Summary
Friedrich Schlegel, who learned his Sanskrit in Paris and whose Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808) Said uses in Chapter One, IV to illustrate both of comparative philology’s founding traits — a new scientific self-consciousness based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to Europe, and a proclivity to divide and subdivide its subject without changing its mind about the Orient — and who returns in Chapter Two, I as a Romantic Orientalist urging the study of India on Europe (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.107-108, 124, 146 / printed p.98-99, 115, 137).
Details
- Said counts Schlegel among the nineteenth-century Orientalists who were at once scholars and gifted enthusiasts, alongside Richard Burton and Edward Lane (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.60-61 / printed p.51-52).
- By the time he published Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier in 1808 Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism, yet he still held Sanskrit and Persian on one hand and Greek and German on the other to have more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American or African languages, and the Indo-European family to be artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic was not; nations, races, minds and peoples held a lifelong fascination for him, in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder, yet nowhere does he talk about the living, contemporary Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.107 / printed p.98).
- His 1800 pronouncement that it is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism meant, in Said’s account, the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta and the Upanishads; the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic and mechanical, were for him different, inferior and backward, his lectures on language and on life, history and literature full of these discriminations made without qualification; Hebrew was made for prophetic utterance and divination, while the Muslims espoused a “dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.107-108 / printed p.98-99).
- Much of the racism in Schlegel’s strictures on the Semites and other low Orientals was widely diffused in European culture, Said argues, but nowhere else, unless later among Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the basis of a scientific subject matter as in comparative linguistics or philology; language and race seemed inextricably tied, the good Orient a classical period in a long-gone India and the bad Orient present-day Asia, parts of North Africa and Islam everywhere (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.108 / printed p.99).
- In Chapter Two, I, Schlegel and Novalis urged on their countrymen, and on Europeans in general, a detailed study of India, because Indian culture and religion could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture, from which defeat a new, revitalized Europe would arise; anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language was in this project a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the holy mission it had lost, and Schlegel is named among the adherents of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.124 / printed p.115).
- The teleological enthusiasms of the period were fueled after 1808 by Schlegel’s celebrated Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which seemed to confirm his own 1800 pronouncement about the Orient as the purest form of Romanticism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.146 / printed p.137).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Philology, Ernest Renan, Edgar Quinet