Oriental Enlightenment

The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought

J.J. Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134784738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is the place of Eastern thought - Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism - in the Western intellectual tradition? Oriental Enlightenment shows how, despite current talk of 'globalization', there is still a reluctance to accept that the West could have borrowed anything of significance from the East, and explores a critique of the 'orientalist' view that we must regard any study of the East through the lens of Western colonialism and domination.
Oriental Enlightenment provides a lucid introduction to the fascination Eastern thought has exerted on Western minds since the Renaissance.

Part I

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Introduction

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Chapter 1

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Orientations
The issues

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THE EAST: EUROPE’S ‘OTHER’

He who knows himself and other, Will also recognise that East and West cannot be separated.

(Goethe)

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. Till Earth and Sky stand presently, at God’s great Judgement Seat.

(Kipling)

The contradiction between these two opinions points to an age-old ambivalence in the West’s attitude towards the East. On the one hand it has been a source of inspiration, fount of an ancient wisdom, a culturally rich civilisation which is far superior to, and can be used to reflect on the inadequacies of, our own. On the other, it is an alien region of looming threat and impenetrable mystery, long locked in its stagnant past until rudely awakened by the modernising impact of the West. It is a place which invites imaginative flights and exaggerations of all kinds. On the one hand, according to Voltaire, the East is the civilisation ‘to which the West owes everything’, and for Arnold Toynbee the West’s encounter with the East is one of the most significant world events of our time. Others have been less enthusiastic: C.S.Peirce spoke contemptuously of ‘the monstrous mysticism of the East’, and Arthur Koestler dismissed its religions as ‘a web of solemn absurdities’. For some, like Goethe, the relationship is deep and significant and, according to the sinologist Joseph Needham, there has been a dialogue going on for 3,000 years between ‘the two ends of the Old World’ in which East and West have greatly influenced each other. For others the relationship is peripheral and ephemeral, only really conspicuous in the brief neo-Romantic movement of the 1960s when young men and women went Eastwards in search of ‘pop nirvana’.

This ambivalence is evident in a whole range of familiar stereotypes and myths which serve to place East and West in a variety of opposing or complementary relationships with each other. Some of these are tied to popular attitudes and prejudices, some to religious and political propaganda, and some originate from more scholarly sources and serve serious intellectual purposes. Oriental ‘splendour’, ‘sensuality’, ‘cunning’, and ‘cruelty’ are well-known examples of this genre. The East has often been perceived as colourful and alluring, summed up in the word ‘exotic’, or by contrast as sinister and threatening, as in such evocative phrases as ‘yellow peril’, ‘Asiatic hordes’, ‘Oriental despotism’. Also familiar is the set of attitudes summed up in phrases like ‘the mystical Orient’ which carry the alluring appeal of spiritual sublimity and also of benighted obscurantism.¹ Broadening out from such stereotypes we can discern a perplexing variety of attitudes, ranging from the eulogistic to the defamatory. Needham expresses the former attitude in his remark that ‘Chinese civilisation has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn’ (1969a:176).

However, even where there was respect for the East, often to the point of elevating it to a position high above the ‘decadent’ West, the otherness, even the strangeness, of the East has been emphasised; thus C.G.Jung, who was as sympathetic as any in the twentieth century towards the East, spoke of ‘the strangeness, one might almost say…incomprehensibility, of the Eastern psyche’ (1978:187). And the Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has argued that for Europeans ‘Asia came to stand for something both unknown and distant yet also to be feared’, in psychological terms ‘a cipher for the Western unconscious, the repository of all that is dark, unacknowledged, feminine, sensual, repressed and liable to eruption’ (1994:234).

