By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The existence of a
cultural continuity called Western civilization is supposed by theories claiming
that there has been a common tradition from the ancient Greeks to the present,
one distinguishable from cultures in the East by certain attributes, such as
the idea of freedom. They propose that there has been a continuity of
self-identification as Western, and as not being Oriental, Asiatic or Eastern.
This has given the West its underlying unity. For example, Karl Jaspers, in his
Origin and Goal of History, writes that "ever since Herodotus, men have
been aware of the antithesis of West and East as an eternal antithesis that is for ever reappearing in fresh shapes" (67). This view
is expressed by historians of Western or European civilization, but also by
contemporary critics such as Edward Said, for whom the West has from its
beginning constructed an image of itself through its Oriental Other.
Denys Hay in his 1957
Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, for example, argues that the salient
geographical distinction for the Greeks involved the dichotomy between
themselves and their Asiatic others. He uses Herodotus as an example of the
Greeks' enduring habit of thinking about the inhabited world in terms of a
duality:
In so far as the
Greeks had a sense of fundamental continental difference, these lay between
East and West, between Persian and Greek, between Asia and Europe. Herodotus
explained his purpose in writing in such terms. It was to preserve "from
decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and
wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were the
grounds of their feud." (Hay, 2-3)
Hay finds in
Herodotus the typical Greek view that Asia ''was all that was antithetical to
Greece and Greek values" (3). Likewise, A. R. Burn, in his introduction to
the 1972 Penguin edition of the Histories, also claims that Herodotus'
principal theme was the conflict of "Greece and the East" (his
translation of Herodotus' "Greeks and Barbarians"), and that
Herodotus' descriptions of the '''great and wonderful actions'" of both
the Greeks and the Barbarians are but secondary "digressions" (17).
Indeed, Burn's heading of the first part of Book I is "East versus
West" (17). In another edition, Aubrey De Selincourt
by no means supports Burn's claim that Herodotus is mainly concerned with the
East/West distinction, however, for he translates Herodotus as intending ''to
preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing
achievements both of our own and of other peoples" (41). This translator
has chosen to use neutral term "peoples" for the Greek
"barbarians," signaling the fact that, for the Greeks, barbarians
were merely those who did not speak Greek. "Barbarians" should not be
assumed to be either equivalent to Asians, or as equivalent to savages.
Did Herodotus make as
much of the dichotomy between Europe and Asia as Jaspers and Said, Hay and
Burn, and many others, claim? What role did the distinctions between West and
East play in Herodotus' thought, and are they equivalent to his distinctions
between Persians and Greeks and barbarians and Greeks? Is it legitimate in any
case to derive from reading Herodotus our sense of what the Greeks as a whole
thought about themselves and others?
To begin with the
last question, Herodotus cannot be thought to be "representative," to
be repeating accepted cultural categories simply. Lewis and Wigen
observe that. in his Histories, Herodotus makes received geographical notions
problematical, taking a critical stance toward custom and the scholarship of
others. For example, he writes: "Another thing that puzzles me is why
three distinct women's names should have been given to what is really a single
landmass ... Nor have I been able to learn who it was that first marked the
boundaries, or where they got the names from ... in any case I shall continue
to use the names which custom has made familiar" (285); "I cannot
help laughing at the absurdity of all the map-makers - there are plenty of them
- who show Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth, with Asia
and Europe of the same size" (282); and "in view of what I have said,
I cannot but be surprised at the method of mapping Libya, Asia, and
Europe" (283). In none of these quotations does Herodotus display any
particular investment in the received geographical categories, let alone any
argument for "a fundamental continental difference" existing
"between East and West" (Hay).
Neither does
Herodotus set out to prove the superiority of Greek culture, nor does he claim
that the Greeks have some monopoly on excellence in relation to Asians or
Africans. For example, he writes: "It would seem that the remote parts of
the world have the finest products, whereas Greece has far the best and most
temperate climate" (247); and ''the furthest inhabited country towards the
south-west is Ethiopia; here gold is found in great abundance, and huge
elephants, and ebony, and all sorts of trees growing wild; the men, too, are
the tallest in the world, the best-looking, and the longest-lived" (248).
Nor does Herodotus
identify the Hellenic as being essentially western or European. He writes:
"About the far west of Europe I have no definite information. . . . I have
never found anyone who could give me first-hand information of the existence of
a sea beyond Europe to the north and west. Yet it cannot be disputed that tin
and amber do come to us from what one might call the ends of the earth"
(250).
Europe therefore is
to the north as much as the west, and far from being associated with high
civilization, it is where the uncivilized peoples live. Around the- Black Sea,
for example, are found ''the most uncivilized nations in the world" (280);
''the Scythians, however, though in most respects I do not admire them, have
managed one thing, and that the most important in human affairs, better than
anyone else on the face of the earth: I mean their own preservation"
(286). Yet Herodotus does not represent the Greeks as having a monopoly on
reason. He recounts the tale of a Scythian, sent to investigate the Greeks, who
reported back "that all the Greeks were too busy to study any branch of
learning, with the sole exception of the Lacedaemonians" (296). Herodotus
also observes that ''the Greek custom of indulging in Dionysiac orgies is, in
Scythian eyes, a shameful thing; and no Scythian can see sense in imagining a
god who drives people out of their wits" (297).
