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Why We Should Remember Philology Author(s): Michael Holquist Source: Profession, (2002), pp. 72-79 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595732 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 15:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Profession. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.121 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 15:26:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Why We Should Remember PhilologyAuthor(s): Michael HolquistSource: Profession, (2002), pp. 72-79Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595732 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 15:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toProfession.

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Page 2: Why We Should Remember Philology

Why We Should Remember Philology

MICHAEL HOLQUIST

There are many ways to understand how the MLA is organized, one of which

is to see it as a professional society that has since the 1960s been a union be

tween two groups who teach and study different languages and literatures:

those who are in English departments and those who are in foreign language

departments. Each of these two groups has its own organization of depart mental chairs. These are the ADE, founded in 1962, and the ADFL, founded

in 1969. Each has its own director, executive committee, and publication. I

begin with this sometimes overlooked feature of MLA structure, because it is a convenient way to diagram a split in our profession that goes much deeper than the impressive organization chart that marks the division between those

who teach English and those who teach foreign languages. Members of the

ADE are more often than not, on their campuses, the moving force in the

textual humanities, with all the implications of that fact, not just as cultural

capital but for tenured slots, salaries, graduate stipends, and funds for devel

opment (i.e., money!). The ADFL has more members, but on their local

campuses ADFL members are haunted by a number of problems peculiar to

their calling. Some have seen dramatically shrinking enrollments in their

language courses and a growth in the number of literature courses they teach

in English translation. Without the boom in Spanish, the statistics for num

bers of students taking language courses look rather depressing. Formerly in

dependent departments are increasingly giving way to larger and more

homogenized units. These have been formed by combining erstwhile de

The author is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. A version of this article

appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of the ADFL Bulletin.

Profession 2002 72

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Page 3: Why We Should Remember Philology

MICHAEL HOLQUIST ||| 73

partments into such institutionally mandated gerrymanders as German

Slavic-Chinese or the all-purpose single Department of Foreign Languages. The distinctiveness of the problems facing foreign language depart

ments in this country extends to the particular way in which they have been

forced to confront the rise of cultural studies, a new paradigm of scholar

ship that now seems hegemonic under its various and constantly proliferat

ing subsets, too familiar to this audience to catalog. That is, within the

ranks of the ADE there are several ways to accommodate the new demands

that cultural studies make without losing purchase on the traditional aca

demic mission of English departments. Shakespeare is more popular than

ever, with new readings of his work enabled by postcolonial insights into

Caliban's speech in The Tempest, for instance. Well might an envious social

scientist such as my friend Arjun Appadurai complain that "[fjor an anthro

pologist in the United States today, what is most striking about the last de

cade in the academy is the hijack of culture by literary studies" (195-96). The situation looks quite different in language departments, where teach

ers of foreign languages feel less like successful imperialists than they do like

beleaguered natives whose professional terrain has been invaded by the

forces of ethnology. That is to say, the turn to cultural studies has been no less

marked in foreign language departments than in English departments, but this move carries with it a danger to their academic missions that teachers of

English are spared. As the number of students enrolled in German studies or

French studies grows, the role of the German language or the French lan

guage in such programs is diminished. We may be keeping up our enroll

ments, but there is a danger that by doing so we have jettisoned our main task. None of what I have said so far will have surprised members of foreign

language departments. I raise these familiar issues again in order to ask the

question I most wish to address in these few remarks: What, as teachers of

foreign languages, is our main task? In terms that are more fraught, and therefore more appropriate to the urgency of our crisis, what, we may ask, is our reason for being? It is in trying to answer such questions that I be lieve the utility of remembering philology makes itself apparent.

Since the very term is now obscure (when not completely neglected or

used as a term of abuse), it might be well to make clear which of its many possible meanings is the one intended here. I have in mind a very specific use

of the word, one that can be isolated in a particular moment in history. The

place was Saxony and the year was 1779. A young man named Friedrich Au

gust Wolf confounded the prorector of Gottingen University by refusing to

register in any of the four faculties (philosophy, medicine, law, and theology) that then constituted the entire university curriculum. Wolf wanted to study the ancient Greeks, and so he was advised to register in the theology division,

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74 HI WHY WE SHOULD REMEMBER PHILOLOGY

because Greek was part of the training it offered. Wolf insisted that he did not wish to study Greek in order to read the New Testament: he wanted to

read Greek in order to read Homer (see Grafton). And he was indeed finally enrolled as studiosus philologiae, going on to become professor at Halle and founder of a resurgent school of classicists that would completely transform our understanding of the ancient world. It was Wolf's 1795 Prolegomena ad

Homerum, for instance, that first established the modern understanding of Homer as a body of texts orally composed by generations of bardic singers.

