Through a Glass, Darkly: Blurred Images of Cultural Tradition and Modernity over Distance and Time (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology)

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Editor S. ISHWARAN

VOLUME LXXV WIL ARTS (ED.) THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY Blurred images of cultural tradition and modernity over distance and time EDITED BY

WIL ARTS

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN 2000

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Through a Glass, Darkly : blurred images of cultural tradition and modernity over distance and time / ed. by Wil Arts - Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2000. (International studies in sociology and social anthropology ; Vol. 75) ISBN 90-04-11597-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available

ISSN 0074-8684 ISBN 90 04 11597 8

© Copyright 2000 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, U.S.A. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

CONTENTS WIL ARTS, Through a Glass, Darkly: An Introductory Essay WOLF LEPENIES, Beyond Melancholy and Before Utopia: A Plea for a Boring World JACK GOODY, Experience and Expectations of the East NILUFER GOLE, Global Expectations, Local Experiences: NonWestern Modernities HANS BELTING, The Visual Arts Today: Experiences and Expectations HARRY PEETERS, Old Virtues and Vices as Icons of a New Morality WlLLEM WITTEVEEN, Pursuing the Spirit of the Laws: An Epilogue

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56 67 79

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS AUTHOR INDEX SUBJECT INDEX

92 94 96

12 30 40

Acknowledgment We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation and Tilburg University

Through a Glass, Darkly An introductory essay WIL ARTS Introduction Erasmus's first visit to England, which lasted from the early summer of 1499 till the beginning of 1500, marked for him a period of drastic change. He came as a learned poet. He left with a need to dedicate himself to more serious matters. The cause of this turn was, according to Johan Huizinga's famous biography of Erasmus, that he found in England two new friends, John Colet and Thomas More, who as personalities were far superior to those who had crossed his path till then. Another biographer of Erasmus, Cornelis Augustijn, describes vividly how deeply impressed Erasmus was by the lectures Colet delivered in Oxford in 1499 on the epistles of St. Paul. While returning from his second visit to England in the summer of 1514 Erasmus wrote a letter to the Prior of the Monastery of Steyn who had called him back to the cloistered life that he had abandoned twenty years before. The core of his letter is a reasoned and staunch refusal to be recalled. For the sake of argument he refers to the important lessons he learned from John Colet and defends how he put those lessons into practice, i.e. his way of living. He lists the works he wrote in the mean time and elaborates on his plans especially with regard to the epistles of St. Paul. That he turned his attention to more serious things did not mean, however, that Erasmus the poet had gone for ever. In 1509, while he crossed the Alps on the way from Italy for his second visit to England, the conception of his now world famous The Praise of Folly came to him. He wrote it quickly in London, at the house of Sir Thomas More, to whom it is dedicated. The book is spoken by Folly in her own person. She makes fun of all kinds of things, such as national pride and professional conceit. There are passages, however, where the satire gives way to invective, and Folly utters the serious opinions of Erasmus. Even in some of those passages we find references to the letters of St. Paul, especially those to the Corinthians: Erasmus's inevitable and revered St. Paul, one could call him! For above all he wanted to follow St. Paul's lead by reconciling two cultures, Christendom and Greek philosophy. 'Saint Socrates, pray for us'; so

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wrote Erasmus at the end of his Religious Symposium, comparing the pagan Greek philosopher to St. Paul. [2]

Conference Erasmus dispatched the last letter known to us from Basle, where he had lived at the end of his life, on the 28th of June 1536. In this letter he wrote aegra manu, i.e. with a sick hand, 'Oh, if Brabant was only somewhat nearer...'. In the Dutch province of North-Brabant at Tilburg University a conference was held on the 26th of November 1998 under the title of Through a Glass, Darkly. It was part of a whole range of festivities on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. The Board of the Foundation brought the festivities under one denominator, that of the Festival of Contrasts. The common theme was the interplay between experiences and expectations in modern arts and sciences. The question addressed at the Tilburg conference went as follows: Do the images Western scholars and artists derive from their experiences with modernity and tradition in East and West, in Past and Present contrast with the images concerning the future they draw from their expectations? In view of Erasmus's special affinity with the epistles of St. Paul it seems appropriate that the conference took as its motto part of a famous passage from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known'. St. Paul makes this remark as a sequel to an earlier observation 'For we know in part, and we prophesy in part'. Without any sacrilegious intent these citations were used by the organizers of the conference to emphasize that in today's European arts and sciences most of the time we see not only other, but also our own cultural traditions and the different forms of modernity like a dim image in a mirror. And the future of our own and other cultures seems to be shrouded in mystery, because our gift of knowledge and inspired messages are only partial. We seem to have a propensity to look at cultural forms of tradition and modernity over distance and time as through a glass, darkly. Is it possible to get an almost face-to-face intimacy with various forms of cultural tradition and modernity by using our experiences and our powers of imagination, i.e. our expectations, in a more fruitful way? That was the question to be addressed at the conference. This book contains the proceedings of this conference in which preliminary answers were given to this weighty question. The contributors to the conference tried to give these answers by taking as a guideline Erasmus's famous motto ad fontes, i.e. always go to the sources.

INTRODUCTION

Without, however, nursing the illusion that our partial knowledge will ever be complete. Problem definition The central question of the conference, and therefore of this book, was as mentioned above the following: How do our experiences of cultural tradition and modernity in East and West, in Past and Present, contrast with our expectations of cultural changes in the time to come? This question raised new questions. For example: How can we derive a vision of what is bound to happen or what we want to happen by applying our experiences of the past and our expectations of the future? How do our experiences of culture and society in East and West, in Past and Present, contrast with our expectations of cultural and societal changes that will direct us possibly or probably, hopefully or regrettably to the global society of the future? From the vantage point of the social and behavioral sciences, these questions place us on the horns of a dilemma. We as human beings, regardless of whether we are living in either East or West, take part in a culture that has both traditional and modern characteristics. In coping with the challenges of tradition and modernity we are directed by our mind and its brain, which are complex informationprocessing systems that function to identify problems and offer solutions to them. Because human perception and action take place through time from the past to the future, we necessarily live in a world full of contradictions and paradoxes. Why is that so? Because in order to solve our problems we have to nurse the expectation that our future will be different from the past. If we want to use our experiences to solve our problems, however, we need the future to be like the past. The past can be known by having recourse to our experiences but cannot be influenced by us, whereas the future can be influenced by us but not known by having recourse to our experiences. We can only make guesses about possibilities and probabilities and entertain hopes or be afraid of what the future will bring. In solving our problems by using our mind and its brain we therefore have to be directed by both the visible hand of the past and the invisible hand of the future. And we have to realize that there is an almost unsolvable tension between those two hands, or at least a tension that is very difficult to neutralize. Let me give an example that elucidates this rather abstract line of reasoning and which is quite appropriate to the subject of this book. Our experiences of cultural changes in past and present give credence to our belief that modernization and globalization processes will go on accelerating at least for a while. At the same time, however, we expect that the acceleration

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of these processes will lead, as a kind of compensation, to a deceleration which manifests itself in the keeping and falling back on regional and ethnical identities and traditions, a 'Ruckfall aufs Mundliche\ This expected acceleration and deceleration will lead, if our expectations come true, to an intriguing coexistence of and contrast between cultural tradition and modernity. But whether our expectations will come true is a question only the future will give a definite answer to. For we cannot look directly into the future. Fortunately, however, we will not have to wait and see what ultimately happens. Using our experiences and putting our expectations into words we can at least make bold conjectures about the future and put those conjectures to the critical tests of reason and knowledge. The authors who contributed to the conference and to this book did their utmost to shed as bright a light as possible upon the problems mentioned above. By doing so they not only shared there experiences of cultural traditions and modernities in East and West, in Past and Present, with the audience and the readers, but also their expectations of the future. The point of departure of the contributions is today's predicament. Did the fall of the Berlin Wall and the victory of liberalism signal the end of history, as Fukuyama claims in The End of History and the Last Man? Or do we have to prepare ourselves for intense cultural struggle and religious wars, as Huntington warns in The Clash of Civilizations^. Or is there perhaps a third way between Fukuyama's future oriented, naive optimism and Huntington's past oriented, aggressive cynicism? Is there, they ask, a real chasm between the 'modern' West and the 'traditional' East, as so many authors have argued? And if so, how deep is this chasm and how is it to be bridged? How much do people in the West know about their own cultural tradition and the modern times they live in? How much do they know of the traditions and the modernities of the East and how much do they need to know in order to cope with what the future will probably bring? Are our images of cultural tradition and modernity in East and West, in Past and Present so blurred that we look at them as through a glass, darkly? Beyond melancholy and before Utopia The keynote speech of the conference was delivered by the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies. For centuries, he argued in his speech and in several earlier publications, the history of how artists and scholars came to grips with the history of European experiences and expectations was determined by the contrast between the melancholy of despair and the exuberance of Utopia. In the main European intellectuals felt themselves torn between two choices: to lament an existing world which did not answer to

INTRODUCTION

their personal convictions and expectations or to develop blueprints for an alternative world in which their own ideas and expectations would become reality, through violence if necessary. Melancholy and Utopia, between them lie all the glory and the misery of the European intellectuals of past and present. In our own century, these two attitudes in the guise of fascism and communism have been responsible for the death of millions of people. The second world war brought the end of fascism, the velvet revolutions the end of communism. That was the last of Europe's Utopian projects. Several slogans have been advanced to characterize the essence of this new world: The End of Ideology, The End of Utopia, The End of History. In Europe we live now, after the Velvet Revolutions of 1989, in a postcommunist world. This means that in the East everything has been changing. And because everything changed in the East many of us were convinced that everything would remain as it was in the West. But history is not something unpleasant that only happens to other people. It did happen and still happens to us, and it will happen to us in the future. Some speak of the present as the triumphalism of modernism. And because modernism was and is a European project this means the triumph of Europe. Europe's uniqueness enabled this continent to 'Europeanize' the entire world, making its own cultural beliefs into universal guiding ideas. Others, not believing in The End o f . . . speak instead of the crisis of modernity. Contrary to what people in other modernized cultures experience, for Europe this means a threat to its own value system. And this makes European intellectuals uncertain about what the future will bring and makes them lament the dependency of the mind. At the same time, however, they are full of hope that the course of history can be influenced by the efforts of hard thinking. Several times this paradox has turned up in Lepenies's work and comes especially to the fore in his contribution to this book. How can we be prepared for the future? By learning from the past, by learning from our experiences? But that is a less simple option than it at first glance seems to be. On closer inspection it becomes clear that it is not very easy to extend our experiences to the future. We can follow the lead of the natural scientists by making predictions that extend past and present to the future, but past and present consist of many things we no longer want. We need to think of tomorrow, but we must do something today. Learning by doing, piecemeal engineering those are the old slogans that can still be useful today. In his opinion it is now time for a culture of compromise, good examples and small steps. This is neither grandiose nor stirring stuff, and possibly a little boring, but living in a boring world is always better than in a world governed by melancholy, lethargy and cultural pessimism, or in a world governed by Utopians who are willing to use violence to change it. It is a world of consultation and

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democracy. A world in which we can and want to learn from other cultures. Providing we succeed in translating these cultures into each other. And that is definitely a task for the future.

Global expectations, local experiences That the task of translating cultures one to another is not an easy feat to be accomplished is shown in the contribution by the Turkish sociologist Nilufer Gole. She has treated in her works time and again the clashes between Western political culture and Islam. She argues that the objections of many Europeans to Islam are ambiguous and ambivalent. On the one hand Western culture is presented as an example of enlightenment, while on the other it is assumed that the adoption of this culture by non-Western countries can only lead to disaster. For example, the propagation of democracy in this way all too frequently entails an indictment of many Islamitic countries, concentrating on the sore point of their lack of democracy, yet at the same time the governments of these countries are told to act in an authoritarian fashion against Islamists where these have acquired political power through democratic means. This Western attitude leads to a double bind for the Islamitic countries: Whatever they do, they will not do it well. In her contribution Gole goes deeper into this paradox, which in her opinion can be attributed to the exclusive myopic preoccupation of Western countries with their own experience of 'superior' modernization. The West must pay more attention to non-Western modernization, which has an ingenious character of its own. Non-Western countries can no longer be seen from the viewpoint that they chronologically lag behind the West. Global communication and the international flow of capital encompass all cultures in a single time zone and therefore the 'modern' no longer is a monopoly of the West. It would seem that the 'modern' has acquired a wholly different meaning. The new challenge is therefore to rethink modernity from the vantage point of the encounter with non-Western experiences. Both in the East and the West artists and scholars have the habit of reflecting on modernity and the future in the mirror of Western experience. We have to make an attempt, however, to reread modernity from the angle of nonWestern countries. We have to compare and contrast their experience with that of the West; and this means raising the question whether we can refer to shared experience, a similitude of experience which would justify the label 'modernity'.