Nor does he consider
that the Greeks have a monopoly on cultural creativity and innovation. In his
opinion, "it.was the Egyptians too who
originated, and taught the Greeks to use, ceremonial meetings, processions, and
liturgies" (152). Far from demonstrating the cultural chauvinism of a
Victor Davis Hanson, Herodotus makes no claim that the Greeks are superior and
does not judge all the other peoples according to
Greek standards. In a statement of cultural modesty that seems close to what
contemporaries might call "cultural relativism," Herodotus asserts
the following: "For if anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity
of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which
he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their
relative merits, choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception
believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be
the best" (219).
It is the case,
however, that Herodotus describes the Persian Wars as a conflict between the
Persians in Asia and the Greeks in Europe, and it cannot be denied that this
opposition does playa role in his work. But, at the
same time, he claims that it is the Persians who have made the most of this
distinction: they believe that the present enmity between themselves and Greece
started in the Trojan War, an inappropriately aggressive response to the last
in a series of retaliatory thefts of women. He writes: From that root sprang
their belief in the perpetual enmity of the Grecian world towards them - Asia
with its various foreign-speaking peoples belonging to the Persians, Europe and
the Greek states being, in their opinion, quite separate and distinctive from
them In their view it was the capture of Troy that first made
them enemies of the Greeks. (42)
Herodotus depicts a
Xerxes motivated by the desire for conquest. He imagines Xerxes thinking that:
"If we crush the Athenians and their neighbors in the Peloponnese, we
shall so extend the empire of Persia that its boundaries will be God's own sky,
so that the sun will not look down upon any land beyond the boundaries of what
is ours. With your help I shall pass through Europe from end to end and make it
all one country." Xerxes does indeed describe the Greeks as
"western": "My own belief is that all the Greeks and all the
other western peoples gathered together would be insufficient to withstand the
attack of my anny - and still more so if they are not
united" (475). Yet it seems clear from the context that the Greeks and
other peoples are located in Europe and thus are western geographically, not
culturally. When it comes to accounting for the victory over the Persian,
Herodotus does not celebrate the military virtue of the Europeans or the
Westerners or even the Greeks, but rather the valor of the Spartans (477), and
the Athenians' particular love of freedom (487).
Certainly, a number
of examples of Herodotus' cultural stereotyping exist, especially in his
contrast between Hellenic virtue and Persian luxury. He reports that Pausanias
said concerning the luxury of the captured Persian camp: "'Gentlemen, I
asked you here in order to show you the folly of the Persians, who, living in
this style, came to Greece to rob us of our poverty'" (609). Yet to use
this as support for the claim that the contrast between the Greeks and their
Asian enemies structures Herodotus' whole account is a real distortion. It
misses his critical approach to given categories, and his novel attempt to
present a wider view of the world, one where not only the Hellenic has value.
Herodotus is mistranslated when read through a twentieth-century conceptual
lens which wants to see the features of the West as a cultural totality first
displayed by the ancient Greeks. As Helmut Heit
argues in his 2005 "Western Identity, Barbarians and the Inheritance of
Greek Universalism," Herodotus might well have displayed some
"ethnocentrism" in his writing, even though his overall thrust was
toward the tolerant understanding of other peoples, but he did not display any
"Eurocentrism" (729-30).
Herodotus' Histories,
therefore, do not provide evidence for the Greeks themselves originating the
idea of a Western civilization, nor for their identity being fundamentally
formed by the negation of Asia. That twentieth-century commentators such as Hay
and Burn discover the West in Herodotus reveals a pattern that will be noted
often in this study. Even Heit, who in his article
cited above critiques how the Greeks are misrepresented to bolster a
Eurocentric outlook, misrepresents Thucydides. Heit
interprets Pericles, in his funeral oration, as praising the universal but
unique accomplishments of the Greeks. But the passage he quotes shows the
leader of Athens praising the universal but unique accomplishments of the
Athenians in contrast to the other Greeks, as well as to everyone else.
Edward Gibbon's
famous The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,written
from 1764 to 1788, may well have been important in promoting a consciousness of
the East-West axis of Europe, and thus have been important for the emergence of
the concept of the West. Patrick Parrinder, in his
"Ancients and Moderns: Literature and the 'Western Canon,'" for
example, argues that ''the modem idea of the West begins in the eighteenth
century, and owes much to the influence of Gibbon's great history" (271).
He also notes, however, that it had to work against the traditional division of
Europe between North and South, and that it is Hegel who should be credited for
plotting "world history on a linear and, so to speak, horizontal
axis." The Decline and Fall also seems a plausible source for one of the
key themes belonging to the concept of the West - namely, that although the
dominant now, it might soon "fall" as the Roman Empire had fallen
although Gibbon himself does not draw this conclusion. When Hanson claims that
the West would not fall as Rome had, he echoes Gibbon's assertion in his
"General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West"
concerning the assured future of civilized Europe. Despite Gibbon's thoughts on
the matter, however, the force of comparison between the ancient empire and its
present successor has been hard to avoid.
Jeffrey Peter Hart
inaccurately and anachronistically claims, in his "What is 'The
West'?", that "Gibbon tried to account for the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the West in an attempt to warn the British Empire against a similar
fate" (2). Arthur Herman, in his 1997 The Idea of Decline in Western
History, writes more accurately that "Gibbon's conception of the Roman
Empire as doomed to self-destruction by its own success had a profound impact
on the modem historical imagination. All great empires and societies reach an
end point, it suggested, a point of no return, after which they must inevitably
be replaced by something else" (27). Thus, as Herman argues, modem
civilization has been as much haunted by the possibilities of its decline as it
has been inspired by the anticipation of infinite progress. Gillespie
maintains, in fact, that ''the idea of the West in its fullest sense" -
what I am calling the concept of the West - has been inseparable from "the
idea of the end of the West, as the retrospective recognition of a horizon that
we have now transcended" (11).
