Extended Abstract

Conceptualising a Twenty-first Century Discipline: Notes on ‘Liberation Philology’

Sheldon Pollock’s proposal for a future, more desirable, philology is a very unusual attempt to rigorously imagine an academic discipline in these times of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. At one level the argument is for philological pluralism that includes ‘philologies’ from other non-western traditions – Indian, Persian, Middle-Eastern, Chinese, and potentially others. At a more ambitious and general level, he places a reimagined ‘liberation philology’ at the core of twenty-first century humanities. Making sense of texts by reading them in their original language, philology seeks to discover what it is to be human. If natural sciences read the book of nature, the book of humanity is going to be read by a ‘future philology’.

We have two texts of Pollock where he is directly concerned with reconstruction of philology. One is the public lecture delivered in Delhi as part of CSDS golden jubilee series titled ‘liberation philology’ i . Second is a published paper titled ‘Future Philology’ that was published in Critical Inquiry. i i I have based my comments on these two texts.

Philology was a well-established discipline in the nineteenth century academics. According to Pollock, though, it ‘never developed into a discrete, conceptually coherent, and institutionally unified field of knowledge and remained a congeries of method… We have failed spectacularly to conceptualise our own disciplinarity.’ In twentieth century, philology was displaced from its important nineteenth century position so much so that Pollock fears that the philological form of expertise is in the danger of vanishing. Which would entail that we have lesser and lesser access to the texts in original languages of our past which in turn amounts to a loss in our understanding of being human.

Triad of Meanings

Pollock takes philology broadly to be concerned with making sense of texts and he delineates three sets of meanings that we encounter when confronted with a text. This triadic structure of meaning in the process of interpretation is the key conceptual move that Pollock relies on to imagine a future philology out of the past. These three sets of meanings are variously enumerated: author’s meaning, tradition’s meaning, my own meaning; or, textual meaning, contextual meaning, philologists’ meaning.

i Video of this lecture is avai lable on YouTube.i i This paper is avai lable onl ine from Sheldon Pol lock’s Columbia Universi ty webpage.

Though Pollock sees philology as a mode of historical knowledge, the scientific ‘historicist’ reading of text is only one of the three dimensions of meaning that philology is concerned with. He traces this ‘historicist’ tradition to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In the Tractatus, Spinoza reads the bible not as a believer but as a philologist, and most of the principles and techniques for reading this text that is employed by Spinoza is very close to what is being taught in philology classes today. In such philological reading the text is supposed to carry a singular meaning which can in principle be entirely elucidated with reference to its own historical time.

What a historicist reading implies is that the meaning of a historical text is forever locked in its own historical time. No new meaning can be disclosed by the text in a new historical time except more and more of its own history, its own historical meaning. There is no potentially trans-historical dimension to the meaning of any historical text.

In this historicist reading of the text the present of the philologist is irrelevant to the task of elucidation of ‘historical meaning’ of a text. This activity of making sense of the text is itself assumed to be outside of ‘history’. Pollock does not reject the historicist meaning. It can even be considered central to ‘the future philology’ in the sense that it provides the choice of object: the text; and philology’s directedness towards the past as a form of historical knowledge. He rejects the trans-historical self-location of the philologist. The present of the philologist is in fact the third of the three sources of meanings that together constitute (or, should constitute) philology. The presentist reading is our own meaning of the text. How we apply the text to our present life. He uses Gadamer’s conception of ‘application’ in the hermeutic process to elucidate this presentist dimension of meaning. ‘We write the kind of past we write because of the kind of present we inhabit and the kind of future we desire.’ Spinoza’s philology of the Bible is the kind it is because it paves the way for a democratic polity. It is the philology of the capitalist age. Now we need a post-capitalist philology and now we desire a kind of new species consciousness. We need a global, pluralist philology. Our reading of the historical text will be shaped by our present.

But Pollock is very clear that the scientific practice of philology cannot help but imbibe the conviction that the historicist way of reading the text takes one to ‘the deeper meaning’ of the text, if not to the ‘only true meaning’. ‘No practicing philologist’, he states in the public lecture, ‘who reads a text doubts that there is a deeper, truer textual truth that we can get to as a historicist and we cannot but continue to strive along that scientific path’.