INTRODUCTION

Experience and expectations of the east The British social anthropologist Jack Goody has pointed out repeatedly in his work that the European temporary advantages in the sphere of technology and other knowledge systems in modern times has been wrongly extended back to earlier times and into the future and incorrectly generalized to the whole domain of culture. The mistaken conception of the European advantage as something permanent has led to mistaken notions about the West and the East which conditioned our understanding of the present as well as our expectations of the future. In his contribution he argues that notions which suggest that modernity and modernisation are typically Western are wrong, both in terms of time and space. We need to look much more carefully at the experience and expectations concerning Asia if we are to understand our past, our present and our uncertain future. Since the sixteenth century, the West has felt itself to be superior to other cultures. With the rise of capitalism, the rapid expansion of technology and the developments in the arts, a society came into being that considered itself exalted above those elsewhere in the world. Many Western artists and scholars thought and think that this superiority has to do with typically European institutions, qualities and skills, such as the family, the spirit of enterprise, forms of rationality and ethics. However, there are no 'cultural genes' that might justify such a European conviction of superiority. Before the time of Erasmus (around 1500), China was much further developed than the European countries in many cultural spheres. How should one explain the superiority of the East before the Western Renaissance and explain the great success — until recently — of the so-called economic tigers of SouthEast Asia? Why the retarded state of Africa? If there are no cultural genes at work, what are the decisive factors? For the sake of the future, in any case, we need to reevaluate our own experience and revise our expectations of other cultures — because a large part of the problem concerns the expectations that have wrongly been drawn from our experience. Old virtues and vices Harry Peeters, a Dutch historian and psychologist and the auctor intellectualis of the conference, argued in his contribution that not only mistaken notions of the East, but also of our Western history hinder our understanding of the present as well as our expectations of the future. Respect for tradition lost its value in our own time; the age-old representations of good and evil are no longer self-evident. In modern times many artists and scholars in the West have been inclined to think that real morality is not bound to time and place, but is independent

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of historical contingency. In their opinion there were universal criteria to adjudge good and evil and those criteria every rational human being ought to know and accept. What sociologists have shown, however, is that the modernization process has led in Europe today to a fragmentation of primary values and norms and a legitimation of individual life styles and preferences. Does this mean that ethical principles and moral standards are after all determined by specific circumstances, such as time, place, culture, social group or individual conscience? To answer this question Peeters in an earlier book went in search of the foundations of morality. In his contribution to this book he gives more or less a repeat performance. He especially looks at images and narratives as a mirror of virtue, realizing however that images and narratives are not enough, ideas are needed for structure and signification. He shows by means of a history of images and narratives, of moral ideas and practices that in the West virtues have since time immemorial been deployed to keep men on the straight and narrow path. From classical antiquity onwards virtues served, together with vices as their deterrent counterparts, as the guardians of morality, a task for which they were extremely well suited. Perhaps the most beautiful visual moral lesson that can serve as an example of this fact can be found in Lorenzetti's allegory of good and bad government in the townhall of Siena — a fresco painted in 1338 as an overture to the Renaissance in Italy. The portrayed figures are a mixture of classical and contemporary public virtues and vices. They give an image of the transition of a traditional society based on family and clan relations to a modern society in which the Ben Commune is the guideline for Law and Society. The pictorial moralizing role of frescos, miniatures and painting is in our time, the era of After Virtue, fulfilled by photographs, films, television and internet. This grassroots technology is going to create, according to Peeters, a new ethos. The metaphor of the Internet makes it clear what we have to expect; anarchy, self-regulation, fragmentation and decentralization. All forms of totalitarian normativity will disappear. A hedonistic morality will prevail which will strive for the pleasing and the congenial as the highest good. There is, however, also another side of the coin. Tradition is not so easily discarded. The new visual culture will also ensure that the past will be more secure in the future than is perhaps the case at present. In this new culture old virtues may arise again. And this new culture will therefore be pluralistic.

INTRODUCTION

Visual arts today Just like Peeters, the German art historian Hans Belting emphasizes the role of visual images — even more so. He addresses the question of what major cultural changes such as modernization and globalization mean for the arts. Confucianism, Islam and Western Christendom all have their own specific art forms. Will these forms merge into one global art as modernism assumed? For modernism was synonymous with a new international culture which defeated the old religious and national cultures. Or will each religion or culture continue and even deepen its own art forms? Or is it a question of movement and countermovement? When in modern times people's experiences of art became contradictory to the production of art by artists, art historians expected the end of art. Belting makes a further step. Our expectations of what art should be, he argues, are usually results of our experiences. To make sense of those experiences and in order not to lose direction we construct something we call history. History contains the heritage of past traditions. The avant-garde, however, rather anticipates the future. The conclusion is that art either is turning into something obsolete, into a memory of what it has been in other times, or else art is changing face and exchanging its realm of activities. Ten years ago, Belting didn't yet know what the answer would be when he wrote a book titled The End of Art History? Since then, however, the question mark has been removed. According to him, art history should be seen as a framework, the frame round a picture, the frame within which the image of Western art has been invariably been projected. And although art markets, exhibitions and the traditional division between visual and performing arts work to reinforce the boundaries of our Western mental geography, the time of territorial protection is past. The framework has fallen apart. What was previously considered as Western art and art per se is now open to influences from other cultures and new technological media. The Korean video-artist Nam June Paik, who might be seen as the father of technological art in the West, is illustrative of this turn of events. Paik introduces another mentality which is rooted in another culture, but he does so as an artist who lives in the West and there reinterprets the notion of art in contemporary society. He radically disturbs our Western notions of art and technology with his 'Zen for TV or 'TV Buddha'. The latter work Belting chooses as an example for discussion of the cultural boundaries and expectations in the contemporary experience of art and technology. He argues that Paik not only changes our experience, but also our expectation of art's contribution to an extended discourse of the present world, a discourse which crosses cultural boundaries.

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In conclusion

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Looking back at the above briefly summarized contributions to this book it becomes clear that in all of them a resistance is discernible against the often made assumption that there is a watershed between modernity on the one hand and tradition on the other. Whereas tradition is in the literature often only negatively defined as all things cultural that are not modern, modernity is most of the time a much more precisely defined concept. It is then taken to mean the collection of practices, processes, structures and values which have characterized the worldwide expansion of Europe. An expansion made possible by what historians have called the Rise of the West or the European Miracle. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment gave rise to a rapid cultural evolution that led in its turn to the emergence of all kinds of very successful institutions (capitalist enterprises, stock exchanges and markets; standing armies; museums, laboratories and universities; industries and bureaucracies) on various societal domains. Many European artists and scholars have truthfully thought and still think that Europe covered a unique course. By this train of thought a feeling of superiority was born. None of the contributors wants to belittle the accomplishments of the modernization process, but all of them argue that the West has tended to misunderstand even itself in drawing too sharp a contrast between its own individualism, rationality, universalism, and their collectivism, traditionality, particularism. Modernity must not be described in monolithic terms and the ambiguities inherent in the project must be recognized. There were earlier modernities and there are other modernities. And each of these modernities accommodates traditions, often invented traditions. For other civilizations which did not share the individualist and liberal values of the West, the modernization process was often not only a bewildering experience, but also a violent one. Modernity was not experienced simply as the encounter with an alternative set of ideas. Rather it was part of a process of domination, penetrating society, reshaping people's lives and enforcing a kind of conformity with the new political and economic organization that straddled the globe. A variety of intellectual responses emerged. Some admired the power of the European example and tried to emulate its forms of organization and of thought for a variety of ends. Others reacted sharply against it and tried with waning success to insulate themselves and their societies from the contagion of materialism, secularism and impious innovation. For many, however, the world had irrevocably altered, and the challenge became one of seeking to reconcile the values of their own heritage with the seductive imaginings of modernity.

INTRODUCTION

What the contributors to this book argue for is the necessity of looking at developments in both East and West, in both Past and Present, from a wider perspective — by taking a global point of departure. They argue for greater understanding and communication between cultures, for cultural pluralism (as distinct from cultural relativism). They argue for the open, tolerant, nondogmatic and critical thought that was the most important characteristic of Erasmus's philosophy.

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Beyond Melancholy and Before Utopia A Plea for a Boring World WOLF LEPENIES A Feeling of Gratefulness in Times of Ambiguity This is a "Festival of Contrasts" and therefore I give you the choice. How would you like me to begin? Dark and with the pessimistic tone imparted by the end of a millennium, or cheerful and ready for whatever comes, as befits the dawn of a new century? I could intone, in the blackest minor key, a millenarian aria of despair: at the end of the second thousand years, there are no clear answers to the urgent questions of the times. Is the work force in danger of running out of paid work? Can the disciplines of the future still rely on the capacity of conventional knowledge production to find solutions for problems it has, to a considerable extent, created itself? What can stop participatory democracy from further deteriorating into a political system where apathy prevails? What will keep us together as the bonding power of traditional institutions like the church and the family, the school and the university apparently dwindles more and more? So much for the aria of despair. Now for a prelude in a moderately optimistic major key, with which I could just as easily have begun in a single sentence: confronted with the challenges of a new era, individuals and societies all over the world, not least in the West, have long since begun to develop innovative lifestyles and structures of living together that combine work, knowledge production and political participation in original ways thereby creating new forms of social cohesion and mutual solidarity beyond the borders of age and gender, class and race. Hopefully, the world will never become a global village, but the idea of a global neighborhood is no longer a Utopian dream. Faced with these two scenarios, I feel myself in the position of the Paris journalist of the 17th century who told his readers: "Some say that Cardinal Mazarin is dead, others that he is alive. I think that both are wrong." Having been asked by the organizers of this festival to address the intricate relationship of experiences and expectations from my own, personal point of view, I want, first of all, to say that I do it, at the end of this century,

BEYOND MELANCHOLY AND BEFORE UTOPIA as a member of a lucky generation, with a deep sense of gratitude. Born in 1941, I belong to those Germans who were too young to join the Nazi Youth Movement. On February 13, 1945 my mother who was carrying my baby sister on her left arm and was holding me by her right hand, missed the local train to Dresden. We had to spend the night in the small village nearby where we had come on our flight from East Prussia. The farm where we were allowed to stay was located on a hill. Even today, more than fifty years later, I can recall how we went outside the farm and saw Dresden, not too far away, burn to ashes. The next day, my father who assumed that we had gone to Dresden as planned desperately roamed through the remains of the city where he thought he would find us among ten thousand burned bodies. For a long time I firmly believed that I had survived the bombing of Dresden in the heart of the city itself. Whenever I told this episode I could not but tell it in a tone of barely hidden triumph — as if it were a merit to have survived a disaster turned into a tragedy. When we returned, during that night in February, to the farmhouse, the adults could no longer sleep but stayed up until dawn. I was put to bed again, but the door to my room was left open a crack so that I could see how the lamp was shaking above the table where the adults were sitting, too tired to talk, too shocked to sleep. Was it the Russian artillery that made the floor tremble and therefore the lamp shake? Soon I fell asleep, four years old but all of a sudden much older. The rest of the war has faded from my memory. Why do we tend to believe, having escaped a disaster unharmed, that we have survived an even much bigger catastrophy? Predestination seems to prevail here: the greater the misfortune that spared us, the greater the merit that we are obviously allowed to attribute to ourselves. Survival should lead to modesty: but all too often it results in a feeling of triumph instead. This is a sign of the times in which my own generation grew up. After all, we — too young then — are not responsible for the dreadful crimes of the past bloody century; and we — too old now — will not suffer, at least that is our hope, from the crises that threaten the century to come. Clever timing is characteristic for my generation: we came too late to become guilty and we will have left before things get serious again. We are lucky indeed. Let me now turn to two other disasters. The Origin and the End of Good Conscience On June 12, 1859, on its return voyage from Arabia through the Suez Canal to Europe, a ship ran up against a coral reef in the Red Sea and began to sink. An eyewitness reported on this incident in his memoirs. I quote:

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The ship lay almost completely on its side, and the great life-and-death question for every living being on it was whether it would come to rest or capsize, casting us all into the deeps. I erected a small observation post, by means of which I could follow the continuing tilt of the ship against an especially brilliant star, and from minute to minute I proclaimed the result of my observations. Everyone listened in suspense to this news. The call 'at rest!' was greeted with a short, joyful murmur, and the call 'sinking!' was answered with isolated cries of anguish. Finally, no more sinking could be observed, and the paralyzing fear of death gave way to energetic rescue efforts."

