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Knowledge and Method: The Parisian Legacy

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Philology and the Appropriation of the World

Part of the book series: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences ((SHSSHS))

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Abstract

In an important study Anouar Louca interprets Champollion’s desire to understand the culture of ancient Egypt as a romantic impulse, following an aesthetic a priori which cannot be subsumed under the concept of analytical science. If the notion of a ‘romantic Champollion’ is aimed against the reclaiming of Champollion as a scientific figurehead of the French imperial regime, it makes sense not to open up a simple opposition. Champollion’s work seems an exception not because of its roots in an epistemic system other than French universalism, which would be a romanticist genealogical understanding of culture (against civilisation), or even in an ‘alterocentrism’. On the contrary, it is precisely because his approach is located within the episteme of late Enlightenment that it marks a significant rupture within this system of knowledge. Even if it is true that his empirical accomplishments contributed to the emerging success of a historical and comparative philology, Champollion’s scientific project is not conceivable without its rootedness in the Ideologists’ tradition of thought. In his work, too, in spite of its strong focus on empirical-systematic methodology of collecting and evaluating materials, the lifelong perspective remained philological in the larger sense of a cultural interpretation of texts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Foucault ([1966] 1970: 280–294, particularly 285f.).

  2. 2.

    See Oesterreicher (1998: 221f.), Harris (2005: 64f.), Messling (2008, introduction), and Trabant (1990: 193, footnote 17), who points out that the concept of the ‘oralisation’ of language studies in the nineteenth century is problematic; see also Coulmas (1985: 95–97).

  3. 3.

    See Wolf (1807: particularly 34–49). Regarding the political and philosophical group of the Idéologues, see Moravia (1974), Busse and Trabant (1986), Haßler (1999), and Désirat (2000).

  4. 4.

    See Louca (2006: 99–116, here 99).

  5. 5.

    My impression is that we find such a tendency towards romanticisation at the end of the chapter in Louca’s book titled ‘Déchiffrer Champollion’ (2006: see mainly 112–116). Still, we must consider the biographical and intellectual position from which Louca wrote his book, and which seems to me to illuminate his attempt to ‘rescue’ a certain French Orientalism: ‘The prejudice, however, resists. It confirms an enormous delay in the trail to be blazed from imperialism to decolonisation. This is a delay which will remain considerable as long as people are happy to see a figure such as Champollion in Bartholdi, and as long as there is a refusal to decentre oneself in order to become aware of this’; Louca (2006: 101). For a discussion of Bartholdi’s statue, see the end of the introduction to this book as well as Messling (2022).

  6. 6.

    Louca (2006: 106).

  7. 7.

    See Schlieben-Lange (1986: 198).

  8. 8.

    Werner Krauss ([1978] 1987: 13).

  9. 9.

    See Schlieben-Lange (1986: especially 182).

  10. 10.

    See the chapter ‘Dixième Époque—Des progrès futurs de l’esprit humain’ (Condorcet [1795] 1988: 265–296).

  11. 11.

    This juxtaposition of the terms technology and techniques takes recourse to Michel Serres’s anthropology: ‘The changes in the recording media for information—“soft” technologies, at the negentropic scale—therefore seem, by their flexibility, speed and capacity for expansion, to influence individual behaviour and social organisation more strongly than the aforementioned revolutions engendered by the “hard” technologies, at the entropic scale, such as the Industrial Revolution. However much mechanics and thermodynamics have long introduced us to a precise and developed knowledge of the hard technologies and their laws, energy constants or engine outputs, we are still largely ignorant of the laws of the soft technologies, so distinct in orders of magnitude and applications. In the French language, I have therefore kept the Anglicism technologie for the set of man-made objects that manipulate signs, that is to say, logos, and oppose it to techniques, whose energy field of action differs from the first one by a factor of 1016.’ Serres (2019: 176).

  12. 12.

    Condorcet ([1795] 2012: 6).

  13. 13.

    See the ‘Avertissement de l’auteur’ to the Leçons d’Histoire (Volney [1788–1795] 1989: 503–507). And ‘vérité de faits’ (Volney [1788–1795] 1989: 519).

  14. 14.

    For a discussion of the increasing importance of historiography in the scientific landscape of the late Enlightenment era, see Jaeger and Rüsen (1992: 18f.).

  15. 15.

    Schlieben-Lange (1986: 194).

  16. 16.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij).

  17. 17.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij).

  18. 18.

    Hartleben (1906/I: 197). See also Champollion’s Aperçu des résultats historiques de la découverte de l’alphabet hiéroglyphique égyptien (1827) and Champollion (1824a: 172–176), where he explains the use of his decipherment for the evaluation of the dominant theories of his time on the history of ancient Egypt.

  19. 19.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij).

  20. 20.

    See Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: ij).

  21. 21.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij).

  22. 22.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij).

  23. 23.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iij–iv).

  24. 24.

    Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iv).

  25. 25.

    See Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: iv). Champollion’s conception thus paradigmatically displays a disciplinary interconnection which is structurally based in the claim of a ‘new’ oriental philology but receives a significant impetus through his experience in the field of archaeology in Egypt (see Gran-Aymerich 1998: 63–107). In a wider framework this is reflected in the orientation of the Société asiatique, founded in 1822, both conceptually and in terms of its publications (see Fenet et al. 2007: 52).

