“Unfabling the East” by Jurgen Osterhammel

The thesis of Osterhammel’s massive tome is that “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” He considers the Enlightenment to be the timespan of the long eighteenth century, from around 1680 through 1820. Osterhammel’s breath and depth in this book is impressive. It is a comprehensive survey of European Enlightenment thought on Asia, taken from a plethora of primary sources: explorers, merchants, and expats, as well as from contemporary social scientists and theorists who relied on these travelogues to expound more sweeping pronouncements. Osterhammel is candid when authors might be embellishing the truth or spinning complete yarns from cloth. He is also a keen judge of their prejudices and strengths. Osterhammel also spends a great deal of space comparing and contrasting what different Europeans thought of differences between Asian cultures. Through the course of the book, Osterhammel seamlessly weaves between large themes and a minutia of facts in a coherent fashion. Among the larger topics discussed are border policy, urban planning, language and translation barriers, despotic governance, aesthetics, religious differences, slaves, treatment of women, social stratification, and political modernization. 

Osterhammel begins by conceding that “Asia” itself was a European term. “In the eighteenth century the individual peoples of Asia did not identify themselves as “Asians”…. Societies on the Asian continent were considerably more heterogeneous than their contemporary European counterparts.” There also was not a homogenous pattern of thought from the European minds regarding Asia. It’s thinkers were diverse and nuanced. When discussing India, he mentions, “no accusation hit Warren Hastings harder than Burke’s claim that he adhered to a relativist “geographical morality” in his dealings with the Indians, treating them in ways that would be proscribed in Europe as tyrannical and criminally reprehensible.”

However, as an interesting general statement, Osterhammel describes the difference in cultures many Enlightenment thinkers felt there was between the countries of Asia deemed most relevant to European outsiders. “Nobody in Europe dreamed of calling the Japanese “barbarians.” Japan was the only country in Asia that was always recognized as a civilization in its own right. Differing opinions could be expressed about China, even if the voices proclaiming it to be barbarian remained at all times in a minority. The opposite held true of the Turks, who were respected by Europeans for their military prowess far more than they were admired for their cultural achievements. Even their most vocal champion, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ultimately saw the conflict between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as one “between civilization and barbarism.”… The Persians, conversely, had been regarded since the days of Herodotus as a highly civilized nation, an appraisal that their political renaissance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century seemed only to confirm. The chaos that descended on the land in the eighteenth century cast doubt on this judgement. Persia now became the only Asiatic country in which a Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all—appeared to have been realized in the present…. No contemporary inhabitants of Asia fitted the eighteenth century’s image of “barbarian” better than the Tatars.… Unlike the desert Arabs, the competing candidates for the role, the Tatars not only fulfilled the criterion of nomadic people who had moved beyond the stage of primitive savagery; they also embodied the raw forces of history that had been pacified not long before.”

In regards to the nomadic lifestyle of many in the Near East, Osterhammel makes an astute point. He states, “because nomads are not tied to any fixed place, temples as well as immobile images of the divine are foreign to them. As a consequence of their way of life, they therefore possess fairly abstract ideas about god, making them receptive to monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, the most aniconic among them.” However, throughout most of his book, Osterhammel tries to let his sources do the talking, battling out competing theories between themselves, with little commentary from Osterhammel in between. He reports what Enlightenment contemporaries thought about the East without value judgement and in the context of the times. Osterhammel commends Montesquieu as “the creator of a general framework of a general social science…. [Montesquieu] also never plays off a specific concept of anthropology as the science of “them,” the exotic others, against something like “sociology” as the science of “us.” Montesquieuean social theory is transcultural and universal, comparative and counter-teleological, empirical and nonnormative. Societies in all civilizations are studied as they are or as they appear to be; they are not assigned to one of the stages preordained for them by a philosophy of progress.”

Osterhammel also points to how European scholars contrasted the lack of an aristocratic class throughout most of Asia with their own cultures. “Had not Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli already taken the absence of a nobility to be a chief characteristic of despotic states?” Now, during the Enlightenment, “the seventeenth-century insight [was] that highly sophisticated civilizations could survive and even flourish without an aristocracy…. There was no such thing as aristocracy in China. There were no dynastic magnates, no vassals, no patrimonial privileges, no feudal dues, no great landholdings, no courtly society outside the imperial power center, no code of chivalry, and no estates-general or parliaments…. The bureaucratic hierarchy (which was indeed made up of nine ranks) fulfilled many of the functions performed by the aristocracy…. The “mandarins” [Europeans] encountered at court had spent years mastering the classical texts in preparation for the grueling and highly competitive state examinations…. The scholar could now take his place in the legally privileged elite group of the shenshi or “gentry.” Only if he went on to achieve success in the central examination, gaining his “doctoral degree” in the presence of the emperor himself, was he now qualified—although by no means guaranteed—to secure one of the few bureaucratic offices in the territorial administration of this enormous country and at the imperial court. These coveted offices, like the title of gentry, were nonhereditary.” As a contemporary German scholar put it, the Chinese “associate nobility with the person and not with his blood.”