The second quotation is from the year 1932. A few years ago, I took a sea journey with a naval squadron. The squadron put out to sea in Toulon and was on its way to Brest. In the middle of a bright day, it was suddenly surrounded by fog in those dangerous waters around the rocky coast of the island of Sein: six battle cruisers, thirty light ships, and submarines were suddenly blinded and came to a standstill — at the mercy of the wind and waves in the middle of a field of rocks. The slightest gust could have destroyed these citadels full of arms and artillery; the impression was overwhelming: here they were, these great and wonderfully equipped ships, constructed by men of science, courage, and discipline, who had access to all the power and precision that modern technology can offer — and now they were fogged in to the point of helplessness, damned to anxious waiting, and all this because of a bit of mist that had formed over the sea.

The author of the first text is a German, that of the second a Frenchman: the first is a technician and scientist who greatly cherished literature and the arts; the second is a poet and philosopher who felt close to mathematics, the natural sciences, and technology and originally wanted to become a naval officer. The first author, who died in 1892, is Werner von Siemens; the second, born in 1871, is Paul Valery. Shipwrecks are key metaphors of European intellectual history. As Hans Blumenberg has shown, they can be used to help us understand the decisive changes that the appraisal of science and technology went through in the modern period. The semantics of catastrophes plays a decisive role in this. Even if it seems unusual and the product of chance to victims and eyewitnesses, each catastrophe fits into a tradition. An accident seldom comes alone. Together with 500 other passengers, the German engineer Werner von Siemens suffered shipwreck in the Red Sea. When this "Prince of Technology" — as the Prussian Academy of Sciences later dubbed him when it accepted him into its ranks — was threatened with drowning, he organized his own rescue and that of his fellow passengers. His cold-blooded presence of

BEYOND MELANCHOLY AND BEFORE UTOPIA mind makes us think of Robinson Crusoe. For nothing characterizes the value system of European modernity better than that key scene in Daniel Defoe's novel in which, after his shipwreck, the protagonist uses double entry bookkeeping to gain clarity about the liabilities and assets of his lonely existence. On his "Island of Despair", he figures out that the advantages of his situation markedly outweigh the disadvantages, and that, even in the midst of the worst catastrophe, succor is always still possible for one who knows how to calculate correctly. But Werner von Siemens does not only recall Robinson, this literary personification of European early capitalism. To the dogmas of capitalism later also belonged the radical Enlightenment thinker Condorcet's conviction that nature has set no bounds to man's hopes and that humanity, as he exclaimed enthusiastically, "marches forward, liberated of all chains, escaping from the rule of chance and of the enemies of progress, secure and industrious on the paths of truth, virtue, and happiness". Reason itself guides and leads the progress of the sciences and of technology; scientific and technological activity, properly conducted, will inevitably lead to reasonable and wise results. Even in the midst of a catastrophe, Werner von Siemens never lost this belief. From the bridge of the sinking ship, as if driven by an inexhaustible source of inner strength, he used the starry firmament as a standard by which to determine his position and thus to clarify his chances of surviving. All catastrophes fall within a tradition and thus inscribe themselves in memories mediated by language. Under Arabian skies, Werner von Siemens' attitude recalls the mood with which Immanuel Kant concludes the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and continuously thought concerns itself with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." When did we lose this awe? Is this hope-filled self-certainty gone forever? In Kant's times, trust in physico-theology's doctrine of harmony was already waning. Doubt was steadily growing whether the catastrophes pursuing humanity could indeed be seen as nature's balancing act, one that, in the end, maintained an equilibrium between mankind and the animal and plant kingdoms, thus securing the survival of the species homo sapiens. The beginning of this far-reaching doubt is usually dated to All Saints' Day, 1755, when the Lisbon earthquake claimed more than 32,000 lives, shaking the optimism that had prevailed in Europe for long. In Candide, Voltaire would settle his score with Leibniz's theodicy and with the equally proud and preposterous conviction that ours is the best of all possible worlds. Today, another reaction to the Lisbon earthquake seems even more farsighted to us. I refer to the Reverend Thomas Malthus and to his Essay on the Principle of Population, which appeared in 1798. Written forty years after the

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catastrophe, Malthus's essay does not reflect the alarm of a contemporary, but bears the features of a sober, scientific balance sheet. The volcano eruptions, the famines, the epidemics, and the floods have all lost their former [16] decimating effect, so necessary for the survival of the human species. Shortly after the catastrophe, Lisbon was already as densely populated as it was before. According to Malthus, the actions of mankind no longer contribute blindly to the enforcement of a divinely willed natural purpose; rather, homo sapiens must now be moved by its power of insight to consciously behave in a way that secures humanity's ability to survive. With this insight, Malthus is perhaps the most modern author of the 18th century: never before was so much imposed on man, and never again was the human race deemed capable of so much. Compared with Malthus the Modern, Werner von Siemens must seem to us like an old-fashioned moralist. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century, the world view of this scientific technologist and entrepreneur still bore the stamp of physicotheology, an optimistic theory that trusted the fate of humanity to stand under the protection of divine wisdom and heavenly foresight. Here, the oeconomia naturae is also something like a divinely-willed ecology, in which all catastrophes have a deeper meaning, ensuring the balance of nature. In - this context, Carl von Linne praised the Nemesis Divina, divine retribution, which already pursues the guilty individual here on earth, thus giving the , species the reassuring sign that justice prevails hic et nunc, compensating for evil and holding the moral world in balance. Let us return once more to the year 1859 and the site of the catastrophe in the Red Sea. 500 people fight for their lives — among them Werner von Siemens, who in cold blood calculates his own and his fellow passengers' chances of survival. The final rescue is brought by a ship, whose initially faint silhouette appears and then grows ever clearer on the horizon. Finally it comes close enough to the shipwrecked that, on a pitching deck still threatening to slide into the depths, they can give a name to their succor. For the enlightened passenger who knows what it means, this name has something terrifying and reassuring at once. For, as if the ship finally coming to rescue had been christened by a philosopher of history, it bears the conspicuous name: Nemesis. What at first glance appears to be an accident, is in reality, though paradoxically enough, a metaphor for salvation — thus asserting beyond all doubt the optimistic message of physico-theology, which still had its adherents in the 19th century, even — or, as I should better say, not least — among adepts of science and technology. The obsolescence of this optimism becomes obvious in Pauls Valery's description of terror on the still seas.

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Without becoming an adherent of the reactionary Leon Daudet, one could still agree with his judgment that the 19th century was a period of short-sightedness and stupidity. Indeed, the "stupide siecle" as he called it branded as outsiders and lunatics all those who dared to regard scientific and technical progress with scepticism — among them Nietzsche and Burckhardt, Kierkegaard and Joubert. But Werner von Siemens was a phenotype of, not an outsider to his epoch: "What could threaten modern culture? Where is the lightning bolt that would destroy this Tower of Babel? One gets dizzy at the thought of where current development will take mankind in a hundred, in a thousand, in ten thousand, in a hundred thousand, and in ever more years. What can remain beyond its reach?" Where is the origin of this hybris that still prevailed at the end of last century and that is expressed here in the words of the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Rector of the Berlin University and permanent Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences? The origin is the "provisional morals" that accompanies the emergence of the experimental sciences in the 17th century. To increase the chances of institutionalizing this empirical philosophy, as the sciences were called then in the royal academies, from now on scientists — and notably the founding members of the Royal Society — renounced once and for all any attempt to connect their scientific activity with normative interests. In the Discours de la methode (1632), this primary book of modern science, Descartes gave pithy expression to this "morale par provision". Initially, the customs and norms of a country are exempted from general and radical doubt, for the scientist resembles the occupant of a house that is being torn down: before it is rebuilt, he has to seek temporary housing. But the temporary shelter of provisional morals becomes a permanent domicile for the scientists. The result is a paradox, far-reaching to this day: precisely because scientists are trained to eschew normative questions, they expose an unprotected science to normative goals imposed on it from outside. With this de-moralization of scientific activity, the scientist relieves himself of the consequences of his acts: eventually he becomes a person of good conscience — and has remained such until today. But European intellectual history does not consist solely of the history of science and technology. It is formed not only by "people of good conscience", but also by members of the "lamenting class". The "People of Good Conscience" and the "Lamenting Class" Did Paul Valery know Werner von Siemens and his work? It is certain that the creator of Monsieur Teste, who had read Lord Kelvin's Constitution of

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Matter and who was familiar with Maxwell's studies on electromagnetism, would not have found Siemens alien — all the less so, since Valery propounded the conviction that an artist's and a scientist's or technician's properties of intellectual production did not, in principle, differ from each other. To the poet Valery, Werner von Siemens, the technician and former officer in the Prussian artillery, would have appeared as the perfect model of the socalled "conquete methodique", that strategy of methodological conquest that German industry followed with military-style discipline, to the detriment of France. Valery would have seen in Werner von Siemens the impressive embodiment of the European mind as formed by the belief in rationality — for the essence of Europe could not be defined with the aid of history or of geography alone. Characteristic of Europe, rather, was an anthropological type, the homo europaeus, who was incarnated by no one as well as by the scientist, with his experimental approach to understanding and altering the world. Europe's uniqueness, which eventually enabled our own continent to "Europeanize" the entire world, lies in the development of the experimental sciences and of modern technology. With this, Paul Valery expressed a viewpoint that has characterized the European self-image since the Renaissance and that reached its climax with the Enlightenment. In the middle of the 18th century, Carl von Linne characterized homo europaeus, which he saw as the highest form of homo sapiens, as "levis, argutus, inventor" — as highly mobile, keen-witted, and inventive. This equated the European with the scientist, the scholar and the intellectual. There are various and quite opposed variants of homo europaeus. Limiting ourselves to a single, admittedly somewhat simple opposition, there is, on the one hand, the European intellectual, who is a self-confident and aggressive sanguine type, a man of deeds, who wants to proseletyze, convert, and conquer the rest of the world. And then there are those who constantly brood and doubt everything, those caught in reflection, who withdraw from the world into the self — the melancholic type. For Paul Valery, this type of intellectual is best epitomized in Hamlet, who, after having returned from Wittenberg, the university of Faust and the home of German Protestantism, glances out from the terrace of his Danish castle toward Europe as toward a continent of melancholy. The melancholic is a type of homo europaeus intellectualis, he belongs to a species characterized by its unquenchable penchant for reflection. As Valery says with quiet irony, the melancholic are entangled in thought, they are "les malheureux qui pensent". Happiness, by contrast, is thoughtless. Yet, the melancholies are shrewd, and often they turn their suffering into a metier:

