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THERE are many ways to understand how the MLA is organized, one of which is to see it as a professional society that has since the 1960s been a union between two groups who teach and study different languages and literatures: those who are in English departments (about 60% of the membership) and those who are in foreign language departments (about 40% of the membership). Each of these two groups has its own organization of departmental chairs. These are the ADE, founded in 1962, and the ADFL, founded in 1969. Each has its own director, executive committee, and publication. I begin with this sometimes overlooked feature of MLA structure, because it is a convenient way to diagram a split in our profession that goes much deeper than the impressive organization chart that marks the division between those who teach English and those who teach foreign languages. Members of the ADE are more often than not, on their campuses, the moving force in the textual humanities, with all the implications of that fact, not just as cultural capital but for tenured slots, salaries, graduate stipends, and funds for development (i.e., money!). The ADFL has more members, but on their local campuses ADFL members are haunted by a number of problems peculiar to their calling. Some have seen dramatically shrinking enrollments in their language courses and a growth in the number of literature courses they teach in English translation. Without the boom in Spanish, the statistics for numbers of students taking language courses look rather depressing. Formerly independent departments are increasingly giving way to larger and more homogenized units. These have been formed by combining erstwhile departments into such institutionally mandated gerrymanders as German-Slavic-Chinese or the all-purpose single Department of Foreign Languages.
The distinctiveness of the problems facing foreign language departments in this country extends to the particular way in which they have been forced to confront the rise of cultural studies, a new paradigm of scholarship that now seems hegemonic under its various and constantly proliferating subsets, too familiar to this audience to catalog. That is, within the ranks of the ADE there are several ways to accommodate the new demands that cultural studies make without losing purchase on the traditional academic mission of English departments. Shakespeare is more popular than ever, with new readings of his work enabled by postcolonial insights into Caliban’s speech in The Tempest, for instance. Well might an envious social scientist such as my friend Arjun Appadurai complain that “[f]or an anthropologist in the United States today, what is most striking about the last decade in the academy is the hijack of culture by literary studies” (195–96).
The situation looks quite different in language departments, where teachers of foreign languages feel less like successful imperialists than they do like beleaguered natives whose professional terrain has been invaded by the forces of ethnology. That is to say, the turn to cultural studies has been no less marked in foreign language departments than in English departments, but this move carries with it a danger to their academic missions that teachers of English are spared. As the number of students enrolled in German studies or French studies grows, the role of the German language or the French language in such programs is diminished. We may be keeping up our enrollments, but there is a danger that by doing so we have jettisoned our main task.
None of what I have said so far will have surprised members of foreign language departments. I raise these familiar issues again in order to ask the question I most wish to address in these few remarks: What, as teachers of foreign languages, is our main task? In terms that are more fraught, and therefore more appropriate to the urgency of our crisis, what, we may ask, is our reason for being? It is in trying to answer such questions that I believe the utility of remembering philology makes itself apparent.
Since the very term is now obscure (when not completely neglected or used as a term of abuse), it might be well to make clear which of its many possible meanings is the one intended here. I have in mind a very specific use of the word, one that can be isolated in a particular moment in history. The place was Saxony and the year was 1779. A young man named Friedrich August Wolf confounded the prorector of Göttingen University by refusing to register in any of the four faculties (philosophy, medicine, law, and theology) that then constituted the entire university curriculum. Wolf wanted to study the ancient Greeks, and so he was advised to register in the theology division, because Greek was part of the training it offered. Wolf insisted that he did not wish to study Greek in order to read the New Testament: he wanted to read Greek in order to read Homer (see Grafton). And he was indeed finally enrolled as studiosus philologiae, going on to become professor at Halle and founder of a resurgent school of classicists that would completely transform our understanding of the ancient world. It was Wolf’s 1795 Prolegomena ad Homerum, for instance, that first established the modern understanding of Homer as a body of texts orally composed by generations of bardic singers.
