Acknowledgement: This essay was written by Edward P. Butler, Independent Scholar.The critique of German Indology in The Nay Science is aimed not merely at disclosing the ideologies and discourses of power animating the work of a certain body of researchers in a single subdiscipline of the humanities, but rather, as its Prologue reveals, at freeing space through this critique for the emergence of a new philology.German Indology proves the ideal point from which to launch this critique for several overlapping reasons. German Indology is linked to an event of world historical importance, namely the project of German nationalist intellectuals to appropriate for themselves an "Aryan" identity. Furthermore, German Indology constituted the cutting-edge of European intellectual response to the challenge of Indian thought, an unbroken polytheistic intellectual tradition reaching back to antiquity, which by its very existence implicitly called into question the sundered relationship of European thinkers to their own antiquity. And Indology provided a model for the application of the positivistic ideals of nineteenthcentury philology to the works of other civilizations which might similarly threaten to participate in the European intellectual conversation not as museum pieces, but as partners in real time, such as Chinese thought, or to complicate the European narrative about its own antiquity, such as the rediscovery of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought, or about its colonial intentions, as the study of thought from the Americas and Africa.The critical undertaking launched by The Nay Science therefore must continue to stimulate self-criticism in a host of other philological disciplines, including, especially, Classics, insofar as modern philology is grounded in the peculiar relationship of modern European thought to its roots in pagan antiquity, a relationship of appropriation and would-be sublation implicitly presented as a model to contemporary non-Western civilizations of the relationship to which they might aspire regarding their own traditions, with or without the adjunct proffered them by Christian missionaries. Alongside this critical effort, though, must come the effort toward discerning the principles of a new philology embodying the Platonic sense of a philia or eros toward logos or discourse, in which the search for psychogonic value in texts would be recognized as inseparable from their technical grasp. The Nay Science, with uncommon discipline, deploys the gray archival work of Foucauldian genealogy in the service of this possibility, that future scholars might, looking up from the texts over which
