Abstract
A more globalized concept of culture and the tsunami of information made available 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 (1777–1872) 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 cooperation with scholars having other competencies.
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Notes
In what follows, I will essentially be using the understanding of what we currently mean by World Literature as it is laid out in Damrosch (2003); I have also found Franco Moretti an exciting source of ideas on the subject. He has written copiously on the topic, but see especially his manifesto-like essay (Moretti 2000). An example of what scholarship based on a philosophy of ‘distant reading’ might look like is Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005.
Another helpful anthology in shaping my own ideas has been the anthology (Saussy 2006). Haun Saussy’s essay (pp. 3–42), is full of good ideas, and raises serious issues about the viability of traditional philology in the global future that any future attempt to blend the two disciplines will have to face. (cf. pp. 7–10) I regret to say I came upon Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of letters (2004) too late to engage in this essay.
The eminent Indologist, Sheldon Pollock, has recently published the opening shot in what will be a more extended battle he has initiated to bring philology back into the limelight. He is currently at work on a history of world philology (personal communication). See Pollock (2009, pp. 931–961). A spate of books devoted to philology appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. Learned and well intentioned though they were, none has succeeded in establishing a clear-cut definition of the discipline, or its place in the university as it is now constituted. See Cerquiglini (1999), and Gumbrecht (2003) [but see the devastating review of this book {and a somewhat less abrasive consideration of Lerer (2002)} by Ziolkowski (2005, pp. 239–272). See also Pascale 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 in Europe, the study of ancient Greece and Rome that begins in Peisistratus’ Athens but which has its golden age in 19th century Germany. So all draw, implicitly or explicitly, on the 3-volume juggernaut account of Greek/Latin scholarship published by Sandys (1903–1909). See History of Classical Scholarship (or the more 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 were ironically aware, to reformulate) a version of New Philology. See the special edition of Romanic Review (79, 1), pp. 1–248, edited by Stephen G. Nichols, and his essay “Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” the introduction to a another special edition he edited (of Speculum 65, 1, pp. 1–10. Another essay of particular interest is by R. Howard Bloch in the same issue: “New Philology and Old French,” pp. 38–58.
A brilliant illustration of the Russian Formalist doctrine of ‘perspective by incongruity’ is the cosmopolitan take on philology in general that emerges from the meticulous study of Chinese scholarship in the Qing period (1644–1911) by Elman (1984).
“What is Philology?” was the title of a conference held at Harvard’s Center for literary and cultural Studies in 1998. Two years later, the conference papers were published in a special edition of Comparative Literature (vol. 27, vol. 1, 1990; later that year, Ziolkowski (1990) republished the papers as a book with the more neutral title.
As in the Oxford English Dictionary (1972, p. 778).
For an intelligent account of Philology’s relation to Linguistics, see Manczak (1990, pp. 261–272).
Even so smart and sympathetic a literary scholar as John Guillory finds philology “protohumanistic.” See his essay (2002, p. 28).
Ovid, Metamorphose, xiii, 508–510. Quoted and translated in “Preface” to first edition (Geyer and Wood 1998, p. 99).
Republished in Godzich (1993, pp. 21–26).
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 previously unrecognized.
Scholars debate whether Egyptian hieroglyphs might be somewhat earlier, or contemporaneous with Sumerian cuneiform, but its clear that writing enters human history roughly at the end of the fourth millennium. Uruk, appropriately, is the city that was ruled by Gilgamesh. Cf. Damrosch (2006, esp. Chaps. 5 and 6, pp. 151–235).
Cooper (1996).
Site of the Qarawiyyin Mosque, where Gerbert of Auvergne (930–1003), later Pope Sylvester II, was once a student, and who, according to legend, introduced the use of zero and Arabic numerals to Europe as a result of what he learned in Fez.
However, since the Koran was the central document for these scholars, they often hesitated to practice critical philology out of piety or fear. Cf. Kopf (1956, pp. 33–59). The particular problem that religious texts raise for philology is a red thread running through other traditions as well, of course, none more so than the Christian. It is precisely this ancient, heteronomous, faith-based reading practice that begins to be resisted in Europe after 1650. For a less optimistic account of the role of religion in philology after Sir William Jones’ discovery, see Olender (1992). Olender’s important book demonstrates how the discovery of Sanskrit’s relation to European languages created new myths about Aryans and Semites that were secretly fueled by religious and racial prejudice.
