PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/191455 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-04 and may be subject to change. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE HUMANITIES Ideals and Practices of Scholarship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, 1750 – 1850 Floris Solleveld The Transformation of the Humanities The Transformation of the Humanities Ideals and Practices of Scholarship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, 1750-1850 Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 9 april 2018 om 16:30 precies door Floris Otto Solleveld geboren op 9 juli 1982 te Amsterdam Promotoren: Prof. dr. Peter Rietbergen Prof. dr. Rens Bod (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. Alicia Montoya Prof. dr. Christoph Lüthy Prof. dr. Joep Leerssen (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Prof. dr. Wijnand Mijnhardt (Universiteit Utrecht) Dr. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen (Roskilde Universitet, Denemarken) Contents 1. Introduction: The Transformation of the Humanities 9 What were the Humanities? 14 What was a Scholar? 24 A Map of the Learned World 31 A Scientific Revolution? 34 Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Conceptual Change 39 An Integrated Approach 47 Styles of Reasoning 48 Forms of Presentation 54 Ways of Criticism 64 Types of Intertextuality 69 2. A Science of Letters? Forms of ‘Normal Science’ in the 18th-century Humanities 79 The Ideal of Grand History and the Practice of Compilation 84 Antiquarianism and the Compendium 92 Rethinking Universal History 103 General Grammar and the ‘Science of Language’ 114 Strange Hybrids and the ‘Origin of Language’ Debate 124 The End of ‘Letters’? 136 3. Histoire Philosophique 139 What was Histoire Philosophique? 141 Perfecting the ‘Historical Art’: Philosophical History in the British Enlightenment 146 Philosophical History and the Non-Western World 153 From Pragmatische Geschichte and Universalgeschichte to Philosophical History 161 The Afterlife of Histoire Philosophique 169 Conclusion 173 5 4. Reshuffling the Faculties: Academic Reforms and the Emancipation of Philosophy 175 The Emancipation and Transformation of Philosophy 176 Idéologie and the Reformulation of Knowledge 187 Bildung and the Prussian Bildungsreform 197 Bildung abroad: Comparative Reports and British Debates 209 5. The Entanglement and Separation of Linguistics and Philology 217 Language Comparison and Information Explosion 220 Schlegel and Adelung: Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Unzeitgleichen 224 Grimm: Philology as a Self-correcting Enterprise 235 Raynouard and Diez: from Provençal Poetry to Romance Linguistics 242 Incorporating the Paper Trail 249 Extending the Comparative View 258 Organicism, Typology, and Professionalization 263 6. New Histories: Redefining Literature and Antiquity 269 From ‘Letters’ to Literature 271 New Antiquity: Egypt and Mesopotamia 284 Re-imagining Antiquity: Altertumswissenschaft between History and Philology 296 7. Re-imagining History 305 Mill reviews Michelet: comparing French, British, and German History Writing 308 Reviewing History 316 Historicism as Model-construction 319 From Philosophy and Poetry to Professionalism 330 8. Conclusion 333 6 Literature 343 Illustrations 373 Summary 375 Samenvatting 381 Acknowledgements 387 7 1. Introduction: The Transformation of the Humanities In the second half of the 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, there is a lot of revolutionary rhetoric in the domains of scholarship that we now call the humanities. Pro- grammes and overviews for new sciences and disciplines are published; scholars proclaim in forewords that their works will put the study of art, antiquity, grammar, or humanity at large on a new footing; in the same forewords, they declare the work of their predeces- sors obsolete, unsystematic, wrong, or unscientific; or worse, they keep silent about them, thereby implicitly declaring their work irrelevant. The rhetoric can be found in every do- main of study that deals with language, history, or culture; sometimes it coincides with political upheavals and institutional reforms. That rhetoric is not mere rhetoric. Arguably, what we now call ‘the humanities’ took shape in this period. A new model of research replaces the older: the humanist érudit and the Enlightenment philosophe make way for the academic professional. A diffuse set of scholarly pursuits is stratified into disciplines: linguistics, history, philology, art history, archaeology, and to some extent also philosophy and theology. Still, it is obviously coun- terfactual, in view of the mass of early modern and Enlightenment scholarly production, to claim that the humanities were created in this period; that is why this study speaks of transformation. In view of all the revolutionary rhetoric, and all the very real changes that came along with it, one could even speak of a revolution. This book is a study of this transformation, or these transformations. The question is, in plain words, how we ended up with what we now call the humanities. More theoret- ically speaking, the aim is to rethink what scholars in the past were doing – and what, to a large extent, they still are doing – by looking at how the modern humanities took shape. The outcome is not a given: it was neither predetermined nor unambiguous. Whatever the scholars discussed in this book said or thought they were doing, ‘shaping the humanities’ was not part of their agenda, and in different countries, what we came to call the hu- manities took different shapes. The domain of the humanities does not fully overlap with Geisteswissenschaften or sciences humaines. The transformations that shaped them are hard to put under a common denominator. ‘Humanities’ or ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ did not exist by that name in 1750 or 1800; the very notion of Geisteswissenschaften was only introduced 9 towards the middle of the 19th century. Therefore, to write a book about ‘the transforma- tion of the humanities’ is to consciously use an anachronism. To the extent that the changes in the study of history, language, and culture mark a transition from a prescientific to a scientific state, the results of that transition have never been conclusive. Using a phrase that has become less popular in recent decades, one could sum up my research in one question: was there a scientific revolution in the humanities around 1800? Or, to rephrase it in a way that brackets out questions about the meaning and utility of the term ‘scientific revolution’, to what extent has our current thinking about language, culture and history been shaped, altered, and verwissenschaftlicht during this period? In Ian Hack- ing’s words, the question is also “how these various concepts, practices and institutions, which we can treat as objects of knowledge, at the same time disclose new possibilities for human choice and action”.1 The way in which I mean to answer this question is by develop- ing a new theoretical framework for studying scholarly reasoning and conceptual change, and to apply that to the transformation or transformations summarized here. There has been, undoubtedly, change. Scholars in the 19th century use different kinds of source material, which they can gather or consult in more ways and in greater quantities than before. They do different things with this material, both in scrutinizing and defining it and in arranging and presenting it. In short, there are changes in the ways information is transformed into knowledge. This coincides – at least in time – with changes in the way scholars define and present themselves and their scholarly enterprise. A scholar in the 19th century does not merely do different things, he is also a different kind of person, living in a different world. But in spite of all the intensification, professionalization and discipline formation, the status of scholarship continues to be problematic. The introduction of the term ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ itself is partly a defense move against the rise of the exact sciences within the German university system, a way to assert the scientific status of the humanities without assimilating them to the exact sciences. There is a continuous trail of critique of bookish dullness from Pope’s Dunciad Variorum to Nietzsche’s Über Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, and that critique, again, is more than mere rhetoric; it shows that the accumulation of facts will not do, and that scholarship in the humanities, no matter how methodologically advanced or ‘scientific’, continually has to re-assert its own relevance. The period covered in this study is primarily the period between ca. 1750-1850 that Reinhart Koselleck controversially identified as the ‘Sattelzeit’.2 Like most historical de- marcations, the line is not strict. Transformations in this period, in the humanities or else- where, cannot be understood without taking into account antecendents in the early 18th 1 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge (Mass.) & London: Harvard UP 2002), 4 2 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung”, in: R. Koselleck, O. Brunner & W. Conze (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. I (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1972), xv; cf. Stefan Jordan, “Die Sattelzeit: Transforma- tion des Denkens oder revolutionärer Paradigmenwechsel?”, in A. Landwehr