activities which are connected with one another only by the
name philology.47
What Nietzsche is concerned about in these remarks is the extraordinary disciplinary
mitosis that divides philology in these years. Boeckhs triumphant definition of it as das
Erkentniss des Erkannten, the knowledge of what is known,48 made clear how bloated
the claims being made for philology had become. His dream of a great all-encompassing
empire of knowledge would lead to the break up of classical philology. In his Encyklopedie
46 For a detailed account of Wilamowitz-Moellendorffs attack, see Groth (1950, pp. 179190).47 Kennedy, p. 1. http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/nietzsche.php?name=nietzsche.1869.homerandclassicalphilology.kennedy accessed, September 1, 2010.48 Klussman (1886, p. 10).
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he writes about philological sciences in the plural, and the great bulk of his book (over
600 pages) is devoted to separate chapters on agriculture, coinage, architecture, economics,
music, etc. of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Philologys claims to be an all-
encompassing science broke down under the weight of its own ambition, resulting in a
reduced and splintered discipline.
In the process of its decline, philological study of the Greek past had produced sys-
tematic effects on its own culture. It did so because some of the major features in its
makeup had an inherent a capacity for development beyond the limited scope of ancient
Greece. Among these were the emphases philology put on topics of language, history, and
literature, each of which now spun off new disciplines not associated with philology.
German Romanticism was enabled by the efforts of a small group of young men who, at
the end of the eighteenth century, reoriented philological attention to language, history, and
literature in new directions. The modern study of vernacular languages, the modern (post-
Niebuhr/von Ranke) study of history, and the new study of national literatures all now
became academic subjects that threatened to eclipse their philological parent.
Romantiker such as Friedrich von Schlegel took for granted the extraordinary impor-tance that Fichte, Humboldt, and other leading thinkers of the period assigned to language.
But they were also aware that language was taking on new meanings in light of devel-
opments outside classical philology. The most significant of these was the demonstration in
1786 by Sir William Jones of the historical kinship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the
Germanic languages. The significance of this event can hardly be overstated, not only
because of its foundational role in the rise of the modern science of linguistics, but also
because of the expanded new sense of values that it opened up. Jones not only showed
connections between Sanskrit and the European languages (no philologer could examine
all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source), but he did so
in terms that valorized the greater antiquity of Sanskrit: The Sanskrit language, whatever
be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than
the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either49
Here were new vistas in timeand in taste. Sanskrita language not only older, but
more refined than Greek! It is not by chance that the study of Sanskrit should soon find its
greatest centers in Germany, where the prestige of Greek was higher than in any other
European nation. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel published ber die Sprache und Weisheit derIndier,50 eloquently calling for a deeper study of Sanskrit in German universities. In thewake of universities that came back to life or were founded in the years following the
Napoleonic Wars, new chairs for Sanskrit studies were established. Bonn University
opened its doors in 1818, and in the very next year August Schlegel (Friedrichs brother)
was appointed professor of Sanskrit.
The history and comparison of Indo-European languages became an important new
subject in its own right, making the nineteenth century the origin of modern linguistics.
Germany dominated the new discipline of Sprachwissenschaft. It was recognized inter-nationally thatas Yales William Dwight Whitney put it in 1867the birth of linguistics,
has been wholly the work of the present century51 Moreover, As Whitney went on toconcede, Germany is, far more than any other country, the birthplace and home of the
49 As quoted in Robins (1990, p. 149).50 You can see the shift in philology in Schlegels own career: in 1797 and 1798, he had published books onthe Greeks and the Romans; but a mere decade later, he was publishing on Sanskrit.51 Whitney (1867, p. 1).
280 M. Holquist
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study of language, and he goes on to list the great pioneers of linguistics such as
Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, etc., all of whom are German.52
Those who pioneered linguistics in other countries, such as Whitney himself, got their
training in Germany, or were, like Max Muller in England, expatriates from Germany.