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they are quite aware that pessimism can bring forth great works, and their lament then becomes a song that sells well. The melancholic intellectual is chronically dissatisfied; he suffers on principle under the current state of the world. Sometimes despair thus becomes fashionable and melancholy, consequently, a deformation professionelle. Melancholy reflection arises from inhibition against acting, against doing what should be done. At the same time it also inhibits further activity. This is, by no means, just a tale of times past: When Jacques Delors saw the Europeans' constant thinking about themselves, their repli sur soi, as the greatest obstacle to the unification of our continent, he was lamenting a disease that is as much a part of European identity as was, originally, the vitality-radiating will to conquer the world, which today seems to characterize much more the homo americanus. But the intellectuals do have a reason to lament, because the world is indeed out of joint. They are courageous in their grief; as Aristotle noted, the best and bravest intellectuals are melancholies. At the turn of the last century, Maurice Barres spoke of his "melancholic legacy", which provided him his living as an intellectual. "We are... melancholies," he once remarked, and his subsequent question, "Must we lament it?", is full of irony. When Paul Valery answered Barres' question with a definition of the intelligentsia as a class (intelligence-classe), he took this irony to its extreme. Obviously mocking Descartes, Valery exclaimed: "Cette espece... se plaint. Donc elle existe." At the beginning of European modernity stands Descartes' world-investigating doubt; at its end stands a melancholic whose eyes are averted from the world. Melancholy is the mood of old civilizations: as Valery wrote, one must be able to mourn a Caesar, Charles V, or Napoleon to properly despair of the world. The melancholy intellectual suffers from the world, he tries to give his suffering an adequate expression, and finally he suffers from himself. Of course, this is not true always and everywhere. In this extreme form and exclusivity, it was true neither in European Antiquity, nor in other times and cultures that clearly value the vita contemplativa higher than the vita activa. The melancholy of the intellectuals did not become the European topos until the moment when, with the victorious breakthrough of capitalism and the prominence of the Protestant ethic, the vita activa became the generally accepted ideal of behavior and the vita contemplativa in turn came under pressure to justify itself in bourgeois society. In this sense, the economic mentality characteristic of early capitalism was always understood as an antidote to melancholy. This found succinct expression in Thomas Carlyle's laconic prescription: "Work and do not despair!" Today, working for a living threatens to diminish considerably as a general social activity, confronting

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the leisure industry with unprecedented challenges to control the release of a legion of melancholy dispositions. In the future, maybe, instead of relaxation to compensate for work and effort, people released from work will require artificial tensions as a substitute for action. In a society where work may have lost its prominent place, melancholy will probably lose its status as the temperament of the elite and will fall to the level of the general mood of the masses. The process of civilization — here I am obviously thinking of Norbert Elias and his work — constrains people to a long-term view and to a constant control of their emotions. Melancholy, regarded as a sign of inner turbulence of the individual, threatening revolt, thus falls under suspicion at an early stage. And with it, the intellectual is also suspected. If he does not commit the sacrificium intellectus, adapting himself to the world, on the one hand, or does not want to risk his life in open revolt, on the other, the intellectual must think up and dream a different, better world. Thus Utopia was born, the literary genre that accompanied Europe's breakthrough to modernity. As is well known, the term "intellectual" arose in the France of the Dreyfus Affair, and there are good reasons not to begin a history of the intellectual before the turn of the 20th century. But here too, a thing doesn't require a fitting name in order to exist. I do regard the intellectual as the constitutional melancholic, who keeps open — for himself but, above all, for the sake of mankind — an escape route to Utopia. Robert Burton, who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy in the 17th century, ominously begins his treatise with a Utopian vision, to drive away his melancholy. Tommaso Campanella, who was allowed to put his overflowing thoughts on paper during his long imprisonment in a dungeon, became an intellectual with his Civitas solis, at the latest and La Rochefoucauld turned into a melancholic author of maxims and reflections after the failure of the last great uprising of the French nobility, la Fronde, now fighting with the pen on paper, instead of with the sword on the battleground. These are all intellectuals avant la lettre, members of the lamenting class, that secret society called the "melancholische Kompagnie" that the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen described in the 19th century. A singular interplay of melancholy mood and Utopian exuberance molds their existence. The intellectual laments the state of the world, and this lament eventually leads to Utopian thought, thereby sketching a better world in order to drive away melancholy. That is the reason why melancholy must disappear from Utopia. Beyond that: in Utopia, there is, as a rule, a strict ban on melancholy. This ban on melancholy is to be found in the work of Robert Burton as in Campanella's writings, in Thomas Morus as well as in George Orwell's dystopia 1984. As a matter of course the activity-obsessed aristocrats of the

BEYOND MELANCHOLY AND BEFORE UTOPIA futuristic movement who, like their leader Marinetti, were proud of their sanguine temperament, combatted melancholy and the inhibition of action it entails. Communism displays the same picture. In 1919, when the Russian Revolution had triumphed, Alexander Blok wrote to Maxim Gorki: "Ah, if just once for a decade we could only stop thinking!" But precisely that is the never-ending pain of the intellectual: the inability to put an end to thinking. The intellectual is neither always a melancholic nor must he necessarily turn into a Utopian. But his existence, as a rule, swings between these two poles. He suffers from the world — and, suffering, he feels compelled to design a better one. Here lies the origin of what Julien Benda later branded the treason of the intellectuals. For Utopia's ban on melancholy quickly turns into the constraint to find happiness in society, or if this turns out to be too difficult, nay impossible, to at least enforce the public appearance of happiness on private faces. "Organiser la fortune" was the motto of the Utopian Cabet, and the French Revolution — with its mouthpiece Saint-Just — made the highest goal of state activity nothing less than happiness itself. This unfulfillable order forbids the individual to openly display his private unhappiness — no matter how painful this may turn out to be. Melancholy is thus rigorously suppressed, and becomes all the more unacceptable to the powerful, since it appears ungraspable. Joubert very aptly thus described melancholy as the sadness that finds no words. It is not only in distant Utopias that this sadness without words finds no space, no site, no topos. Stalin wants to see the people of Russia happy — and woe to him whose facial expression fails to obey the tyrant's order! Hitler and Goebbels want to make the Aryan Germans happy — using whatever force and crimes against the rest of mankind as are necessary. Melancholy and Utopia — between them lie all the glory and the misery of the European intellectuals. When I say this, I have artists and writers especially in mind. But one group of intellectuals whose social origin also lay in modern Europe, beginning with the Renaissance, apparently eludes this alternative: the (natural) scientists. One could even describe empirical science as that area of intellectual activity that lies beyond melancholy and this side of Utopia. The scientist, as a rule, does not despair of this world, but strives to understand and to explain and eventually to manipulate and to change it; he does not think in Utopian terms, but makes predictions that extend the present into the future; neither despair nor hope, but calm neutrality and a peaceful conscience characterize "normal science" and its personnel. Here lies the origin of that tension between the two layers of European intelligence that I would like to distinguish as the "lamenting class" and "the people of good conscience". This tension is not adequately expressed in the

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common distinction between the so-called two cultures — men of letters and the humanities on the one hand, and natural scientists on the other. But the social scientists, not least because they are uncertain which values they want to follow, display it sharply in their constant swing between scientific and literary attitudes. The Intellectuals — Melancholies of an Old Continent At the beginning of his foreword to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant placed a quotation from Bacon's Instauratio Magna: "De nobis ipsis silemus: De re autem, quae agitur, petimus: ut homines earn non Opinionem, sed opus esse cogitent; ..." But we may better remain silent about ourselves: no one has violated this prescription more than intellectuals, who love above all to talk about their own tribe — as I am just doing here — and at a very early stage turned their monologues and their conversation with those like them into a means of earning their living. In the 19th century, Donoso Cortes called the bourgeoisie a "discussing class", una clasa discutidora. In this sense, the intellectual is the bourgeois par excellence. To quote an innocent witness: the parrot in Raymond Queneau's novel Zazie dans le Metro seems to be thinking of the intellectual whenever he blabbers: "Tu causes, tu causes, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire!" But prior to speaking, the task of the intellectual lies in thinking and the constant danger for him lies in never coming out of himself again for all that thought. The danger of reflection is the flight from the world. Diderot recognized this danger when, almost masochistically, he called the intellectual an unnatural system, "un systeme agissant a rebours". De nobis ipsis silemus. Why don't the intellectuals follow Bacon's and Kant's demand and remain silent about themselves for a change? Not only since the Renaissance but, one might argue, since Greek and Roman times, European politics has always also been a politics of the spirit, "une politique de 1'esprit", as Paul Valery put it, so the intellectuals have been hard to bracket off from European politics and history — as the latest upheavals in Europe have made even clearer. For intellectuals have played an important and sometimes decisive role in the changes that finally led to the fall of Communism; though many among them were heroes and traitors, oppositionals and lackeys to power at the same time, and too many were silent when they should have shouted and denounced the tyranny with their word. Two slogans, more than anything else, have been used to characterize the essence of the post-Communist world: The End of Utopia and The End of History. At the end of the 19th century, when the French historian Adolphe

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Thiers triumphed that no one spoke any longer of socialism, and that this was a good thing indeed — On ne parle plus de socialisme et on fait bien — his statement was a little premature. Thiers, a great egomaniac, also said of himself: "Je n'ai pas de collegues." Today, Thiers has found many colleagues, who not only jubilate at the end of Communism, but thereby also announce the death of Europe's last Utopian project. The historical semantics are cruel: in only a few years, Utopia has become an impossible word. No one speaks of Utopias anymore. But is one right to do so? The West tries to persuade itself that the end of the socialist Utopia marks the end of any Utopia and, at the same time, the grandiose triumph of capitalism, democracy, and the liberal rule of law. Finally, the one Truth has prevailed! Now the world will become what the Enlightenment thinkers hoped for: a world society. Our age, a period of unheard-of complacency, recalls the mood that reigned at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee as Arnold Toynbee described it in his childhood memories: "I remember the atmosphere" — Toynbee writes — "It was: well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there — forever! There is of course a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people." Today, one no longer speaks of Utopias in the West, but this attitude of political correctness and philosophical common sense is deceiving. For today's proscription of Utopian thought merely expresses the conviction that another Utopia, that of the world market and a universal bourgeois society, has finally become a reality. Immediately after 1989, the annus mirabilis of recent European history, two groups of intellectuals faced each other as equals, if only for a short while. In Central and Eastern Europe, intellectuals, almost without exception, did not come to power on the basis of their political skills or their economic competence, but due to their moral engagement, their sense of community, and their courageous advocacy of human and civil rights. These intellectuals — a minority to be sure, confronted with many conformists, collaborators and fellow travellers — were moralists of modern times who bestowed upon Europe the gift of a new culture of dispute; they, too, once belonged to the "lamenting class", but now they had changed into members of an odd species indeed. They had become melancholy actors who unmasked the deeply totalitarian character of the official optimism that prevailed in all Communist regimes. In the East, suddenly there was something new: a rebirth of intellectual morality. In the West, on the contrary, a population of postmodern, blase intellectuals was growing who had long since lost any interest in questions of morals, people of an irritatingly good conscience who, without ever uttering the non-word 'utopia', were deeply convinced that after

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the fall of Communism, which they credited not least to themselves, nothing more could delay the development of the whole world into a global market society modelled after the capitalism that had so early conquered the West. But moralists and experts confronted each other in Europe only for a short time. The moralists in the East were melancholies who had liberated themselves from their reluctance to act and who suddenly, to their own amazement, held power after the first free elections and had something to do with it. For them, their daily routine henceforth consisted no longer in invoking Utopias, but in carrying out the sometimes boring routine of Realpolitik. And so the fate of these melancholic moralists became what Max Weber ingeniously had described as the routinization of charisma: once adapted to the game of politics, many of them turned into experts and therefore — it seems paradoxically only at first glance — vanished from the political stage after the second free elections in their country. At the same time, optimism grew weaker in the West, as well. From its beginning, the goal of capitalism had never been to create a society full of harmony in the distant future, but to optimize market processes here and now. But even if capitalism never had Utopian objectives, the economic mentality associated with it was inextricably linked to a specific and extraordinarily forceful Utopia of means: the belief that, aided by science and technology, a one-world society molded by the rules and regulations of the market would infallibly develop. Today, we have lost this self-confidence. Communism, this Utopia of goals, has failed, and capitalism faces unprecedented challenges. Its Utopia of means also has become obsolete. This is the reason why a present-day Hamlet would again look out from his castle toward a melancholy continent. Self-Criticism and Modernity 1989, the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, will remain a watershed date in European history. It was an ambivalent year. The market societies of the West triumphed — and, in the moment of their triumph, didn't realize that the time for great doubt had long since arrived. After the victory over Communism, the West lacked a politician like the French Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Odilon Barrot, who wrote 150 years ago: We were victorious, but it was clear to me that now our true difficulties would come [...]. As long as danger continued, one had only one's enemies against one, and one triumphed; but after the victory, one suddenly had to deal with oneself, with one's own softness, with one's own pride, and with the deceptive security that accompanies victory; and finally one does fall.

