Orientalism - autonomous learning

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134 ORIENT ALISM Orientalist Structures and Restructures 135 liberal critic whQse WQrk harbQred the mQst eSQteric nQtiQns Qf tempQrality, Qrigins, develQpment, relatiQnship, and human wQrth? Part Qf the answer to. this questiQn is that, as his early letters Qf philo.lQgical intent to. VictQr CQusin, Michelet, and Alexander vo.n HumbQldt shQw,27 Renan had a strong guild sense as a professio.nal schQlar, a pro.fessio.nal Orientalist, in fact, a sense that put distance between himself and the masses. But mo.re impo.rtant, I think, is Renan's o.wn cQnceptiQn Qf his ro.le as an Oriental philo.lo.gist within philQlo.gy's larger histo.ry, develQpment, and o.bjectives as he saw them. In o.ther wo.rds, what may to. us seem like parado.x was the expected result o.f ho.w Renan perceived his dynastic po.sitio.n within philo.lQgy, its histo.ry and inaugural disco.veries, and what he, Renan, did within it. Therefo.re Renan shQuld be characterized, nQt as speaking about philQlo.gy, but rather as speaking philologically with all the fo.rce o.f an initiate using the enco.ded language o.f. a new prestigio.us science no.ne o.f who.se prono.uncements abo.ut language itself co.uld be co.nstrued either directly o.r naively. As Renan understo.o.d, received, and was instructed in philo.lo.gy, the discipline impQsed a set o.f do.xo.lQgical rules upo.n him. To. be a philo.lo.gist meant to. be go.verned in o.ne's activity first o.f all by a set o.f recent revaluative disco.veries that effectively began the science o.f philQlo.gy and gave it a distinctive epistemQlo.gy o.f its Qwn: I am speaking here o.f the perio.d roughly frQm the 1780s to. the mid-1830s, the latter part o.f which CQincides with the period Qf Renan's beginning his educatio.n. His memo.irs reco.rd ho.w the crisis o.f religio.us faith that culminated in the lo.ss o.f that faith led him in 1845 into. a life o.f scho.larship: this was his initiatio.n into. philQlo.gy, its wQrld-view, crises, and style. He believed that o.n a perso.nal level his life reflected the institutio.nal life o.f philo.lo.gy. In his life, ho.wever, he determined to. be as Christian as he Qnce was, o.nly no.w witho.ut Christianity and with what he called "la science lai"que" (lay science). 28 The best example o.f what a lay science co.uld and CQuld nQt do. was pro.vided years later by Renan in a lecture given at the So.rbo.nne in 1878, "On the Services Rendered by Philo.lo.gy to. the Histo.rical Sciences." What is revealing abo.ut this text is the way Renan clearly had religio.n in mind when he spo.ke abo.ut philQlo.gy-fo.r example, what philo.lo.gy, like religio.n, teaches us abo.ut the o.rigins Qf humanity, civilizatio.n, and language--only to. make it evident to. his hearers that philQlo.gy co.uld deliver a far less co.herent, less knitted to.gether and po.sitive message than religio.n. 29 Since Renan was irremediably historical and, as he o.nce put it, mo.rpholo.gical in his o.utlo.o.k, it stQo.d to. reaso.n that the o.nly way in which, as a very yo.ung man, he co.uld mQve o.ut o.f religiQn into. philo.lo.gical scho.larship was to. retain in the new lay science the histo.rical wo.rld-view he had gained from religio.n. Hence, "o.ne o.ccupatio.n alQne seemed to. me to be wo.rthy of filling my life; and that was to. pursue my critical research into. Christianity [an allusiQn to. Renan's majo.r SCholarly pro.ject o.n the histo.ry and o.rigins o.f Christianity] using thQse far ampler means o.ffered me by lay science."3o Renan had assimilated himself to. philQlQgy acco.rding to. his Qwn Po.st Christian fashion. The difference between the histo.ry o.ffered internally by Christianity and the histo.ry o.ffered by philo.lo.gy, a relatively new discipline, is precisely what made mo.dern philo.lo.gy possible, and this Renan knew perfectly. FQr whenever "philQlo.gy" is sPQken o.f arQund the end Qf the eighteenth century and the beginning Qf the nineteenth, we are to. understand the new philo.lo.gy, who.se majo.r ,successes include co.mparative grammar, the reclassificatio.n of languages into. families, and the final rejectio.n o.f the divine Qrigins o.f language. It is no. exaggeratio.n to. say that these acco.mplishments were a mo.re Qr less direct co.nsequence o.f'the view that held language to. be an entirely human pheno.menon. And this view became current o.nce it was discQvered empirically that the so.-called sacred languages (Hebrew, primarily) were neither Qf primQrdial antiquity no.r Qf divine prQvenance. What FQucault has called the discQvery Qf language was therefo.re a secular event that displaced a religious CQnceptio.n o.f ho.w Go.d delivered language to man in Eden.31 Indeed, o.ne o.f the co.nsequences Qf this change, by which an etymo.lo.gical, dynastic no.tiQn o.f linguistic filiatio.n was pushed aside by the view o.f language as a do.main all Qf its o.wn held together with jagged internal structures and cQherences, is the dramatic subsidence Qf interest in the problem of the o.rigins Qf language. Whereas in the 1770s, which is when Herder's essay o.n the o.rigins o.f language won the 1772 medal from the Berlin Academy, it was all the rage to. discuss that pro.blem, by the first decade o.f the new century it was all but banned as a tQPic fo.r learned dispute in Euro.pe. On all sides, and in many different ways, what William Jo.nes stated.in his Anniversary Discourses (1785-1792), o.r what Franz Bopp put fo.rward in his Vergleichende Grammatik (1832), is that