Rasmus Rask (a Dane working in Germany), Jakob Grimm, Franz Bopp, and Wilhelm von
Humboldt himself, were indeed the founders of the new science of linguistics. The climax
to this development occurs in 1878 when Osthoff and Brugmann publish their paper on
Morphological Researches, the manifesto of the Neo-grammarian school that marks thetransition from the old comparative method to the new scientific method of linguistics
(there is some irony in the fact that this was only a year after the publication of the final,
authoritative version of Boeckhs encyclopedic account of classical philology [1877]).
The new science was conscious that it was indeed a new science, and not just acontinuation of philology: Researches into the genealogies and affinities of words have
exercised the ingenuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring mindsNothing,however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older investigations in
the domain of language53 Philology is specifically put into its (inferior) place vis-a`-visthe new science, and is now regarded as a mere handmaidenthe forerunner and founderof the science of human speech.54 So, the first new discipline that classical philology
gives birth to in Germany is linguistics, understood first as the comparative study of the
several languages in the Indo-European family, but increasingly after the 1860s as the
study, the science, indeed, of language itself (die Sprache uberhaupt).A second new discipline that emerges out of philologys decline in the same years is a
logical development of the first: specialized research on non-classical, vernacular language
families, producing first German (as opposed to Classical) philology (Germanistik) in such
masterpieces of scholarship as Grimms Deutsche Grammatik (18191837) and his greatdictionary, finished only in the twentieth century. Romance philology, especially the study
of French, now flourished. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century, it was again the Germans who would play a leading role even in this area of
scholarship, resulting in Meyer-Lubkes great 4 volume grammar of the Romance lan-
guages (1890-1902) and his 13 volume etymological dictionary (19111920). The
uncontrolled mitosis of German classical scholarship produced among its other affects the
departments of national language and literature in modern universities. Perhaps predict-
ably, national traditions were translated into departments of national literatures55 first in
nations on Europes periphery, such as Russia and the United States, and then later in
52 Ibid., p. 4.53 Ibid., p. 2. Nevertheless, it took almost another century before linguists were able to get recognition from othersciences. In December, 1923, the American Philological Association, which was still the professional society mostlinguists belonged to, held its meeting in Cincinnati, because the august American Association for theAdvancement of Science (founded 1848) was meeting in that city. The negotiations worked, and the Linguisticsociety of America was founded (and recognized by AAAS) in 1924. Cf. Sturtevant (1924, pp. 142144).54 Whitney, p. 3.55 The moment when literature begins to be studied as a subject in its own right is always a turning point ina cultures literacy. The study of Arabic poetry qua poetry is a particularly interesting example. Because ofthe need to separate the Arabic of the Koran from the canonical poetry written in Arabic before the seventhcentury, Al-Suli (880-946) called for the establishment of literary criticism as a separate discipline alreadyin the tenth century. For this fascinating story, see Gruendler (2010).
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confident old centers such as Oxford (first Merton Chair in English, 1885).56 The inter-
national, non-nationalist study of ancient Greece broke up into the national and nationalist
study of increasingly modern literatures.
Philologyenvisioned by the founders of the University of Berlin in 1810 as unifier of
all other knowledgewas 50 years later a fractured science splintered into several dif-
ferent disciplines. Although Philology is still to be found in European universities (where
it is felt to be somewhat anachronous) it now figures in the United States as a professional
modifier almost exclusively among classicists as a descriptor in journal titles and profes-
sional associations. Experts on ancient Indian, Arabic, or Asian languages and literatures
are scattered across the academic map in departments of area studies, anthropology, lin-
guistics, and a number of other units in which they are housed in decreasing numbers.
Philology and world literature
The decline of the particular form of philology that fueled the ambitious dreams of the late
German Enlightenment is what has conduced to the general sense that philology, as a
subject, is dead. But that version of philology was always more a dream of German idealist
and Romantic utopians than a fully actualized institution. Contemporary calls to revive
philology, even when made by modern sophisticates such as Paul De Man, are naive in
ways that are similar to seventeenth and eighteenth century attempts to identify the original
language spoken by humans (variously identified as Hebrew, Swedishor my favorite
Flemish).57 We cannot go back beyond Babel; there is no trans-historical version of
philology to which we can return. The Golden Age was philologys high point because
under challenging new conditions it reinvented what the discipline had been. If philology is
to play a role in the still unfolding drama of world literature, it will have to reinvent itself
again.