A different
interpretation of Gibbon's position is given by Manfred P. Fleischer, in his
The Decline of the West? Fleischer has Gibbon asserting that, due to the spread
of enlightenment, "a decline of the West would not happen again"
(125). But Gibbon does not really conceive of the West in the way this wording
suggests, namely that there is a West comprehending both ancient Rome and modem
Europe. According to Pocock, Gibbon' s "West" consists only of the
far western Roman provinces which fell to the barbarians ("Some Europes" 60). The term Gibbon uses for the larger unit
in his own time is "Europe," which he proposes should be considered
"as one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the
same level of politeness and cultivation" (8).
While the relative
power of individual nations within Europe will fluctuate, Gibbon is confident
that "these partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of
happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously
distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies."
I argue that Gibbon
had not yet "discovered" the concept of the West, and that his Europe
is not the West's equivalent. For one thing, Gibbon makes no claim of ancestry:
there is no indication that the historical connection between ancient Rome and
modem Europe represents different stages of a singular cultural totality, nor
that the heritage of ancient Rome explains Europe's present accomplishments.
Gibbon treats Europe, not as a development out of Rome, but as an independent
entity. And, although Gibbon does claim that Europe is superior to other
nations, it is not the only place that is civilized. He is concerned with the
fundamental distinction between "the savage nations of the globe,"
which are "the common enemies of civilized society," and the
civilized nations. These include "the polite and peaceful nations of
China. India, and Persia" (9-10), as well as Russia, which ''now assumes
the fonn of a powerful and civilized empire"
(8). Gibbo does not compare one civilization with
another, then, but contrasts civilized and savage, or cultivated and
uncultivated, societies. The cultivated know "arts and agriculture,"
"the plough, the 100m, the forge," ''the progress of knowledge and
industry:' polite manners, temperance, order, and that military art which can
repulse ''the rude valor" of the barbarians (10). Because the arts are now
enjoyed in most parts of the world, a relapse into ignorant barbarism is not
possible: "We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that the
very age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the
happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race" (11).
Gibbon thinks of
civilization as a universal process, or as a condition possessing universal
value, rather than as a distinct culture, and his view is shared by other
historians in the Enlightenment. "Civilization" was not
particularized until about 1819, according to Braudel (6) and Williams (59);
the latter writes that discourse involving plural civilizations only became
common in the 1860s.18 Even though Gibbon asserts Europe's superior level of
civilization, his idea of progress concerns the increase of civilization as
such, not the increase of the power of one particular civilization called
European, let alone Western. Yet Fleischer's brief summary of Gibbon's position
exemplifies the habit of reading the West backwards. Fleischer's use of the
West is not merely the substitution of one name for an equivalent
"Europe," for the text could not be rewritten to say that
"although Europe had declined once, it would not do so again." The
concept of the West as Western civilization involves a different conception of
history than Gibbon's, one which sees the Western Roman Empire and present-day
Europe as an organic whole linked through a common historical development.
According to Fleischer, Gibbon attributes Western dominance to its unique
possession of civilization and enlightenment.
"The West"
will not fall again because it enjoys enlightened reason. But Gibbon himself
wondered whether civility itself could be overcome by barbarians in the future.
His categories are at once more specific, in his comparison of ancient Rome
with modern Europe, and more universal, in his distinction between civility and
barbarism, than those pertaining to Western civilization. Fleischer's
substitution of the West for Europe is made unthinkingly, yet his
misrepresentation of Gibbon's supposed meaning is brought closer to ours. This
impedes our awareness that Gibbon uses different historical concepts than our
own. (Perhaps this is why Pocock, in his magisterial study of Gibbon's work,
notes that "Western" is a term he has "sought to avoid" [II:3])
The case of Gibbon shows that, while there are often strong overlaps in meaning
between Europe and the West, with European and Western civilization, and
Europeanization and Westernization, often used interchangeably, the terms have
different histories of usage and their meanings are closer at some times more
than at others.
From our vantage
point, however, the West in some of its present meanings could have played a
role in Gibbon's work:. A single word, embracing a commonality broader than
Europe's, would have been more useful than Gibbon's "Europeans and their
colonies," for instance.19 Gibbon does make a claim concerning Europe's
relative advancement, because its level of cultivation and institutions
"advantageously distinguish" it and its colonies "above the rest
of mankind," and his Enlightenment project of writing history as
explanation, particularly as explanation for the emergence of modernity in
Europe (Wright, 138), remind us of contemporary assertions of and explanations
for Western exceptionalism. But, while some of his account anticipates the
evaluative function that is a hallmark of such works, Gibbon does not conceive
of cultivation or civility as something that can be particularized. Europe is
more advanced because has already attained a high level of politeness or
civilization, not because it is informed by a unique set of cultural values.
Gibbon's Europe is, therefore, not really equivalent to the West. It does not
claim a line of continuity between modem Europe and ancient Rome, and it
characterizes Europe instead as a modem commonwealth or a republic of nations.
