The Transformation of the World (175 page)

In 1857, Japanese artists, most notably Takahashi Yuichi, began to practice European techniques of oil painting and triggered a new wave of interest in Western art. In the same decade, the first Japanese woodcuts reached Europe in the baggage of travelers and diplomats. Some were put on display for the first time at a public exhibition in London in 1862, but this and later collections by no means gave a representative overview of ancient and modern Japanese art.
Nevertheless, individual prints by masters such as Hokusai or Hiroshige were a source of lasting excitement to artists and critics. The so-called Japonism that grew out of these encounters was something new: art from outside Europe was no longer used only for decoration or costumes, in the way that Chinese and Turkish material had been in various Oriental fashions of the eighteenth century, or that North Africa had featured as an exotic setting for desert or harem motifs in French painting between 1830 and 1870 (Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Fromentin, and others). Japanese art gave answers to problems with which artists in the forefront of European modernism were then wrestling; they observed its independent achievements and realized the close affinities with their own efforts. Thus, the European enthusiasm for Japanese art and the Japanese enthusiasm for European art peaked at exactly the same time, but for different reasons. The fascination of the Western aesthetic for Japanese people began to wear off after Ernest Fennelosa—an influential figure in both East and West—alerted them to the wealth of their own artistic heritage and placed himself at the head of a movement that, with the support of official cultural policy, advocated the patriotic renewal of genuinely Japanese painting. An American Japanophile thus became the founder of Japanese neotraditionalism. Fennelosa's writings elicited a strong response in Europe too, raising the interest in things Japanese to a new level of art criticism.
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The musical influence of East Asia was also important, though rather less epochal. The old prejudice that Chinese music was intolerable to Western ears remained alive for a long time, based only on the impressions of individual travelers and their incomplete attempts to transcribe exotic tunes into European notation. In the 1880s, the invention and rapid proliferation of the phonograph finally created the conditions for non-Western music to become better known in Europe. Giacomo Puccini and Gustav Mahler, for example, studied phonogram recordings of East Asian music, the former turning them to account in
Madame Butterfly
(1904) and
Turandot
(1924–25), the latter in
Das
Lied von der Erde
(1908) and his
Ninth Symphony
(1909); Puccini, it has been alleged, ultimately relied on a musical clock imported from China. Composers of light music were content simply to evoke Oriental moods by means of instrumentalization and tone color. Musical inspirations that often sounded like clichés could lead to fresh inventions in the hands of such masters as Giuseppe Verdi (
Aida
, 1871), Camille Saint-Saëns (
Suite algérienne
, 1881), or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (
Sheherazade
, 1888). The Asian influence ran deeper where the Western tone system was allowed to be destabilized by alien elements. Claude Debussy led the way in this respect, after he had heard authentic gamelan music at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.
¹⁰¹

After its heyday in the period between 1860 and 1920, the European fascination with Asia gradually subsided. Postwar Europe was more preoccupied with itself, while “Oriental” Asia seemed to lose its magic as urban modernization got under way, revolutions and anti-imperialist movements flared up,
and harbingers of military rule appeared here and there. The small minority of fin-de-siècle European intellectuals who looked east to Asia did so with little concern for its contemporary reality, in a spirit of
Kulturkritik
or with hopes of salvation. The attraction was the inexhaustible depths of various “Eastern wisdoms,” amid a crisis that seemed to many to be affecting Christianity as much as the rational worldview of natural science. In Germany the publishing house of Eugen Diederichs, a lawyer who espoused conservative lifestyle reforms, brought out the
Analects of Confucius
, the
Book of Laozi
, and other texts of the ancient Chinese canon, in a series of translations by the missionary-sinologist Richard Wilhelm that were of a high philological and literary quality. From 1875 the system of so-called theosophy, preached with bizarre appurtenances by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, had a particular impact, even in India and Ceylon. It was a syncretic version of conventional occultism combined with the most diverse Middle Eastern and Asiatic traditions, from the Kabbalah to the Hindu Vedas, with a sprinkling of Aryan racism.
¹⁰²
Rudolf Steiner, a master to a huge number of devoted followers in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States, came out of this mystical milieu; in 1912 he created a doctrinally more temperate Anthroposophical Society of his own.

