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 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 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 Damrosch’s 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: michael.holquist@yale.edu

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 isMoretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005.

Another helpful anthology in shaping my own ideas has been the anthology (Saussy 2006). Haun Saussy’sessay (pp. 3–42), 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 topic

that currently finds itself hedged about with question marks.2 For instance, there is so little

agreement on the field’s 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 something—exactly what is usually a

little vague—to 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. 7–10) I regretto say I came upon Pascale Casanova’s 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. 931–961). 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. 239–272). 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 (1903–1909). 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. 1–248, 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. 1–10. Another essay of particularinterest 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 cosmo-politan take on philology in general that emerges from the meticulous study of Chinese scholarship in theQing period (1644–1911) by Elman (1984).3 ‘‘What is Philology?’’ was the title of a conference held at Harvard’s 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 Philology’s relation to Linguistics, see Manczak (1990, pp. 261–272).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 Ovid’s 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

Philology’s 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 Man’s 1982 TLS essay, ‘‘The Return to

Philology,’’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 culture’s 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 Dostoevsky’s Father Zosimma, the revered corpse stinks. In

order to understand philology’s 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 time—as measured in the sweep of world history—after the first invention of writing

itself. Philology’s 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, 508–510. Quoted and translated in ‘‘Preface’’ to first edition (Geyer and Wood1998, p. 99).8 Republished in Godzich (1993, pp. 21–26).9 See Lee Patterson (1994, p. 241), and Harpham (2005, pp. 9–26). A particularly thoughtful piece is aposthumously published essay by Said (2004, pp. 57–84) (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. 151–235).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

(1037–1101); 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 of

language—that’s linguistics—or the theory of meaning or the truth—that’s philos-

ophy—but 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 West—which is, after all, only one

strand of philology—by 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 (930–1003), 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. 33–59). 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 Jones’discovery, see Olender (1992). Olender’s important book demonstrates how the discovery of Sanskrit’srelation 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 society’s 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

Philology’s golden age: The rise of a new paradigm in education and society

While this tale is essentially a European—and even more narrowly, a German—story, 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 scholarship—no matter where

practiced on the globe—that 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 years—a particularly powerful

example of what William Clark has called ‘‘academic charisma’’19—that subsequent

authors have in mind.

The tale of philology’s 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

philology’s break up into a myriad of new disciplines—linguistics, the academic study of

modern vernacular literatures, cultural studies, programs in literary theory—may 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 any

logic of representation…’’20 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 ‘philology’s

birthday’—that fateful day in April, 1777 when young Friedrich August Wolf insisted he

be identified in the Matriculation Book of Gottingen university as studiosus philologiae—

is 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 Enlightenment—in 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 Kant’s 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 one’s 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: there

arose 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,’’ arguing

that Wolf’s 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 reason—the world-in-itself—and Wilhelm von

Humboldt’s paradoxical new vision of language as something in its own right—language-

in-itself, independent of any particular speaking subject or national language—effected a

qualitative difference in how both philology and literature were perceived. Call it what you

will—a 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 Wolf’s matriculation (he was 10 years younger thanGoethe) and Goethe’s use of the word Weltliteratur, both men and events were very much shaped by thesame cultural currents.23 Schiller (1794–1795).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 to

embrace the alterity of another people’s 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 Kant’s 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 authority—convictions 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 philology—deep study of ancient

languages, establishing grammars and editions—were 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 (1729–1812), himself a great scholar of ancient Greek and editor

of definitive classical editions, ‘‘whose name was awful through all the schools of North

Germany…’’33 The problem was not the study of ancient Greek as such, but rather what

you would do with the knowledge of the language thus gained. That is, ancient Greek was

taught at Gottingen, and had been since the university’s 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 a

gesture 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. 100–101).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 faculties—including the Theological—were put on the same footing. Its nominal patron was the Elector PalatinateGeorg 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 Gottingen becamefamous was the Hanover Minister Gerlach Adolph Baron von Munchhausen (1688–1770)—not to beconfused with that other Freiherr von Munchhausen, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus (1720–1792), who becamethe legendary teller of tall tales in Raspe’s 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 university’shistory fails to list Wolf among its famous graduates. For a more detailed history, see Ziolkowski (1990,pp. 218–308).32 At an earlier stage in the evolution of German universities, Johann Winkelmann (1717–1768), 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 Philology’s Golden Age.

But Wolf’s 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 (1466–1536), who

published the first version of the New Testament in its original Greek (1516). Spinoza’s

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 toward

scriptural authority that underlay his philological forays into examining the language of the

Bible in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1670. Twelve years later, Richard Simon

published his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, which advanced the principle of

classifying 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

(1717–1791) was longtime professor and the teacher of a man who was to have a large

influence on Wolf’s 1795 masterpiece, Prolegomena to Homer, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn

(1753–1827). 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. Wolf’s 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 Holub’s 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-tion…Whereas before 1650 practically everyone disputed and wrote about confessional differences, sub-sequently, by the 1680s, it began to be noted…that 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. 3–4).37 Spinoza (1925, vol. IV, Praef, p. 206). My emphasis, MH.

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Grafton,38 has shown the enormous influence that Eichhorn’s methodology (history of

alphabets and writing implements, changes in language use, etc.) exercised on Wolf’s

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 to

include virtually all aspects of life in ancient Greece and Rome.