The image of unity in diversity belongs to the idea of Europe, but plays no
role in the concept of the West.20
David Ferris's Silent
Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity is an important work for understanding
Hellenism, an intellectual movement that was the essential precondition for the
adoption of the West as a concept. While Greek and Roman authors had long
provided models for European education, Ferris argues, a different
consciousness of modernity emerged that was in dialogue with a new kind of
identification with the Greeks, beginning in the late eighteenth century. He
demonstrates convincingly that many contemporary theorists (along with Martin
Bernal) have falsely accused Romantic Hellenism of providing ideological
support for claims of Western racial superiority, and have thus failed to
appreciate its diversity and its project of cultural criticism. In making this
argument, however, Ferris does not examine critically the West as a tenn with a history, but rather assumes it as an already-
available problem, and as a given object of speculation.
Ferris’s
interpretation of Holderlin, whom he reads as
pondering upon the fate of the West, provides a striking example of how
assuming the category of the West results in an anachronistic reading of older
texts. Ferris translates, for example, the phrase "der abendliche
nachher" as "the evening afterwards"
(183), but then comments on it in this manner: Weare
simply told of the two acts and both are presented as what belongs to the West
("abendlich"): the putting down of a mantle
and the loosening of locks of hair by a god, who is described in the form of
evening.
The subsequent lines
express why this act takes place, why it is performed by a god who is figured
as not only the West but also its evening: we are told of a failure to gather
oneself together . . . a failure that angers the gods ... From this standpoint,
the putting off of the mantle and the loosening of the locks of Mnemosyne can
be read as the sign of the fall of an antiquity whose failure is now
interpreted by its Christian successor. For this reason the god is figured in
the word "abendlich," as both evening and
the West, since the moment Mnemosyne puts off her mantle is the moment when the
gods will begin to fade. (184)
According to Ferris's
interpretation, Holderlin refuses to mourn the
passing of antiquity, for such mourning would prevent modernity's "birth
to presence," following the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy. In a note,
Ferris quotes Nancy: "'This is the presence of whoever, for whomever
comes: who succeeds the "subject" of the West, who succeeds the West
- this coming of another that the West always demands, and always
forecloses'" (240n38). Thus for Ferris, following Nancy, ''the evening
afterwards" has a kind of world-historical significance, symbolizing the
modem West's relationship to antiquity and the question of its future. But it
is not clear that HCSlderlin in this poem is even
speaking of the West or even the west, for he does not use the proper name Abendland" but rather the adjectival or adverbial fonn abendlich - yet Ferris
wonders "why the 'a' of 'abendlich' is not
capitalized (239n36). The answer might be a simple one: the poem is speaking of
what is happening "later, in the evening" - perhaps with a poetic
sense similar to Hegel's famous image of the owl of Minerva only flying at
dusk, or symbolizing the "passing of an older world. There is no evidence
in the poem that Hoelderlin is trying to make a wider
claim about something called the West, understood either as a culture uniting
the ancients and the moderns, or as a civilization in decline, or even as a
direction.
The interpretive
danger of Ferris's kind ofreading is that Hoelderlin a,nd his fellow
Romantics are assumed to possess a ready-made sense of history in the form of
the Grand Narrative of Western civilization - but this was not a conception yet
available to them.
The Romantic
Hellenists, including Hoelderlin, struggled to
reconcile the modern world in which they lived with the Hellenic world they
were coming to know, which they found desirable but out of reach. It was in
their attempts to work through this dilemma that contemporary forms of theory,
which even now find themselves in dialogue with the ancient Greeks, began to be
constructed. Ferris, by his unquestioning use of the West and his dependence
upon Nancy's interpretation of it, works against appreciating the significance
of the very inter-relations of Hellenism, Romanticism, and modernity that he is
trying to establish.
More than any other
thinker, Hegel might well be responsible for the emergence of the concept of
the West. He took up the Romantic dilemmas concerning Hellenism and modernity
described by Ferris, and resolved them into a new conception of
"History," and one presupposed by the concept of the West, as we
argued before. But did Hegel himself have a conception of the West, or of
Western civilization ?
Hegel's most notable
use of the West comes from his elaboration of older poetic traditions
concerning the movement of the sun across the sky for the new purpose of
imaging the movement of Spirit through world history. The philosophical imagery
connects the sun to enlightenment, and thus the movement of the sun to the
progress of knowledge In a well-known passage, Hegel proclaims that "the
History of the Worl travels from East to West, for
Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. . . although the
Earth forms a sphere, History performs no circle round it, but has on the
contrary a determinate East, viz,. Asia" (99). As the sun rises in the
east and arrives in the west, so ''the Sun of self-consciousness" emerges
in the East and finds its home in the West. The original German helps bring out
Hegel's meaning here: dawn is Morgen and East is Morgen/and, land of the dawn;
evening is Abend and West is Abend/and, land of the evening. History will end in
the West, not because it is the place of decline or decay, but because it is
the place of completion, fulfilling ''the great Day's work of spirit"
(103).
History does not
circle in a continual becoming, but has a specific direction and end,namely to bring the "uncontrolled natural
will" into "obedience to a Universal principle"(104). To make
this image work, of course, Hegel must disregard the spherical nature of the
world, and claim the absolute directionality that had belonged to it when it
was considered to be stationary. Thus "Asia is, characteristically, the
Orient quarter of the globe - the region of origination. It is indeed a Western
world for America, but as Europe presents, on the whole, the centre and the end of the old world, and is absolutely the
West - so Asia is absolutely the East. "
Hegel calls Europe
the absolute West, because it is where human knowing and human freedom find
their completion. The Oriental and Asiatic East that is distinguished from this
West, is characterized through the range of stereotypes associated with
negative Orientalisrn, despite his acknowledging
importance as ori~n. The East is despotic,
unchanging, unreflective, and luxurious. True conceptions of freedom, history,
and philosophy really first commence with the Greeks and Romans. Thus Hegel's
philosophy of history is notably Eurocentric, because it treats the history of
Europe, and of European thought, as essentially equivalent to universal
history.