The idea of the East as some shadowy, threatening ‘other’ with which the West is in sharp conflict, and the essentialising of East and West into two simple and contrastive categories, has a long history and can be traced back to the time of Herodotus and to the epic conflict between Hellenes and Persians, giving rise to the mythical contrast between the heroic, liberty-loving and dynamic West and the despotic, stagnant and passive East. This idea has taken various forms in more recent times. The historian Raghavan Iyer, for example, has spoken of a ‘glass curtain’ that the West has created between itself and the lands and cultures of the East, and has drawn attention to what he describes as ‘an eternal schism’ between Asians and Europeans which is backed by ‘the dubious notion of an eternal East-West conflict, the extravagant assumption of a basic dichotomy in modes of thought and ways of life’ (1965:5 and 7). And the political theorist Samuel Huntington has recently argued that the conflict between East and West is part of a wider ‘clash of civilisations’, involving a fundamental cultural cleavage between Western and other civilisations which goes deeper than national or ideological differences (see Huntington 1993). Such polarities have sometimes taken less obviously conflictual form and been manifested in the archetypal myth of East and West as mutually complementary opposites, a view which has often encouraged the elevation of the East to sublime heights, though it has also at times sanctioned less flattering attitudes. In the hands of some thinkers this duality carries the Romantic message of the ‘marriage of East and West’ and the pursuit of the ultimate unity of the human spirit which has had the misfortune to become bifurcated in the modern age, the West’s ‘rationalistic and ethical, positivistic and practical’ mind needing to be supplemented by ‘the Eastern mind [which] is more inclined to inward life and intuitive thinking’ (Radhakrishnan 1939:48). For some it signifies the possibility of a more harmonious and complete mental life that encourages the integration of opposite yet complementary psychic factors such as introverted and extraverted tendencies, or which brings into balance the ‘feminine’ qualities of the East and the ‘masculine’ qualities of the West. And for yet others it has powerful political implications, addressing the modern dilemma of a world which is converging socially and economically, yet which at the same time is riven with mutual enmity and strife, and which needs the complementary qualities of both East and West. On the other side of the coin, such polarities have at times betokened fundamentally oppressive attitudes whereby, whether consciously or otherwise, the East is seen as the negative complement of the West, a passive inferior consort to the controlling masculine West, a culture characterised by emotional, feminine weakness, contrasted with the rational, male strength of its Western other.²

Equivocal attitudes such as these go some way to explain why there is still a reluctance in the academic world to take traditional Asian thought seriously. Even in times characterised by the globalisation of culture there still remains an endemic Eurocentrism, a persistent reluctance to accept that the West could ever have borrowed anything of significance from the East, or to see the place of Eastern thought within the Western tradition as much more than a recent manifestation, evanescent and intellectually lightweight, at best only a trivial part of a wider reaction against the modern world. For some the Orient is still associated with shady occultist flirtations, the unconscious rumblings of the repressed irrational urges of a culture that has put its faith in scientific rationalism. For others Eastern interests remain little more than the manifestation of the exotic but inconsequential extravagances of New Age mysticism. Many academics continue to feel a certain embarrassment about the whole subject of the East, and not only have histories of philosophy tended to exclude Eastern thought ‘Philosophy speaks Greek and only Greek’ as Simon Critchley ironically put it (1995:18)—but the role of Eastern thought within the broad Western intellectual tradition has largely been ignored by historians of ideas.³ My aim in this book is to try to alter such perceptions and to show that throughout the modern period from the time of the Renaissance onwards, the East has exercised a strong fascination over Western minds, and has entered into Western cultural and intellectual life in ways which are of considerably more than passing significance within the history of Western ideas. I shall draw attention to the long tradition of orientalist research and intellectual curiosity in Europe and America which has helped to place religious and philosophical ideas of India, China, and Japan within the mainstream of Western thought, indicating how in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods the ‘East’ was a central theme of intellectual debates, and that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ideas from the Orient have played an increasingly serious role in a wide variety of contexts. Moreover, I shall suggest that the information flowing Westwards from these cultures has provided not merely entertainment and distraction, a sort of exotic time out, as is often supposed, but also an instrument of serious selfquestioning and self-renewal, whether for good or ill, an external reference point from which to direct the light of critical inquiry into Western traditions and belief systems, and with which to inspire new possibilities.

The aim of this book, then, is to present a challenge to this myth, not only by displaying the Eurocentric narrowness of intellectual historiography, but also by bringing into sharp relief the momentous intellectual encounter that has indeed taken place between ‘the two ends of the Old World’. This encounter of ideas between East and West over a considerable historical period is surprising enough in itself. What is all the more paradoxical is that it has occurred in the period of the rapid extension of Western military and economic power over the nations of South and East Asia, a period in which Western global superiority was being exerted and celebrated in so many fields of cultural endeavour. On the face of it, there is something deeply puzzling about the fact that the West, in a manner which is almost unique amongst major imperial powers, while exerting its hegemony over the East, has simultaneously admired it, elevated it, and held it up as a model, an ideal to be aspired to and emulated, going Eastwards as a ‘pilgrim in sackcloth and ashes, anxious to prostrate himself at the guru’s feet’ (Koestler 1960:11). Much of the West’s perception of the East may have been clouded by fantasy and wishful thinking; as we shall see, the representations of the East by Western thinkers often tell us more about the minds of the latter than of the former. Nonetheless, it remains a matter of astonishment that generations of intellectuals and scholars, followed by an ever-growing sample of the educated public, have sought insight and inspiration in far-off lands in the East, and have endeavoured to incorporate the Orient into their own thinking. As the Indologist Wilhelm Halbfass observes, by contrast with the civilisations of Asia which have not spontaneously reached out towards Europe, the East has been ‘the goal and referent of Utopian projections, of searching for the identity and the origins of Europe, of European self-questioning and self-criticism’ (1988:369).

