ABSTRACT
This essay examines the works of Hegel, Marx, and Weber as a fruitful source for understanding Western intellectual representations of Asia. Hegel strove to integrate the “East” as a stage of the development of “spirit” culminating in the modern Germanic Protestant world. Marx, though condemning the cruelties of the West’s colonial exploitation of Asia, nonetheless also integrated the East into a theory of development, believing that the advance of capitalism into Asia would rescue the East from the backwardness of its culture. Weber, on the other hand, did not try to fit Asia into a theory of stages of historical progress, but he still viewed it from the perspective of its capacity to produce an analogue to the “Occidental personality” that had helped make the West what it was. Despite the rich and imaginative portraits of Asia in the work of these thinkers, they each put Asia into a Eurocentric scheme and agenda of their own that forced them to oversimplify and reduce many aspects of Asian culture and society.
To what extent the intellectual and cultural encounter with Asia affected nineteenth-century European thought and culture is difficult to measure, as are the relations between such thought and both popular views of Asia and the development of Western 147society and culture. 1 The experience of Asia clearly influenced, and was strongly influenced by, European economies and their political and military policies. It also influenced the arts in every form and inspired a scholarly engagement with the “Orient” in all of its manifestations, though that engagement was not without serious distortion. 2 England and France were pioneers, not only in colonialism, but in making available Asian texts of all kinds, as well as generating studies of Asian religious, social, and political life more generally. Yet it was Germany, through the intensity of its engagement and the profundity of its thinkers and writers, that was the home of the “renaissance” of Oriental studies, especially of India, and of much of the greatest and most influential philosophical and social thought of the century.
Our concern here is the representation or “construction” of the Orient in the works of a few of the great thinkers that Germany and the West produced then: G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), the last great philosophical system builder, whose work was the culmination of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato; Karl Marx (1818–1883), Hegel’s most powerful critic, who produced a materialist interpretation of history that sought to comprehend all societies from the ground up; and Max Weber (1864–1920), the founder of modern social science, who recognized the importance to Occidental self-understanding of a serious encounter with Asian culture in all its forms.
Despite the great differences between them, Hegel, Marx, and Weber had enormous influence, not only in the West but in Asia. Indeed, their works are a fruitful vehicle for understanding Western conceptions more generally, for as we learn from recent anthropological thought, the way a culture represents the “other” of a different culture involves not simply translating the reality of that other but imposing a meaning as well. More to the point, “every version of an ‘other,’ wherever found, is also the construction of a ‘self.’” 3 Thus, while representations by Western thinkers of the “other” of Asia reveal crucial aspects of European understanding of the Orient, they also illuminate the larger theoretical schemes of these thinkers, and, through them, some of the West’s more important and characteristic “discourses” as well.
A number of cultural and social facts influenced the West’s experience of Asia. First was the European view of the ancient Greeks, whose understanding of “Asia” was mediated by the Persian wars and later by the conquest of parts of Asia to the Indus valley by Alexander the Great. Herodotus, for example, visited Persia and Egypt, and left impressive accounts of their culture 148and life. At the same time, he interpreted the Persian wars as a struggle between East and West and as the preservation of ancient freedoms from mass enslavement by an Asian emperor. Though Greek freedoms were themselves built on slavery; though Asian “enslavement” tolerated the greatest diversity of cultural, religious, and ethnic groups; and though Eastern religious elements undoubtedly influenced the religious mysteries of Greece and Rome, these facts were deemed of lesser account than the important elements of philosophy, politics, and culture that Hellas had bequeathed to the West by its victory. Second were the complicated attitudes toward the Islamic peoples, which Catholic Europe had seen as barbarians in control of the “Holy Lands.” It had been forgotten that Arabic culture had flourished and preserved and translated ancient Greek texts at a time when Westerners outside of the church could no longer even write their names. Third was the fact of Turkish power in the eastern Mediterranean and the “underbelly” of Europe, which, despite European naval and military strength, was an uncomfortable reminder of Europe’s vulnerability to “incursions” from Asia. Fourth, and most importantly, were the greater and greater exploratory, colonial, and imperial ventures undertaken in East and South Asia, which produced not only new sources for the encounter with Asian culture but also embroiled the European powers in worldwide conflicts, exploitation, and domination. European perceptions were also linked to the fear, among a number of thinkers, that the West and its economic system would lapse into crisis, rigidify, and lose its dynamism in a social organization that would cripple individual development. Thus, the overdeveloped bureaucratization of Egypt, the immobility and lack of movement of China, the horrors of the caste system of India: each of these images of Asia had enormous negative symbolic power in the imagination of Europeans. Yet, before the time of the domination of capitalism and its extension to all sectors of life, the Orient was viewed as a source of principles for wise rule and balanced social order, as well as for religious wisdom. Intellectuals like Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and the Physiocrats were much more open than later figures to learning about Asian social order and learning from the wisdom they believed resided in the East. Apart from the case of Adam Smith, the fear of stasis and rigidity became widespread only with the extension of capitalism and the development of romanticism, when evils of all kinds were projected onto Asia, although the reverse idealization of Asia occurred as well.
In nineteenth-century Europe, there were as many vantage 149points on Asia as there were thinkers, each one motivated by a different need to use, appropriate, or understand the East. At the same time, the thinkers we are considering here all steeped themselves in the literature on Asia. Hegel sought to integrate the East into a picture of “spiritual” development and the development of freedom, taking as his vantage point what he regarded as the achievements of modern Protestantism and the Germanic world. For him, Asia, Greece, Rome, and the Protestant German world were sequential stages in the unfolding and development of “spirit” in history. Thus, Hegel could grasp Asian culture only in terms of its relation to a spirit whose culmination and fulfillment he found in the West. Marx, on the other hand, focused on Western social and economic “foundations,” and examined the East both historically—in terms of its “old” modes of production that were being surpassed by the modern capitalist mode—and politically—criticizing the barbaric exploitation of the East by the colonial powers of the West. While recognizing the cruelties of the capitalist mode of production as it expanded over the earth, he still believed that capitalism furthered the general advance of humankind. Asian culture—backward, enslaved, and riddled with mystical and primitive religion—needed the liberation and modernization that capitalism could bring, despite the destruction it also brought. In this way, Marx hoped to find a silver lining in the dark cloud of imperialism. Yet he never really condoned the violent destruction of the old patterns of life. Weber, who did greater justice to the integrity, value, and many-sidedness of Asian experience than the others, did not try to fit the East into similar lines of development. He was interested, rather, in what a culture equips men and women for, what it encourages and what it prevents. Nonetheless, Weber evaluated Asia through the optic of his notion of the “Occidental personality,” to discover whether in Asia there were sources of innovation and inner-worldly character strength and mastery comparable to those that had appeared in the West at the time of the birth of capitalism. Because of this, he could not provide a rounded picture of Asian culture and its genuine difference. 4
