1 OFFICIAL ORIENTALISM

IT IS NOT NECESSARY to say a great deal here about official orientalism, for we have already on many occasions pointed out both the inadequacy of its methods and the falsity of its conclusions: if we have kept it fairly constantly in sight, whereas we have hardly concerned ourselves with other Western attempts to interpret the East, this is because it presents at least a semblance of seriousness which the others lack, so that we were forced to make a distinction in its favor. We do not wish to contest the good faith of the orientalists, for that is usually beyond doubt, nor would we dispute the reality of their special kind of scholarship; what we do contest is their competence in respect of anything that lies outside the field of pure erudition. It is moreover only fair to pay some tribute to the commendable modesty which some of them show in declining to touch the work of interpreting doctrines, being only too well aware of their own limitations; but unfortunately these people are in the minority, and the majority, as we have said from the beginning, is made up of those who take erudition for an end in itself and who sincerely believe that their linguistic and historical researches give them the right to pronounce on every conceivable subject. On these people we think it would hardly be possible to pass too severe strictures, either concerning the methods they follow or the results they obtain, although we are always prepared to pay whatever respect is due to them personally, since they cannot altogether be held accountable for their prejudices or their illusions. An exclusive attitude is the natural result of a narrow outlook, or of what we have called 'intellectual myopia', and this mental defect seems quite as incurable as physical shortsightedness: like the latter, mental shortsightedness also is a distortion induced by certain habits that bring it on gradually and imperceptibly, although there must doubtless be some predisposition toward it as well. This being the case, the ill-will shown by the majority of orientalists toward those who will not submit to their methods or accept their conclusions should not be a cause of surprise; it is only one more example of the results that normally follow on the abuse of specialization, and one of the countless manifestations of that pseudo-scientific attitude of mind that is so easily mistaken for the true scientific spirit.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the excuses that can be made for the standpoint of the orientalists, it is nonetheless certain that the few positive results which their researches have yielded in the special field of erudition are far from compensating for the damage they have done to intellectuality in general, by blocking all the other paths along which those possessed of the requisite aptitudes might have been led, and led much further; if the intention be to scare away from these paths nearly all those who might be minded to enter upon them, it is enough, given the prejudices of the modern West, to declare solemnly that such and such an approach 'is unscientific', simply because it does not conform to the methods and theories accepted and officially taught in the universities. When it is a case of defence against some danger or other, it is not usual to spend time over questions of personal responsibility; therefore if certain opinions are intellectually dangerous—and we think this is the case in the present instance—one must strive to expose their untruth irrespective of the feelings of those who advance or support them, the question of their personal good faith not being in any way in dispute. Such considerations, which are quite unimportant in the face of ideas, cannot be allowed to intervene when combating theories which stand in the way of the realization of certain possibilities: and since the bringing to pass of these possibilities, to which we will return in the concluding chapter, is not immediately practicable, and since any consideration of propaganda is for us out of the question, the most effective way of opposing these theories is not to engage in endless discussion of them on their own ground, but to cause their falseness to stand out by the simple act of re-establishing the truth, which alone matters to anyone who is capable of understanding it.

Herein lies the chief point of difference, upon which no agreement is possible with the specialists of erudition: when we speak of truth, we do not merely refer to a truth of fact, which of course has its importance, secondary and contingent though it may be; what interests us in a doctrine is the truth of that which it expresses, in the absolute sense of the word. On the contrary, those who adopt the point of view of erudition are in no wise concerned with the truth of ideas; in reality they are almost totally unaware of what this implies, or even of whether such a thing exists, and they do not trouble to inquire; truth means nothing to them, the special case of historical exactitude apart. The same tendency is also noticeable among historians of philosophy: what interests them is not whether a certain idea is true or false, or in what measure it is so; their only concern is to find out who first propounded the idea, in what terms he formulated it, and at what date and under what accessory circumstances he did so; and this history of philosophy, which busies itself exclusively with the scrutiny of texts and biographical details, claims to take the place of philosophy itself, thus bringing about its final divorce from any small intellectually valuable residue that it might have retained in modern times. It is indeed obvious that such an attitude is as unfavorable as can be to the understanding of any doctrine whatsoever: by clinging to the letter only, it is unable to enter into the spirit, and so the very goal it aims at is certain to be missed; absence of true understanding can only give birth to wild and arbitrary interpretations, that is to say to real falsehoods, even when it is only a question of historical exactitude.

This occurs in orientalism more frequently, perhaps, than in any other similar field of activity, because an attempt is made to deal with conceptions that are entirely foreign to the mentality of those who profess to study them; it spells the bankruptcy of the so-called 'historical method' even under the heading of that plain historical truth which is its chief justification, as is shown by the name that has been given to it. Those who follow it commit a double error: for on the one hand they are unaware of the more or less dubious theories behind it all, which can for the most part be traced back to the 'evolutionary' hypothesis, while on the other hand they labor under serious delusions as to its scope, since they think their method can be applied wholesale; we have already explained why it is totally inapplicable to the metaphysical realm, from which the merest notion of evolution is excluded. In the eyes of the partisans of this method the first condition required for the studying of metaphysical doctrines is evidently not to be a metaphysician; similarly, those who apply the same method to the 'science of religions' more or less openly contend that a man is disqualified from this line of study by the very fact of belonging to a religion: it amounts to saying that in any branch of study only those may be considered competent who possess a purely external and superficial knowledge of it, such as may be gained through book-learning only, and this is doubtless the reason why in respect of the Eastern doctrines the opinion of the Easterners themselves is treated as null and void. In this we see above all an instinctive fear of everything that transcends ordinary scholarship and threatens to show it up for the insignificant pursuit that it really is; but this fear derives added strength from the fact that it agrees with the much more conscious interest of preserving the monopoly that the representatives of official science have in practice established in their own favor, the orientalists perhaps more than most. The fixed resolve not to tolerate anything that might prove dangerous to accepted opinions, and the attempt to discredit it by every means, alike find their justification moreover in the very prejudices that blind these narrow-minded people, and which lead them to deny the value of anything that is not a product of their own school: here again, we do not impugn their good faith, but we simply observe the effect of a very human tendency, whereby men find it all the easier to persuade themselves of a thing, the more directly their personal interests are engaged.