Wolf’s 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 (1785–1867) he published what became the Bible of philology at the time,

his great Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften40 As opposed

to Boeckh’s Sachphilologie focused on objects, scholars such as Leipzig’s Gottfried Her-

mann (1772–1848) proposed a Wortphilologie, a word based philology, grounded in the

deepest 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. 20–26.40 This enormously influential book was a compendium of lectures Boeckh (Bockh) gave over a periodstretching from his 2 years at Heidelberg (1809–1811) 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 Boeckh’scourse 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 and

metrics by invoking Kant’s abstruse logic. But for other philologists, most notably Wolf’s

friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), Kant was significant as ground for a new

sense of the category of personhood and the novel theory of human development—the

famous doctrine of Bildung—that 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 second

aspect of knowledge consists in intuitions (Anschauungen), messages that come to us from

empirical 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 ‘‘Verbindung’’

is arguably the key to Kant’s whole system in the first Critique, since it is cast as the

fundamental 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 tools

by 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 criticizes

in 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.

Humboldt’s 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 simultaneously

experience 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 activity

that 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 the

mind on the one hand and the existence of the world outside the mind could not be

overcome absolutely. But by negotiating the simultaneity of sign and signified in language,

something very like a parallel negotiation of mind and world could be accomplished

within 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, 1836–1840 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 and

internal conceptual forms (inner speech). The secret to overcoming the gap between reason

and 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 Vernant’s 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 passing

without trace, becomes through sound, externalized in speech and perceptible to the

senses.’’43

The new conception of thinking that results from Kant’s 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), and

von 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 Kant’s famous 1783 essay

on Enlightenment, which he defines as ‘‘…man’s emergence from his self-imposed

immaturity (Unmündigkeit). Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without

guidance from another.’’44

Humboldt took from this injunction the idea that education is essentially the act of

gradually taking responsibility for one’s own knowledge. The term Bildung is closely

interwoven with Urbild and Abbild, an original and its reflection, the idea being that the

individual 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 can

be 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 speaking—evenbefore the publication of Kant’s first Critique (although not before Kant’s completion of his Inauguraldissertation). In 1771, Herder’s 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 vision…built 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-chließung 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 Berlin’s effort to encourage autonomy. The royal road to Bildung wound its way

through the ancient classics: amassing knowledge of the ancient world and making it one’s

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

Germany’s 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 years—which we today

can only envy—is 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

Wolf’s matriculation as a student of philology in 1777 heralds the beginning of philology’s

Golden Age. Its apogee is no less certainly marked in the opening of von Humboldt’s

University of Berlin in 1810. But very soon after this, the hope that philology might

integrate all the sciences—able to instill the autonomy that Kant had argued was the

hallmark of Enlightenment—implodes. 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 government—recovered

from the shock of French invasion and occupation—now 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 philology’s 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 Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in 1872, aroused disputes among

philologists that made public the discipline’s loss of its former magic promise. The book’s

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 Nietzsche’s 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 book’s 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.

Nietzsche’s argument aroused the ire of another, even younger philologist, Ulrich

Wilamowitz-Moellenmdorff (1848–1931), who, was already famous for his encyclopedic

knowledge of classical culture. But Greek tragedy—and especially Euripides—was a

specialty of his, so he found Nietzsche’s book particularly offensive. He published a review

of The Death of Tragedy (‘‘Philology of the Future!’’),46 a withering and factually detailed

critique of Nietzsche’s 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. Boeckh’s 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-Moellendorff’s attack, see Groth (1950, pp. 179–190).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. Philology’s 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 either…’’49

Here were new vistas in time—and in taste. Sanskrit—a 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 Über die Sprache und Weisheit derIndier,50 eloquently calling for a deeper study of Sanskrit in German universities. In the

wake 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 (Friedrich’s 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 that—as Yale’s William Dwight Whitney put it in 1867—the birth of linguistics,

‘‘has been wholly the work of the present century…’’51 Moreover, As Whitney went on to

concede, ‘‘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 Schlegel’s 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).

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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 the

transition 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 Boeckh’s encyclopedic account of classical philology [1877]).

The new science was conscious that it was indeed a new science, and not just a

continuation of philology: ‘‘Researches into the genealogies and affinities of words have

exercised the ingenuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring minds…Nothing,

however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older investigations in

the domain of language…’’53 Philology is specifically put into its (inferior) place vis-a-vis

the new science, and is now regarded as a mere ‘‘handmaiden…the forerunner and founder

of 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 philology’s 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 Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819–1837) and his great

dictionary, 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-Lubke’s great 4 volume grammar of the Romance lan-

guages (1890-1902) and his 13 volume etymological dictionary (1911–1920). 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 Europe’s 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. 142–144).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 culture’s 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.

Philology—envisioned by the founders of the University of Berlin in 1810 as unifier of

all other knowledge—was 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, Swedish—or 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 philology’s 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 (or—at very liberal campuses—would 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 (1638–1712) 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 God’s 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 work

of 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 been

its target—the 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 philology’s ‘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 narrow

area 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. That’s 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 choir—a 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 Grammar’’—based on tracing filiations between

ancient Sanskrit and modern European vernaculars—foundered on just this limitation. The

inevitable result was, as Saussure noted, that their work was ‘‘exclusively comparative, not

historical.’’61

What I’m 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 of

amateurish reader response criticism, but as a turn to the intricacies of the brain’s 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).

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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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