1999: Humanism and Heroism Author(s): Edward W. Said Source: PMLA, Vol. 115, No.

7, Special Millennium Issue (Dec., 2000), p. 1946 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463612 Accessed: 06/07/2010 21:12
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1946

Special MillenniumIssue

PMLA

and 1999:Humanism Heroism

EDWARD W. SAID

RECALLHERE THAT many pages, an abundance of articles and books, have recently lamented the decline of literacy, the death of literature,and the need to returnto the classical Westerncanon. Our profession today is riven by the chasm that separates proponentsof whateveris considerednew and progressive from those who feel that the literary text, our greatest authors, the canon, the traditionalmodes of study have been abandoned to jargon and barbarism.I don't want to repeat what I have said in my MLANewsletter columns over the past year, except to underline the genuine intellectual predicamentthat faces us, as we need to look beyond Eurocentrism and the set of dominating as well as ethnocentric attitudesthat accompanyit while remaining trueto intellectualcoherenceand,yes, humanistic dignity in professing literature, language, and culture. [. ..] Parenthetically I should like here to note that much of the hubristhat I have found so repellent in the poorly informed encomiums to

NOW I'D LIKETO

the Western humanistic tradition from Burkhardtto Kristeller to Allan Bloom and his followers is based on a reprehensiblystubbornand deep ignorance about other traditionsin which many of the attitudes and practices associated with figures such as Ficino, Montaigne, and Erasmuswere prefiguredlong before the Europeans came upon them. This is specially true of the Islamic schools, in addition to Indian and Chinese humanists who were doing what we think of ratherquaintly as Westernthings well before the West was capable of either knowing about or doing them itself. The recent work of George Makdisi, now emeritusprofessor at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, has definitively traced humanistic dialogue, editing, and disputationto the greatIslamic schools of Andalusia, North Africa, the Arab world, and Sicily well before a few Italian humanists seized on them as models; similarly important work by my Columbiacolleague George Saliba has shown through very convincing evidence that in the hard sciences (astronomy, mathematics, physics, etc.) even so redoubtablyrevolutionarya figure as Copernicuswas dependent on earlier non-Europeanscientists for his major work.