In our readings from the past three weeks, we have looked at contemporary scholars' attempts to sort out the ways in which travelers' accounts about their voyages transformed into knowledge. The problem is often addressed as the issue of incorporating “otherness” into existent epistemic systems. As we have seen in the past few weeks, the discovery of the New World posed particular problems and was received in particular ways into European intellectual traditions.
Hentsch convincingly demonstrates that the Orient was represented and incorporated into “European” thought in its own particular ways. The difference between the new world and the Orient-- to put it overly simplified and schematically-- is that the new world was “new” to Europe, and the Orient was “ancient”. The peoples encountered in the new world were sometimes characterized as pre-political, representing just a very distant kind of ancientness. But on the other hand, the new world was the site of irreconcilable alterity. In this sense they were portrayed as uncivilizable, ahistorical, and inhuman.
The Orient, then, presented less extreme a challenge of “incorporation.” The Orient includes places mentioned in the bible, and Europeans had had mercantile contact with farther regions for a long time in established trading systems. Hentsch says that, in the classical European world view, which, we know all too well, was egregiously Eurocentric, the Orient “stood as a hierarchical second.”
In the 18th century, argues Hentsch, the Orient became the site of new conceptual investigation. No longer “an unblinking mirror at whose feet European classicism had come to lay its certitudes,” Enlightenment thinkers turned to the East as a site of fresh reflection-- the certitudes became less certain. Hentsch's narrative suggests that Enlightenment “progressed” (pg 98, toward the bottom) from masturbatory self-congratulation, to a supposed “genuine opening to the world.” However, while French epistemology did change, Hentsch stipulates, old representational cliches about the Orient did not go away. The discourse of the Orient was given new life and new structure with “the opening of minds to the outside world,” but the presumed impartiality of rational investigation still fell prey to the persisting cultural meaning of the east that had lingered through the 17th and into the 18th centuries.
Hi Vincent, I like the point you brought up at the beginning about how all the accounts we have read are accounts that may have influenced what Europeans held to be "knowledge" about what were viewed as other worlds. I wonder: what do the readings tell us about how justified this attitude would have been? It's tempting, I think, to quickly say the traveler's accounts distorted realities and fed into pre-conceived ideologies, but they do represent first-hand reflections. How does that distinguish them from myths, theories, and imaginings?
ReplyDeleteI think you did a really good job of capturing Hentsch's argument. It seemed like the perception of the Middle East as an ancient civilization was a fairly new development, something that came once Europeans felt more secure in their political and cultural superiority.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Cameron. Especially since the Middle East was a bastion of enlightenment and learning compared to Europe for many years - the idea of "the Orient" as ancient and backward is actually a fairly new development.
ReplyDeleteVincent, you say: "The difference between the new world and the Orient-- to put it overly simplified and schematically-- is that the new world was “new” to Europe, and the Orient was “ancient”. So can I infer from this statement then that when the Europeans first discovered the Orient, this region also resembled a very "distant kind of ancientness"...one akin to the new world's unique characterization? Is this a cycle that both areas go through, or is there something more unique about the New World?
ReplyDeletewoah "Masturbatory" !! Anyway....I thought your distinction between the savage New World and the ancient Orient is important. However, I would not say that the European appraisal of Islam was necessarily an opening to the world. It was, in my opinion, more of a critique of Christianity than anything else. I thought that Enlightenment philosophers were, in a sense, using the Orient to serve their own "masturbatory" self-congratulation - their belief that all religion was man-made.
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