Until roughly yesterday, when genetics rose to its current position as a sort of ur-text of human nature and origins, it was linguistic diversity, and the vestiges of languages left to us from the past, that held the greatest promise of telling us who we are and where we come from. The science that dealt with languages and their textual traces was known as philology, and it was long the very soul and backbone of whatever it is we do when we study literature, history, and perhaps also philosophy.
The humanities are today mere slivers of a once unified project, crystallized from the Renaissance through the 19th century only to shatter spectacularly over the course of the 20th. Humanities programs are rapidly being killed off by financially minded administrators and a broader societal mentality that values only what can turn a quick profit. Humanists realize the urgency of radically rethinking what the humanities might be — indeed, might once have been and could be again. And while this might come as a surprise, it is philology that offers the best hope for ensuring a central place for the humanities in the university of the 21st century. But even that does not go far enough. For philology also holds the promise of re-establishing the lost unity of the human sciences with the sciences of nature, or, as we say these days, of the humanities with STEM.
Part of philology’s apparent irrelevance today has to do with society’s radical and unprecedented presentism. No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to tweet and “text” and share memes, we are moving into a post-textual era. For those who continue to write academic theses, it’s surely the case that there are more dissertations published per year on Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on Baudelaire. If you set out to work on Babylonian calendars or something else that is truly primordial, you are bound to be seen as something of an eccentric. You will be seen, that is, just as your nonacademic family members see you, as someone “into some pretty obscure stuff.” Humanists, then, are growing nearly as presentist, as clueless about historical legacies, as oblivious of origins, as everyone else.
This presentism not only cuts us off from what was long understood to be a central concern of the humanities — to know who we are by knowing where we’ve come from — but also perpetuates and deepens the separation of the human from the natural sciences. Understood as philology, as a search for origins, the humanities share a great deal with a number of other sorts of inquiry often cordoned off on the other side of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” divide. Philology shares aims and objectives, and sometimes methods, with archaeology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and even those branches of theoretical physics that deal with the distant origins of the universe. All seek to account for how the world got to be the way it is.
In the introduction of World Philology (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia, writes that in the latter half of the 20th century, the humanities were “turned into a tenement and rented out to a congeries of regional or national philology departments (East Asian, Middle Eastern, Romance, Slavic, South Asian, and of course English and classics), with worse quarters given to those thought to be lower on the cultural-evolutionary scale.” Thus humanists were no longer able to discern the global reach of important cultural developments, such as science and literature, or to appreciate regional traditions for what they in fact are: inflections of a diffuse global process, and not, by any means, indigenous growths spontaneously generated in the special soil of a given place.
This localism has been further hardened by a strain of identity politics in the humanities, particularly in the English-speaking world, which now takes as gospel truth that only a member of a given ethnic or religious group “gets to speak for” it, “gets to decide” what is distinctive and special about that group, or, by contrast, what is shared with other groups. This is the sad dead end of the partition of the humanities into area studies.
Among the humanities, philosophy is the field in which provincialism has most successfully disguised itself as a universal and timeless form of inquiry. It’s not at all uncommon to hear philosophy professors demur, when the subject of, say, classical Indian logic comes up, that they “regrettably don’t know anything about that.” What they really mean is: “My professional identity is wrapped up with my not knowing anything about that.” This is something we learn as graduate students: not only how to display our knowledge of, and commitment to, a given circumscribed domain, but also how to scoff, subtly, at whatever falls even slightly beyond that domain. This is an acquired syndrome, transmitted from faculty to graduate students in the course of their own professional reproduction.
In Pollock’s view, whoever wishes to usher the study of things into the future must ask, “What are the minimal requirements that successful applicants for admission to the twenty-first century temple of disciplinarity will have to meet in order to qualify as core knowledge forms?” First, any discipline that is to have a hope of survival must be historically self-aware: “Twenty-first-century disciplines cannot remain arrogantly indifferent … to their own historicity, constructedness, and changeability — this is an epistemic necessity, not a moral one — and accordingly, the humbling force of genealogy must be part and parcel of every disciplinary practice.”
