Philology's defenders may not be certain that they can secure its future, but they know that they must do everything possible to prevent its demise. Because, interpretation of texts and using them for the progress of mankind is too essential to be ignored or underplayed
Mesopotamian scholars began writing commentaries on Babylonian and Assyrian texts as early as 800 BC. Some four centuries later, scholars in India brought systematic order to the language and discourse of the (by then very ancient)Vedas, while those in Alexandria for the first time became aware of variation in the Homeric poems and the need to address it through textual criticism. In the seventh century, Arab scholars were confronted with the problem of clarifying the language of a new revelation, the Quran. Across the early modern world, the problem of textual understanding became acute: scholars in fifteenth-century Italy realised that language is historical and that texts in newer languages that pretended to be old (like the Donation of Constantine) were forgeries; a little later, scholars in Timbuktu and neighboring regions invented ways to adapt the Arabic script for writing West African languages.
Those in late seventeenth-century China were convinced they had lost the empire to barbarians because they no longer understood their classics, and developed “evidential research studies” in response; and scholars in eighteenth-century Japan believed that if they could learn how to read their most ancient texts (like the Kojiki), they could therein find an original Japan, one that had existed long before the influence of Chinese culture.
These scholars were all philologists: Contributors to the discipline of making sense of texts-all texts, whether oral, written, printed, or electronic, whether literary, religious, or legal, those of mass culture no less than those of elite culture. If philosophy is thought critically reflecting on itself, philology is the critical self-reflection of language. If mathematics is the language of the book of nature, philology is the language of the book of human being. And under this description-and not its older and narrower definitions (grammar or textual criticism or corpus linguistics)-philology has been as ubiquitous a discipline in time and space as either philosophy or mathematics. Human history from Mesopotamia to Japan for almost three millennia is evidence enough. Philology once defined education itself: Every educated person learned languages and texts, and how to interpret them. Today, however, philology is confronted with two closely related threats. First, almost everywhere in the world, the field is vulnerable in the academy; to some observers, philology’s very survival now hangs in the balance. Second, philology has no secure disciplinary geography in today’s university, nor has it ever in my sense of the term held one in the era of the modern university.
In Europe, while esteem for philology may remain high, anecdotal evidence points to a serious diminution of professorial positions. Consider the fact that as of 2012 for the first time since 1821, when Franz Bopp was appointed professor and introduced, according to Michel Foucault the science of philology itself-Sanskrit is no longer taught in a university in Berlin. And in India, the world’s greatest philological laboratory, it seems almost on the verge of shutting down. It is now conceivable that within a few generations, the number of people able to make sense of texts in many of India’s almost two dozen pre-modern languages which together constitute the world’s longest continuous multilingual textual history will have approached a statistical zero. In short, we may well be standing on the verge of a historic event: The inauguration of a world without philology for the first time in three thousand years.
Philology’s fall from grace in the course of the 20th century was caused in part by the classics’ loss of centrality, but even more from the proliferation of philology’s sub-fields, such as linguistics and comparative literature, and, more recently, by the transformation of language and literature departments into area studies. In fact, philology today is not defined as a unified discipline, but is divided by and confined to geopolitical units, whether national traditions in the West (such as English, French, and German) or regional traditions in the non-West (such as those in South Asia, East Asia, and West Asia). These are admittedly important conditions of understanding texts exist in social and political contexts, after all but they need to be complemented by a structure that acknowledges what unifies philologists, encourages comparison and synthesis of diverse traditions and their interpretive multiplicity, and fosters larger generalisation from particular cases. It is through the disciplinisation of philology that its real intellectual contribution as the basic science of the humanities can be realised.
How broad this science is, both within the academy and outside, is easily demonstrated. Textual interpretation, which is the core of philological theory and method, is central not just to literary and religious studies but to history and law (philology being like mathematics in the vast dissemination of its techniques, but unlike mathematics in its lack of a disciplinary home). Beyond the academy, philology though one that does not know its name continues to broadly influence the public domain. It is ironic to observe, given the decline I have charted, how significant are the philological energies across the Internet on sites like ‘Rap Genius’ (http:// rap.genius.com), a self-described “crowd-sourced (and artist/ producer-sourced) annotation of rap lyrics/beats, from ‘Rapper’s Delight’ to ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’.” Users, including original creators, provide annotation to the often complex lyrics of songs, as well as inter-textual linkages and contextual material.
The purpose of Rap Genius, originally named Rap Exegesis, is precisely to make sense of texts. It has recently been branching out to include other musical forms, as well as law, history, and more; it is, in fact, now simply named ‘Genius’. The site seeks to “annotate the world”; “to help us all realise the richness and depth in every line of text”. This is pure philology in terms of practice, albeit practice that as yet has little awareness of its history, theory, or method. Providing that context, and formalising the discipline, is the role of the university; and today’s academy must also recognise and channel the energies of these popular philological enterprises.
The discipline of philology must not only be to enable students to gain a historical and theoretical grasp of textual understanding — to understand why United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is wrong to assert, about the text called the US Constitution, that “words mean what they mean”, and “their meaning doesn’t change” but also to see the remarkable continuities in global philology, and, equally important, the differences, sometimes startling, in what it has meant for people to make sense of texts; indeed, it can be a way of living. You are how you read, and learning to read better, with greater precision, self-awareness and, above all, respect for the diversity of textual truth in a world ever more unified and ever more in need of unity, means, potentially, learning to be better.
We are aware that far-reaching social and technological developments may be working to the disadvantage of philology, and even to the disadvantage of the very literacy philology rests upon. But every society will continue to have texts of some sort, and the need to make sense of them is assured. Philology’s defenders may not be certain that they can secure its future, but they know they must do everything possible to prevent its demise.