I choose this particular moment as defining philology (or at least the sense of that word I wish to invoke) because it contains within it several fea tures that are pertinent to any attempt to understand the present state of

scholarship and teaching devoted to foreign language and literature. Wolf's insistence on training as a philologist rather than as a theologian suggests that eighteenth-century German universities experienced turmoil in ways not entirely dissimilar from American universities in the twentieth. The

four faculties that exhausted the university's offerings at Gottingen and

other schools were being challenged because they were not sufficiendy ca

pacious to include the things a new generation of students wished to study. Many of the actual courses Wolf wished to take were in fact available in

1779 in the theology faculty, but they were locked into an institutional structure that he felt distorted their content. Further, the existing restric tions discouraged the evolution of available resources into new areas of in

quiry. You could study ancient Greek and Latin, but only for study of the

Bible, not as an opening to the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.

Wolf's insistence that he matriculate as studiosus philologiae was one of

several indicators that the German university system was about to undergo

revolutionary change. The most famous challenge to the status quo was to

come twenty-seven years after Wolf's rebellion. In 1798 Immanuel Kant

published his Conflict of the Faculties, in which he argued that his own univer

sity of Konigsberg needed to be reorganized so that the primary function of

the philosophy faculty could be better articulated. That function, Kant ar

gued, was perpetual criticism and first of all criticism of the other faculties.

The right, indeed the necessity, of such a role lay in two basic assump tions Kant had made in his three critiques: in order to achieve the hyper value of freedom, human beings had to exercise reason in the service of

achieving their own autonomy from the demands imposed on them by the

world. He used these principles in his plea for reform of his own university. He argued that the other three faculties at Konigsberg were all too inti

mately and uncritically involved with the empirical world. The theology

faculty accepted the preexisting authority of the Bible and turned out stu

dents who became professional pastors; the law faculty accepted the au

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MICHAEL HOLQUIST ||| 75

thority of the existing statutes and turned out students who became lawyers; the medical faculty accepted the authority of its accumulated knowledge about the body and turned out students who became physicians.

What flows from such an arrangement is that, insofar as the higher fac

ulties are in the thrall of an authority that precedes their instruction, they are

directed from outside themselves. The theologians are not free to specu late about the existence of God, the lawyers to speculate about the nature

of justice, the doctors to conceive medical practices so radically experimen tal they call into question current dogma about what conduces to health.

They are, in other words, all heteronomously driven.

The philosophy faculty, at least in Kant's version of it, was not so bound. It

was, in his charged sense of the word, autonomous. The philosophy faculty was analogous to the ethical individual who is free because he accepts no au

thority but that of reason itself. Thus the philosophy faculty does not pro duce students who do anything practical in the world. The philosophy

faculty does not teach a preexisting body of knowledge. Its only activity is

criticism; it serves as a source of constant meditation on the nature of knowl

edge itself. Kant recognizes that the state needs lawyers and pastors and that we all need physicians. He does not seek to destroy the existing order of the faculties. The practically oriented higher faculties might indeed be populated by businessmen (Geschaftsleute) rather than by those seeking wisdom. But

they nevertheless provide a necessary service to the commonweal of the state.

But in order for them to provide their service effectively, well, their work must always be in accord with reason. And yet it is in the nature of the

higher faculties, insofar as they are oriented toward already existing dogma they must accept as authority, that they are unable to exercise the critical fac

ulty that reason requires. The government wishes to train the best pastors,

lawyers, and physicians. "But the government cannot be completely indif ferent to the truth of these teachings, and in this respect they must remain

subject to reason (whose interests the philosophy faculty has to safeguard)." Kant puts his case polemically: "The people (das Volk) conceive of their wel

fare, not primarily as freedom, but as [the realization] of their natural ends and so as these three things: being happy after death, having their possessions guaranteed by public laws during their life in society, and finally, looking forward to the physical enjoyment of life itself (that is, health and a long life)." Thus they want from the theologians, the lawyers, and the physicians to know only, "if I've been a scoundrel all my life, how can I get an eleventh hour ticket to heaven? If I've broken the law, how can I still win my case? And even if I've abused my physical powers as I've pleased, how can I stay healthy and live a long time?" (49). Believing that scholars in the higher fac ulties have answers to such questions, the Volk treat them with superstitious

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76 II WHY WE SHOULD REMEMBER PHILOLOGY

respect. It is then no wonder that there are businessmen in such faculties

who have the effrontery to believe they can offer such miracles.

