Summary
In Said’s account in Orientalism, the discipline from which modern Orientalism took its most important technical characteristics: the new philology of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a comparative science of languages and families that rejected the divine origins of language and, in Ernest Renan’s hands, became a naturalized, modernized, laicized substitute for Christian supernaturalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.131, 140-145 / printed p.122, 131-136).
Details
- Almost without exception every Orientalist began his career as a philologist, and the revolution in philology that produced Bopp, Silvestre de Sacy and Burnouf was a comparative science based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the Indo-European and the Semitic are two great instances; Orientalism carried forward from it a newly found scientific self-consciousness and a proclivity to divide and subdivide its subject without changing its mind about the Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.107 / printed p.98).
- The essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis can be understood, in Said’s thesis, as structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, themselves naturalized, modernized and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.131 / printed p.122).
- The new philology’s major successes include comparative grammar, the reclassification of languages into families and the final rejection of the divine origins of language: the sacred languages were discovered to be neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance, a secular event that displaced the religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.144 / printed p.135).
- For Renan, as Said presents him, the founders of modern mind are philologists and philology is the exact science of mental objects; the philologist’s laboratory is where an object like Semitic is articulated, set in a system of classification and judged comparatively against the organic Indo-European norm (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.141, 148-152 / printed p.132, 139-143).
- Philology developed the systematic and institutional powers Sacy had never exploited, and it is through Renan’s adaptation of Orientalism to philology that the Orientalist structures were perpetuated intellectually (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.139 / printed p.130).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Ernest Renan, Silvestre de Sacy, William Jones