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The Foreign Minister was named Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the reasons the West misjudged the fall of Communism and its possible consequences was because it lacked insight into the complicated connection between historical events and social structures. The transforming power of the events seduced us to far-reaching miscalculations and rashly wishful thinking — apparently, we didn't recognize the tremendous stabilizing power events can also exert. Because everything was changing in the East, we were convinced everything would remain as it was in the West. In deceptive self-assurance, we interpreted the changes in the East from the perspective of a short-winded history of events; but we lent our own intellectual lethargy the dignity of the longue duree. Dust there, eternity here — the announcement of the end of history, gladly lapped up by the State Department, was inevitable. This triumphalism corresponded to a philosophy that raised not only the West's political credo, but also its cultural beliefs to universal guiding ideas. Now, not even eight years after the triumph of 1989, the West is beginning to question itself. The core problems facing our industrial societies are not problems of the middle range. They are long-term problems and can hardly be solved without a far-reaching mental re-orientation. Europeans cannot meet the challenges of the post-Communist period by merely extending their customary behavior and stabilizing their practiced habits of thought. Behind the spectacle of events, we are beginning to become aware of the inertia of our mental structures — 'the wheeles of custome', as Bacon once called them. What we need is a policy of the long term, beyond the goal-lines of single legislative periods and terms of office, a. politics of mentalities as I have proposed to call it. Let me provide some examples. Global migrations will force us — and this is of special importance for my own country, for Germany — to recognize that we have become lands of immigration indeed. Dramatic demographic shifts will force us to find innovative arrangements of social law, but above all new forms of justice between the generations, forms that draw the long overdue consequences from the fact that our society is rapidly aging. In the face of a fixed platform of unemployment that increases not only during recessions but even during economic booms, we will have to ask ourselves whether the traditional notion of work can remain the core value of industrial society. Confronted with the advance of the poverty line, we will have to find the means to avoid a re-feudalization of our society in which the crisis-proof and the crisis-shaken sectors would drift further and further apart. Finally, the ecological reconstruction of our societies can hardly be realized without massive changes in the attitudes and behavior of

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large segments of our population, changes that will entail new patterns of mobility and a renewed ethics of living together. In his analysis of the process of civilization in Western Europe, Norbert Elias has shown how far-sightedness coupled with highly effective control of the passions — the 'deferred gratification pattern', for short — made the democratic industrial state possible in the first place. One of Europe's decisive problems today is that we have lost much of our ability to orient ourselves toward the long term. We live in a world of the everyday in which the culture of events complements a politics that follows the frantic rhythm of legislative periods and relatively short terms of office. Europe's strength once lay in the long-term orientation of its political and economic elites; characteristic for the European bourgeoisie that brought forth capitalism was a willingness to defer immediate gratification. It appears that Europe has lost this strength. My plea for a politics of mentalities is also an appeal to restore it. The modern world was molded primarily by four processes: secularization, the rise of science and technology, industrialization, and democratization. These processes unfold at varying speeds and take locally specific forms; but they intertwine and influence each other worldwide. If we define modernity as the result of these processes, we see that we are at a turning point indeed. When the increase in knowledge produced by science is no longer unquestioningly accepted as cultural enrichment but seen as a possible threat; when the core value of the labor society softens with the erosion of traditional patterns of work; when participation and involvement are no longer self-evident motives for action in political life, turning participatory democracy into a democracy of absence; and finally, when fundamentalisms spread while established religions falter — then we are indeed in a crisis of orientation affecting all the guiding principles of our economic and social activity. What this crisis is all about is, however, unclear: one can, for example, debate whether religious belief is really vanishing today, or whether it is merely the official Churches that are losing their attractiveness, while an invisible Church grows; one can diagnose the shrinking ability of our system of scholarship and higher education to provide the directions for a "good life", while pointing at the same time to alternative forms of knowledge increasingly taken as guidelines in our society; one can balance the growing disillusion with political parties with the anarchic pleasure in free-floating political mobilization; and one can accept the crumbling of traditional industrial labor in the recognition that, in the service industry, new working patterns are emerging today. In short, one can confront each anticipation of a catastrophy with a scenario of compensation.

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But it remains indisputable that these changes will affect, above all, European self-confidence. For however we judge the current results of the four processes of secularization, scientific progress, industrialization, and democratization, these processes have their origin in Europe. Modernism is a European project, all the more so since, well into the 19th century, America can be understood as an overseas Europe, in Jacob Burkhardt's words. These processes of modernization most strongly influence Europe's self-confidence, not because they themselves affect Europe in larger measure, but because they emerged on and from our old continent. When Europeans speak of the crisis of modernity, they, unlike Asians, are speaking of a threat to their own value system. The current structural problems of Asian industrial societies are in principle comparable to those of the West, and in some regions are just as dramatic; but European societies face an incomparably more urgent demand for intellectual revision. Acting from the Viewpoint of a Politics of the Mind Paul Valery classified his essays of the 1920s under the heading "Politics of the Mind", "Politique de 1'Esprit". They are painful reflections lamenting the dependency of the mind, and at the same time they are full of hope that the course of history can be influenced by the efforts of hard thinking indeed. With their nervousness and their premonitions Valery's considerations share scepticism and hope with other great projects of the inter-war period, projects like the sociology of knowledge, Husserl's phenomenology, Wittgenstein's critique of language, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Valery's work enhances our enduring sympathy with these projects — despite or precisely because of their failure. But in one decisive point, Valery's will to scepticism found its limits. He clearly saw that Europe's power to dominate was coming to an end. Coldly and without much regret, he saw that it was getting ever more difficult "d'ordonner a des fins europeennes le reste du monde". Europe turned out to be mortal — like all civilizations. Valery could cling to this insight only because he separated political Europe from intellectual Europe — and because he confronted power with intellect with a rigor corresponding more to the German than to a French tradition of thought. In the end, Europe will not harvest the fruits of its intellectual politics, it will, on the contrary, be punished for its politics. Today we no longer find consolation in this separation. The Europe of the mind cannot be separated from the Europe of politics. Rather, we must admit the degree to which the political history of Europe has always also been intellectual history, and the degree to which the intellect contributed

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to Europe's triumph, as well as to the downfall that threatens to make it, in the words of Goethe, an "old continent" again today. Can there be an Enlightenment that is not Eurocentric, but self-critical and aware of its own limitations? This is not the time for propagating a Counter-Enlightenment, but for reconsidering the Enlightenment in a critical spirit. In a period when European identity is threatened, what could an intellectual politics look like whose goal is not to Europeanize the rest of the world by force? In the society of the future, which will be less a work-oriented society in the traditional sense than a knowledge society, how can the bonding forces necessary to the survival of any society be developed and spread? Today, the intellectuals, these constitutional melancholies, must become actors who, instead of suffocating in self-pity or longing for the impossible, try to do what is possible. Coming to the end of my contribution, I should like to stress that what I have said is not the result of speculations from an arm-chair, but grew out of experience. After 1989 I have become engaged, to a large extent of my professional life, in exercises of institution-building, first and notably in Central and Eastern Europe and lately in Africa also. These activities have resulted in founding new and in supporting existing institutions of higher learning and of scholarship. Thus, to mention just a few examples, the Collegium Budapest was founded as the first Institute for Advanced Study in Central and Eastern Europe, the New Europe College in Bucharest was built, the Bibliotheca Classica in Sankt Petersburg was preserved where the study of Latin and Greek had helped to build an intellectual haven in which traditional European values could find shelter under communism and, finally, in Bamako, the capital of Mali, one of the few working democracies in Africa, a center for local knowledge — Point Sud. Muscler le Savoir Local — was set up which eventually should help large organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to better implement their projects in a local context of impressive knowledge and competence. True, in all these activities a Utopian moment was not totally absent. Was it not a Utopian dream to think, in the fall of 1989, of building a full-size Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, thereby strengthening a local culture of knowledge that would henceforth prevent excellent scholars from the region from leaving for abroad while, at the same time, attracting excellence from all over the world? Yet such a dream could only become true since goals were defined in realizable terms and because the melancholy of brooding, preventing oneself from doing anything at all, was left behind in international and interdisciplinary teamwork. For me, this is a unique period in European history. It is unique not least because it gives intellectuals unprecedented opportunities not only to think

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but also to act. The loss of cultural certainties as I have described them is a great challenge but it provides an even greater opportunity at the same time. Many things can no longer be taken for granted. New thinking is required more than ever before. Yet we don't have the time to speculate or to build Utopias — we must, in a time of restless change, act swiftly. Robert Merton's plea for a theory of the middle range comes to one's mind: we need to think of tomorrow but we must do something today. Compared with a non-politics of despair or of Utopian visions this may sound boring indeed. But I can only tell you that my own experience in building institutions with ideas has been a most rewarding one. Not for a moment would I want to miss this down-toearth activity — beyond melancholy and before Utopia.

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Experience and Expectations of the East JACK GOODY Western experience of Asia has changed dramatically over time. While there was always an element of ethnocentrism in our attitudes, like those of peoples everywhere, Jesuit priests who visited the East from the sixteenth century were greatly impressed with the achievements of those regions. So earlier still was Marco Polo, seeing the Chinese capital as the greatest city on earth. While they had not discovered all the inventions or the knowledge of the later West, they had done much else and were in no sense a backward nation — organising imports and exports, trading expeditions and complex cities, not to mention a huge internal empire with its market that dwarfed that of any Western nation. It was only with the so-called Enlightenment and the development of the Industrial Revolution, preceded by the intensification of proto-industrial production and developments in scientific and other forms of knowledge, that the situation changed. From that time on, Western Europe developed a superiority complex with regard to the East, realistically based upon the achievements that continent had made (or contributed to) which have been characterised as industrialisation, capitalism and more controversially as something called modernity, which is given varying content by diverse writers. While superiority under these heads was undoubtedly a feature of this transformation, there were two tendencies in subsequent thinking, both at the popular and at the scientific levels, that characterised Western views and Western intellectual experience of the past. Although these notions were mistaken both about the West and about the East, they conditioned our understanding of the present as well as our expectations for the future. Those tendencies were firstly to extend a temporary advantage that followed the Renaissance back to earlier times, as a result of which the European advantage was seen as permanent, as located in our cultural genes from earliest times and as likely to continue into the future. The second tendency was to generalise the advantage from the specific spheres of technological and other knowledge systems to the whole domain of culture, to include the family (and its associated morality, as in the case of many historical demographers associated with the Cambridge Group), with love (as for de Rougemont, many historians, such as Duby and Stone, and

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sociologists like Giddens), with ethics (at least, the economic ethic, as for Max Weber), with Christianity (as for the anthropologist Louis Dumont, and a horde of others), with civilisation itself (as for Elias and his followers). I believe these tendencies are profoundly mistaken, and hinder our understanding of the past, the present and the future. Firstly, Europe in the Middle Ages was backward in relation to China and the East in a number of respects. Take the fundamental feature of the accumulation of knowledge, especially in scientific spheres. The West is now seen as dynamic, innovative and entrepreneurial, the East as stagnant, traditional, conservative. The great German scholars, Karl Marx and Max Weber, thought this and in addition that Eastern societies are authoritarian and collective — in contrast to Western individuality and rationality. In that way they attempted to explain why the East had never made the breakthrough to industrialisation, capitalism and modernisation more generally. These differences have been considered to be deeply ingrained in the respective societies, as features of the cultures themselves. This form of culturalism, as common among scholars as among the wider population, almost approaches the biological in its seeking to determine the present and the future by past events or characteristics. However there was a very long period in the Middle Ages, leading up to the Renaissance — to the Rebirth — when Europe in fact decidedly lagged behind the East in the scientific, cultural and economic fields. China's early record of scientific achievements has been amply discussed by Joseph Needham in the remarkable series which he edited on Science and Civilisation in China. It is not now the occasion to run over China's detailed successes in the different fields of science, but they are many and wide ranging. At a time when Europe's achievements were falling off from those of the Mesopotamians, Greeks and Romans, the Chinese were gaining ground in their knowledge of the universe. Part of the relatively slow growth in Europe was no doubt economic but a good part was due to what might be considered political and ideological factors, to the decline of state organisation after the fall of the Roman empire, to the rise in dominance of the Christian Church with its stress on a world-view of an other-worldly kind that tended to inhibit the freer type of enquiry on which the search for further knowledge depended. The standard example is that of Galileo but the situation was pervasive and cannot be summed up by citing one particular case. During the Middle Ages, the schools at whatever level taught the accepted religious version of the truth about the world, a truth that was set in tablets of stone, in unalterable scriptures or in unquestionable councils. There was but little room for unfettered liberal enquiry.