As the greatest philologists have discovered again and again, there is no original text,
even of such carefully maintained documents as the Bible, the Koran, Homer, the Con-
fucian classics, or the ancient Vedic texts. It is significant that exposure of forgeries plays
so large a role in the history of so many different schools of philology. As Wolf himself
says in his Prolegomena to Homer:
If we demand the bard in Simon-pure condition, and are not content with what
contented Plutarch, Longinus, or Proclus, we will have to take refuge either in empty
prayers, or in unrestrained license in divination.58
56 It was characteristic of foreign language departments in the US as late as the 1970 s to have specialists inthe language as well as the literature of their area. Such experts would teach courses in the history of theirparticular language, plus courses on how to read the earliest manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, Old ChurchSlavonic, Old High German, etc. Such experts would usually not have an appointment in the linguisticsdepartments of their universities (orat very liberal campuseswould have at most a joint appointment inlinguistics). Even this last institutional vestige of the old commitment of philology to a combined study oflanguage and literature has now pretty much died out.57 See Olender (1992) for details.58 Prolegomena, 1985, p. 46. The concept of philological doubt (i.e., there is no original text) is extremelycomplicated. Scholars such as the Oratorian Richard Simon (16381712) might conclude, as he did in hisCritical History of the Old Testament, that much of scripture was corrupt because of the machinations of theMasorete Jews, or because the Church at its inception had no version of the Bible except for the GreekSeptuagint. But he then, as I noted above, went on to claim that while the text was corrupt, the holy motherChurch was not, and believers could be secure in their faith because of Gods covenant with Catholic custom
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Knowing that there are no original texts, authoritative because they are of a purity denied
other versions did not mean for the early Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla, or the Qing
dynasty philologist Hao Ching the same thing as post-modernist declarations of the death
of the author. Philology is a version of academic agnosticism: beginning with the
conviction that there is no text privileged in itself, the scholar then goes on to do the workof establishing as honestly and as painstakingly as he can, what might be called a goodenough text. As Wolf says of his work on the Iliad and the Odyssey:
Once I gave up hope, then, that the original form of the Homeric Poems could ever
be laid out save in our minds, and even there only in rough outlines, it seemed
appropriate to investigate how far the ancient evidence would take us in polishing
these eternal and unique remains of the Greek genius.59
Philology, then, as I began by saying, is a multiple history, composed of the various
attempts made at different times and in different places to appropriate past meanings
through minute study of texts based on expert knowledge of language. It is, in other words,
the history of how a set of technical practices (attention to changes in grammar, lexicon,
the appearance of neologisms, changes in word usage, spotting details in manuscripts such
as dittographies, etc.) has been employed across the globe and in different ages to establish
as close to a past textual meaning as humans reasonably can be expected to achieve.
There are, then, living aspects of philology so understood that might well be helpful to
scholars in the emerging age of world literature. But this can be the case only if the
differences between the texts traditionally studied by philology and the new texts coming
on-line in world literature are taken into account. Without the technical skills that have
defined it for millennia, philology does not exist. That is what is meant when we say it is away of reading. Traditional philology, devoted to the ancient works that have always beenits targetthe establishment of definitive editions, work on historical changes in the
technologies of literacy, etc.will go on. The exploration of meaning from the past never
ends.
However, in order to be part of world literature, the skills that define philology will have
to be integrated into a vast new body of texts, different from those that have been its
traditional subject of study in almost every way. A crucial difference will be the new
temporal horizons of world literature texts, many of which are of recent creation. World
literature expands not only the spatial limits of literary study; it widens as well the time
frame from the earliest writings to works that appeared yesterday. So the first adjustment
philology will have to make is to bring the skills it has honed over the centuries from the
study of antiquarian works to bear on very recent, even contemporary, works.