Osterhammel points out that Europe, educated and modernized by Enlightenment thought, was poised to takeover after Asia’s own self-inflicted decline. “When early modern Asian states did collapse, this was hardly ever the result of European intervention; the Crimean Khanate was a notable exception. The British, for example, played no part in the breakup of Aurangzeb’s Mughal Empire; they merely understood how to take advantage of it…. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Europeans, now armed with the highly efficient institution of the militarized chartered company, set about integrating Asia’s coastal regions into worldwide trading networks.”

Throughout Osterhammel’s book he stresses that, for the most part, the cross-cultural learning was a one-sided affair. Scholars and travelers from Europe explored, studied, and debated the merits of Asian cultures. For much of the Enlightenment, Asia was viewed in the West as different and exotic, but not necessarily inferior. In contrast, Asians, for most of the long eighteenth century, rarely showed the slightest curiosity towards the Other. “Asian interest in Europe was desultory. Phases of mental opening to the West, such as the high water mark of Chinese curiosity about Europe reached in the second half of the Kangxi emperor’s reign (circa 1690-1720) and the Ottoman “Tulip Period” shortly thereafter (1718-30), proved short-lived. Only in Japan, the most inaccessible of all Asian countries after Korea, was Europe studied in anything like a systematic way on the basis of imported books, mainly in Dutch. This willingness to learn from the outside world was the legacy of a centuries-long absorption of Chinese civilization…. The anticolonial self-strengthening reforms undertaken by Haidar Ali in India, later pursued with similar intent by Pasha Muhammad Ali in Egypt, belong to a new era: they are already reactions to Europe’s burgeoning power.”

“The Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)

Pessoa wrote under many heteronyms. Campos was a poet and a sensualist. He did not intellectualize, but felt. “May God either change my life or end it.” In another poem, Campos again pontificates on death, “Once the session is over and we leave,/ There’s no house to go home to, no car to take us anywhere,/ but only Absolute Night and God perhaps like a Vast Moon/ signifying”

Campos was also a subjectivist, “Everything we’ve ever seen is us, we alone experience the world./ We have only ourselves inside and outside,/ We have nothing, we have nothing, we have nothing…” He was a dreamer, not a doer, “No, I don’t believe in me./ The lunatic asylums are full of madmen brimming with certainties!/ And since I have no certainty, am I more right than them or less?/ No, I don’t even believe in me… The world is for those born to conquer it/ And not for those who dream they might conquer it, even if they’re right./ I’ve dreamed far more than Napoleon ever did./ I’ve clutched to my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ ever did./ I’ve secretly written philosophies that no Kant ever wrote./ But I am, and perhaps always will be, a tenant in one of those garrets,/ even if I don’t live in one;/ I will always be one of those not born to do this.”

In his poetry, Campos also stressed the reality of the mind, “We all have two lives:/ The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children,/ And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist;/ The false one is the life we live in the company of others,/ Which is the practical, the useful life,/ The one where they end up, putting us in a coffin./ In the other life there are no coffins, no deaths./ There are only illustrations from childhood:/ Big colored books, to look at rather than read;/ Big colorful pages to remember later on./ In that other life, we are us,/ In that other life, we live;/ In this one we die, which is what living means.”

Finally, Campos also wrote prose, which justified and explained both his poetry and the differences between himself and Pessoa, along with the other heteronyms. Campos expressed his own philosophy to life, “No age can pass its sensibility on to another age; it can only pass on the intelligence implicit in that sensibility. It is through emotion that we become ourselves, whereas through intelligence we become other…. Each age gives to subsequent ages only what it was not.” In prose, Campos also gave his literary opinions, “The superior poet says what he actually feels. The average poet says what he decides to feel. The inferior poet says what he thinks he should feel…. Most people feel conventionally, albeit with great human sincerity, not, however, with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, that is what matters to the poet.”

“Aspiration- The Agency of Becoming” by Agnes Callard

Callard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Strictly, her book is narrowly focused on the subject of aspiration, but I often found as I read my mind wandering to larger themes of the human experience, in general. She stresses that aspiration is a process, taking place over a period of time, and which results in a complete transformation of the Self, with a new values, ethics, and beliefs. Callard uses aspiration as her lens to wrestle with philosophical issues such as decision theory, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.