I choose this particular moment as defining philology (or at least the sense of that word I wish to invoke) because it contains within it several features that are pertinent to any attempt to understand the present state of scholarship and teaching devoted to foreign language and literature. Wolf’s insistence on training as a philologist rather than a theologian suggests that eighteenth-century German universities experienced turmoil in ways not entirely dissimilar from American universities in the twentieth. The four faculties that exhausted the university’s offerings at Göttingen and other schools were being challenged because they were not sufficiently capacious to include the things a new generation of students wished to study. Many of the actual courses Wolf wished to take were in fact available in 1779 in the theology faculty, but they were locked into an institutional structure that he felt distorted their content. Further, the existing restrictions discouraged the evolution of available resources into new areas of inquiry. You could study ancient Greek and Latin, but only for study of the Bible, not as an opening to the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.
Wolf’s insistence that he matriculate as studiosus philologiae was one of several indicators that the German university system was about to undergo revolutionary change. The most famous challenge to the status quo was to come twenty-seven years after Wolf’s rebellion. In 1798 Immanuel Kant published his Conflict of the Faculties, in which he argued that his own university of Königsberg needed to be reorganized so that the primary function of the philosophy faculty could be better articulated. That function, Kant argued, was perpetual criticism and first of all criticism of the other faculties.
The right, indeed the necessity, of such a role lay in two basic assumptions Kant had made in his three critiques: in order to achieve the hypervalue of freedom, human beings had to exercise reason in the service of achieving their own autonomy from the demands imposed on them by the world. He used these principles in his plea for reform of his own university. He argued that the other three faculties at Königsberg were all too intimately and uncritically involved with the empirical world. The theology faculty accepted the preexisting authority of the Bible and turned out students who became professional pastors; the law faculty accepted the authority of the existing statutes and turned out students who became lawyers; the medical faculty accepted the authority of its accumulated knowledge about the body and turned out students who became physicians.
What flows from such an arrangement is that, insofar as the higher faculties are in the thrall of an authority that precedes their instruction, they are directed from outside themselves. The theologians are not free to speculate about the existence of God, the lawyers to speculate about the nature of justice, the doctors to conceive medical practices so radically experimental they call into question current dogma about what conduces to health. They are, in other words, all heteronomously driven.
The philosophy faculty, at least in Kant’s version of it, was not so bound. It was, in his charged sense of the word, autonomous. The philosophy faculty was analogous to the ethical individual who is free because he accepts no authority but that of reason itself. Thus the philosophy faculty does not produce students who do anything practical in the world. The philosophy faculty does not teach a preexisting body of knowledge. Its only activity is criticism; it serves as a source of constant meditation on the nature of knowledge itself. Kant recognizes that the state needs lawyers and pastors and that we all need physicians. He does not seek to destroy the existing order of the faculties. The practically oriented higher faculties might indeed be populated by businessmen (Geschäftsleute) rather than by those seeking wisdom. But they nevertheless provide a necessary service to the commonweal of the state.
But in order for them to provide their service effectively, well, their work must always be in accord with reason. And yet it is in the nature of the higher faculties, insofar as they are oriented toward already existing dogma they must accept as authority, that they are unable to exercise the critical faculty that reason requires. The government wishes to train the best pastors, lawyers, and physicians. “But the government cannot be completely indifferent to the truth of these teachings, and in this respect they must remain subject to reason (whose interests the philosophy faculty has to safeguard).” Kant puts his case polemically: “The people (das Volk) conceive of their welfare, not primarily as freedom, but as [the realization] of their natural ends and so as these three things: being happy after death, having their possessions guaranteed by public laws during their life in society, and finally, looking forward to the physical enjoyment of life itself (that is, health and a long life).” Thus they want from the theologians, the lawyers, and the physicians to know only, “if I’ve been a scoundrel all my life, how can I get an eleventh-hour ticket to heaven? If I’ve broken the law, how can I still win my case? And even if I’ve abused my physical powers as I’ve pleased, how can I stay healthy and live a long time?” (49). Believing that scholars in the higher faculties have answers to such questions, the Volk treat them with superstitious respect. It is then no wonder that there are the businessmen in such faculties who have the effrontery to believe they can offer such miracles.