An undifferentiated “Asia,”
fons et origo
of salvationist doctrines, thus became the symbol of an irrationalism polemically counterposed to the Western faith in reason that seemed to reach even into the well-tempered culture of orthodox Protestantism. Such impulses were not expected to come from Islam. There was an aesthetic appreciation of Muslim poetry and architecture, but its main currents were quite rationalist and did not seem to offer an alternative religious worldview. A paradoxical situation therefore developed in the last third of the nineteenth century. Painfully aware of the gap that had opened up, elites in the non-Occidental world strove to appropriate advanced science and technology from the West, often regarding it as a universal achievement of the modern age that would forearm them against the supremacy of the major Western powers,
¹⁰³
while also—especially in India and, a few decades later, in China—sharply criticizing elements of irrationalism and “superstition” in their own traditions.
¹⁰⁴
At the same time, minorities of intellectuals in Europe and North America instrumentalized “Eastern wisdom” in their struggle against the faith in reason that characterized Western scientific culture. The ironical counterpoint that Max Weber presented in his late studies of the economic ethos of world religions escaped public notice in this regard. In his view, the tension between worldliness and otherworldliness was a source of the economic dynamism of the Occident, whereas India was too strongly, and China too weakly, oriented to spiritual hopes of salvation.

Around the turn of the century, Asia thus acquired greater importance than ever in certain fields of Western thought, but it also became a projection screen for European irrationalism that seemed to leave it with no opportunities for development of its own. Revered for its “spirituality,” Asia was stuck in limbo, with
no present and no future. Only Mohandas K. Gandhi, the later “Mahatma” who first attracted Western attention after his return, in 1915, from a long sojourn in South Africa, managed (at least in European eyes) to combine the air of an Asian prophet and holy man with a cunning politics to empower the powerless.

5 Humanities and the Study of the Other

By 1900 the sciences had acquired unprecedented cultural authority in Europe, the United States, and some Asian countries like Japan and India.
¹⁰⁵
At first small, then rapidly growing communities of scholars had taken shape in newly formed disciplines. The great majority of the world's scientists were no longer educated amateurs but salaried professionals working in universities, industry, or government research institutions. The system of education in the most advanced countries now included both “pure” and “applied” science—a distinction that had only just appeared on the scene. A foundation in mathematics
and
(ancient) languages, universally applicable, meant that the sciences could be extended into further domains through the training of new generations. Admittedly the total volume of creativity did not keep pace with the number of scientists, since there was a disproportionate growth of mediocrity and routinism. The production of geniuses can be socially managed to only a very limited extent.
¹⁰⁶

The Human and Social Sciences

Institutionalized expansion took in not only natural science and medicine, which by the early twentieth century was no longer understood as a proto-scientific craft and an art, but also the human and social sciences (
Geistes-und Sozialwissenschaften
)—two terms that were, if not coined, then first popularized among the scientific public toward the end of the nineteenth century. The “humanities” was another neologism of this kind. “Social science” went back a few decades earlier, used from the beginning not as an umbrella term for older discourses such as “statistics” (= the description of states) or “political economy,” but as an indication that the rigor of modern natural science was being claimed for the study of society, with practical purposes, chiefly social reform, in view. If we leave aside early theorists with a background in philosophy, such as Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer, the discipline was at first closer to empirical investigation than to theory (in Lorenz von Stein or the early representatives of the German Verein für Sozialpolitik founded in 1873). Karl Marx, not just a speculating theorist but a tireless student of social reality, was one of the few who transcended this opposition in their work.