There is, of course, another side to this story. The peoples and cultures of Asia have also been the objects of political and economic domination, and of arrogant, racist opprobrium in the West. The story of the relationship between the Western colonial powers and the nations of the East is not only one of enlightened intellectual and cultural exploration, but is often a shameful one of colonial exploitation and expropriation in which the peoples of Asia have been perceived as the inferior complement to the West, its opposite ‘other’, the bearer of negative qualities whereby the West’s own superiority is by contrast underscored and its rule legitimised. It is painfully evident that the West has approached Asia ‘armed with gun-and-gospel truth’ (Koestler 1960:11), systematically imposing its religions, its values, and its legal and political systems on Eastern nations, frequently careless of local sensitivities and indifferent to indigenous traditions. Moreover, recent postcolonial studies have drawn attention to the way in which oppressive and racist attitudes not only are to be found in the historical reality of empire, but also have become firmly inscribed in Western discourse at many levels, even at a time when the official apparatus of colonial rule has been all but dismantled. Colonialism survives in postcolonial minds and societies, for as one recent book in this field puts it: ‘The hegemony of Europe did not end with the raising of a hundred national flags [for] its legacy of division and racism are alive and well in political, media, and legal domains’ (Tiffin and Lawson 1994:9). As I have already indicated, and as we shall discover in greater detail in the course of this work, there is indeed something deeply ambivalent about the West’s attitude towards the East. Even where the conscious intentions and attitudes of Westerners have appeared most benign and reverential towards the East, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the ‘Light of Asia’ has been exploited for Western purposes with as much ruthlessness as more tangible substances. There are those who would argue that, even where Western interests have been hallmarked with the purest of scientific intentions, Asian philosophical and religious ideas have been commodified and expropriated in ways that reflect and reinforce the more overt manifestations of imperialist expansion. Some would go so far as to claim that the relationship between West and East in the modern period, however spiritual and lofty it may appear, must necessarily be understood in the final analysis as ‘a relationship of power, domination, of varying degrees of complex hegemony’ (Said 1985:5).

ORIENTALISM: TERMS AND THEMES

In this book, then, I shall seek to recover and re-examine the serious intellectual involvement—with all its incongruities and contrarieties—of the West with Eastern ideas. For the sake of convenience I shall employ the word orientalism to refer to the range of attitudes that have been evinced in the West towards the traditional religious and philosophical ideas and systems of South and East Asia. This is a debatable choice. ‘Orientalism’ has become a highly problematic term, one which is difficult to use in a neutral sense, and which according to the Islamicist Bernard Lewis ‘is by now…polluted beyond salvation’ (1993:103). Moreover, it is a word which in recent years has been more typically associated with attitudes towards the cultures of the Middle East than with those of South and East Asia which are the concern of the present study.⁴ The term first appeared in France in the 1830s, and has been employed since then in a variety of different ways: to refer to Oriental scholarship, to characterise a certain genre of romanticfantasy literature, to describe a genre of painting, and most significantly in recent times—to mark out a certain kind of ideological purview of the East which was a product of Western imperialism. The latter connotation is famously associated with Edward Said whose ideas are seminal to any debate on the subject matter of this book, as well as in the broad domain of postcolonial theory. A Palestinian who since 1963 has taught English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Said drew the concept into the centre of contention in the 1970s with his book Orientalism. There he used the term to launch a powerful critique of Western representations of the East, arguing that the ‘Orient’ is a Western construct, ‘a system of ideological fictions’, whose purpose is to reinforce and justify Western power over the Orient, and that Western knowledge of the Orient ‘has generally proceeded not only from dominion and confrontation but also from cultural antipathy’ (1985:321 and 155).⁵ To be sure, Said’s concern in that book was, for the most part, with the Islamic world of the Middle East. Our concern in the present book, by contrast, will be with the philosophical/religious systems associated with the countries of South and East Asia, and which are usually known under such names as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.⁶ Nevertheless, as a consequence of Said’s writings the whole debate about Europe’s relationship with its ‘other’ has been refigured, and has extended its terms of reference outwards to engage with a whole range of contemporary intellectual debates, into issues concerning, for example, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, discourse theory, and postmodernism, one consequence of which is that any study of the West’s relationship with Eastern thought must be contextualised within the debate which Said’s work helped to initiate.