Thus the need for the critical agency of the philosophy faculty: "the

businessmen of the three higher faculties will always be such miracle

workers, unless the philosophy faculty is allowed to counterattack them

publicly not in order to overthrow their teachings but only to deny the

magic power that the public superstitiously attributes to these teachings and the rites connected with them [. ..]" (Kant 51). Between the claims of

the higher faculties and the criticism of the philosophy faculty there is,

then, not only conflict, but necessary conflict. As the site of reason's purest

activity, "the philosophical faculty can never lay aside its arms in the face of

the danger that threatens the truth entrusted to its protection [. ..]" (55). Kant's treatise has recendy come into vogue again and is frequendy in

voked to provide authority for arguments from various points of view about

current university reform by Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Bill Read

ings, Bruce Robbins, and a host of less well known figures. But what has

gone largely unremarked in these uses of Kent's Conflict is that work's con

nections with the discipline of philology as it came to be defined by Wolf in

the years after his graduation. It is that connection that makes Conflict most

pertinent to understanding our own conflicts as members of the ADFL.

To see how this might be so, it should be remembered that both Wolf

and Kant served as presiding spirits behind the institution that completely revolutionized the idea of the university not only in Germany but also in

the world, not least of all in the United States. I refer, of course, to the

founding of the University of Berlin in 1810.1 will not dwell on the obvi

ous importance of Berlin as the archetype of the modern research univer

sity. Suffice it to remember that from Berlin spring virtually all the

appurtenances that now define our academic culture: study beyond the

baccalaureate level, graduate seminars, the dissertation based on original research, the PhD as necessary accreditation for teaching in higher educa

tion, and much more. It was the success of the Berlin model that gave the

twin concepts of research and science the central place they came to have in

subsequent academic life, thus paving the way for a whole new prestige that attached to the university as a modern institution.

The triumph of the Berlin model has been so complete that the signifi cance of philology's role in it is frequently overlooked. Virtually all the fig ures who contributed to the establishment of the new university in 1810 were

disciples of Kant. They took his model of the free, ethical subject as the

product education should produce. They were, in other words, attempting to solve the paradox of how to institutionalize autonomy. It was in wresding

with this apparent contradiction that the utility of philology came to the fore.

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MICHAEL HOLQUIST ||| 77

The minister of the king who was directly charged with reforming Prussian

education was Wilhelm von Humboldt. He was not only an admirer of Kant

but also a passionate student of languages who after his early retirement

from public life devoted all his energy to philological pursuits. He was a life

long friend, not surprisingly, of Wolf, with whom he would spend Christmas

retreats at his estate translating Pindar and arguing over fine points of Greek

grammar and history. And it was Wolf he called to Berlin to help him formu

late plans for the new university. So a third spirit who shapes Berlin is Hum

boldt, after whom the university came to be named.

It was Humboldt who created the real-world conditions for the radical

experiment that Berlin was when it opened its doors for the first time. But

it was also he who helped form the dream behind the reality. Along with

Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schelling, and a num

ber of other visionaries, he saw the study of language as a way to resolve

the Kantian paradox of how to institutionalize autonomy. While there are

great differences among the various schemes that went into the final form

the university assumed, there was agreement about the close relation be

tween the love of wisdom and the love of the word. Kant had argued for

philosophy's place in the curriculum because it represented a "purely au

tonomous moment when knowledge reflects upon itself (Readings 66). As

this principle came to be worked out by such figures as Schleiermacher and

Humboldt, "the process of philosophical reflection grounds knowledge in an organic principle rather than as the simple self-coherence of an abstract

system. Facts are not simply arranged by philosophical reflection according to a logical principle of non-contradiction; they are given life. Philology, the historical study of language, is the form that this organic grounding takes [...;] in the process of philological research, history is reworked ac

cording to rational principles in order to reveal its unity" (66). The preeminence of philology as the queen of sciences in Berlin was

short-lived. The very forces that had created the conditions for so radical an experiment in reform would all too rapidly work against the central

place of the historical study of language in the curriculum. For if Kant, Wolf, and Humboldt were three of the presiding spirits at the birth of the new university, the fourth (folklore's obligatory bad fairy) was Napoleon. It was his military victory over the Prussians in 1806 and the political catas

trophe and national humiliation that followed the battle of Jena that con

vinced even the most conservative Junkers that only radical reform, dedicated to unifying knowledge as a base for unifying the nation, could save the Prussian state from disappearing from the stage of history (as it now has). It took only a short time for the fear of Napoleon's revolution that created the new university in 1810 to become the fear of a Prussian

