The "Science" of Reading

"Philology is, literally, the love of words, but as a discipline it acquires a quasi-scientific intellectual and spiritual prestige at various periods in all of the major cultural traditions that have framed my own intellectual development. Suffice it to recall briefly that in the Islamic tradition, knowledge is premised upon a philological attention to language beginning with the Koran...and continuing through the emergence of scientific grammar in Khalil ibn Ahmad and Sibawayh to the rise of jurisprudence (fiqh) and ijtihad and ta'wil, jurisprudential hermeneutics and interpretation, respectively. Later, the study of fiqh al lugha, or the hermeneutics of language, emerges in Arab-Islamic culture as possessing considerable importance as a practice for Islamic learning. All these involve a detailed scientific attention paid to language as bearing within it knowledge of a kind entirely limited to what language does and does not do. 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. Similar developments occur in the closely related Judaic tradition in Andalusia, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. In Europe, Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) launches an interpretive revolution based upon a kind a philological heroism whose results are to reveal, as Nietzsche was to put it a century and a half later, that the truth concerning human history is 'a mobile army of metaphors and metonyms' whose meaning is to be unceasingly decoded by acts of reading and interpretation grounded in the shapes of words as bearers of reality, a reality hidden, misleading, resistant, and difficult. The science of reading, in other words, is paramount for humanistic knowledge" (Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press (2004), 58).