Despite the above, we
would argue that Hegel does not have a concept of the West as defined
previously, but only uses the west as an image. Hegel's West is not equivalent
to a Western civilization, for example, which has risen and is coming to its
fulfillment.
Hegel's history of
philosophy is also not framed as a history of the Western tradition, nor does
he present as the object of his analysis something called "the West."
He writes in his Philosophy of History that "the subject of this course of
Lectures is the Philosophical History of the World" (1), because world
history reveals "the rational necessary course of the World-Spirit"
(10). While Hegel's account is Eurocentric, insofar as world history is more or
less European history, at the same time his purpose is to discern the meaning
of history as such, or History. He writes: "History in general is
therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of
the Idea in Space" (72). The Philosophy of History is History as a whole,
tracing changes of world-historical significance as they occur among one people
and then another, not the history of a particular civilization or culture that
stretches back through different ages. To make a distinction more clearly, one
could say that Hegel analyzes the history of Spirit as it moved to the West and
occurred in the West, but he does not analyze the history of the West.
Hegel's stages of
History, in the Philosophy of History, are well-known to be the Oriental, the
Greek, the Roman, and the Germanic - but they are not these simply. In certain
circumstances, Hegel amalgamates the Greek and Roman stages, because both
aspects of the classical world knew "that some are free" (19); in
some instances. Hegel makes a distinction between the static far East and the
more dynamic near East (the Persians being a historical pepple,
for example, while the Indians are not); and in many cases. he draws a strong
distinction between Catholic Europe. which has not discovered freedom, and
Protestant Europe. which has. However he designates the stages, their
importance lies in how they are different from one another. But "the
West," as both Hanson and Nancy understand it, involves the claim that
there has been an essential continuity in all the stages of its history,
uniting it into an organic whole. While Hanson asserts the West's "common cultural
tradition," Hegel writes that "nothing is so absurd as to look to
Greeks, Romans, or Orientals, for models for the political arrangements of our
time" (47).22
For Hegel, the
important unit of History is not civilization. but the nation-state: "the
State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its
Freedom" (47).
Spirit works itself
out in History through the succession of principles. embodied in constitutions,
each one specific to a World-Historical people. The constitutions of states
cannot be universalized: "each particular National genius is to be treated
as only One Individual in the process of Universal History" (53). The
national "genius" serves to distinguish one state from others
externally, but internally to unite all its aspects into a singular totality:
"the constitution adopted by a people makes one substance - one spirit
with its religion, its art and philosophy, or, at least, with its conceptions
and thought – its culture generally" (45-46). Given Hegel's framework, the
Greeks and the Romans cannot be connected to modem Europeans as ancestors, but
are singular peoples constituted according to principles unique to each.
Furthermore, the
meaningful geography of world history would not correspond to any version of
the modem West's geography, despite Hegel's emphasis on History's westward
path. At the center is not Western Europe, but the Mediterranean: "For the
three quarters of the globe the Mediterranean Sea is similarly the uniting
element, and the centre of World-History" (87).
The non-historical regions of the world would include eastern Asia, sub-Saharan
Africa, North and South America, and even, until recently, Northern Europe
(87-8). And, when world history moved to Northern Europe in modem times, it left
behind much of Europe itself: not only the Eastern European nations of the
Slavs, but the "Romanic nations" ofItaly,
Spain, Portugal, and to some extent France, in Europe's South (420). Where
Europe has remained Catholic, it has failed to cultivate humanity's true
inwardness, and has left humanity self-alienated and enthralled to religious
authority (421).
America, in contrast,
has extended Protestant freedom to the New World. Yet Hegel does not unite it
and Europe into a "West," for he does not consider them to be the
same. Europe is the "absolute West," the space where the progress of
History has reached fulfillment. On the other hand, America is ''the land of
the future," and ''the land of desire for all those who are weary of the
historical lumber-room of old Europe" (86). A new kind of History may well
take place there: "It is for America to abandon the ground on which
hitherto the History of the World has developed itself' (87). It would seem
that Europe is the end of History , the "absolute West," only to the
extent that it is the final point that can be discerned so far. Likewise, Hegel
observes that, in the future, the Slavs might well become "an independent
element in the series of phases that Reason has assumed in the World"
(350) - although this would mean that Spirit would have to turn in the wrong
direction, or continue westward across the Pacific. In these two cases at
least, it appears- Hegel calls Europe the evening (Abend) of history only from
the position of present knowledge.
In many instances,
Hegel's representations of the western seem to fit into the discourse of the
West without requiring tranSlation. Yet, even Hegel's
absolute West is not really our concept of the West. He makes none of the
claims of exclusive ownership or heritage usually attending it which make
possible such common phrases as "our Western tradition." These are
unwittingly connected to racial theories later in the nineteenth century, which
held that cultural accomplishments were the products of ethnic attributes,belonging variously to peoples of Aryan,
Teutonic, Romano-Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry. But Joseph McCarney, in his
Hegel on History, argues that Hegel "ridicules the first stirring in his
own time of the idea of an Aryan race, an Urvolk'
whose ancient culture has been transmitted to modem Germans; according to
Hegel, culture is the achievement of spirit not nature (140). Likewise, as
McCarney also observes, Hegel argues that the Greek achievement was inspired
from their encounter with foreign cultures, and was not merely the expression
of "'the simple development of a race'" (qtd. in McCarney 141). Thus,
while the concept of the West emphasizes intrinsic and distinctive cultural
development, Hegel emphasizes the roles of heterogeneity and antitheses in historical
change. Perhaps most importantly, the vehicle of History, according to Hegel,
is world-historical peoples constituted as States; the West, conceived as
civilization, has no determinate institutional form, and thus it cannot be the
means by which Spirit manifests itself concretely.