No attempt was made before 1890 to define a common identity that differentiated the social sciences from other fields of learning; only then did professorships in “sociology” start to become common in Europe and the United States.
¹⁰⁷
For the time being, sociology and economics remained closely intertwined, especially in the two German traditions of Marxism and the Historical
School of
Nationalökonomie
(up to and including Max Weber). After 1870, economic science in most countries moved away from the older tradition of political economy—which focused on production and labor in their social interrelationship—and turned to theories of marginal utility and equilibrium primarily concerned with the market and the structure of subjective needs. This separation of economic behavior from its social preconditions was part of a general differentiation within the social sciences during the last four decades before the First World War.
¹⁰⁸
By 1930, at least outside Germany, where remnants of the Historical School stood their ground, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between economics and sociology—as well as a split between the social conformism of economic science and the sociological interest in the dark sides of capitalist development and the chances for reforming society. In Japan, the Western social sciences met with greater interest than anywhere else. But they were received selectively.
Gemeinschaft
was more important than
Gesellschaft
, the collective rated higher that the individual, for early Japanese sociologists and political scientists. Since their work involved them in the grand national project of neo-traditionalist integration through a strong state, they were wary of subjecting the new myths of the Meiji period—above all, the emperor cult and the fiction of Japan as “one big family”—to rigorous criticism.
¹⁰⁹

Humanities faculties began to take shape in European universities, especially in France and Germany, in the middle of the nineteenth century; the individualist gentleman-scholar held sway for a little longer in the British Isles. The academization of the human “sciences” was something new. Historians, for example, had existed for more than two thousand years in Europe and China, but never before had history been taught in educational institutions as a methodical science. The first history
professors
still worth mentioning in a history of science were to be found after 1760 in Göttingen, then the most highly regarded university in the German-speaking world, but they also taught politics or topical matters relevant to the life of the state (“statistics,”
Polizeywissenschaft
, etc.). At the same time, the greatest European historian of the age, Edward Gibbon, was writing his monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–88) in the comfortable circumstances of a prosperous private scholar on the shores of Lake Geneva. In Britain the first significant historian to occupy a university chair was William Stubbs, in 1886. After Germany had once again taken the lead (Leopold Ranke's professorship in Berlin began in 1834 and lasted until 1871), it took several decades for history faculties to become established in all European countries. This happened quite early in Russia, where Sergei Mikhailovich Solovev helped to create a school in Moscow in the 1850s. In France, it was only in 1868 that the founding of the École Pratique des Hautes Études initiated a similar process of “scientific” historical research in the Ranke tradition. Even Jules Michelet, both then and now the most famous French historian of the nineteenth century, was noted more as an orator and writer than as an educator. After Louis Napoléon removed him in 1851, for political reasons, from his positions at the National
Archives and the Collège de France, Michelet lived off the royalties from his numerous publications.

In Europe and the United States, the professionalization of historical science was a phenomenon of the period after 1860.
¹¹⁰
It took a little longer to develop in the aesthetic disciplines. Intellectually rigorous criticism had existed in Europe since at least the middle of the eighteenth century,
¹¹¹
but it was only shortly before 1900 that university departments of art, music, and various national literatures came into being alongside (not in place of) the freer public discourse of literati, journalists, private scholars, clerics, artists, and professional musicians. There was a less clear-cut separation between public criticism and academic science than in the case of history; the distinction between amateur and professional remained more permeable than in other fields of knowledge. Scholarship differed from aesthetic argument by virtue of its strict philological methods and its careful attention to ancient or medieval sources. As nations increasingly defined themselves in terms of a shared and distinctive cultural legacy, literary critics acquired a prominent new role as literary
historians
. The history of the nation's great poets, dramatists, and prose writers joined its political history as a second prop of national identity and pride. Not infrequently, as in the German case, language and literature were a more important element in mental nation building than the memories of a rather unglamorous record of political togetherness. The
Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen
(1835–42), by the historian and liberal politician Georg Gottfried Gervinus, became a fundamental work of the age.