Thus, the need for the critical agency of the philosophy faculty: “the businessmen of the three higher faculties will always be such miracle-workers, unless the philosophy faculty is allowed to counterattack them publicly not in order to overthrow their teachings but only to deny the magic power that the public superstitiously attributes to these teachings and the rites connected with them [. . .]” (Kant 51). Between the claims of the higher faculties and the criticism of the philosophy faculty there is, then, not only conflict, but necessary conflict. As the site of reason’s purest activity, “the philosophical faculty can never lay aside its arms in the face of the danger that threatens the truth entrusted to its protection [. . .]” (55).
Kant’s treatise has recently come into vogue again and is frequently invoked to provide authority for arguments from various points of view about current university reform by Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Bill Readings, Bruce Robbins, and a host of less well known figures. But what has gone largely unremarked in these uses of Kant’s Conflict is that work’s connections with the discipline of philology as it came to be defined by Wolf in the years after his graduation. It is that connection that makes Conflict most pertinent to understanding our own conflicts as members of the ADFL.
To see how this might be so, it should be remembered that both Wolf and Kant served as presiding spirits behind the institution that completely revolutionized the idea of the university not only in Germany but also in the world, not least of all in the United States. I refer, of course, to the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. I will not dwell on the obvious importance of Berlin as the archetype of the modern research university. Suffice it to remember that from Berlin spring virtually all the appurtenances that now define our academic culture: study beyond the baccalaureate level, graduate seminars, the dissertation based on original research, the PhD as necessary accreditation for teaching in higher education, and much more. It was the success of the Berlin model that gave the twin concepts of research and science the central place they came to have in subsequent academic life, thus paving the way for a whole new prestige that now attached to the university as a modern institution.
The triumph of the Berlin model has been so complete that the significance of philology’s role in it is frequently overlooked. Virtually all the figures who contributed to the establishment of the new university in 1810 were disciples of Kant. They took his model of the free, ethical subject as the product education should produce. They were, in other words, attempting to solve the paradox of how to institutionalize autonomy. It was in wrestling with this apparent contradiction that the utility of philology came to the fore. The minister of the king who was directly charged with reforming Prussian education was Wilhelm von Humboldt. He was not only an admirer of Kant but also a passionate student of languages who after his early retirement from public life devoted all his energy to philological pursuits. He was a lifelong friend, not surprisingly, of Wolf, with whom he would spend Christmas retreats at his estate translating Pindar and arguing over fine points of Greek grammar and history. And it was Wolf he called to Berlin to help him formulate plans for the new university. So a third spirit who shapes Berlin is Humboldt, after whom the university came to be named.
It was Humboldt who created the real-world conditions for the radical experiment that Berlin was when it opened its doors for the first time. But it was also he who helped form the dream behind the reality. Along with Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schelling, and a number of other visionaries, he saw the study of language as a way to resolve the Kantian paradox of how to institutionalize autonomy. While there are great differences among the various schemes that went into the final form the university assumed, there was agreement about the close relation between the love of wisdom and the love of the word. Kant had argued for philosophy’s place in the curriculum because it represented a “purely autonomous moment when knowledge reflects upon itself” (Readings 66). As this principle came to be worked out by such figures as Schleiermacher and Humboldt, “the process of philosophical reflection grounds knowledge in an organic principle rather than as the simple self-coherence of an abstract system. Facts are not simply arranged by philosophical reflection according to a logical principle of non-contradiction; they are given life. Philology, the historical study of language, is the form that this organic grounding takes [. . .] in the process of philological research, history is reworked according to rational principles in order to reveal its unity” (66).
