Jul 12, 2023
9 mins read
9 mins read

Wilhelm von Humboldt and the ‘Orient’: On Edward W. Said’s remarks on Humboldt’s Orientalist studies

Wilhelm von Humboldt and the ‘Orient’: On Edward W. Said’s remarks on Humboldt’s Orientalist studies

Abstract

From an epistemological perspective, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s studies on the Oriental and East Asian languages and writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, Chinese, Polynesian) raise the question of his position in the Orientalist discourse of his time. Said [Said, E.W., 1978. Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient, fourth ed. Penguin Books, London, 1995] considers Humboldt to be part of the “official intellectual genealogy” of a Eurocentric discourse on the ‘Orient’, which served as an ideological legitimation of European colonialism. This judgement on Humboldt is due to the assumption that Humboldt’s linguistic anthropology is based on the racial premises of a language typology formulated in 1808 in Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians [Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier]. Being an independent scholar, Humboldt may typify the non-political, at least noncolonial context of the genesis of Orientalist philology in Germany. Nonetheless, to state that a “cosmopolitan erudition” [Mangold, S., 2004. Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft” – Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart] was a main characteristic of German Orientalism must be considered as insufficient when it comes down to the concrete philological works in question, because Said’s analysis targets the subtle intellectual measuring of ‘Oriental’ cultures using Eurocentric criteria. Humboldt, whose linguistic position is generally characterized by the endeavour to combine universalism and cultural difference, especially in his Orientalist studies, has slipped on to Said’s list of eurocentric and racist ideologists for reasons which should be given serious consideration. For this reason Humboldt’s work shall be analyzed according to the main characteristics of Orientalism formulated by Said: the typological judgement on the Other, the interrelation between language and nation, and the religious discourse on the Indo-European origins of European civilization. It will become clear that Humboldt’s position within the Orientalist discourse of his time is remarkably different from the one assumed by Said.

Introduction

From an epistemological perspective, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s studies on the Oriental and East Asian languages and writing systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, Chinese, Polynesian) raise the question of his position in the Orientalist discourse of his time. Edward W. Said (1978) considers Humboldt to be part of the “official intellectual genealogy” of a Eurocentric discourse on the ‘Orient’ which, finally, served as an ideological legitimation of European colonialism:

The official intellectual genealogy would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt, Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir, to mention a few famous names almost at random from the nineteenth century. (Said, 1978, p. 99)2

The fact that Said sweepingly mentions Humboldt in one breath with a man like Joseph-Ernest Renan, whose thinking was based on the idea of linguistic races,3 with Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who is famous for his racial ideology,4 and Edward Henry Palmer, who was willing to work for the British occupation forces in Egypt,5 is due to the assumption that Humboldt’s linguistic anthropology is based on the racial premises of a language typology formulated in 1808 in Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (“Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier”) (Said, 1978, p. 365, fn. 50). Of course, this is a rash judgement – like many of Said’s judgements on details in his important book.6

Being an independent scholar, Humboldt may typify the non-political, at least noncolonial context of the genesis of Orientalist philology in Germany.7 Nonetheless, to state that a “cosmopolitan erudition” (“weltbürgerliche Gelehrsamkeit”, Mangold, 2004, p. 298)8 was a main characteristic of German Orientalism must be considered as insufficient when it comes down to the concrete philological works in question, because Said’s analysis targets the subtle intellectual measuring of ‘Oriental’ cultures using Eurocentric criteria. Humboldt, whose linguistic position is generally characterized by the endeavour to combine universalism and cultural difference, especially in his Orientalist studies, has slipped on to Said’s list of eurocentric and even racist ideologists for reasons which should be given serious consideration.

In line with Michel Foucault’s theory, Edward W. Said is interested in the reconstruction of a European discourse on other cultures that consists in judging differentiations, classificatory structures and mechanisms of intellectual appropriations. These discursive elements lie in deeper textual structures and may not converge with the programmatic intention of the texts. On the other hand, in keeping with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony and due to general hermeneutical reflections, Said, in contrast with Foucault, is also interested in the inconsistency of the textual material9 due to the divergent intellectual patterns and practices of different authors.10 But these individual aspects remain mostly ornamental variations in Said’s book, which focuses on the attitude of the European civilization as a whole towards a phenomenon that seems to be its cultural counterpart. With regard to this, Said’s main thesis is that the emergent field of Oriental studies in particular and its linguistic, anthropological, and sociological scientific disciplines supplied the subtle criteria for an intellectual mapping of other cultures and thus ideologically prepared the cartographical mapping of the ‘Oriental’ world and its colonization (Arens, 2004, p. 11 and p. 14). As for the construction of this intellectual hegemony of the ‘West’, Said attributes great importance to German scientists and philosophers:

