William Warburton: An Eighteenth Century Bishop Fallen among Post‐Structuralists

Extract

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The work in question is The Divine Legation of Moses; written by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester and literary controversialist in 1738. It was first set upon by Frenchmen in 1744, when the section of the work dealing with the origin of language was removed from its original theological context and translated by Leonard des Malpeines as the Essai sur les Hieroglyphes des Egyptiens. Warburton’s subsequent influence on thought concerning language has been compared to that of Saussure in our own day, it is felt at many places in the Encyclopédie, and in the writings of Condillac and Rousseau. With the revival of interest in the problematic of the origin of language in the climate of Post-Structuralism, Malpeines edition was republished in Paris in 1977, smothered with critical commentary by Patrick Tort and Jacques Derrida. For the latter Warburton has proved a significant influence.

In what follows I am going to give a brief outline of Warburton’s thoughts concerning the origin of language in the original context of his concern with biblical exegesis. Then I shall describe what is made of his reflections by the Post-Structuralists. Finally I will call in not one but three Samaritans, intellectually alien for Warburton in his own century, whose insights may yet rescue him from his 20th century predicament.