The Philological Apparatus: Science, Text, and Nation in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create illusions of timeless knowledge. This historical inquiry therefore asks how one modality of text interpretation could morph into an integrated complex of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational system, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The essay scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the consolidation of philology.

A Historical, Critical Retrospective on Historical Criticism

“…Kritik's techniques became universal, applicable to writings no matter their diversity in language, culture, or genre, in their chronology, geography, or materiality. 32 It sought to conquer the human past and do so by commanding the history of texts, with close attention to linguistic and literary variation. In the first half of the century, Karl Otfried Müller, with a Prolegomena of his own that echoed those of Wolf and Kant, studied language to extract historical information from Greek myth, while George Grote separated legendary Greece from historical Greece.…”