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It is significant that while the great achievements of medieval scholarship were Summae of sacred texts and knowledge, during the Sung period China saw the production of many encyclopaedias which attempted to summarise and add to secular knowledge about the world. But China was not then in thrall to a single world religion that claimed a monopoly of knowledge and created an over-arching 'great organisation'. Attempts to do just this by the Buddhists were countered by the Court who gave its favours to a Confucianism which supported the state and had no church. That doctrine promoted a sceptical view of religious attitudes and encouraged secular ones. Hence the intellectual climate in the Middle Kingdom was more open to advances in the field of natural knowledge. On the cultural level the experience and achievements of the East and the West at this time were perhaps more similar. China had possessed a system of writing long before most of Europe, though not of course long before the Near East, that is Western Asia. Their system was logographic; each sign corresponded to a unit of meaning, rather than to a phoneme, a unit of sound, as with the alphabet. There is little doubt that the latter has some advantages in ease of mastery though the problem is complex; and it is certainly simpler to produce mechanically, that is by printing, even though this technical advance was first made in the East. However, the disadvantages of the logographic script (sometimes called pictographic as if it was somehow prelinguistic!) have been much exaggerated, including by this author. Much was possible with the aid of such scripts as the history of Mesopotamia and its scientific and literary achievements show. Knowledge could be stored outside the human memory; communication could be established over time and over distance and many of the other advantages of writing — in helping to organise social and mental life, in making what is implicit more explicit, in assisting 'rationality' and argument — were present. While Max Weber and other scholars have spoken of a 'Western rationality', a rationality of world mastery, in contrast to that of the East this judgement was clearly an ex post facto evaluation of an ethnocentric, Eurocentric sort. Formal logical procedures, of a syllogistic kind, spread to the East through Indian and Buddhist channels: but in any case there is no need to assume fundamentally different forms of rationality in written cultures. In the West, popular opinion often sees in Chinese divination and geomancy quite different modes of thinking, forgetting the way that many Protestant entrepreneurs (and in a different way Catholics too) saw their work as guided by God. And on a more popular level by an astrology that looks back to Chaldean times and which spread both West and East. Writing also permitted and encouraged certain types of literary achievement, for example poetry as distinct from song, and later the novel as distinct

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from folk-tale or epic, not to speak of the 'prose' needed for scholarly discourse of one kind or another. Poetry is particularly interesting. In China we have anthologies dating from the eighth and ninth centuries B.C.E. These poems seem to have been produced in a Court environment and their subject is mainly love. A constant theme of Europeans has been that love was a Western invention, other cultures being characterised by lust, by passion or by desire, certainly not by romantic love which is seen by de Rougemont, for example, as having its birth among the troubadours in Southern France in the twelfth century. Or by other historians and sociologists much later in the eighteenth century with the onset of 'modernisation'. Attention to Chinese literature suggests that these assumptions are quite wrong, both in terms of time and space. It is true that in Africa there is not much elaboration of the discourse of love. I have suggested that this elaboration takes place largely in a written context when, in contrast to speech which is essentially face-to-face, one is communicating to or about a loved one at a distance, for example, after he or she has left on a voyage or when the lovers have been separated in some other way. These are situations which writing was created to deal with and we find such an elaboration of love discourse in poetry both in the East and in the West. The question of love is often merged with that of choice of partner; and it is true that outside posteighteenth century Europe, the marriage choices of the partners were often more restricted, weight also being given to the views of parents, relatives and of society at large. It was a situation that could give rise to tension between the generations and hence young, 'modernising' elites in the East often seized upon what they saw as the Western model of 'free choice' when faced with the remodelling of their own societies. That was the case with the Chinese revolutionaries of 1911 as well as in Japan and to a lesser extent in India and the Near East. But it needs to be remembered that free choice for the partners meant no choice for the others who, in agricultural regimes involving common exploitation of the family farm, would be concerned about their partners and successors in the enterprise. Moreover marriage in which parents or society had a say were not 'arranged' marriages in any absolute sense; unions often involved some choice or consent by the partners who would be less likely to live together permanently were this not the case. Nevertheless there was undoubtedly more individual, ego-centric choice in the post-eighteenth century West, which has served as a model for other countries, partly though its expression in novels, in films and in magazines. That does not mean there was no individualism in non-Western societies, as some commentators have supposed. Far from it. Nor has free-choice necessarily meant greater happiness, certainly not greater stability for the conjugal pair or for their

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children. A doctrine of free choice means almost inevitably that the choice can be revised; hence more divorce, more children without resident fathers, more single parents. Returning to the theme of literacy, at a later date China also saw the appearance of the novel, mostly of a picaresque kind. That development too has often been seen in purely Western terms, as a realistic successor to earlier romances which accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie in early eighteenth century Europe, especially England. The emerging capitalist economy in England was epitomised in the work of Daniel Defoe whose Robinson Crusoe encapsulates the idea of a man against the world, an individual making a success of his life entirely by his own efforts. This association was wrong not only from the standpoint of literary history but as we will see below from that of the economy as well. Let me touch briefly on the other arts. China developed a Court music, which Europe only did in a significant way at the Renaissance. Before that time, music was largely the prerogative of the Church except at the level of popular culture. That was also true of painting, while sculpture was totally excluded from the Christian West for theological reasons. In China on the other hand they had a secular tradition of representation (not unchallenged), associated first with the Court and then with the prosperous merchant towns of southern China; the repertoire included landscape painting (from later Han times), flower painting and other genres practised by professional artists, women as well as men. While a similar tradition existed in classical times, Europe did not experience its relaunch until the Renaissance and the development of still life and landscape painting, notably in the Low Countries from the sixteenth century. We see no grounds, then, for thinking of the East as stagnant, traditional, authoritarian, any more than the earlier West. Western perceptions were mistaken (or rather elaborated on the back of the Industrial Revolution), the assumption of backwardness being made in that context and generalised to the culture and economy as a whole. Because the East had not been industrialised at the same time as the West, it was thought to be congenitally incapable of being so. But as we have seen it was more advanced in scientific and cultural achievements in pre-Renaissance times and economically it was certainly not as backward as many accounts suggest. Both China and India constituted vast markets in themselves but they also traded with one another (using Malacca for example as an entrepot), as well as with Indo-China and Indonesia. The Indian Ocean and the China seas formed a large trading network long before Europeans entered the scene; that network extended to sub-Saharan Africa where the Chinese made a famous expedition in the fifteenth century (led by Muslims) and where Indian trade was of yet longer

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standing. Asia and its coasts were the centre of economic activity at that time (of the world system, if you like), not the West, despite the slow revival of trade and commerce in Europe after the millennium. This trade required not only a complex network of traders, large and small, of markets, of transport, of commercial information and of exchange and banking facilities; it also required production since the trade consisted of much more than raw materials, than spices for example. China produced silks and porcelain for export in substantial quantities, some of which made their way to Europe by the famous Silk Roads that included seaborne traffic. The manufacture of silk was largely a peasant industry, the produce of which was collected as taxes and traded by the state and its agents. But porcelain and bronzeware was produced by means that were at least incipiently industrial and involved a large measure of standardisation and of a complex division of labour. The Indian equivalent was the trade in painted and printed cottons that had formed the staple of their exchanges with Indonesia for spices, exchanges that were accompanied by a considerable measure of cultural transfers to those islands, not only Buddhist but Hindu too, as well as more general influences that persist to this day in Bali and elsewhere. Cotton was largely grown, processed, woven, painted and printed at the village level but its production formed part of a complex trading network that included merchants, bankers and a system of 'putting-out' whereby the producers were provided with the goods needed to make the items for export. That was the extensive system found by the Dutch when they reached India under Portuguese auspices and in which they participated, firstly to finance their own purchases of spices and then to bring cloth back to Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century: the colours, quality and indeed cheapness of the cloth conquered the market in Western Europe, as did the more expensive Chinese porcelain. That led in turn to efforts of import substitution, for porcelain in the shape of Delftware and for cotton by local initiatives, leading eventually to the production of a competitor in the shape of industrially produced goods: these generated so much inventive activity in the eighteenth century which eventually in the 1780s led to an integrated system of factory-based industry that changed the face not only of Europe but of the world. Those particular developments took place in Western Europe and have often clouded our judgement ever since, making it seem as though only we could modernise, industrialise, capitalise, in this way. That was the

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conclusion of Karl Marx who saw the Western sequence of tribal, ancient society, feudalism as leading to capitalism. The East followed, according to him, quite a different sequence; his 'Asiatic exceptionalism' led him to posit the Asiatic mode of production that depended upon a centralised despotic government and excluded the development either of a decentralised feudalism or of a mercantile bourgeoisie. The state certainly played its part in economic developments in the East, as it did in early modern Europe (in the later seventeenth century regime of France, for example) and in the postTokagawa achievements of Japan and those in China after World War II. But there was also a substantial growth of a merchant class especially in southern China, which came to act as patrons of art, of literature, of the cultivation of flowers and other cultural activities, based on their successful economic activities. Moreover town life in China did not unfold along completely different lines from the West as Max Weber, among others, maintained in his study of Die Stadt. That is to say, the bourgeoisie were not completely subject to government regulation and patronage; there existed systems of guilds, of commercial law and of recourse to a judicial system. While the extent of independence of the communes of Western Europe may at times have gone further, given the decentralised nature of many feudal regimes, the middle classes existed in their own right and partly regulated their mode of life, not only in China but in India too. In the Indian city of Ahmadabad as in the Chinese city of Hankow, they had their own representatives and were not without power, especially in the commercial world. Early European visitors to India were amazed not only at the size of towns (as Marco Polo was in China) but at the extent of trade, the dimensions of the ships and the wealth of the merchants, one being described as the richest in the world. While in some ways the caste system may have inhibited the economy, as Weber maintained, in other ways it promoted such developments, especially in the banking activities of certain castes such as the Chettiars of southern India (who could borrow more cheaply from fellow members and lend at a profit to outsiders), and among such religious groups as the Jains who also specialised in money-lending and trade. That was also true of some clans in China which Weber again saw as obstructing commerce. But such clans invested some of their corporate wealth in business activity and in commerce and so encouraged these branches of the economy. Contrary to the beliefs and expectations of Marx and Weber the East was well advanced in mercantile capitalism. It was almost as ready for the takeoff to industrial activity as the West and was inhibited partly because the West

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successfully made the first moves in that direction, though the East had gone a long way towards the mechanisation of silk production (as Elvin explains). That it had such a propensity is apparent in the way that it has successfully developed capitalist activity and industrial production over the last hundred years, whereas Africa, which was not prepared in the same way, has failed to do so. At first, Western scholars proclaimed Japan as the Asiatic exception, finding in that country structures of feudalism, of the bilateral family or of the economic ethic that were similar to Europe. The Protestant ethic was paralleled by the Confucian. The expectation was that other countries would find it much more difficult to develop for mainly cultural reasons. That expectation was shattered by later experience. Hong Kong, Taiwan and the other little dragons became exemplary capitalists. Then the states of SouthEast Asia followed and more recently India itself. These outcomes could have been anticipated had Western expectations not been based upon a radical differentiation between Europe and Asia with their diverging trajectories, a notion that included Asia and Africa in an undifferentiated concept of the Third World. That assumption made capitalism inevitable in the one case and impossible (at least initially) in the other. We should instead have based our expectations on the recognition that all the major states of Eurasia had gone through what has been called the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, which was based upon a transformation of the rural economy by the animal-drawn plough, by animal traction and human transport (by the wheel) and often irrigation. That development supported an economically stratified society with a significant urban sector with its crafts and specialisations, including — so important for all of us — the skill of writing. There was therefore a commonality in Eurasia's preparedness for further developments, based on written knowledge systems, on increasingly elaborated craft specialisation, on trade and commerce and on an urban sector. There was exceptionalism at this level, but rather a common heritage. That commonality can be seen from the contrast with Africa which has so far not developed economically in the way that Asia has, for it never experienced the changes of the Bronze Age, except in rather marginal ways. The greater difficulty of adaptation means that Black Africa has signally failed to feed its people and has many problems in funding the exchange capacity to import the food required, being forced to rely in many cases on foreign aid and debts to feed a growing population. I do not wish to imply for one moment that in the post-Renaissance period Europe did not catch up and surpass the East in many ways. In the arts, in the mercantile and industrial economy and in knowledge systems it has been very successful, so that for other parts of the world to 'modernise'