Yet what German Orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, […]. (Said, 1978, p. 19)

For this reason Humboldt’s work shall be analyzed according to the main characteristics of Orientalism formulated by Said:11 (1) the link between philology, typological judgement on other languages, racism, and the appropriation of the Other; (2) the essentialist conception of the intellectual foundations of the ‘Orient’; (3) the interrelation between language and nation; and (4) the secular religion glorifying the supposed Indo-European origins of European civilization. It will become clear that Humboldt’s position within the Orientalist discourse of his time is remarkably different from the one that Said assumes. This analysis may be of minor importance with respect to the plausibility of Said’s thesis in general, which does not need to develop its convincing argument on the basis of a particular text. But nonetheless, the question of Humboldt’s position within European Orientalism must be raised, as it largely transcends mere moral aspects and refers to an epistemological problematic that has recently been exposed by Katherine Arens (2004, p. 12) concerning the specific configuration of the German Orientalist tradition in general. Programmatically centred around a beloved linguistic diversity, do Humboldt’s studies not reveal contrapuntal aspects that show an internal inconsistency and even the contradictory character of the discourse in general to a larger extent than Said proposes? For any study of the construction of knowledge in Europe regarding the languages and cultures that were encountered and dominated, this question is of great importance. For the research on Humboldt’s works, it appears to be urgent. Here, we have to deal with the hermeneutical question of Humboldt’s intellectual integrity. Provoked by Hans Aarsleff’s introduction (Aarsleff, 1988) to the English version of Humboldt’s Kawiuvre, there has been discussion of the racism verdict on Humboldt, focussing on the typological problems raised by the Chinese language and script (For an overview of this debate, see Joseph, 1999, p. 90).

With regard to these two aspects, taking Said’s work as the point of departure, this paper sets out to once again approach Humboldt’s precarious position within the Orientalist discourse in a more general way.

Section snippets

Language and culture

The idea of a deep correlation between language and national character, which was of paramount importance for the Romantic Movement and for the formation of historistic thinking in general, goes back to Herder (Berlin, 1999, Gardt, 2000a, Bär, 2000). Its classical formulation is to be found in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Kawi-Œuvre:

The mental individuality of a people and the shape of its language are so intimately fused with one another, that if one were given, the other would have to be completely 

The ‘German Nation’, India and Humboldt’s studies on Sanskrit

In his famous work on the language and wisdom of the Indians published in 1808, Friedrich Schlegel considers that the world’s languages fall into two groups: the Indo-European one arising from “reason” (“Vernunft”) and the other, including explicitly the Semitic languages, emerging from an “animal-like torpor” (“thierische Dumpfheit”) (Schlegel, 1808, pp. 62–66). This disastrous polygenetic theory became established in the cultural awareness of his time and extended beyond it (Timpanaro, 1972,

Language classification

The linguistic dichotomy proposed by Friedrich Schlegel is based on a fundamental conception of the genesis of linguistic forms: inflecting, i.e. Indo-European, languages are characterized by their initial capacity to generate grammatical forms out of the roots of words, which give them an “organic” character, “richness”, “durability”, and thus perfection. These are opposed to all the other languages, which were initially entirely or largely without inflection and which built up their

The case of Chinese and Humboldt’s ambivalent typological position

In their detailed study, Jean Rousseau and Denis Thouard (1999) trace the development through which Humboldt goes in his analysis of the Chinese language. In his treatise On the Origin of Grammatical Forms and their Influence on the Development of Ideas (GS IV, pp. 285–313) published in 1821, Humboldt had explicated a teleological conception of language evolution that tends towards the ultimate realization of the inflecting principle (Thouard, 1999, p. 15, p. 21). Being without inflection,

Conclusions

To maintain that Humboldt’s language theory is racist is undoubtedly misleading. Humboldt was not a racist. The racism verdict primarily touches on moral and ideological questions. This analysis of Humboldt’s linguistic project with regard to the ideological (especially Indo-European and nationalist) foundations of European Orientalism has shown that Humboldt’s cultural conception of languages is anything but racist. It conforms with his own research programme that goes back to the question of, ...