  26. 26.

    Foucault ([1969] 1972: 7).

  27. 27.

    Champollion (1824a, Préface: xj). In this sense, Champollion’s position can be read as a footnote to the ‘Orientalism’ unmasked by Said ([1978] 1995)—as a powerful discourse of the ‘West’ about the ‘Orient’ and as a politically motivated negation of the capacity of the Arabic world to speak up for itself. Said’s thesis (see particularly [1978] 1995: 96ff.)—that the philological return to Oriental antiquity would have corroborated the image of the classical, ‘eternal Orient’ and established the foundation for the non-perception and non-appreciation of the ‘real’ Arabic world—needs to be interrogated again in view of its polemic edge, in spite of the manifest truth of the claims it makes about colonialism. This is necessary since Champollion does not give back, to Egypt, its own language but another one than that of the Islamic Orient. Stating that this is not a part of Oriental identity, even on a theoretical level, would mean supporting an equally harsh anthropological determinism.

  28. 28.

    Foucault ([1969] 1972: 7).

  29. 29.

    Boeckh elaborates regarding the definition of ‘what has come to be cognised’: ‘Philology presupposes that a given knowledge exists everywhere, and that its own task is to recognise this knowledge. The history of all sciences is thus philological. But this does not exhaust the concept of philology; rather, it coincides with that of history in the broadest sense’ (Boeckh 1877: 10). To speak with Horstmann: Boeckh’s description of the object of philological investigation as ‘what has been cognised’ is thus the ‘entire historical reality, i.e., everything that has impressed its seal on human beings’ (Horstmann 2010: 66; on the interpretation of the term, see ibid., 66–68).

  30. 30.

    Both quotes: Boeckh (1877: 10).

  31. 31.

    Both quotes ibid.: 11.

  32. 32.

    Champollion, Précis (Préface: ix). See Michel Foucault’s reflection on the notion of the document as ‘an inert material’ Foucault ([1969] 1972: 7).

  33. 33.

    Foucault ([1969] 1972: 7).

  34. 34.

    Champollion ([1822] 1963: 40).

  35. 35.

    See for instance the accounts given by Haarmann (1991: 221f.) and Jensen ([1935] 1969: 47ff.); Jensen, in particular, also represents a counter-position via various representatives but finally supports the developmental hypothesis of ideography via logography to phonography, since it would be difficult ‘to believe that the development of writing in Egypt should have taken another course as everywhere else where we are in the position to observe and reconstruct it’. Ignace J. Gelb’s prominent economistic and evolutionary theory of the development of writing (see Gelb 1952: particularly 69 and 200 f.) also interpreted Egyptian writing as a word syllable system from which Western Semitic writing emerged as monosyllabic script (see Gelb 1952: 194ff.) in order to be able to integrate the phonetic hieroglyphs; this, however, contradicts the more recent view that mono-consonantal signs already existed in the very early stages of Egyptian writing (see Kahl 2003: 129 f.). Early on, Cohen (1953: 32) argued cautiously against the developmental hypothesis. On this point more generally, see Coulmas (1994: particularly 262).

  36. 36.

    See Kahl (2003) and Parkinson (1999: 74); the latter gives slightly later dates for sentence and text.

  37. 37.

    For this important fact, I am grateful to Stephan Seidlmayer (Freie Universität Berlin and Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), who was also so kind to point out to me the literature on the results of the excavation in Abydos.

  38. 38.

    The thesis, formulated around 2007 by the German adventurer and researcher Carlo Bergmann, of the existence of prehistoric ideographic hieroglyphic writing, which he based on the discovery of hieroglyphs in the area of Djedefre (in the Libyan desert between Gilf Kebir and the Dakhla Oasis), to be found on an animalistic image of Neolithic appearance, seems implausible from the perspective of current debates. Nonetheless, the cultural historical exploration of the discoveries in the Sahara, which today extend to the northeast part of Chad and northern Sudan, are also interesting in the context of the history and typology of Egyptian writing. On this point, see Young (2007).

  39. 39.

    Dreyer (1998: 181). The historical stage ‘Naqada IIIa2’ is dated to about 3200 BC. Dreyer (2003: 123f.) supposes that even older cylinder seals and inscriptions on pottery (ca. 3400 BC), found in Tomb U-j, are already hieroglyphs; cf. however the opposing opinion of Kahl (2003: 130f.).

  40. 40.

    See Kahl (2003: 127).

  41. 41.

    On this point, see Champollion ([1822] 1963: 41).

  42. 42.

    See ibid.

  43. 43.

    Champollion (1824, Introduction: 11). Champollion reconfirmed these statements in their very principle in his Grammaire Égyptienne: ‘My works have shown … that the phonetic signs, just as the letters of our alphabet, constituted on the contrary by far the largest part of the Egyptian texts—hieroglyphic, hieratic, and Demotic—where they represented the sounds and the articulations of the words proper to the spoken Egyptian language’; Champollion ([1836] 1984, Introduction: xviij).

  44. 44.

    Champollion ([1822] 1963: 41–42).

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Messling, M. (2023). Knowledge and Method: The Parisian Legacy. In: Philology and the Appropriation of the World . Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12894-3_3

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