Second, a fit discipline must be global, rather than provincial, in scope: “Disciplines can no longer be merely local forms of knowledge that pass as universal under the mask of science.” Pollock’s third requirement, finally, is methodological and conceptual pluralism: “Understanding by what means and according to what criteria scholars in past eras have grounded their truth claims must be part of our own understanding of what truth is, and a key dimension of what we might call our epistemic politics.”
Pollock concludes that “no aspirant for inclusion in the twenty-first-century disciplinary order could satisfy these historical, global, and methodological-conceptual requirements better than a new philology.”
Philology has been conceptualized in different ways throughout its long history, but it usually balances somewhere between the two poles of grammar and hermeneutics. In the 19th century, this opposition was highlighted in the conflict between Friedrich Nietzsche and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. The latter defended the careful, rigorous approach to texts as traces of the past, and thus embodied the figure of the dusty antiquarian philologist.
Nietzsche, for his part, wanted to transform philology into a kind of ecstatic new philosophy. Those who today dismiss philology tend to see grammatical science as soulless or “dead,” missing altogether the fact that in some cases, such as with Sanskrit or Arabic, the most fundamental questions of philosophy have been pursued through the analysis of grammar. They tend to see textual interpretation as disconcertingly “Talmudic,” as too willing to subordinate itself to the authority — a revealing term — of the authors who produced the texts, and even to attribute to them a divine, and thus infallible, source.
Textual science did emerge out of a commitment to the divine inspiration of Scripture. But this commitment didn’t block the development of philology. A case in point is the early history of Arabic philology. As Beatrice Gruendler of the Free University of Berlin has shown, the newness of Arabic as a literary language at the time of the composition of the Quran forced early interpreters to seek out archaic poets and even practitioners of oral poetic traditions. These philologists would have been perplexed by the dichotomy over which Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff would later fight, between a view of philology as the study of “a text as an artifact of the past” and philology as the task of bringing a text alive in the present. “For all their veneration of the textual witnesses they gathered,” Gruendler writes, “their sharp-eyed testing of their authenticity, and their linguistic commentary on them, the Arabic philologists were devoted to extracting from these sources a usable language for the present.”
The field research of the Arab linguists anticipates proposals made by the German polymath G.W. Leibniz, at the end of the 17th century, to systematically collect samples of the Lord’s Prayer in all the native languages of the Russian Empire. For Leibniz, the interest was in linguistic diversity itself. In the modern period, we see two large shifts occurring in the study of language and its textual traces, both reflected in Leibniz’s proposal. One is a move toward naturalism and an increasing assimilation of linguistic research into other areas of natural science concerned with diversity, botanical taxonomy being the most important. Thus William Jones’s research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, carried out in the 1780s and 1790s, is an inquiry into the diversity of the names of things and into the things themselves.
The second great shift in the modern period was from a scriptural hermeneutics that buttressed and sustained religious faith to one that, whether intentional or not, put revealed truth in historical and intellectual context. No thinker represents this shift more vividly than Spinoza, whose Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670 aimed, as James Turner argues in Philology (Princeton University Press, 2014), “to undercut ecclesiastical authority in civil affairs. A good way to do this was to weaken its ultimate ground in a divinely inspired Bible. Spinoza combined metaphysical naturalism with Hebrew learning to turn the Bible into a product of human history.”
For Spinoza, the study of nature and the study of texts were united in a single project: understanding how things, in the most general sense, came to be the way they are.
What Turner does not emphasize enough is that metaphysical naturalism — the belief that everything that happens in nature must be explained without appeal to supernatural forces — is precisely the basis of what came to be called “natural science.” For Spinoza, then, as for many others in the next few centuries, the study of nature and the study of texts were united in a single project: understanding how things, in the most general sense, came to be the way they are. Throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, learning how nature got to be the way it is, by studying the natural world, was seen as fundamentally akin to accounting for the human past by studying texts that had been passed down to the present.