Between the historicist and the presentist meaning, is the traditional meaning. What the text meant in the tradition is another kind of ‘true meaning’ for Pollock. Meanings attributed to the text in tradition are ‘true meanings’. He

goes so far as to say that none of these interpretations is false. His defence of the truth of traditional meaning seems to rely on the truth of any interpretation whatsoever. ‘All interpretations are embodiments of human consciousness called into being by certain properties of the text and it cannot be called correct or incorrect in their historical existence. We have to ask what there is about the text that call those interpretations into being’. Pollock puts ‘the text’ as prior to all interpretations. In fact, he seems to be doing a historicist reading of the tradition of reading in the sense that its significance of the traditional is primarily historical.

These three dimensions of meaning do not have to come together or hang together in Pollock’s view. Pollock takes a broadly pragmatic view on the question of truth or ‘true meaning’. Philology has to work within this triadic structure of meaning. But there is an inherent tension in his schema between the pluralist stance and the scientific stance. On the one hand he states that what kind of meaning of a text we privilege at some point depends on the context, on the ‘use’ that we are going to make of this text. He contrasts the pluralist Indian stance on interpretation with the modern European theory of the ‘one true meaning’. On the other, he admits that there is always the idea of ‘the true meaning’ guiding the scientific labours of philology. This dimension is also implicit in the claim to ‘read the book of humanity’.

Texts and Knowledge Traditions

Pollock probably looks at these internal tensions within his schema as the necessary tensions of a pluralist enterprise. I will try to look at some other sources of these tensions.

Let us first look at the relation between the historicist and the presentist aspect of philology. The historicist conviction of access to a deeper strata of meaning is located in the ‘present’ of the researcher. This present is significantly constituted by a tradition of scientific philology. It is because the researcher is approaching its subject from within a research tradition broadly characterized as ‘scientific’ that it seeks to discover that ‘text’ of the real which is beyond all culturally produced texts. In Pollock’s scheme, just as in the scientific tradition itself, the tradition of inquiry to which researcher himself or herself belongs, becomes invisible. This tradition regards itself as ‘non-traditional’ or ‘anti-traditional’. A knowledge tradition marks the presence of certitude, or absolute meaning, in the form of a set of practices or a form of life. Therefore, while Pollock rejects the historicist philology’s exemption of itself from being ‘in history’, he does not note its exemption from tradition.

Texts are traces of knowledge traditions. In fact, a text is the intersection of several knowledge traditions. For example, a text of Buddhist philosophy will be part of textual, literary, philosophical, meditational traditions. How a text is understood in a tradition depends on how the text is ‘used’, or which is the same thing, how the text is ‘read’ in that tradition. We may open the text and look reverently at it each day. We may read out the text to others on certain occasion. Meaning and significance of a text depends on how it is used or read within a tradition. I am not making the argument that ‘meaning is the use’. If one wants to relate a text to a context outside of it , the first step is to look at how the text is used or read. This knowledge of how the text is ‘used’ does not come from the knowledge of the text. It can only come from the knowledge of the tradition to which that text belongs.

When a philologist reads a text from a distant past culture, we can say that two knowledge traditions are potentially in contact. But we cannot know the knowledge tradition only by our reading the text, we will have to know how the text was used and why it was so used.

In newer translations of texts from Indian philosophical tradition there is a move away from ‘philological’ to more ‘philosophical’ translations. Earlier translations sought to preserve the syntax of original language texts and were truer to the original texts. There is a new practice now where conveying of the philosophical content is privileged. This is not to deny that philology plays an important role in the access that we have to these philosophical texts.

Pollock does access knowledge traditions from non-western cultures in the form of philological traditions in Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese. He thinks that philological pluralism has almost been institutionalized in Sanskrit tradition. ‘Proliferation of meaning is a basic practice of Indian exegetical tradition. Proliferation of meaning with full self-awareness of its validity…’. They are included in the global philology. What they lack is precisely the historicist dimension.

Basically, I would like to argue that the significance of philological research is more in terms of facilitating access to multiple knowledge traditions, rather than as a form of historical knowledge. It is certainly less ambitious than the claim of being the language of reading the book of humanity. We may not be reading ‘the book of humanity’, but we may be able to understand certain ways in which the book of humanity is written.

- Avinash Jha