Philology once meant spiritual insight into language, not mere textual scholarship.
Evidence
What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, all as philologists? The term seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritual insight into language and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of aesthetic and historical power. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 351
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the expanded, Nietzschean meaning of philology as spiritual-historical insight that later professionalized into a narrower academic discipline.
Related
- Nineteenth-century philologists saw language study as a science able to rebuild dead societies (similarity 0.82)
- Modern philology emerged by secularizing language from divine to human origins (similarity 0.81)
- Philology is the foundational interpretive art behind comparative literature’s worldview (similarity 0.81)
- Modernity and Europeanness are only legible against an alien past culture. (similarity 0.80)
- Philology’s abstraction turned language into a sightless realm ruled by race and nation (similarity 0.79)