Orientalism - autonomous learning

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258 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
259
Therefore, in the best Orientalist work done during the interwar
period-represented in the impressive careers of· Massignon and
Gibb himself-we will find elements in common with the best
humanistic scholarship of the period. Thus the summational attiR
tude of which I spoke earlier can be regarded as the Orientalist
equivalent of attempts in the purely Western humanities to understand
culture as a whole, antipositivistically, intuitively, sympathetically.
Both the Orientalist and the non-Orientalist begin with
the sense that Western culture is passing through an important
phase, whose main feature is the crisis imposed on it by such threats
as barbarism, narrow technical concerns, moral aridity, strident
nationalism, and so forth. The idea of using specific texts, for instance,
to work from the specific to the general (to understand
the whole life of a period and consequently of a culture) is common
to those humanists in the West inspired by the work of Wilhelm
Dilthey, as well as to towering Orientalist scholars like Massignon
and Gibb. The project of revitalizing philology-as it is found in
the work of Curtius, Vossler, Auerbach, Spitzer, Gundolf, Hofmannsthal
66 -has its counterpart therefore in the inVigorations provided
to strictly technical Orientalist philology by Massignon's
studies of what he called the mystical lexicon, the vocabulary of
Islamic devotion, and so on.
But there is another, more interesting conjunction between
Orientalism in this phase of its history and the European sciences
of man (sciences de l'homme) , the Geisteswissenschaften contemporary
with it. We must note, first, that non-Orientalist cultural
studies were perforce more immediately responsive to the threats
to humanistic culture of a selfRaggrandizing, amoral technical
specialization represented, in part at least, by the rise of fascism in
Europe. This response extended the concerns of the interwar
period into the period following World War n as well. An eloquent
scholarly and personal testimonial to this response can be found
in Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis, and in his last methodoR
logical reflections as a Philolog. 67 He tells us that Mimesis was
written during his exile in Turkey and was meant to be in large
measure an attempt virtually to see the development of Western
culture at almost the last moment when that culture still had its
integrity and civilizational coherence; therefore, he set himself
the task of writing a general work based on specific textual analyses
in such a way as to layout the principles of Western literary perR
formance in all their variety, richness, and fertility. The aim was a
synthesis of Western culture in which the synthesis itself was
matched in importance by the very gesture of doing it, which
Auerbach believed was made possible by what he called "late
bourgeois humanism."68 The discrete particular was thus converted
into a highly mediated symbol of the world-historical process.
No less important for Auerbach-and this fact is of immediate
relevance to Orientalism-was the humanistic tradition of involvement
in a national culture or literature not one's own. Auerbach's
example was Curtius, whose prodigious output testified to his
deliberate choice as a German to dedicate himself professionally to
the Romance literatures. Not for nothing, then, did Auerbach end
his autumnal reflections with a significant quotation from Hugo of
St. Victor's Didascalicon: "The man who finds his homeland sweet
is st.ill a t~nder beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one
is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as
a foreign land."69 The more one is able to leave one's cultural home,
the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well,
with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true
vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien
cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.
No less important and met!Jodologically formative a cultural
force was the use in the social sciences of "types" both as an
analytical device and as a way of seeing familiar things in a new
way. The precise history of the "type" as it is to be found in earlytwentieth-century
thinkers like Weber, Durkheim, Lukacs, Mannheim,
and the other sociologists of knowledge has been examined
often enough:70 yet it has not been remarked, I think, that Weber's
studies of Protestantism, Judaism, and Buddhism blew him (perhaps
unwittingly) into the very territory originally charted and claimed
by the Orientalists. There he found encouragement amongst all
those nineteenth-century thinkers who believed that there was a
sort of ontological difference between Eastern and Western economic
(as well as religious) "mentalities." Although he never thoroughly
studied Islam, Weber nevertheless influenced the field considerably,
mainly because his notions of type were simply an "outside" confirmation
of many of the canonical theses held by Orientalists, whose
economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental's
fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality.
In the Islamic field those cliches held good for literally
hundreds of years-until Maxime Rodinson's important study Islam
and Capitalism appeared in 1966. Still, the notion of a type-­