Yet it would be hard
to deny that Hegel's work did contribute significantly to the emergence of the
concept of the West. Although he did not claim that the Greeks and Romans were
united into a common entity with modem Europe, his stages of world historical
development clearly anticipate the Grand Narrative of the West. While his
account includes nations in the East, it does so only to put them aside, for
Hegel treats the Greeks as the real.origin of
History. They were the first people to know they were free ("that
consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were
free" [18]), and the first to be truly rational and truly historical. Even
in his distinction of the ancients from the modems, therefore, Hegel links them
through the structure of a unified consideration. From the vantage-point of the
present, his History seems to have the familiar form of the history of the
West. Nevertheless, to agree with Alastair Bonnett's
judgment on this question: "Hegel had little to say about the West as a
unity ... Hegel had scant interest in developing an explicit or overarching
sense of Western identity. The ease with which he dispenses with the West is
indicative of its continuing marginality as an idea" (24).
There are many
problems in trying to determine whether Nietzsche draws upon the concept of the
West. One difficulty lies in attempting to define Nietzsche's
"position," which involves judging the relative importance of his
thought in different periods, and the status of his unpublished writings
collected as The Will to Power. Moreover, perhaps any attempt to discover an
underlying coherence violates his very style of thinking. Do any of the moments
of Nietzsche's philosophy concern the West? If they do not, many of the
representations and assessments of his work in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries would need to be reconsidered, for to read Nietzsche via the concept
of the West (as in "Western metaphysics," "Western nihilism,".
etc.) would be to distort what he says.
In works that concern
themselves with the meaning of the West, Nietzsche is commonly understood to
offer a diagnosis of the situation of Western modernity in decline. David Gress, for example, claims: ''Nihilism became Nietzsche's
key political category and the fate he predicted for the politics and the
political thought of the West" (336); "according to Nietzsche and
Spengler, nihilism was the symptom and the empty core of the declining West,
the reason it rejected tradition and the reason that tradition could not be
recovered" (337); it was the Greeks, in contrast, who were ''the pinnacle
of perfection and the models of the West" (71 ). Yet Nietzsche does not
use "the West" in the passages Gress cites
to support these claims, nor does he suggest that either Europe or the Greeks
are essentially Western or Occidental. For example, Gress
quotes the following from Die nachgelassenan Fragmente 23: "Greece was the first great linkage and
synthesis of everything Oriental and thereby also the beginning of the European
soul," as the evidence for his Clainf-a,boutthe
Greeks being-the models of the West for Nietzsche, without commenting on the
philosopher's linking "Oriental" to the Greeks and to the Europeans,
and with no reference to the Occidental. How is the "European soul"
supposed to be Western ifit is founded on
"everything Oriental?"
Making a different
kind of point, Gillespie argues that Nietzsche's analysis of European nihilism
is crucial for the development of the contemporary idea of the West, which he
identifies as essentially originating in the thought ofHeidegger.
Gillespie does not say explicitly that Nietzsche himself did not have an idea
of the West, but in most cases he is careful to refer to "Europe" and
"European nihilism," with a few exceptions. But, in making a strong
claim that "like Nietzsche, Heidegger saw the advent of explicit nihilism
as the end of Western culture" (13), Gillespie shows unwittingly how
difficult it is to read Nietzsche independently of his interpretation by
Heidegger. The latter certainly does have the West as a central concern, but,
as I will attempt to demonstrate, the former does not:Nietzsche's
texts do not support the claims of various commentators that Nietzsche's
thought concerns the meaning of the West.
But they sometimes do
include the term "the West," albeit very rarely and in quite specific
contexts. The West's rarity in Nietzsche's writings is especially difficult to
notice for those reading in English, because translators sometimes use "Western
civilization" or "the West" where these do not appear in the
original. For examplFrancis Golffing
translates this passage from chapter fifteen of The Birth of Tragedy,"Fast jede Zeit und Bildungsstufe hat einmal sich mit tiefem
Missmuthe von den Griechen zu befreien gesucht,"
as: "Practically every era of Western civilization has at one time or
another tried to liberate itself from the Greeks" (91). But "Zeit' in
this case, means "era" and "Bildungsstufe"
means "stage of culture" - Nietzsche does not specify them as
Western.
He rather is
identifying a trait common everywhere, in "practically every era and stage
of culture." The passage should read, therefore: "Practically every
era and stage of culture has at one time or another tried to liberate itself from
the Greeks." Elsewhere, Golffing renders "(sich vergegenwartigt) der kann sich nicht entbrechen, in
Socrates den einen Wendepunkt und Wirbel der sogenannten Weltgeschichte zu
sehen" as: "we cannot help viewing
Socrates as the vortex and turning point of
Western civilization" (94). But "sogenannten Weltgeschichte" should be translated as
"so-called world-history" - again, it is not a reference to the
situation of a particular civilization. For Nietzsche, Socrates is the vortex
of more than Western Europe. As another example, Hollingdale
mistakenly renders what should be "a struggling chaos of all foreign
lands" into "a struggling chaos of all the West" (122), because
he translates "Auslandes" (foreign lands)
as if the word were "Abendlandes" (Western
lands).