The preeminence of philology as the queen of sciences in Berlin was short-lived. The very forces that had created the conditions for so radical an experiment in reform would all too rapidly work against the central place of the historical study of language in the curriculum. For if Kant, Wolf, and Humboldt were three of the presiding spirits at the birth of the new university, the fourth (folklore’s obligatory bad fairy) was Napoleon. It was his military victory over the Prussians in 1806 and the political catastrophe and national humiliation that followed the battle of Jena that convinced even the most conservative Junkers that only radical reform, dedicated to unifying knowledge as a base for unifying the nation, could save the Prussian state from disappearing from the stage of history (as it now has). It took only a short time for the fear of Napoleon’s revolution that created the new university in 1810 to become the fear of a Prussian revolution from within, which withered much of its founding vision. By 1811, Humboldt was already gone from the scene, as were most of the great reformers who were architects of the War of Liberation that brought the Prussians to Paris in 1815. The repressive Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 made clear that the anxious princes had experienced all the autonomy they would brook in the universities. This political wave of repression combined with developments in chemistry and then in physics and biology that eclipsed philology as the primary armature for implementing in historical experience a dream of unified Wissenschaft. It was replaced by visions of the natural sciences as models of research and new knowledge, a model that only recently has itself come into question.
The Germans themselves have subsequently argued that the celebration of Berlin’s founding is nothing more than deference to a myth—Mythos Humboldt, as it is called. And even the most sympathetic philologist is forced to admit that the Kant-Wolf-Humboldt vision of education disappeared in what was no more than a blink of history’s cruel eye. So why do I invoke that version of our philology as a potential aid in answering the question I began with and with which I will soon conclude: What—as members of the profession gathered under the acronym of ADFL—is our reason for being?
Out of the many definitions of philology I might have chosen, I select that of Wolf and Humboldt first of all because it is grounded in a past that could be invoked as a guide in the present. These men were visionaries who conceived philology less as a mere profession, another form of preparing Geschäftsleute, than as a cognitive and ethical task. Philology in their view was, moreover, a task that needed constant performance. It was always relevant, because its fulfillment was an endless work that was never completed. It was never completed because its ultimate aim was to remember language. Like Kant’s philosophical faculty, the faculty of philology is critical. What was wrong with theology and medicine in the old universities was that they had forgotten their own immersion in the ineluctable need for representation that comes with being human. Insofar as they presumed the transparency of their categories, they treated the discourse of their profession as if it were a magic language. Their pretensions to authority were based in the conviction that the patois peculiar to the practice of law or to the profession of theology was different from natural language, somehow free from the confusions, the discrepancies, the sheer muddle that results when signs intervene between us and the world.
In the Humboldtian dream of philology, language was at the center of the university because in the study of foreign tongues students best learned the humility that comes from never forgetting that we are in signs. The necessity to negotiate the otherness of the world that accompanies struggling to master alterity in other languages had, Humboldt felt, the capacity to provide students two gifts that any education should strive to give: positive knowledge of other cultures and a critical stance toward one’s own culture.
The institutionalization of that dream of philology was subverted in the nineteenth century by the raw energies of competing nationalisms and a transformed idea of science that reduced it to knowledge of brute nature. Our task as teachers of foreign languages, it seems to me, is to remember not only the ineluctable foreignness of language itself (even when we think we are speaking our mother tongue) but also the version of the study of language that animated Wolf and Humboldt. We should cease to be apologetic about what we do. We should resist marginalization. We should insist on the central place in the university that properly belongs to a scholarship that has criticism and difference at its heart. All the currently fashionable talk about globalization masks a new impulse to homogenization of knowledge, an impulse that has eerie echoes of the time when nothing could be discussed outside a theological framework. Remembering languages in all their specificity and difference is the most effective way to expose students to a world in which tectonic shifts in politics, economics, and culture are indeed producing radical new effects, while at the same time making them aware that we still have not shaken off the need to order the world in signs, a need that is as old as history itself. As one of the most profound modern philologists reminds us: “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical” ‘Das Staunen darüber, dass die dinge, die wir erleben, im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert noch möglich sind, ist kein philosophisches’ (Benjamin viii; my trans).
Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Illuminationen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. 251–63.
Grafton, Anthony. Introduction. Wolf 3–36.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Briefe an Friedrich August Wolf. Ed. Philip Mattson. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990.
———. Über der Kawi-sprache auf der Insel Java. Berlin: Drückerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836–38.
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. and introd. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Wolf, Friedrich August. Prolegomena to Homer. Trans. Anthony Grafton et al. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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