Callard begins by making the point that aspiration is something you do, not something that is passively done to you. It is a change in values that is actively sought, if not yet gained. “Agency, as distinct from mere behavior, is marked by practical rationality. Insofar as becoming someone is something someone does, and not merely something that happens to her, she must have access to reasons to become the person she will be…. Gaining a value often means devoting to it some of the time and effort one was previously devoting elsewhere…. Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values.” Importantly, aspiration is an ongoing process, not a single event. “More generally, if I cannot know in advance what a transformative experience will be like, I also cannot know how transformative it will be…. Our point of view on the matter changes little by little, and we transition slowly from someone who is relatively indifferent to the preferences, values, and interests of the new way of being to someone for whom they figure as the centerpiece of her life…. Sometimes one’s character and values change (“drift”) in incremental steps, so that one can see only in retrospect the magnitude of the change that those steps have added up to.” There is agency throughout this process, however. Aspiration is not an act of submission. The aspirant might not know exactly where she is going, but she is working hard to get there all the same. “Coming to acquire the value means learning to see the world in a new way…. [Aspiration] challenges the prevailing assumption that basic or fundamental preferences (desires, values, etc.) are the kinds of things you can only reason from, by exposing a way we have of reasoning towards them…. On an aspirational model, these decisions are best understood as climactic moments embedded in a longer transformative journey, marking neither its beginning nor its end…. The one making the decision is, therefore, not entirely an outsider to the life she may opt into.” The aspirant does not aspire alone. She is often helped by a mentor, a role model, her family, or a community. “Aspirational agency is distinctly dependent on such environmental support…. Original contact with the values that will eventually become objects of aspirational pursuit” is critical to the process.

Callard makes the case that it is possible to reason one’s way towards values that one does not at present fully hold. That is the process of aspiration and part of its ongoing nature. ““Bad” reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the “real” reason…. She sees her own motivational condition as in some way imperfectly responsive to the reasons that are out there…. Something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous…. The agent who can give an account of what is to be gotten out of what she is doing grasps the value of what she will (if successful) achieve through her action.” There is a hope in the aspirant’s mind that there is more still to come. “You can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and you know that…. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better…. Proleptic reasons are double…. The reason on which she acts has two faces: a proximate face that reflects the kinds of things that appeal to the person she is now and a distal one that reflects the character and motivation of the person she is trying to be. Her reason is double because she herself is in transition.”

Aspiration deals with wholesale changes in someone’s life. Often, during the process, one loses values one held dear, while gaining new ones. It is a moral transformation. “Aspiration is the diachronic process by which an agent effects change on her own ethical point of view. Aspirants aim to direct their own ethical attention in such a way as to more fully appreciate one value or set of values and to become immune or insensitive to those values that intrinsically conflict with the first set. An aspirant is someone who works to improve her desires, her feelings, her ethical evaluations, and, more generally, her own capacity for responding to reasons.” Again, there is agency in this transition. “The aspirant has marked out one attitude as a kind of target toward which she orients herself, and another (or others) as a danger from which she must turn herself away…. Intrinsically conflicted agents interfere in their own thinking; intrinsically conflicted aspirants interfere for the sake of effecting long-term change…. Her goal is to handle these conflict situations in such a way as to eventually mitigate their occurrence…. Deciding to aspire doesn’t resolve anything. What resolves conflict is aspiration itself, the temporally extended work of changing ourselves, our values, our desires, our outlook…. Aspirants externalize the desire all the way into nonexistence.”

Callard next looks into akrasia: weakness of will or lack of self-restraint. There is a difference between “acting on a reason and acting on one’s best reason…. Akrasia is understood as acting on a reason that is worse or weaker than another reason one could have acted on.” Callard resolves the conflict found in akrasia by relying on the aspiring Self. “Because we can be intrinsically conflicted, we are not trapped in the evaluative condition we happen to be in. The fact that we can be akratically insensitive to our dominant evaluative perspective is the flip side of the fact that we can be sensitive to evaluative content that doesn’t fit into that perspective. We are not restricted to taking the reasons we currently have the framework for processing…. Human progress in value depends on our openness to feeling some goodness before we can make reflective sense to ourselves of that goodness. The possibility of akrasia is thus tethered to the possibility of aspiration…. The akratic and the enkratic have an important common ground in the experience of intrinsic conflict that precedes their bad (akratic) or good (enkratic) action. Both characters are distinct from the paragon, and thus neither fully inhabits the evaluative perspective from which they deliberate…. Enkratics know why they are doing what they are doing, and akratics know why they should have acted otherwise…. Aspirants try to resolve their intrinsic conflicts; akratics and enkratics try to act in spite of them. Aspirants try to get a better grasp of the target value, so as to approach the paragon; akratics and enkratics make do with whatever grasp they have, by deliberating as though they were the paragon…. Akratics act from a grasp of value, however partial. Aspirants act toward a grasp of value…. We cannot hold off from making use of our values until such time as they are securely in our possession; for what happens in the meanwhile is also life…. We reason, locally, from the very values we may, more globally, also be reasoning toward.”