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78 HI WHY WE SHOULD REMEMBER PHILOLOGY

revolution from within, which withered much of its founding vision. By 1811, Humboldt was already gone from the scene, as were most of the

great reformers who were architects of the War of Liberation that brought the Prussians to Paris in 1815. The repressive Carlsbad Decrees of 1819

made clear that the anxious princes had experienced all the autonomy they would brook in the universities. This political wave of repression combined with developments in chemistry and then in physics and biology that

eclipsed philology as the primary armature for implementing in historical

experience a dream of unified Wissenschaft. It was replaced by visions of the natural sciences as models of research and new knowledge, a model that

only recendy has itself come into question. The Germans themselves have subsequendy argued that the celebration

of Berlin's founding is nothing more than deference to a myth?Mythos Humboldt, as it is called. And even the most sympathetic philologist is forced to admit that the Kant-Wolf-Humboldt vision of education disappeared in

what was no more than a blink of history's cruel eye. So why do I invoke

that version of our philology as a potential aid in answering the question I

began with and with which I will soon conclude: What?as members of the

profession gathered under the acronym of ADFL?is our reason for being? Out of the many definitions of philology I might have chosen, I select

that of Wolf and Humboldt first of all because it is grounded in a past that could be invoked as a guide in the present. These men were visionaries

who conceived philology less as a mere profession, another form of prepar

ing Geschaftsleute, than as a cognitive and ethical task. Philology in their

view was, moreover, a task that needed constant performance. It was always relevant, because its fulfillment was an endless work that was never com

pleted. It was never completed because its ultimate aim was to remember

language. Like Kant's philosophical faculty, the faculty of philology is criti

cal. What was wrong with theology and medicine in the old universities was that they had forgotten their own immersion in the ineluctable need

for representation that comes with being human. Insofar as they presumed the transparency of their categories, they treated the discourse of their pro fession as if it were a magic language. Their pretensions to authority were

based in the conviction that the patois peculiar to the practice of law or to

the profession of theology was different from natural language, somehow

free from the confusions, the discrepancies, the sheer muddle that results

when signs intervene between us and the world.

In the Humboldtian dream of philology, language was at the center of

the university because in the study of foreign tongues students best learned

the humility that comes from never forgetting that we are in signs. The ne

cessity to negotiate the otherness of the world that accompanies struggling

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Page 9: Why We Should Remember Philology

MICHAEL HOLQUIST ||| 79

to master alterity in other languages had, Humboldt felt, the capacity to

provide students two gifts that any education should strive to give: positive

knowledge of other cultures and a critical stance toward one's own culture. The institutionalization of that dream of philology was subverted in the

nineteenth century by the raw energies of competing nationalisms and a

transformed idea of science that reduced it to knowledge of brute nature.

Our task as teachers of foreign languages, it seems to me, is to remember not only the ineluctable foreignness of language itself (even when we think we are speaking our mother tongue) but also the version of the study of lan

guage that animated Wolf and Humboldt. We should cease to be apologetic about what we do. We should resist marginalization. We should insist on the

central place in the university that properly belongs to a scholarship that has criticism and difference at its heart. All the currently fashionable talk about

globalization masks a new impulse to homogenization of knowledge, an im

pulse that has eerie echoes of the time when nothing could be discussed outside a theological framework. Remembering languages in all their speci

ficity and difference is the most effective way to expose students to a world in which tectonic shifts in politics, economics, and culture are indeed pro

ducing radical new effects, while at the same time making them aware that we still have not shaken off the need to order the world in signs, a need that is as old as history itself. As one of the most profound modern philologists reminds us: "The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical" 'Das Staunen dariiber, dass die dinge, die wir erleben, im zwanzigsten Jahrhun dert noch moglich sind, ist kein philosophisches' (Benjamin 255; my trans.).

WORKS CITED

Appadurai, Arjun. "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational An

thropology." Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Ed. Richard Fox.

Santa Fe: School of Amer. Research, 1991. 195-206.

Benjamin, Walter. "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte." Illuminationen. Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1977.251-63.

Grafton, Anthony. Introduction. Wolf 3-36.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Briefe an Friedrich August Wolf Ed. Philip Mattson. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990.

-. Uber der Kawi-sprache aufder Inseljava. Berlin: Driickerei der Koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836-38.

Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans, and introd. Mary J. Gregor. Lin

coln: U of Nebraska P, 1979.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Wolf, Friedrich August. Prolegomena to Homer. Trans. Anthony Grafton et al. Prince

ton: Princeton UP, 1985.

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