However, while the present work is indebted to Said, it will follow a path which is in certain important respects different from his own. Where Said painted orientalism in sombre hues, using it as the basis for a powerful ideological critique of Western liberalism, I shall use it to uncover a wider range of attitudes, both dark and light, and to recover a richer and often more affirmative orientalism, seeking to show that the West has endeavoured to integrate Eastern thought into its own intellectual concerns in a manner which, on the face of it, cannot be fully understood in terms of ‘power’ and ‘domination’. Where Said, drawing on Michel Foucault’s work concerning the relationship between knowledge and power, saw orientalism as a ‘master narrative’ of Western imperialism which constructs and controls its subjugated other, I shall portray it as tending to confront the structures of Western knowledge and power and to engage with Eastern ideas in ways which are more creative, more open-textured, and more reciprocal than are allowed for in Said’s critique. This does not by any means imply a total rejection of Said’s attitude of suspicion towards orientalism or his attempts to politicise it. Western representations of the East have certainly been shaped to some extent by colonial preoccupations and ethnocentric biases, and, following Said, a number of recent studies have documented and discussed the repressive and discriminative nature of much Western discourse about non-European peoples and cultures. However, while recognising that orientalism can only be understood adequately within the framework of colonialism and the imperialist expansion of the West, I wish to avoid seeing it as simply a mask for racism or as a purely Western construct which serves as a rationalisation of colonial domination. European hegemony over Asia represents a necessary but not a sufficient condition for orientalism. Power has been wielded over the Orient by superior guns and commercial muscle, as well as by the application of organising and classifying schemes which ‘place’ the East within a Western intellectual structure. On the face of it this is not essentially different from the way in which any expansionist nation or tribe seeks to dominate and control the resources and minds of its neighbours, but what is peculiar in the case of orientalism is the degree to which the colonised ideas have been elevated above those of the coloniser, and have been used to challenge and disrupt the master narratives of the colonising powers. Orientalism, I shall argue, cannot simply be identified with the ruling imperialist ideology, for in the Western context it represents a counter-movement, a subversive entelechy, albeit not a unified or consciously organised one, which in various ways has often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive structures of imperial power.

In order to make this case adequately I shall examine a wide range of orientalist texts and debates from the seventeenth century up to the present time. There have been many admirable studies of the relationship between Eastern and Western thought in specific periods and from different perspectives, studies which have focused for example on the the Enlightenment or the Romantic periods, or which have examined particular themes, concepts, or controversies; I shall be making use of these studies in the chapters that follow. What has not yet been attempted, to my knowledge, is an overview which seeks to link these together in a way which, both historically and critically, locates orientalism within the broad sweep of the modern Western intellectual tradition.

This is an ambitious undertaking which requires some justification, especially in the light of current disfavour bestowed on the writing of ‘linear’ histories, and doubts about the possibility of treating the ‘Western tradition’—let alone the ‘Eastern’—in a coherent way. An obvious question is: why construe orientalism as just one story, as a single narrative? Certainly Edward Said believed that there is a discernible coherent history of European representation and intellectual appropriation of the Orient, ‘a remarkably persistent framework of analysis which [is] expressed through theology, literature, philosophy, and sociology’ (Turner 1994:21). However, this view has been challenged in recent years in the service of a more pluralistic, heterogeneous approach, for example by the literary historian Lisa Lowe who queries ‘the assumption that orientalism monolithically constructs the Orient as the Other of the Occident’ (Lowe 1991:ix–x), and by the historian Rosanne Rocher who criticises Said for creating ‘a single discourse, undifferentiated in space and time and across political, social, and intellectual identities’ (in Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993:215). In broader terms it might well be disputed by those who see it as an example of the essentialising and totalising strategies of traditional historiography in which differences are flattened out in pursuit of some transhistorical perspective. To be sure orientalism does not constitute a fixed, simple, or unified subject, and it does not manifest the self-conscious distinctiveness of, say, Catholicism, or science, or Marxism. I will be at pains to underline the historical discontinuities and changes in the focus of the West’s attitude towards Asian thought that have occurred over the past few centuries, and to stress the diversity of ends and purposes that is to be found amongst orientalists, ranging from the religious and spiritual to the political and scientific. Nevertheless there is, I believe, an identifiable family of intellectual attitudes and practices for which this term provides a useful label, a recognisable style of thinking, responding, and evaluating that invites articulated historical and critical investigation.

This approach does not rest on any assumption about the East as a unified cultural object. I shall argue that the identity of orientalism, and hence the distinctiveness of this book’s subject matter, lies not in the supposed unity of the object it has sought to represent, but rather in a characteristic family of attitudes and approaches that Europeans have taken to it, namely the manner in which, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Western thinkers have drawn Eastern ideas into the orbit of their ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The making of the ‘Orient’
• Part III Orientalism in the twentieth century
• Part IV Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index