Callard also looks into the moral responsibility of aspiration. “Our interest is in self-directed value-acquisition, which is, first and foremost, a change of a person in the ethical dimension.” She focuses on the idea of the transforming Self. Although, a single person is a continuous entity, the Self, nonetheless, is changing throughout the process of aspiration. She is creating her new Self. “The aspirant does not see herself as fashioning, controlling, sanctioning, making, or shaping the self she creates. Instead, she looks up to that self, tries to understand her, endeavors to find a way to her.” She is grasping for a value she admires, but does not quite know the true value of, yet. “In aspiration, it is the created self who, through the creator’s imperfect but gradually improving understanding of her, makes intelligible the path the person’s life takes.” Again, agency is intimately involved in this value acquisition process. It is purposeful and self-directed. “The fact that there is no vantage point one can simply adopt outside one’s character doesn’t entail that one couldn’t arrive at the vantage point that is outside one’s current character by working toward that condition…. This kind of work involves both moving toward and moving away from a perspective on value. When engaged in it, not only are we gaining something, we are also often losing something.” There is a relationship between the two Selves that continues through the process. “Instead of imagining my future self as beholden to my past self, I suggest we imagine my past self as looking forward, trying to live up to the person she hopes to become…. If you are trying to get better acquainted with some value, then you take your antecedent conception of that value to be inadequate. You act in order to grasp the value better, but your reason for wanting to grasp that value must be the very value you don’t yet fully grasp…. We work to appreciate them, and this work is rationalized and guided by the values we are coming to know…. It is the end that provides the normative standards for assessing what comes before it…. If practically rational guidance required an agent to know exactly what she wanted out of the outcome, aspiration could not qualify as rationally guided. The aspirant fails to grasp the full normative grounding of her project until it is completed.” The aspirant does not yet possess the normative value she seeks, and yet she is not flailing in the dark. She has an imperfect picture, which she is actively striving to gradually improve. “The aspirant…. is someone whose grasp both is, and is known by her to be, inadequate…. [She] is aware of the defectiveness of her grasp of some value. She is unable to engage in the relevant activity purely for its own sake, precisely because she does not yet value it in the way that she would have to in order to do so.”

Callard contrasts aspiration with ambition, which she calls “the kind of pursuit that is large in scale but is not directed at producing a change in the self.” Ambition is different from aspiration because it is not a process of learning. Ambition is directed towards some sort of success, but the value of which is already fully grasped by the agent at the start of the process. “While the ambitious person may receive assistance from others in achieving his goal, the aspirant needs others to help her with the project of grasping her goal.”

Callard ends by reemphasizing that aspiration is a process that takes place over time. It is not a single act, with a distinct before and after. “Large-scale transformative pursuits often involve a kind of rebirth even with respect to those values that straddle the transformative event.” Aspiration is the process of transforming the entire Self into something new. It is a becoming. “A proleptic reasoner will have trouble explaining exactly why she is doing what she is doing, though once she gets to her destination she will say, “This was why.”"

“The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” by Jacob Burckhardt (translated by S.G.C. Middlemore)

Burckhardt’s treatise on the Italian Renaissance is a comprehensive history of the cultural transition from the Middle Ages. He also seeks to explain why, in his view, the Renaissance started in Italy, as opposed to elsewhere in Europe. He begins, “The worst that can be said of the movement is that it was anti-popular, that through it Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and uncultivated classes…. The civilization of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies—this civilization had long been exerting a partial influence on medieval Europe…. That an age existed which idolized the ancient world and its products with an exclusive devotion was not the fault of individuals. It was the work of an historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have followed, and of the ages to come, rests upon the fact that it was so.”

For Burckhardt, the prime example of the Renaissance artist was Dante Alighieri. “With unflinching frankness and sincerity he lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these sonnets and canzoni, and the marvelous fragments of the diary of his youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an artistic verse; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the word—the first who consciously casts immortal matter into an immortal form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness…. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual element in painting and sculpture attained a power of expression in any way analogous to that of the Divine Comedy.”

The twin aspects of the culture of the European Middles Ages that the Renaissance rebelled against were the primacy of State and Church. Burckhardt states that the conscience of the individual citizen first butted up against the demands of the Italian states, whether ruled as a principality or republic. “The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate…. The sight of victorious egotism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm…. But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity…. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary…. The Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor medievalism either could or would bestow upon it.”

The Italian man of the Renaissance took it upon himself to wrestle free from the control of the Church. The individuality of his belief would no longer allow for him to bend his knee unflinchingly to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the Roman Pope. “The Italians were the first modern people of Europe who gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began to waver…. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form…. That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice.” 

Finally, Burckhardt returns full circle, to the Italian humanists’ love of the classics as a model for living the best life. “Ancient literature now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than discriminated.”