4.4 Orientalism

The Best of All Possible Histories

The charitable reading here is that Hegel worked backwards from a preset conclusion and did not consider the systematic implications. The alternative would be a peculiar kind of theodicy, where wrong always has the purpose of moral education for the victim, spontaneously appearing as if by divine providence whenever someone fails to achieve subjectivity, as is supposedly the case for Atlantic slavery.59 Atlantic slavery must be the irrational exception rather than the rule, for Hegel’s same logic could be used to justify any wrong committed to “uncivilized” people no matter how extreme.

The origins of Hegel’s Orientalism are twofold. First, noted by prior scholars and present throughout his Lectures on the Philosophy of History is the reduction of Asia to a monolith that remains historically static after the birth of the Weltgeist. 60 The static nature of the east ties back to the discussion of cultural essentialism, “for outside the One Power- before which nothing can maintain an outside existencethere is only revolting caprice.”61 There is no motion or contradiction within, say, China because the whole of the nation is reduced to the characteristically Oriental Despot.62 Thus, progress can only result externally, only by its endless dialect with the West can the East hope to progress, it has no independence.

More relevant to the Philosophy of Right, however, is the Eurocentric structure underlying Hegel’s ethical system. The ethical system, comprising the third chapter of Philosophy of Right is, according to Hegel, the first section exclusively applying to modern Europe.63 The sections, including family, civic community, and the state, do away with the abstraction of abstract right and morality, concerning the proper relationship among individuals and society. The set of distortions Hegel places on the East, that it is essentially egoistic and patriarchal,64 that it has no civic community,65 that its state is indivisible,66 are empirically wrong, but they are falsehoods that serve to estrange Eastern cultures from the customs characteristic to family, civic community, and the proper state respectively. Hegel’s system has one valid progression towards the realization of freedom, and that is the historical path

59. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 99. 60. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." 61. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 105. 62. Ibid., 120. 63. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §335. 64. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 101. 65. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §335. 66. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 112-13.

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