Orientalism (25 page)

Renan was a figure in his own right neither of total originality nor of absolute derivativeness. Therefore as a cultural force or as an important Orientalist he cannot be reduced simply to his personality nor to a set of schematic ideas in which he believed. Rather, Renan is best grasped as a dynamic force whose opportunities were already created for him by pioneers like Sacy, yet who brought their achievements into the culture as a kind of currency which he circulated and recirculated with (to force the image a little further) his own unmistakable re-currency. Renan is a figure who must be grasped, in short, as a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, as a style for making Orientalist statements within what Michel Foucault would call the archive of his time.
²¹
What matters is not only the things that Renan said but also how he said them,
what, given his background and training, he chose to use as his subject matter, what to combine with what, and so forth. Renan’s relations with his Oriental subject matter, with his time and audience, even with his own work, can be described, then, without resorting to formulae that depend on an unexamined assumption of ontological stability (e.g., the
Zeitgeist
, the history of ideas, life-and-times). Instead we are able to read Renan as a writer doing something describable, in a place defined temporally, spatially, and culturally (hence archivally), for an audience and, no less important, for the furtherance of his own position in the Orientalism of his era.

Renan came to Orientalism from philology, and it is the extraordinarily rich and celebrated cultural position of, that discipline that endowed Orientalism with its most important technical characteristics. For anyone to whom the word
philology
suggests dry-as-dust and inconsequential word-study, however, Nietzsche’s proclamation that along with the greatest minds of the nineteenth century he is a philologist will come as a surprise—though not if Balzac’s
Louis Lambert
is recalled:

What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, all as philologists? The term seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritual insight into language and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of aesthetic and historical power. Although the profession of philology was born the day in 1777 “when F. A. Wolf invented for himself the name of
stud. philol
.,” Nietzsche is nevertheless at pains to show that professional students of the Greek and Roman classics are commonly incapable of understanding their discipline: “they never reach the
roots of the matter
: they never adduce philology as a problem.” For simply “as knowledge of the ancient world philology cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible.”
²³
It is this that the herd of philologists cannot understand. But what distinguishes the few exceptional spirits whom Nietzsche deems worthy
of praise—not unambiguously, and not in the cursory way that I am now describing—is their profound relation to modernity, a relation that is given them by their practice of philology.

Philology problematizes—itself, its practitioner, the present. It embodies a peculiar condition of being modern and European, since neither of those two categories has true meaning without being related to an earlier alien culture and time. What Nietzsche also sees is philology as something
born, made
in the Viconian sense as a sign of human enterprise, created as a category of human discovery, self-discovery, and originality. Philology is a way; of historically setting oneself off, as great artists do, from one’s time and an immediate past even as, paradoxically and antinomically, one actually characterizes one’s modernity by so doing.

Between the Friedrich August Wolf of 1777 and the Friedrich Nietzsche of 1875 there is Ernest Renan, an Oriental philologist, also a man with a complex and interesting sense of the way philology and modern culture are involved in each other. In
L’Avenir de la science
(written in 1848 but not published till 1890) he wrote that “the founders of modern mind are philologists.” And what is modern mind, he said in the preceding sentence, if not “rationalism, criticism, liberalism, [all of which] were founded on the same day as philology?” Philology, he goes on to say, is both a comparative discipline possessed only by moderns and a symbol of modern (and European) superiority; every advance made by humanity since the fifteenth century can be attributed to minds we should call philological. The job of philology in modern culture (a culture Renan calls philological) is to continue to see reality and nature clearly, thus driving out supernaturalism, and to continue to keep pace with discoveries in the physical sciences. But more than all this, philology enables a general view of human life and of the system of things: “Me, being there at the center, inhaling the perfume of everything, judging, comparing, combining, inducing—in this way I shall arrive at the very system of things.” There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist. And Renan makes his point about philology and the natural sciences:

I shall return to Renan’s citation from Cuvier, as well as to the constant references to natural science, a little later. For the time being, we should remark that the whole middle section of
L’Avenir de la science
is taken up with Renan’s admiring accounts of philology, a science he depicts as being at once the most difficult of all human endeavors to characterize and the most precise of all disciplines. In the aspirations of philology to a veritable science of humanity, Renan associates himself explicitly with Vico, Herder, Wolf, and Montesquieu as well as with such philological near-contemporaries as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bopp, and the great Orientalist Eugène Burnouf (to whom the volume is dedicated). Renan locates philology centrally within what he everywhere refers to as the march of knowledge, and indeed the book itself is a manifesto of humanistic meliorism, which, considering its subtitle (“Pensées de 1848”) and other books of 1848 like
Bouvard et Pécuchet
and
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
, is no mean irony. In a sense, then, the manifesto generally and Renan’s accounts of philology particularly—he had by then already written the massive philological treatise on Semitic languages that had earned him the Prix Volney—were designed to place Renan as an intellectual in a clearly perceptible relationship to the great social issues raised by 1848. That he should choose to fashion such a relationship on the basis of the
least
immediate of all intellectual disciplines (philology), the one with the least degree of apparent
popular
relevance, the most conservative and the most traditional, suggests the extreme deliberateness of Renan’s position. For he did not really speak as one man to all men but rather as a reflective, specialized voice that took, as he put it in the 1890 preface, the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society.
²⁵

