it , i f i } i if: i hil II i " Wh WIT TIL 132 ORIENTALISM of praise—not unambiguously, and not in the cursory way that I am now describing—is their profound relation to modernity, a relation that is given them by their practice of philology. Philology problematizes—itself, its practitioner, the present. It embodies a peculiar condition of being modem and European, since neither of those two categories has true meaning without being related to an earlier alien culture and time. What Nietzsche also sees is philology as something born, made in the Viconian sense as a sign of human enterprise, created as a category of human