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has meant copying Western models. But such achievements cannot be attributed to deep-seated cultural factors, partly because many common cultural elements go back to the Bronze Age, partly because they obviously do not explain the earlier advance of the East and the backwardness of the West, and partly again they do not take account of the recent changes in the East. There is an explanatory job to be done for Europe's modernisation but it is of more modest proportions than is usually thought. It relates to the temporary advance of the West since the Renaissance, which reversed the experience of the Dark and Middle Ages and returned to take up the achievements of the classical civilisations, limiting the restrictions created by the earlier Church. Part of what was then happening was that after the restrictions and relative somnolence of the Middle Ages, creative energies were suddenly released. There was a leap-frog effect. Secular plays, non-religious painting, all sculpture had been inhibited; so, too the kind of free enquiry advocated by Francis Bacon. All these spheres now burst forward as did knowledge systems more generally, encouraged by the burgeoning economic life and by the use of printing with an alphabetic code that promoted mass literacy. Those developments foreshadowed the Enlightenment on the one hand and on the other the continuous technological inventions required to adapt the production of cotton to the use of non-human energy in the factory, in other words to industrial capitalism. That was a technological rather than a moral, ethical or even cultural phenomenon, as we see from the rapid transfer of the productive system to different social environments, to America, to France, to Barcelona, to Europe more generally, to Ahmadabad (the 'Manchester of India') and elsewhere within a relatively short time. It is apparent that nowhere else required the same Protestant ethic, nor was that involved in the initial economic developments in late medieval Italy nor in the France of Colbert. So its relevance as a causal factor, or even in terms of 'elective affinity', must be doubted. A large part of the problem concerns the expectations that have wrongly been drawn from experience. European nation 'modernised', industrialised, from the late eighteenth century onwards — earlier in terms of knowledge systems and the arts. This clearly gave them advantages over other nations in the nineteenth century when Marx was writing. The causes for those advantages have been sought way back in the culture of the continent, sometimes in its Greek heritage, sometimes in its Christian religion, often in other ways. Temporary advantage, a particular experience, has been generalised into a permanent state of superiority, a scholarly ethnocentrism,

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creating mistaken expectations about the performance of our own or other societies. We need to look much more carefully at those experiences and expectations concerning Asia if we are to understand our past, our present and our uncertain future.

Global Expectations, Local Experiences Non-Western Modernities NILUFER GOLE The process of globalization is a new challenge to rethinking modernity from the vantage point of its encounter with non-Western experiences. We have the habit of reflecting on modernity and our future in the mirror of Western experience. Decentering the West and focusing on non-Western modernities can be a creative twist in considering modernity. Non-Western practices seem too distant, both in time and space, to the center of modernity. In the eyes of the citizens of the non-Western countries as well, modernity appears as an ideal to be achieved, as a source of aspiration, as an expectation rather than as an indigenous experience. Yet the historical engagement towards Westernization, nation-state building, and today globalization brought about the penetration and indigenization of modernity. Hence it is a challenge to give new conceptualizations of modernity as it is reappropriated, rejected, subverted, distorted or simply reshaped and reproduced in a plurality of contexts other than the West. The non-Western modernities put a stress both on the particularism of local experiences and on the inescapability of global modernity. The historical, political and intellectual trajectories of these countries are shaped by their very particular dependence on Western modernity. Either by the colonizing process or the civilizing mission, and today by global capitalism, media and migration, modernity through borrowing becomes an indigenous practice, intrinsic to historical trajectories (establishment of nation-states), to social imaginaries (secularism, equality, democracy), and cultural products (the arts, esthetics and science). Modernity is an "in here" matter affecting not only our institutions but also our "1'imaginaire social", everyday life and gender and self-definition. Modernity loses its external, that is Western nature, one-way influence and becomes an indigenous matter, both hybrid and local. The non-Western countries are very often studied in terms of the distance, gap, and time lag they have with Western modernity, that is as noncontemporaneous. Yet the global communication society implies entering into the same time zone, sharing the same time. Understanding non-Western

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modernities necessitates the reconstruction of our analysis in terms of coeval time and not in sequential chronology. Is there any commonality among these unnamed experiences, fragmented realities which would justify the taxonomy "non-Western" and furthermore will enable us to develop a new reading of modernity? Trying to label the "local experiences" is not a new task. Sociology tried to define these societies in counterdistinction from the Western, modern, developed, core countries. They were labeled as traditional, dependent, peripheral, or local. Sometimes a regional unity, like the Mediterranean, provided the opportunity to select and depict a historical and cultural feature, sometimes religion, just as Muslim countries provided the chance to attempt to generalize and name a commonality among these countries. Today with increasing globalization, some, like Fukuyama stress the convergence between different experiences and advance "the end of history" thesis, claiming the end of ideological conflict and the triumph of market economy and liberal capitalism. But apart from the uniformization of the world experience, ethnical, religious, nationalist and cultural differences resurge as new sources of difference and political confrontation. Huntington's thesis of "clash of civilizations" goes in that direction. Modernization and Westernization, which were designating the one and the same phenomenon during the second half of the 20th century, is separated in the contemporary world. Huntington observes this separation which is accompanied by the decline of Western monopoly over the definitions of modernity. The latter becomes more global and at the same time indigenous to different cultural contexts. Huntington responds, in a very nostalgic, hence past-oriented and reactionary way to this divorce. He regrets and feels threatened that modernity is not synonymous with Westernity, but at the same time he wants the Western world to give up its "civilizing mission", that is its universalistic claims and withdraw to its own cultural boundaries. Although the two theses seem contradictory they are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand the principles of liberal market economy become global; on the other hand the quest for alternative identitarian movements are spread out. But both theses are Westbound; their center of reflection is the Western experience. Either they ignore all divergences or consider them at the other extreme as a threat to the supremacy of Western values. How then to read these concomitant processes of the globalization of the capitalism and indigenization of modernity?

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Multiple modernities [42]

The criticism of the mono-civilizational definitions of modernity goes hand in hand with the recognition of the multiplicity of definitions, trajectories and appropriations of modernity in different geographical and cultural contexts. Today the pendulum of social sciences oscillates towards an interest in including the voices of the "other" (such as subaltern studies, feminist studies, post-colonialism, Islamism) and the multiplicity of cultural experiences. Monistic narratives on modernity have privileged acultural and ahistorical approaches. The concept of multiple modernities criticizes the unidimensional construct of "Western modernity" and underlines the differences among the experiences of the West. It addresses a criticism from within, from the center of the Western social sciences, to the master narrative of modernity. Consequently, it enriches the readings of modernity in the light of different historical trajectories and cultural contexts. The emphasis on the multiplicity inevitably brings forth a relativistic conception between different experiences. But not every cultural distinctness is thereby justified and good. One should not forget, as Charles Taylor and Benjamin Lee remind us, that there is a normative promise inbred into the search for multiple modernities, Indeed there are two questions underlying the thesis of multiple modernities: "Can we create a normatively superior modernity? and Can there be a plurality of culturally different modernities?".1 Another issue is related to the differentiation between modernity and modernization. The latter refers to different historical trajectories that each country constructs as a gateway to modernity. In that sense modernization, is by definition pluralistic: the Jacobean model of French modernization is distinct from the liberal market economy of the British model. Yet modernity denotes something more universal than the sum total of each country's historical mode of modernization. And the reference to the West rests on an inextricable feature of modernity. Relativistic and pluralistic approaches not only have the merit of overcoming the Westcentered analysis, but also the risk of underestimating the universalistic dimensions of modernity. Whereas "a viable theory of multiple modernities has to be able to relate both the pull to sameness and the forces making for difference".2

1

Cf. Charles Taylor and Benjamin Lee, Multiple Modernities Project, Modernity and Difference, Working Draft, Center for Transcultural Studies, 1998, p. 10. 2 Ibid., p. 3.

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Alternative modernities Alternative modernities on the one hand assess the inevitability of modernity, and on the other hand suggest the possibility of alternative forms.3 They hint at the existence of different experiences capable of changing, transforming the practice of modernity. It that sense a reference to "alternative" suggests and opens up a realm of social and cultural innovation. But at the same time, emphasis on alternative modernities can imply a Utopian attitude coupled with claims for authenticity and privilege, holistic systemic changes and authoritarian politics. In other words, can we speak of alternative modernities implying an articulation of market capitalism with a different set of values and culture? Or should we be very skeptical vis-avis all discourse on authenticity which leads easily to closing up borders to, "foreign effects of culture", to authoritarian politics in the name of national autonomy, to acts of ethnic cleansing or religious fundamentalism. Modernity is an open-ended social adventure which oscillates between borrowing, blending, hybridization on the one hand, and affirmation of authenticity of culture on the other. Local modernity Conceptualizations of local modernity develop our sensibility to hybrid, paradoxical, non-linear, non-Western acquisitions of modernity. To localize the experience of modernity, rather than presuming that it is acultural, alocal and ahistorical, revalues the particularistic, native, multivocal aspects of modernity. It attempts to include those aspects of modernity repressed or simply considered as discordant and pathological with the "ideal type" of modernity. Distantiation from the universalistic meta-narratives of modernization gives rise to the examination of subjective constructions of meanings, cultural identities, everyday life, popular culture, in short, of the specific articulations between the local fabric and the modernity. Once liberated from master narratives of modernity, the asymmetrical forms of modernity can be highlighted, reevaluated. But the taxonomy of the global/local witnesses to the power relations of domination and calls forth some critical thinking. As there is a positive connection between modernity and mobility, to say of people that they are local implies that they are attached to a place, rooted and limited, in contrast to those who are uprooted, mobile, cosmopolitan and universal (that Dilip Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities, Duke University Press, 1999.

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is belonging to the whole world and the world belonging to them).4 Therefore claims for universalism are not independent of power relations which are in turn defined by one's proximity to the "center". Labeling an experience, an attitude, a social practice as local means attaching it to a place and limiting its meaning to the particular as opposed to the universal. Non-Western modernities Whether we use the term 'multiple', 'alternative', or 'local', each of these labels has shortcomings but also contributes to our conceptual effort. NonWestern modernities should be built upon these conceptions. Multiple modernities help us to overcome the monistic and ahistorical approaches to modernity; local modernity contextualizes forms of modernity; and alternative modernity addresses the question of whether there can be other models of modernity. Non-Western modernity aims to understand the similarities between different trajectories and appropriations of modernity. It has its own conceptual drawbacks. First of all the "non-Western" revokes "anti" Western or non-modern societies. If we recall that modernization and Westernization have been synonymous during the 19th century, we can understand the limits of separating modernity from Westernity. But here the emphasis is not to the rejection but to the contrary on the ways of appropriation, design that modernity takes shape in contexts other than the West. First, the concept aims to find some convergences among these different experiences outside the core countries of the West. Secondly, it introduces the power relations between the West and the others, or at least the problematic relations of the latter to the West. Therefore, the intention is not to cancel the reference to the Western modernity but on the contrary to highlight the particular dependence and the different constructs in time and space. This point brings us to the main weakness of the concept, because it assumes without questioning the wholeness of the concept of "Western modernity". In the eyes of the non-Western, certainly "Western modernity" is very meaningful, although in time and in different geographies it has been constructed differently and selectively. But seen from within, that is from the perspective of those countries that are Western but situated rather at its periphery, the concept loses its operational force. Non-Western modernities should be taken as a theoretical and methodological effort to create new ways of reading and seeing some aspects of social life which have been either repressed as discordant with modernity or 4

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1993, pp. 8-11.

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judged and dismissed as regressive or transitory phenomena. It is a conceptual effort trying to create a new awareness. Postulates such as 1. Decentering the West; 2. Introducing coeval time; 3. Replacing the perspective of "lack" with "extra" modernity; 4. Dissonant traditions can provide some methodological foundations for an approach in terms of the non-Western modernities. 1.

