Abstract
Since the eighteenth century the issue of the relation between the Western and non-Western world has become increasingly prominent. In this connection Edward Said’s book Orientalism is taken as starting point, because of the penetrating picture given of the relationship between the Western and Oriental world. However, Said focuses on the manifestations of Orientalism without considering particular fundamental features of the relation between the Western and non-Western world in general. This relation is philosophically epitomized in Hegel’s philosophy of history, which actually exhibits the Western position as regards its relation to the non-Western world in the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. Hegel conceives the historical process as unilinearly moving from East to West, exhibiting a progressive consciousness of freedom, coming to a climax in Western civilization. That is, the world was seen as including either primitive peoples or peoples that once had been civilized, but had fallen into decay. This viewpoint accorded well with European colonial policy in the sense that it provided its ideology of having a ‘civilizing mission’ towards the non-Western world. In the previous century, this Eurocentric vision on world history implied by Hegel’s philosophy of history was rejected on principal by Spengler and Toynbee. Both consider Western civilization just one among various other civilizations, instead of allegedly being the final stage of world history. Hegel’s philosophy of history got a remarkable revival, however, with Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man (1992). Fukuyama adopts Hegel’s philosophy of history without reserve, claiming that the final stage of the historical process in Hegel’s philosophy of history – that is, the accomplishment of Western civilization – should be considered the end of history. In his book The Clash of Civilizations (1997), however, Huntington develops a position that contrasts sharply with that of Fukuyama. In his view, the current process of modernization in the non-Western world demonstrates that it does not proceed in accordance with the Western model of development. Huntington’s position is not based on theoretical considerations, but is rather inspired by current global developments.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979; or. ed. 1978).
- 2.
Ibid., 1.
- 3.
Ibid., 3.
- 4.
Ibid., 59.
- 5.
Ibid., 96.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., 95.
- 8.
M. Richardson, ‘Enough Said’, in: A.L. Macfie ed., Orientalism. A Reader (Edinburgh, 2000), 208–216, there 211.
- 9.
Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, in: Macfie ed., Orientalism, 217–38, there 233. The article has appeared originally in Khamsin, 8 (1981), 5–26.
- 10.
Ibid., 236.
- 11.
Ibid., 237.
- 12.
Edward Said, ‘East isn’t East. The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism’, The Times Literary Supplement, issue 4792, 03-02-1995, 3–6.
- 13.
Ibid., 3.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism. The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (London, 2005).
- 16.
It is only said that Orientalism ‘strips its human targets of their humanity’, and that ‘[s]ome Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings; they had the minds of children, and could thus be treated as lesser breeds’ (ibid., 10).
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid., 22. A telling example that is given of the European background of anti-Western Occidentalism is the Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II, many of whom were inspired by Western authors. It is said of them that ‘their ultimate sacrifice (and idealism) was often justified and articulated through Western ideas. They had turned the West against the West, as it were’ (61).
- 19.
(London, 1945).
- 20.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett ed. (Cambridge, 2003), 301, par. 49.
- 21.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Fania Oz-Salzberger ed. (Cambridge, 2003).
- 22.
Ibid., 7.
- 23.
Ibid., 14.
- 24.
Ibid., 80.
- 25.
Ibid., 194–5.
- 26.
Ibid., 75.
- 27.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, H.B. Nisbet transl. (Cambridge, 1975), 197.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Otto von Freising (1114–1158) writes in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (‘Chronicle or History of the Two Cities’): ‘Und es ist zu beachten, dass alle menschliche Macht und Wissenschaft im Orient begonnen hat und im Okzident ihr Ende findet; darin zeigt sich die Unbeständigkeit und Hinfälligkeit alles Irdischen’ (‘And it is important to note that all human power and science has started in the Orient and finds its end in the Occident; in that the precariousness and transience of all earthly things is shown’) (Otto Bischof von Freising, Chronik oder die Geschichte der zwei Staaten, W. Lammers ed., A. Schmidt transl. (Berlin, 1960), 14). I am thankful to Dr. A.E.M. Janssen for having given this information.
- 30.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Nisbet transl., 54.
- 31.
Ibid., pp, 198, 202, 203, 205.
- 32.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and The Lectures of 1822–3, Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson eds. and transl. (Oxford, 2011), 251–2.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 271.
- 35.
Ibid., 334.
- 36.
Ibid., 475.
- 37.
G.W.F. Hegel. The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree transl. (New York, 1956), 360.
- 38.
The full passage reads: ‘To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts … If his theory really goes beyond the world as it is and builds an ideal one as it ought to be, that world exists indeed, but only in his opinions, an unsubstantial element where anything you please may, in fancy, be built’ (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox transl. (Oxford, 1967), 11).
