The Prescription: Philology

It was not without a certain level of anxiety, even embarrassment, that Edward Said offered philology as the most effective way to re-tool American humanism for the 21st century. He admits as much in the opening sentence of his lecture, "The Return to Philology," and then offers the reader the consoling reminder that "the most radical and intellectually audacious of all Western thinkers during the past 150 years, Nietzsche, was and always considered himself first and foremost a philologist" (p. 57). From this invocation of Nietzsche, Said moves seamlessly to the fact that in Islamic traditions, "knowledge is premised upon a philological attention to language" which found its beginnings in tafsir (Qur'an interpretation) and developed, with ever greater elaboration (if not sophistication), from grammatical studies (not to mention--and Said does not--close readings of pre-Islamic Arab poetry) through "jurisprudential hermeneutics and interpretation" and culminating, for Said at least, in fiqh al-lugha or "the hermeneutics of language." He then reminds the reader that in the previous lecture he had briefly adverted to the fact that there was "a consolidation of the interpretive sciences that underlie the system of humanistic education, which was itself established by the twelfth century in the Arab universities of southern Europe and North Africa, well before its counterpart in the Christian West." Indeed, it is not until Vico in the middle of the 18th century that Europe actually made a substantial contribution to the development of humanistic knowledge to which "the science of reading," i.e., philology, "is paramount" (p. 58). It is a potted history, true enough in its general outlines, but somewhat slighting of the known development of humanism in Western Europe. That said, I think it is well established that Muslims (predominantly Arab in the beginning but less so as time passed and conversion to Islam increased) led the way to humanism in the history of Central and Western Asia, Eastern and Western Europe. What Said has to say about "philological reading" is perhaps more interesting. A "true" philological reading, he says, is "active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of reality itself" (p. 59). Though Said appears to rely upon Vico, Emerson, and Richard Poirier as his authorities for such a view, it is difficult to read it and fail to be reminded of Herder (and Herder's somewhat agonistic relation to Kant) as well. The kind of active reading that Said has in mind is foreshadowed by the phrase "making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us." And here we are introduced to philology as "secular apocalypse." The move Said wishes to make is from textual practices to "statements about vast structures of power" (p. 61). Such a move involves, however, an ambitious (and far too often reckless) leap of the critic from text to world (or vice versa) and he does what he can to minimize the likelihood that the reader will "move immediately ... from a quick, superficial reading" to such statements--though readers of Said's Orientalism and other works have reason to complain that this is a frailty to which Said himself was too often heir. The remedy for such recklessness is the philological patience that Said asserts is the "abiding basis for all humanistic practice ... a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history: hence the word 'secular,' as I use it, as well as the word 'worldliness'" (p. 61). Said continues:

"... reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial motions that I shall call reception and resistance. Reception is submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects (since this is how they are initially encountered); moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context ... Thus a close reading of a literary text ... in effect will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text" (pp. 61-62).

Consequently, it is not a rash leap from literature to politics that Said contemplates for the humanist, but a gradual one that would appear to grow organically and by means of the practice of humanistic reading itself.