But how was it possible for Renan to hold himself and what he was saying in such a paradoxical position? For what was philology on the one hand if not a science of all humanity, a science premised on the unity of the human species and the worth of every human detail, and yet what was the philologist on the other hand if not—as Renan himself proved with his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study had made his professional name
²⁶
—a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a
liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human worth? Part of the answer to this question is that, as his early letters of philological intent to Victor Cousin, Michelet, and Alexander von Humboldt show,
²⁷
Renan had a strong guild sense as a professional scholar, a professional Orientalist, in fact, a sense that put distance between himself and the masses. But more important, I think, is Renan’s own conception of his role as an Oriental philologist within philology’s larger history, development, and objectives as he saw them. In other words, what may to us seem like paradox was; the expected result of how Renan perceived his dynastic position within philology, its history and inaugural discoveries, and what he, Renan, did within it. Therefore Renan should be characterized, not as speaking
about
philology, but rather as
speaking philologically
with all the force of an initiate using the encoded language of a new prestigious science none of whose pronouncements about language itself could be construed either directly or naively.

As Renan understood, received, and was instructed in philology, the discipline imposed a set of doxological rules upon him. To be a philologist meant to be governed in one’s activity first of all by a set of recent revaluative discoveries that effectively began the science of philology and gave it a distinctive epistemology of its own: I am speaking here of the period roughly from the 1780s to the mid-1830s, the latter part of which coincides with the period of Renan’s beginning his education. His memoirs record how the crisis of religious faith that culminated in the loss of that faith led him in 1845 into a life of scholarship: this was his initiation into philology, its world-view, crises, and style. He believed that on a personal level his life reflected the institutional life of philology. In his life, however, he determined to be as Christian as he once was, only now without Christianity and with what he called “la science laïque” (lay science).
²⁸

The best example of what a lay science could and could not do was provided years later by Renan in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1878, “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences.” What is revealing about this text is the way Renan clearly had religion in mind when he spoke about philology—for example, what philology, like religion, teaches us about the origins of humanity, civilization, and language—only to make it evident to his hearers that philology could deliver a far less coherent, less
knitted together and positive message than religion.
²⁹
Since Renan was irremediably historical and, as he once put it, morphological in his outlook, it stood to reason that the only way in which, as a very young man, he could move out of religion into philological scholarship was to retain in the new lay science the historical world-view he had gained from religion. Hence, “one occupation alone seemed to me to be worthy of filling my life; and that was to pursue my critical research into Christianity [an allusion to Renan’s major scholarly project on the history and origins of Christianity] using those far ampler means offered me by lay science.”
³⁰
Renan had assimilated himself to philology according to his own post-Christian fashion.

The difference between the history offered internally by Christianity and the history offered by philology, a relatively new discipline, is precisely what made modern philology possible, and this Renan knew perfectly. For whenever “philology” is spoken of around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, we are to understand the
new
philology, whose major successes include comparative grammar, the reclassification of languages into families, and the final rejection of the divine origins of language. It is no exaggeration to say that these accomplishments were a more or less direct consequence of the view that held language to be an entirely human phenomenon. And this view became current once it was discovered empirically that the so-called sacred languages (Hebrew, primarily) were neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance. What Foucault has called the discovery of language was therefore a secular event that displaced a religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden.
³¹
Indeed, one of the consequences of this change, by which an etymological, dynastic notion of linguistic filiation was pushed aside by the view of language as a domain all of its own held together with jagged internal structures and coherences, is the dramatic subsidence of interest in the problem of the origins of language. Whereas in the 1770s, which is when Herder’s essay on the origins of language won the 1772 medal from the Berlin Academy, it was all the rage to discuss that problem, by the first decade of the new century it was all but banned as a topic for learned dispute in Europe.

On all sides, and in many different ways, what William Jones stated in his
Anniversary Discourses
(1785–1792), or what Franz Bopp put forward in his
Vergleichende Grammatik
(1832), is that
the divine dynasty of language was ruptured definitively and discredited as an idea. A new historical conception, in short, was needed, since Christianity seemed unable to survive the empirical evidence that reduced the divine status of its major text. For some, as Chateaubriand put it, faith was unshakable despite new knowledge of how Sanskrit outdated Hebrew: “Hélas! il est arrivé qu’une connaissance plus approfondie de la langue savante de l’Inde a fait rentrer ces siècles innombrables dans le cercle étroit de la Bible. Bien m’en a pris d’être redevenue croyant, avant d’avoir éprouvé cette mortification.”
³²
(Alas! it has happened that a deeper knowledge of the learned language of India has forced innumerable centuries into the narrow circle of the Bible. How lucky for me that I have become a believer again before having had to experience this mortification.) For others, especially philologists like the pioneering Bopp himself, the study of language entailed its own history, philosophy, and learning, all of which did away with any notion of a primal language given by the Godhead to man in Eden. As the study of Sanskrit and the expansive mood of the later eighteenth century seemed to have moved the earliest beginnings of civilization very far east of the Biblical lands, so too language became less of a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves. There was no first language, just as—except by a method I shall discuss presently—there was no simple language.