Modern Philhellenism fused barbarism and culture in German scholarship

Evidence

The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient’s lost languages, mores, even mentalities, as Champollion reconstructed Egyptian hieroglyphics out of the Rosetta Stone. The specific Orientalist techniques—lexicography, grammar, translation, cultural decoding—restored, fleshed out, reasserted the values both of an ancient, classical Orient and of the traditional disciplines of philology, history, rhetoric, and doctrinal polemic. But in the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form. The Orient, even in the “classic” form which the Orientalist usually studied, was modernized, restored to the present; the traditional disciplines too were brought into contemporary culture. Yet both bore the traces of power—power to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of anthropological generalization. In short, having transported the Orient into modernity, the Orientalist could celebrate his method, and his position, as that of a secular creator, a man who made new worlds as God had once made the old. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332 (#expands, via linked claim)

When he returned at the end of his year, he brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, mixed with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and others, set off with the distinctively French seasoning of his own literary sensibility. He applied phenomenology to people’s lives in a more exciting, personal way than its inventors had ever thought to do, and thus made himself the founding father of a philosophy that became international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour: modern existentialism. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 23 (#expands, via linked claim)

The best example of what a lay science could and could not do was provided years later by Renan in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1878, “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences.” What is revealing about this text is the way Renan clearly had religion in mind when he spoke about philology—for example, what philology, like religion, teaches us about the origins of humanity, civilization, and language—only to make it evident to his hearers that philology could deliver a far less coherent, less knitted together and positive message than religion. Since Renan was irremediably historical and, as he once put it, morphological in his outlook, it stood to reason that the only way in which, as a very young man, he could move out of religion into philological scholarship was to retain in the new lay science the historical world-view he had gained from religion. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 358 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reading genocide as premodern relic protects modernity’s self-image as reason triumphing over passion; Modern existentialism fused German phenomenology with Danish philosophy and French literary sensibility — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 23; Philology inherited religion’s historical worldview while losing its coherence — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 358 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalist scholarship resurrects and creates its object through philological techniques #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332
• Modern existentialism fused German phenomenology with Danish philosophy and French literary sensibility #expands (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 23
• Philology inherited religion’s historical worldview while losing its coherence #expands (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 358
• Reading genocide as premodern relic protects modernity’s self-image as reason triumphing over passion #complicates (0.72)
• Modern classification of cultures secularized earlier religious structures #expands (0.72)