Philological understanding requires sympathetic entry into a foreign text, not hostility

Evidence

The main requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach and his predecessors were talking about and tried to practice was one that sympathetically and subjectively entered into the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of this time and its author (eingefüllen). Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and another different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter’s mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 42

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the philological method (eingefüllen) that Orientalism’s critique implicitly holds up as the hospitable alternative to colonial reading.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Islamophobia module: this is the humanist counterpoint to Orientalist projection — a framing of interpretation as hospitality toward the foreign Other, which later Islamophobia-critique readings can invoke. — connects to: True intellectual practice includes rather than excludes emotion — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 302
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 42