Elman (1983, p. 200). As in the case of Lorenzo Valla, here is another example of how philological tools when brought to bear on a society’s key texts can have far reaching consequences that affect the whole culture.
Pollock, p. 934.
Sandys (1909, p. vii).
Although he did not resign his professorship at Basle until 1879.
Clark (2006).
Damrosch (2003, p. 281).
Ibid., p. 296.
Although there is a span of 50 years between Wolf’s matriculation (he was 10 years younger than Goethe) and Goethe’s use of the word Weltliteratur, both men and events were very much shaped by the same cultural currents.
Schiller (1794–1795).
The number of theories about how language originated was so great, that finally, in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously included in its bylaws a provision that it would not accept any communication on the subject.
Chomsky (1966, p. 2).
Kuhn (1962).
Bachelard (1947).
Foucault (1970).
These different versions of radical discontinuity in the Enlightenment assign what is perhaps an undue weight to events in the West. For a critique of Eurocentric intellectual history of science, see Bala (2006).
Kant, “Preface” to first edition (Geyer and Wood 1998, pp. 100–101).
One reason why Wolf was able to matriculate so eccentrically is that Göttingen was the most liberal of German universities in 1777. Founded only 40 years previously, it was self-consciously designed to be a model of Enlightenment learning in Germany, remarkable among other reasons because all the faculties—including the Theological—were put on the same footing. Its nominal patron was the Elector Palatinate Georg August (also George II of Great Britain and patron of King’s College [or, after the Revolution, Columbia University] in New York). But the actual architect of the reforms for which Göttingen became famous was the Hanover Minister Gerlach Adolph Baron von Münchhausen (1688–1770)—not to be confused with that other Freiherr von Münchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus (1720–1792), who became the legendary teller of tall tales in Raspe’s famous Adventures and, since 1951, an eponym for a factitious psychiatric disorder. http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/90607.html. Accessed September 2, 2010. As further evidence of how far philology has fallen since the eighteenth century, this official account of the university’s history fails to list Wolf among its famous graduates. For a more detailed history, see Ziolkowski (1990, pp. 218–308).
At an earlier stage in the evolution of German universities, Johann Winkelmann (1717–1768), whose adulation of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” in ancient Greek art inspired later generations of Germans (including Wolf) in their Grecophilia, also wished as a student to eschew the koine of the Septuagint Bible and New Testament in order to study the ancient Greek classics. But, unlike Wolf, he had to matriculate in the theology faculty while a student at Halle.
Pattison (1889, p. 344).
Taking a degree in the Theology Faculty did not necessarily mean you became a pastor; the Theology degree was also a kind of license to teach in the school systems that were blossoming throughout the German states in the eighteenth century. Before finding a place as a Classics Professor, Wolf, too, taught at the government school in Ilfeld.
As a leading student of the secular break has summarized it: “During the later Middle Ages and the early modern 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, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason and frequently challenged or replaced by startlingly different concepts generated by the New Philosophy and what still may be usefully termed the Scientific Revolution…Whereas before 1650 practically everyone disputed and wrote about confessional differences, subsequently, by the 1680s, it began to be noted…that confessional conflict, previously at the enter, was increasingly receding to secondary status and that the main issue now was the escalating contest between faith and incredulity.” Israel (2001, pp. 3–4).
Spinoza (1925, vol. IV, Praef, p. 206). My emphasis, MH.
Working with Glenn Most and James Zetzel. See Wolf (1985).
In the “Introduction” to the English translation cited above, pp. 20–26.
This enormously influential book was a compendium of lectures Boeckh (Böckh) gave over a period stretching from his 2 years at Heidelberg (1809–1811) through his 54 years as Professor at Berlin, where he repeated the seminar on the definition and methodology of philology twenty six times over the span of 54 years. The reverential editors of the second edition give the exact number of students who took Boeckh’s course during these years (an astounding 1696 auditors did so)! The final version was published only after his death by a student (Ernst Bratuschek), in 1877. A second edition was immediately called for, but Bratuschek died during its preparation, and Rudolf Klussman completed it in 1886 (published by Teubner Verlag in Berlin). The best known parts of the Encyclopedia, its first sections on the idea of philology, and two chapters on theory of hermenutics (Boeckh was influenced by Schleiermacher, who encouraged his study of Plato) and theory of criticism, have been republished, but a new edition of the whole is badly needed, and there are rumors such an edition is being prepared. The earlier sections of the 1886 edition have been translated into English (and abridged) translated and edited by Pritchard (1968).
