Orientalism - autonomous learning

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of how Sanskrit outdated Hebrew: "Helas!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 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.
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