136 ORIENT ALISM Orientalist Structures and Restructures 137 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: "Helas! il est arrive qU'une connaissance plus approfondie de la langue savante de l'Inde a fait rentrer ces siecles innombrables dans Ie cercle etroit de la Bible. Bien m'en a pris d'etre redevenue croyant, avant d'avoir 6prouve cette mortification."32 (Alasl 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 <strong>learning</strong>, 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. The legacy of these first-generation philologists was, to Renan, of the highest importance, higher even than the work done by Sacy. Whenever he discussed language and philology, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of his long career, he repeated the lessons of the new philology, of which the antidynastic, anticontinuous tenets of a technical (as opposed to a divine) linguistic practice are the major pillar. For the linguist, language cannot be pictured as the result of force emanating unilaterally from God. As Coleridge put it, "Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. "33 The idea of a first Edenic language gives way to the heuristic notion of a protolanguage (Indo-European, Semitic) whose existence is never a subject of debate, since it is acknowledged that such a language cannot be recaptured but can only be reconstituted in the philological process. To the extent that one language serves, again heuristically, as a touchstone for all the others, it is Sanskrit in its earliest Indo-European form. The terminology has also shifted: there are now families of -languages (the analogy with species and anatomical classifications is marked), there is perfect linguistic form, which need not correspond to any "real" language, and there are original languages only as a function of the philological discourse, not because of nature. But some writers . shrewdly commented on how it was that Sanskrit and things Indian in simply took the place of Hebrew and the Edenic fallacy. early as 1804 Benjamin Constant noted in his Journal intime that he was not about to discuss India in his De la religion because the English who owned the place ana the Germans who studied it indefatigably had made India the fans et origo of everything; and then there were the French who had decided after Napoleon and Champollion that everything originated in Egypt and the newOrient. 34 These teleological enthusiasms were fueled after 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel's celebrated Ober die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which seemed to confirm his own pronouncement made in 1800 about the Orient being the purest form of Romanticism. What Renan's generation--educated from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s-retained from all ,this enthusiasm about the Orient was the intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occidental scholar of languages, cultures, and religions. Here the key text was Edgar Quinet's Le Genie des religions (1832), a work that announced the Oriental Renaissance and placed the Orient and the West in a functional relationship with each other. I have already referred to the vast meaning of this relationship as analyzed comprehensively by Raymond Schwab in La Renaissance orientale; my concern with it here is only to note specific aspects of it that bear upon Renan's vocation as a philologist and as an Orientalist. Quinet's association with Michelet, their interest in Herder and Vico, respectively, impressed on them the need for the scholar-historian to confront, almost in the manner of an audience seeing a dramatic event unfold, or a believer witnessing a revelation, the different, the strange, the distant. Quinet's formulation was that the Orient proposes and the West disposes: Asia has its prophets, Europe its doctors (its learned men, its scientists: the pun is intended). Out of this encounter, a new dogma or god is born, but Quinet's point is that both East and West fulfill their destinies and confirm their identities in the encounter. As a scholarly attitude the picture of a learned West
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ORKENTALI§M --Edward W. Said - I
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The Royal Asiatic Society, Great Br
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Acknowledgments I have been readin
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______ __ _ __ __ _ _ _ Introductio
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4 ORIENTALISM Introduction 5 World
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8 ORIENTALISM Introduction 9 ality,
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12 ORIENTALISM Introduction 13 scri
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16 ORIENTALISM I learned and tried
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20 ORIENTALISM Introduction 21 indi
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24 ORIENTALISM Introduction 25 whos
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28 ORIENTALISM it in its Islamic br
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328 QRIENTALISM human history and e
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332 ORIENTALISM ego. The constructi
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336 ORIENTALISM of fixed identities
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340 ORIENTALISM and Burton their su
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344 ORIENTALISM relationships and b
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348 ORIENTALISM the most basic cond
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352 ORIENTALISM passage. And in re-
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356 Notes 29. Southern, Western Vie
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360 Notes Notes 361 Daniel, [slam,
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364 Notes very interesting accounts
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368 Notes 17. For an illustrative e
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372 Notes 104. "Statement of Purpos
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Index Abbas I (of Egypt), 186 Anda
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380 Index Index 381 Christianity-co
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384 Index Histoire des Mussulmans d
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388 Index Maspero, Sir Gaston, 170
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392 Index Sacy-continued participat
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