The opposition between these two poles continues to be a major consideration in modern classical studies, as witness the tension between two French schools of classicists led by Jean Bollack of Centre de recherche philologique in Lille and the recently deceased Jean Pierre Vernant of the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Vernant was heavily influenced by Levi-Strauss whose theory of myth plays a large role in Vernant’s picture of the Greeks (See Vernant 1974). Bollack (1997) has argued that the anthropologically oriented approach missed the mark because it did not pay sufficient attention to ancient Greek language.
It could be argued that Herder was first to perceive the relation between thinking and speaking—even before the publication of Kant’s first Critique (although not before Kant’s completion of his Inaugural dissertation). In 1771, Herder’s prize-winning essay On the Origin of Language had argued, “…language appears as a natural organ of reason, a sense of the human soul, as the power of vision…built for itself the eye 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 that Herder never developed his 1771 insight into a systematic account of how language might serve to connect concept and intuition, as von Humboldt magisterially did. In fact, very soon after publication of the essay on the origin of language by the Berlin Academy, Herder tried to back away from the views he had expressed in the 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 not exist. Today I would not write it for anything and never again will write anything like it.” Cited in Aarsleff, p. 342.
von Humboldt (1999, p. 54).
Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Muthes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Muth dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.
Quoted in Ziolkowski, p. 295.
For a detailed account of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s attack, see Groth (1950, pp. 179–190).
Kennedy, p. 1. http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/nietzsche.php?name=nietzsche.1869.homerandclassicalphilology.kennedy accessed, September 1, 2010.
Klussman (1886, p. 10).
As quoted in Robins (1990, p. 149).
You can see the shift in philology in Schlegel’s own career: in 1797 and 1798, he had published books on the Greeks and the Romans; but a mere decade later, he was publishing on Sanskrit.
Whitney (1867, p. 1).
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 2. Nevertheless, it took almost another century before linguists were able to get recognition from other sciences. In December, 1923, the American Philological Association, which was still the professional society most linguists belonged to, held its meeting in Cincinnati, because the august American Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1848) was meeting in that city. The negotiations worked, and the Linguistic society of America was founded (and recognized by AAAS) in 1924. Cf. Sturtevant (1924, pp. 142–144).
Whitney, p. 3.
The moment when literature begins to be studied as a subject in its own right is always a turning point in a culture’s literacy. The study of Arabic poetry qua poetry is a particularly interesting example. Because of the need to separate the Arabic of the Koran from the canonical poetry written in Arabic before the seventh century, Al-Suli (880-946) called for the establishment of literary criticism as a separate discipline already in the tenth century. For this fascinating story, see Gruendler (2010).
It was characteristic of foreign language departments in the US as late as the 1970 s to have specialists in the language as well as the literature of their area. Such experts would teach courses in the history of their particular language, plus courses on how to read the earliest manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, Old Church Slavonic, Old High German, etc. Such experts would usually not have an appointment in the linguistics departments of their universities (or—at very liberal campuses—would have at most a joint appointment in linguistics). Even this last institutional vestige of the old commitment of philology to a combined study of language and literature has now pretty much died out.
See Olender (1992) for details.
Prolegomena, 1985, p. 46. The concept of philological doubt (i.e., there is no original text) is extremely complicated. Scholars such as the Oratorian Richard Simon (1638–1712) might conclude, as he did in his Critical History of the Old Testament, that much of scripture was corrupt because of the machinations of the Masorete Jews, or because the Church at its inception had no version of the Bible except for the Greek Septuagint. But he then, as I noted above, went on to claim that while the text was corrupt, the holy mother Church was not, and believers could be secure in their faith because of God’s covenant with Catholic custom as 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 the learning and labor of the scholar in the present can come up with a (good enough) truth from the past.
Prolegomena, 1995, p. 47.
Damrosch (2003, p. 298).
de Saussure (1966, p. 4).
Many will, I am sure, see this suggestion about the future of philology as nothing more than a fanciful coda. For such readers, I recommend looking into some of the following: Dehaene (2009); Wolf (2007). Dyslexia is playing the role in reading science that aphasia did in linguistics, and madness in psychoanalysis: an aberration that brings normalcy into relief by highlighting defects. See Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2008); and Gabrieli (2009).
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A shorter version of this essay will appear in Damrosch et al. (2011).
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Holquist, M. The place of philology in an age of world literature. Neohelicon 38, 267–287 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0096-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0096-7