Today we see humanists attempting to get in on the action of the scientists down the hall, which is to say to mount the gravy train of grant-seeking that favors work purporting to be of scientific relevance. Thus marginal philosophers specializing in phenomenology will attempt to show that phenomenology is relevant to neuroscience, and scholars who work on the Scientific Revolution will claim that their research is necessary to understand developments in biotech. The sad irony is that not too long ago the cachet flowed in the opposite direction: Scientists went to considerable lengths to show that what they were doing was relevant to the people we think of today as humanists.
What caused this reversal? A full explanation must account for the loss of the idea of history as a broad category that straddles the two-cultures divide. Consider the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, writing in 1798 on the occasion of the discovery of woolly-mammoth remains near Paris: “Henceforth it will be necessary to add, to the history of the animals that exist at present in each country, that of animals that have lived or been transported there in the past.” Here, by “history,” Cuvier has in mind simply the enumeration of singular things. But he adds that this endeavor must also include “history” in our sense, the reconstruction of the past:
For … it will be necessary for naturalists to do for the history of nature what antiquarians do for the history of the techniques and customs of peoples; the former will have to go and search among the ruins of the globe for the remains of organisms that lived at its surface, just as the latter dig in the ruins of cities in order to unearth the monuments of the taste, the genius, and the customs of the men who lived there. These antiquities of nature, if they may be so termed, will provide the physical history of the globe with monuments as useful and reliable as ordinary antiquities provide for the political and moral history of nations.
Not so many years later, the English naturalist Charles Lyell would argue that the most suitable disciplinary comparison for geology is, again, history, by which “we obtain a more profound insight into human nature, by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.” But, he continues,
Far more astonishing and unexpected are the connections brought to light, when we carry back our researches into the history of nature. The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains, can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed.
Lyell, in effect, is promoting a science of reading the earth. It is true that after the 16th century few people continued to believe that literal meanings are encoded in the natural world by a divine author. But this does not mean that science in its modern incarnation has been engaged in something that is entirely different from reading. What Lyell understood is that what researchers in some central domains of science do is not completely separate from what humanists do: Both seek to understand the present from traces left, intentionally or unintentionally, by authors, or by natural processes, in the past.
All of which brings me to my humble proposal to restructure the academy and solve the two-cultures problem: Create a single, unified, scientific discipline dedicated to accounting for the state of the world by reconstructing the past using whatever means available — texts, stone tools, burial mounds, tree rings, sediment deposits, fossils, cosmic background radiation. This discipline can be housed in the “faculty of history,” and mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that textual scholars do not retreat into their own little world, as if the sort of traces they study had nothing to do with the other sorts.
There can in turn be a “faculty of the atemporal sciences,” in which scholars seek the laws describing those things that do not change, such as logic, perhaps, or certain domains of mathematics. Here, too, mechanisms should be put in place to prevent ghettoization. And there should be compulsory instruction to ensure that no one ever forgets that there are no truly atemporal sciences, that all emerge from peculiar and contingent historical legacies.
There can, finally, be a “faculty of new stuff,” in which researchers develop new lightweight materials and robots that journey through our entrails, and try to imagine what’s next. Training in how things got to be this way would be compulsory here as well, as the only truly reliable guide to how things are going to be in the future. Above all, history should be elevated to its rightful place as the reigning science in the university. It is the best hope for an exit from the current decline of the humanities, and it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the humanities and the sciences.
History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology is much larger than it is now perceived to be. Philology, Sheldon Pollock notes, “has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been.” This ubiquity used to mean that the historian’s project extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today’s humanists have relinquished too much to scientists. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, science stands to regain its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.
Justin E.H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Paris Diderot. His new book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, will be published by Princeton University Press in May.