- 39.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson transl. (New York, 1926), 18.
- 40.
For an extensive discussion of Toynbee’s A Study of History, see ch. 08, ‘Toynbee and his Critics’.
- 41.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. I (London, 1934), 150.
- 42.
Ibid., 151.
- 43.
Ibid. On the cultural dimension of the non-Western world Toynbee maintains: ‘While the economic and political maps of the World have now been “Westernized” almost out of recognition, the cultural map remains to-day substantially what it was before our Western Society ever started on its career of economic and political conquest. On this cultural plane, for those who have eyes to see, the lineaments of the four living non-Western civilizations are still clear’ (ibid.).
- 44.
Ibid., 152.
- 45.
Ibid., 164.
- 46.
‘E.A. Freeman’s Conception of “the Unity of History”’ (ibid., 339–46).
- 47.
Ibid., 345. The passage concerned is important enough to be fully quoted: ‘[I]f, in Freeman’s time, Western historians had had at their disposal as much knowledge of the history of other societies besides the Hellenic Society and the Western Society as we have in our generation, Freeman would have realized that Hellenic and Western history only covered a fraction of the field of universal history, and that in equating the relation between them with “continuity” sans phrase and endeavouring to stretch the two histories, thus erroneously fused together, into covering the whole field, he was falling into a misconception of growth, as a movement whose track is a straight line, from which his appreciation of the comparative method of study ought to have emancipated him’.
- 48.
Ibid., 157.
- 49.
See note 47.
- 50.
William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee. A Life (Oxford, 1989), 28.
- 51.
Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, Pauline Kleingeld ed., David L. Colclasure transl. (New Haven and London, 2006), 82–4.
- 52.
It is interesting to note that this position is coupled with a revival of the idea of a civilizing mission, when it is declared that ‘the United States will … extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world’.
- 53.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (London, 1992).
- 54.
Ibid., 144.
- 55.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947). English translation: Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Allan Bloom ed., James H. Nichols transl. (Ithaca, 1980).
- 56.
Fukuyama, The End of History, xii.
- 57.
Ibid., 203.
- 58.
Ibid., 48.
- 59.
Ibid., 60.
- 60.
Ibid., 139.
- 61.
Popper, ‘Hegel and The New Tribalism’, in: idem, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London, 1966, or. ed. 1945), 27–80, there 62.
Fukuyama only refers to Popper once, speaking of ‘his usual lack of insight’ in response to his use of the term ‘historicism’ (Fukuyama, The End of History, 350). But it is Fukuyama who mixes up the concepts of historism (the German Historismus), a viewpoint he attributes to Hegel (ibid., 62), and historicism, a term coined by Popper and having a different meaning. Because the concept of historism is sometimes referred to as historicism as well, Fukuyama is not the first to revert to this confusion. For a discussion of the confusion that has arisen with respect to the terms historism and historicism, see: Jan van der Dussen, History as a Science. The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Dordrecht, 2012), 48–9.
- 62.
See note 38.
- 63.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946; revis. ed. 1993), 120.
- 64.
That Hegel’s philosophy of history does not imply that he considers his own time to be the end of history, is also evidenced by the way he ends his lectures on philosophy of history, saying: ‘This is the point which consciousness has attained, and these are the principal phases of that form in which the principle of Freedom has realized itself; – for the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom’ (Hegel. The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree transl., 456).
In another version of his lectures, his conclusion reads as follows: ‘We have now briefly portrayed world history. The intention was to show that its entire course is a consistent [expression] of spirit, and that the whole of history is nothing other than the actualization of spirit, an actualization that culminates in states; and [that] the state is the worldly actualization of history’ (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Brown and Hodgson eds. and transl., 521).
It is noticeable that in both statements Hegel does not maintain that historical development has come to an end, but confines himself in the first to ‘This is the point which consciousness has attained’, whereas in the second Hegel only declares that the state is the worldly actualization of history, which does not preclude that this actualization could exhibit a particular development of its own in the future.
- 65.
Fukuyama, The End of History, 68. A little further, Fukuyama’s ideologically motivated position is made clear when he observes about Spengler and Toynbee: ‘It is no accident that the only writers of Universal Histories who have achieved any degree of popular success in this century were those like Spengler and Toynbee who described the decline and decay of Western values and institutions’ (ibid., 70). It goes without saying that Fukuyama falls with this wide of the mark as regards Toynbee, it just being a mockery.
- 66.
Ibid., 133.
- 67.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1997).
- 68.
Ibid., 75–6.
- 69.
Ibid., 154.
- 70.
Ibid., 183–4.
- 71.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Nisbet transl., 170–1.
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van der Dussen, J. (2016). The West and the Rest. In: Studies on Collingwood, History and Civilization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20672-1_15
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