This can be done only within the shared activity of a community, a group of scholars
with different skills but with shared aims. It is sentimental to call for philologys return;
under the revolutionary conditions of world literature it must once again re-invent itself, as
it did in the eighteenth century. It can no longer be the enterprise of individual giants of
learning, legendary figures such as Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, intimidating in their soli-
tude of their erudition, intimidating in their pietist-Lutheran single-mindedness and self-
abnegation, scholars whose names will be awful through all the schools of North
Footnote 58 continuedas laid down over the centuries. This is doubt only on its way to philological status. Wolf goes all the way:for him, there is no supernatural guarantor of the truth that stands over against corrupt texts: only thelearning and labor of the scholar in the present can come up with a (good enough) truth from the past.59 Prolegomena, 1995, p. 47.
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Germany So philologists will have to continue to learn to work in their own narrowarea of expertise, but as well find new ways to bring their knowledge to a table they share
with other specialists expert in different kinds of reading. Without the technical skills that
have defined it for millennia, philology does not exist. Thats what is meant when we say it
is a way of reading. But new ways must be explored to use these techniques in conjunction
with colleagues who read in other ways.
One way in which world literature makes itself felt as a radical challenge to the
academy is that it calls into question some of the most sacred idols of the professorial tribe.
Humanists of all kinds must necessarily work together if they are to be responsible to
multiple texts and their clashing traditions. It may well be that World literature is fully in
play once several foreign works begin to resonate together in our mind,60 but I suspect
that resonance will be all the richer if it derives from a choira choir in which a small role
would be assigned to narrow experts in the particular cultures from which those foreign
works derive.
That is, the kind of learning required to read philologically is necessarily narrow,
because it must be so deep. Very few human beings possess the gifts required to be at home
in the history and linguistics of more than one culture. The history of the discipline that
used to be known as Comparative Grammarbased on tracing filiations between
ancient Sanskrit and modern European vernacularsfoundered on just this limitation. The
inevitable result was, as Saussure noted, that their work was exclusively comparative, not
historical.61
What Im suggesting is that much as World Literature is not a canon of particular texts,
but rather a mode of reading, so is philology. But it is a way to read that is necessarily at
the opposite end of the spectrum from that which is appropriate to world literature. I hasten
to add, that this polarity difference does not disqualify the two reading strategies from
working to inter-illuminate each other. The depth of historical and linguistic knowledge
that philology requires mandates it devote itself to single cultures. As a result, it has in the
modern period all too often been used as one of the weapons in the armory of nationalism.
But there is no necessary connection between the technical skills of philology and the
particular texts on which those skills are brought to bear. As I tried to suggest earlier, just
as there is a world literature, so is there a world philology whose integrity is ensured not by
what it studies, so much as how it studies. Deep study of texts is of course possible in any
language and could help enrich the work that other experts concentrating on different
aspects might do.
I have been using the word text as if it were an unproblematic term, but of course it is
not: not only are we entering a new age of world literature; we must as well attend the fresh
challenges raised by digitization in all its ramifying variety. It is still not clear how
philological skills, wedded as they are to writing in more stable formats such as tablets,
scrolls, or codices will be brought to bear on such evanescent works as, for instance, the
cell phone novels so popular in Japan.
It is not inconceivable that philology in the future will shift its attention from the
material stuff of literacy, such as books and manuscripts, screens and other digitally
produced texts to the physical act of reading itself. It would do so not as a rehearsal ofamateurish reader response criticism, but as a turn to the intricacies of the brains activity
as it translates visual signals from the page into aural signals in the brain, thus realizing the
text as language (i.e., as phonemes able to convey meaning). If philology as we have
60 Damrosch (2003, p. 298).61 de Saussure (1966, p. 4).
284 M. Holquist
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known it were to morph into a science devoted to the neurophysiology of literacy, its
relevance to world literature would immediately be enhanced, if only because the human
brain is the most cosmopolitan of all sites of text production.62
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The place of philology in an age of world literatureAbstractPhilologys golden age: The rise of a new paradigm in education and societyThe end of the golden agePhilology and world literatureReferences