Summary
Ernest Renan, presented by Said in Orientalism as Orientalism’s second-generation systematizer: an Oriental philologist whose Système comparé et histoire générale des langues sémitiques (completed 1848, for the Prix Volney) re-created the Semitic Orient in the philological laboratory, taking its languages to be inorganic and its peoples a degraded, inferior combination of human nature set against the organic Indo-European norm (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.97, 139-153 / printed p.88, 130-144).
Details
- The difference between Silvestre de Sacy and Renan is the difference between inauguration and continuity: Renan’s task was to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, systematize its insights and establish its intellectual and worldly institutions, adapting Orientalism to Philology and both to the intellectual culture of his time (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.139 / printed p.130). Said reads Renan not for his personality but as a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, a style for making Orientalist statements within the archive of his time (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.139-140 / printed p.130-131).
- In L’Avenir de la science (written in 1848, published 1890) Renan wrote that “the founders of modern mind are philologists” and called philology “the exact science of mental objects”, to the sciences of humanity what physics and chemistry are to the sciences of bodies; the volume is dedicated to Eugène Burnouf, and in its 1890 preface, as Said presents it, Renan took the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.141-142 / printed p.132-133).
- The crisis of religious faith that culminated in the loss of that faith led Renan in 1845 into a life of scholarship and into what he called lay science; his 1878 Sorbonne lecture “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences” shows philology delivering a far less knitted-together and positive message than the religion whose historical world-view he retained (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.143-144 / printed p.134-135).
- Renan repeated the lessons of the new philology throughout his career — the rejection of the divine origins of language and of any primal Edenic language in favour of heuristically reconstituted protolanguages — and in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on February 21, 1862, succeeding Étienne Quatremère in the chair of Hebrew, he opened his lectures to the public so it might see at first hand the very laboratory of philological science (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.144-145, 147-148 / printed p.135-136, 138-139).
- Renan was explicit that Semites and Semitic were creations of Orientalist philological study, and he was the man who did the study: his Semitic treatise, his first full-length Orientalist and scientific study (finished in 1847, published first in 1855), was in Said’s account a fiction invented in the philological laboratory, from which Renan drew retrospective authority for his positions on religion, race and nationalism, and to which he owed a symbol of European dominion over the Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.149-150 / printed p.140-141).
- In the treatise as Said presents it, the Semites are rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce and no civilization, representing an inferior combination of human nature; Semitic languages are judged comparatively against Indo-European as the living, organic norm to be inorganic and denied the capacity to regenerate themselves, a judgment Renan makes clear only the trained Oriental philologist in his laboratory can make (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.151-152 / printed p.142-143).
- Renan follows the Saint-Hilaires’ views on the degradation of types: his Semitic object is comprehended as an eccentric, quasi-monstrous phenomenon, exhibited and analyzed in libraries, laboratories and museums (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.150, 152-153 / printed p.141, 143-144).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Silvestre de Sacy, Philology, Edward William Lane