When Nietzsche does
actually refer to "the West" (using "Westen"
and not "Abendland"), he does so in a quite
specific context. One instance is in Beyond Good and Evil. After Nietzsche
describes the "paralysis of will" of contemporary Europe, which is
nevertheless "seductively dressed up" in "the loveliest false
finery available," he
goes on to claim
that: Sickness of will is distributed over Europe unequally: it appears"
most virulently and abundantly where culture has been longest, indigenous it
declines according to the extent to which "the barbarian" still- or
again - asserts his rights under the loose-fitting garment of Western culture.
(118) [von westlaendischer Bildung]
Nietzsche then compares the will's strength in the different European nations:
it is weakest in France, and stronger in Germany and in England: but strongest
of all and most astonishing in that huge empire-in-between, where Europe as it
were flows back into Asia, in Russia. There the strength to will has for long
been stored up and kept in reserve, there the will is waiting menacingly . . .
It may need not only wars in India and Asian involvements to relieve Europe of
the greatest danger facing it, but also internal eruptions, the explosion of
the empire into small fragments, I do not say this because I desire it: the
reverse would be more after my heart - I mean such an increase in the Russian
threat that Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely
to acquire a single will by means of a new caste dominating all Europe ... so
that the long drawn-out comedy of its petty states and the divided will of its
dynasties and democracies should finally come to an end. The time for petty
politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for the
mastery over the whole earth - the compulsion to grand politics. (119)
A second instance of
"the West" appears in The Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche
writes:
Modem democracy is
the decayingform of the state. For institutions to
exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative, which is
anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to
centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations
backwards and forwards in infinitum. If this will is present, there is
established some such as the Imperium Romanum: or
such as Russia, the only power today which has durability in it, which can
wait, which can still promise something - Russia, the antithesis of that
pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness which with the
foundation of the German Reich has entered a critical phase. . . The entire
West [Der ganze Westen] has
lost those instincts out of which institutions grow: perhaps nothing goes so
much against the grain of the "modem spirit" as this. (93-94)
It is Russia in both
cases that is the Other to Nietzsche's West. "Western culture" and
the entire West" are distinguished, not from the East, Asia, or the
Orient, but from the Russian Empire, the power lying between Europe and Asia.
The West is thus equivalent for Nietzsche to Western Europe. In the first case,
the will of Western Europeans has been weakened by their culture, except when
it has remained only a superficial cover for barbaric energy; in contrast, the
will of Russia is concentrated and menacing. In the second case, the strength
of will exemplified by the Roman Empire can now be found only in Russia; in
contrast, all the nations of Europe, together comprising "the West,"
have dissipated their energy in petty squabbles.
There is no evidence
that Nietzsche uses the term "the West" for any other purpose than to
contrast the nations in the west of Europe with Russia, which is in both Europe
and Asia. The West is not an organizing category for him in general. But the
few instances of the West in Nietzsche's.Writings
indeed anticipate one, of its principal meanings in the twentieth century, when
it takes the form of a call for the unity of Western Europe and its allies in
North America in the face of the Eastern Bloc of communism. As Nietzsche's West
identifies the need for a united European will to counter the single will of
Russia, so would the West of NATO play the same role in the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, Russia was too backwards to be a real threat to the
European powers, and Nietzsche's call for (Central) European unity would be heared when Germany went to war in 1914-- with such a goal
in mind try’d once by Napoleon before.
While we have argued
that the term ''the West" plays little role in Nietzsche's writings, it is
still possible that the concept of the West has a role, under a different name.That is, the concepts of Europe or of modernity might
be functionally equivalent to what later was termed Western civilization.
According to the premises of conceptual history, Nietzsche's Europe and
modernity would be doubles of the concept of the West if they displayed the
West's conceptual features. If Nietzsche conceived of Europe as a totality, and
distinguished it from other cultural wholes by some essential feature - such as
science, technology, capitalism, the secular state, democracy, freedom, or
individuality - then his Europe would essentially be a synonym for the concept
of the West, or at least a close double, in his thought.
There is some support
for this possibility. Nietzsche's Europe and the later West have the Orient and
Asia as common opposites, and his Oriental is often contrasted to the
Occidental. On the other hand, none of these terms have fixed meanings or
valuations in Nietzsche's work. Instead, Nietzsche seems to use them playful
reference to the opinions of his contemporaries, targeting especially
anti-Semitism. In The Gay Science, for example, he claims that "if
Christianity has done everything to orientalize the
Occident, Judaism has provided vital help in occidentalizing it again: which in
a certain sense means making Europe's mission and history a continuation of the
Greek" (175).
According to George
S. Williamson, in his 2004 The Longing for Myth in Germany,Nietzsche
in this passage is deliberately inverting Wagner's equation of Christianity
with the Occident and Judaism with the Orient (273). Nietzsche's particular
claims do not reflect a commitment to an overall position about these
questions, however. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that ''the Greek was
the first great union and syntheses of everything Near Eastern [Oriental], and
on that account the inception of the European soul, the discovery of our 'new
world'" (542). And, in Beyond Good and Evil, he argues that the Greeks
"were Asia's best heirs and students" (167). In The Anti-Christ,
Nietzsche regrets that European culture was formed out of the alliance of the
German barbarians with Christianity and the reject of the culture of Islam:
"Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient
world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The
wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at
bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome,
was trampled down" (195-96).
