독일 역사철학의 오리엔탈리즘

Abstract

Edward Said puts the origin of modern orientalism back at 1798, when Napoleon explored Egypt. According to Said, Power and knowledge about the Orient were not united earlier than that time. But the question is how such a 'union' was possible. Said only mentioned that Union as a historical fact, but he did not fuly analyze the structure of the long dree in the Western intellectual history which enabled that union.Referring to this kind of limitation of Said, I want to investigate the intellectual origin of orientalism in the Western philosophy. I will focus on the German historical philosophers from Kant past Herder to Hegel, who set up and justified the hegemony of the modern Western nation as a general idea and historical fact.Firstly, Kant put forward the 'europe-centric' idea of general history, refering to the civilized European who alone recognized the idea of general history. Herder rejected Kant's idea of the general history of the 'ideal type', which was suposed to be aplicable to every nation equally. He was rather interested in stresing the particular independence of a nation with the general humanity presumed. But he also described the developmental process of world history in a way that only European civilization was in a special position to bring the idea of general humanity into effect, and Herder therefore approved of the European exceptionalism. So, a de-orientalistic reflection is required to reestablish the real world history.