Nietzsche's ideas
about, and his evaluations of, the Occidental, the Oriental, the Asian, and the
European, are quite fluid, therefore, and together do not constitute a definite
conception of a Europe equivalent to Western civilization. Nor are his
assessments of history congruent with seeing the West as a definite tradition.
His representations of the Greeks, Jews, Romans, Christians, and modem
Europeans are familiar ones to contemporaries, and individually might find
their places in some recent versions of the Grand Narrative, but Nietzsche does
not bring them together himself into a narrative of the unified historical
development of a common civilization. His well-known admiration for the Greeks
does not entail a claim of ancestry, for example. While Gress
represents Nietzsche as believing that the Greeks were "the models of the
West" (71), this misrepresents, or at least vastly oversimplifies, the
complex ways he treated both the Hellenic world and modem Europe. In Twilight of
the Idols, for example, Nietzsche writes: "One does not learn from the
Greeks - their manner is too strong, it is also too fluid to produce an
imperative, a 'classical' effect" (117). And, in Daybreak: "Nothing
grows clearer to me year by year than that the nature of the Greeks and of
antiquity, however simple and universally familiar it may seem to lie before
us, is very hard to understand, indeed is hardly accessible at all" (116).
According to Nietzsche, the Romans are much more part of Europe's past that the
Greeks; but still, they are not the same as Europeans for him. He treats Rome
instead as a noble culture ruined by barbarians and Christians. If Hellenic
culture does become incorporated into the European, it will not be because it a
passively received cultural inheritance, but because contemporary Europeans
have taken it in deliberately.
As these passages
quoted make plain, Nietzsche throughout his work plays with various
characterizations of the Oriental and Occidental, showing both his critical
engagement with an existing discourse where the distinction was an important
one, and his refusal to agree with any consistent set of valuations. As well,
rather than structuring his analysis around the concept of civilization - with
the West, on one side, and the East or the Rest, on the other - Nietzsche
privileges "peoples," or "races" as pure national types,
including the ancient Greek, the Indian, the Persian, the Japanese, the
Scandinavian, the ancient Roman, and the Renaissance Italian. His principal
dualities are not those of West and East, the Orient and Occident, or even
Europe and Asia, but rather of the Greeks and the modems, Christianity and
modernity, Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics,Germans
and Latins, and the North and South in Europe. According to Williamson again:
Nietzsche found it impossible and even undesirable to escape the maze of
confessional and religious rhetoric in which he lived and worked. While he was
capable of inverting the received dichotomies of antiquity and modernity,
Christian and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, he never envisioned a plane where
such dualisms would become unnecessary or attacks based on them
irrelevant.(273-74)
Despite the variety
of his characterizations and valuations, Nietzsche's work is, in many aspects,
strongly Eurocentric. He associates Europe particularly with modernity,
explaining that the advent of nihilism in modern Europe was ultimately the
result of Christianity's will to truth, producing the modem science that turned
against it. While the Christian past is not the only origin of nihilism - given
that Buddhist nihilism is far more profound - it seems as if European nihilism
has a unique meaning: it both puts humanity as such in the most danger, and it
opens the through which a new humanity might emerge. European history is thus
considered to possess a uniquely dynamic and transformative character. In this
sense, Nietzsche treats European history as if it alone has world-historical
significance.
What is more evident,
however, is his desire to dispute the accepted meanings of many of concepts
that would underlie the later concept of the West. These include: historical
consciousness, culture, bildung, nationalism, the
folk, origins, Hellenism, race, science, modernity, the French Revolution,
freedom, development, Jews, democracy, liberalism, and progress. In the end,
Nietzsche's thought is really "post-West," in that it provides the
criteria for critiquing the concept's privileging of origins and totality.
Nietzsche also articulates the grounds for the psychological attraction. to
concepts of cultural identity, such as the West, through his various critiques
of nationalism, and German nationalism especially. His attacks on Germany's
assertion that its military success in the Franco Prussian war was due to its
cultural superiority would be equally telling against such defenders of Western
civilization as Victor David Hanson.
Thus we can say that,
during nineteenth-century Europe there were many competing ways of narrating
history and mapping the world in the process of being formulated, and the
diversity of other categories -especially the nation, but also language, race
and class prevented both civilization and the West from dominating
scholarship or political debate.
There were present,
of course, a number of traditions using western motifs, a number of fields of
scholarship in which the distinction between the Occidental and Oriental was
important, and a number of political divisions along an East-West axis, but
there was no stable concept of a single culture united by history. The various
available ideas and images about the West did not carry the significance they
would gain after the turn of the twentieth century, when they began to coalesce
into the concept of the West. Before this happened, they were counterbalanced
by other and more important terms of analysis and sources of identification in
European thought. The West is therefore a fairly contemporary concept, by which
cultural traits are organized into a totality in retrospect; to read this
project into earlier works is to misinterpret them. Even so, the frameworks
developed by the authors consideredabove, especially
those of Hegel and Nietzsche, contributed to the content of the West, once it
emerged as a major category of political and social analysis.
Alastair Bonnett, in his The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and
History, makes the convincing case that the West became an important conception
in ''non- Western" countries such Japan before it was used in
"Western" ones. The West was first a category developed by those who
positioned themselves as outside, rather by those seeking an internal mode of
cultural identification. As we will next , however, the earliest, most
developed, and eventually most influential discourse involving the concept of
the West, emerged first in Russia. Through nineteenth-century Russian debates
over that country's relation to Europe, the various strands of discourse were
crystallized, enriched, complicated, and strengthened, such that the West
became a fundamental mode of making sense of world history and geopolitics in
the twentieth century.
Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism
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