Decentering the West

The current phase of globalization decenters the Western influence. Although still dominated by Western power, there is no two-way process, even no direction from the West towards the rest; as Anthony Giddens observes globalization today can no longer be spoken of only as a matter of one-way imperialism.5 Hence to conceptualize modernity which is generic to non-Western contexts, we need to shift our sense of direction and read non-Western societies not in the mirror of the Western influence of modernity, but on the contrary revisit modernity as it is shaped by the non-Western. Hence the concept of the non-Western, rather than conveying a sense of opposition to the West, attempts to understand the particular relations that these societies weave with modernity. The concept suggests that the relation that nonWestern countries have with modernity not only has a passive character, but also carries a potential for innovation. The end of identification between modernity and the West brings forth the question of alternative models of modernity. It forces us to rethink whether modernity can acquire a different pattern, in different geographical and cultural contexts. The attempt to reread modernity from the angle of non-Western countries raises the question whether we can refer to a shared experience, a similitude among these experiences which would justify such a label. We have to compare and contrast these experiences in order to distill some common aspects of their practice of modernity. Non-Western countries have almost exclusively taken Western modernity as a reference point to understand their own experience. Each non-Western country positions itself almost exclusively in relation to the Western model of modernity as a standard-bearer, ignoring other experiences. Decentering the West invites us to establish the intellectual references among non-Western countries — horizontally; it provides an opportunity to read our experiences in the reflection of each other's historical experience and social practice. 5

Anthony Giddens, "Living in a Post-Traditional Society", in Reflexive Modernization, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Stanford University Press, California, 1994, p. 96.

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These societies which are only described, named, labeled as the "other" of the West, can gain a new visibility only if their social practice is contrasted with each other, translated and mediated. It is sometimes surprising to find similar representations, common myths that one thinks particular to one's own geography; for instance both Hong Kong and Istanbul claim to be the cities where East meets West, where tradition mixes with modernity. The compulsory positioning in relation to the West affects as well the geographical conceptions of distance. As a consequence, for instance Western geography is symbolically perceived as closer than the neighbor countries (but there is no reciprocity in this sense, that is from the point of view of Western citizens, for instance Istanbul seems more far away than it actually is, both in terms of traveling time and climate differences). Decentering the West will enable us to grasp global modernity in a multidimensional direction and hence compare, contrast, and cross the boundaries horizontally, creating an awareness of similarity between seemingly unconnected historical and cultural experiences. 2.

Coeval time

A linear, sequential time conception is geared into the discourse of modernity which is produced by binary oppositions between moderns and traditionals, civilized and barbarians, developed and underdeveloped. Those who are distant to the center of Western modernity, and located at the "periphery" of the system are also those who "lag behind", are "backward", delayed in terms of time. A hierarchical differentiation between "late comers", "followers" and precursors of change underpins the discourse of modernity and its evolutionary conception of time. The ideal of progress circumscribes a common direction of change and links different countries' historical trajectories to a common end, to that of modernity. A universalistic claim of modernity posits the possibility for each country to follow the footprints of the West and hence achieve progress in the same direction. By no means can any country be indifferent to modernity; but any history can be written independently from the history of modernity. Thus the location of each country is evaluated according to their proximity in time and space to modernity. The universalistic claim of modernity is inseparable from a hierarchical stratification among countries in terms of time and space. Faith in progress cancels the possibility of different historical developments, cultural preferences and presupposes that underdeveloped countries will follow the same stages of development as the West. Theories of underdevelopment (Andre Gunder Frank) did not share this optimism. They observed the relationships between exploitation and dependence, and claimed

GLOBAL EXPECTATIONS, LOCAL EXPERIENCES

that underdevelopment is caused and sustained by Western development itself. Although these theories reversed the perspective and exposed modernity from the angle of dependent countries, they reproduced the sequential and evolutionary time notion of modernity. The thesis of "development of underdevelopment" is based upon the very notion of linear direction of change, two-way process and domination between late comers and those who are in advance in time and in location on the line of progress. It is the distanciation between time and space which makes worldwide capitalism a shared experience. Already in early modernity, as Simmel has shown, money as a means of bracketing time and bridging distances provided for the enactment of transactions between agents widely separated in time and space.6 Today, with the globalization of media and capital, space is further organized independently of physically shared places and time. Globalization is "action at a distance"; it follows some of the patterns established during the initial phase of modern social development and it frees social activity from localized contexts and reorganizes social relations across large time-space distances.7 The globalization of capitalism, communication and life-styles reinforces the simultaneity of experience, requiring the abandonment of the linear and evolutionary notion of time derived from industrial capitalism. But as we have already argued, the ways we use the notion of time is not independent of identity constructions and the power/stratification relationships between the West and the others. There is this implicit noncontemporaneous time attribution to the non-Western, as not sharing the same time with "us"; "us" being defined as the moderns, Westerns and seculars in opposition to those perceived as traditionalists, religious, backward. Therefore the use of time in the constitution of relationships between the Self and the Other is not value-free, it implies an affirmation of difference as distance and the "denial of coevalness".8 The denial of coeval time does not exclusively concern the work of the social scientists from the Western countries, but includes as well the work of those from other countries reproducing, often in a more accentuated form, the dualism in terms of time and space between the West and the others. The well-known motto for modernizing elites of the non-Western countries is a good example of the ideological time dimension of modernity. We can find the same ideal in different languages, namely "reaching the level 6

Georg Simmel, Philosophy of Money, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978. Anthony Giddens, op. cit., p. 96. Johnes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983. 7 8

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of contemporary civilization". The use (misuse) of "contemporanization" ("cagda§la§mak" in Turkish) is very telling. It expresses the aspiration and difference in time between the West and one's own experience. Although "contemporary" means present time, sharing the same time, the Turkish mode of modernization points at a time in the future, "contemporanization" denoting becoming rather than being a contemporary of the West and sharing the same time and experience. Therefore "contemporary" does not convey a neutral time definition of the present but rather encapsulates the ideal of progress: it is future-oriented and identified with the values of "Western civilization". The public debate about the Islamic head-scarf during the post1983 period in Turkey exemplifies well the terms of the modernist project. The ban on the Islamic head-scarf from the universities was grounded on the argument that "Islamic dress was not appropriate to contemporary dress codes". Contemporary, rather than referring to a present phenomenon, is used interchangeably with modern and Western. In other words, the non-Western countries do not perceive themselves as contemporaries of the West. They are alienated from their own present which they want to overcome by projecting themselves either to the Utopian future or to the golden age of the past. The time lag stigmatized the consciousness and the self-definitions of the nonWestern, in the words of Daryush Shayegan, it "mutilated their eyes".9 The desire for tabula rasa with the present time, geared into both the fundamentalist and revolutionary movements, stems from this feeling of impotence in the face of contemporary reality. Nonetheless modernity is becoming an intrinsic part of everyday life in non-Western countries, becoming a simultaneous experience with Western countries. Voluntary modernization, forced colonization, and globalization of the free flow of capital, ideas, consumer goods, cultural artifacts, all contributed at different stages to the indigenization and coevalness of modernity. Introducing a notion of coeval time in the analysis of non-Western societies can produce a creative twist in opening-up the social sciences. The latter suffers or profits (depending on where one stands) from the evolutionary notion of linear time which conveys privileges to West-centered analysis. The modern West and the avant-garde intellectual are a complementary couple. The Western intellectual, social scientist, feminist, by definition all have a position of superiority, as they "know in advance" compared with their nonWestern counterparts. The non-Western is not really a source of curiosity, worthy of "knowing" to the extent that its social history is not innovative but a delayed one, to be re-written behind the footprints of the West. Daryush Shayegan, Le regard mutile, ed. De la Decouverte, Paris, 1989.

GLOBAL EXPECTATIONS, LOCAL EXPERIENCES

It is ironical to note that the non-Western becomes a subject matter of knowledge to the extent that it threatens the West as its "Other". Islamism fulfills such a role. Islamism represents the alterity, but at the same time arouses curiosity which the West manifests in confrontation with the "Other". The ways in which political Islamism is studied provides an example for the "denial of coevalness". It is explained as a fundamentalist movement, belonging to the past, rather than as a contemporary social movement rooted in modern problems. A theorization of the non-Western modernities is possible only if we introduce a contemporaneous time notion. The precondition to be open to the idea that these societies are potentially innovators of modernity is the acknowledgement of social and cultural practice as an open-ended question; and to question them from the vantage point of modern times instead of condemning them as backward or insignificant or transitory. The contemporaneous approach to the social practices of the non-Western will not only contribute to the decentering of the West but also delegitimize the avant-garde privilege of Western intellectuals. 3. Extra modernity We can expand our perspective of modernity from a European-centered, mono-linear trajectory towards a multicultural and manifold conception of modernity. Nonetheless we cannot speak of a symmetrical development between the West and the non-Western. Coevalness does not imply sameness but points to the fact that modernity is a shared experience but shaped and reflected differently depending on the cultural context and location. The concept of multiple modernities does not account for these differences which are geared into the relationship betweeen power and dependence. Furthermore, the reference to the West is inbred in non-Western histories and societies. The historical, political, and intellectual trajectories of the non-Western countries are particularly shaped by their very dependence on Western modernity. And in this respect, there is no reciprocity between Western and non-Western countries because the opposition, but also the connection, between them is historically constructed by these "asymmetrical desires and indifferences".10 Therefore once again, "coevalness" does not imply similarity, but on the contrary necessitates an awareness of these asymmetrical reconstructions of the relationships between the modernity of the West and the others. 10Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1993, p. 1.

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In non-Western contexts, where modernity is not an outcome of indigenous cultural dynamics, Western history and thought appear as standard bearers, as imprints on their history-making. Where modernity is weak, fragmented, modernism becomes a fetish. One can depict the repercussions of this dependence at the level of the discursive constructs and praxis of social and political actors. The mirror-effect of the West is an intrinsic part of the social realities and cultural fantasies of non-Western histories. Aspiration for modernity is a common feature of non-Western countries. The study of the ways in which the Western modernity is reconstructed in different contexts and in time, of how some of its features are selected, accentuated and others neglected, will give a hint towards understanding the asymmetrical nature of non-Western modernities. We can advance the thesis that modernity in non-Western contexts can be approached neither in symmetrical terms, nor in terms of deficiency and contrast with the West, but rather in its "extra" character. Extra modernity expresses the modernist aspirations of the non-Western. We can read "extra" both as external to the West and as additional and uncommon. We have the habit of defining non-Western societies as retarded in time and underdeveloped and therefore as incomplete, if not deficient. We can hardly imagine that there can be a surplus, excess of modernity in some domains of social life.11 The fetish of modernity and its conspicuous manifestations is a trait of the non-Western. Similar to the behavior of those converted into a new religion, late-comers to modernity overemphasize and authenticate their belonging to it. Labeling the non-Western modernity as "extra" conveys also the sense of the uncommon as extraordinary, open to surprises, hence worth knowing. Extra modernity reverses the perspective of retarded and lacking modernity. The extra modernity thesis will give an opportunity for awareness and new ways of seeing. The evolutionary concept of historical change and denial of coevalness will argue, for instance in respect to the status of women, the following: if there is sexist discrimination in the West, it can only be worse in less developed countries. From this perspective we cannot infer that discrimination may not be the most appropriate concept defining gender power relations in every context. Neither can we presume that there are different historical trajectories in which women's agency and position are in "advance" compared to their Western counterparts. 11 §erif Mardin has observed for instance a "super Westernization" during the Tanzimat period in Turkey. Serif Mardin, "Super Westernization in the Ottoman Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century", in P. Benedict et al. (eds.), Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives, Brill, Leiden, 1974.

Figure 1, Wolfgang Lepenies

Figure 2, Nilufer Gole

Figure 3, Jack Goody

Figure 4, Wil Arts

Figure 5, Willem J. Witteveen

Figure 6, Harry Peeters

Figure 7, Hans Belting

Figure 8, Melancholia, Albrecht Durer(1514)

Figure 9, Utopia, Thomas More (1629)

Figure 10, Nam June Paik, TV Buddha

Figure 11, Modern China

Figure 12, Map showing Chinese and Portuguese discoveries and navigations in the 15th century, from Science and Civilisation in China, volume 4 part 3, by Joseph Needham. (Cambridge University Press, 1971)

Figure 13, Islamic Modernism (1)

Figure 14, Islamic Modernism (2)

Figure 15, Erasmus, Portrait by Hans Holbein (1523), Musee du Louvre

Figure 18, Montesquieu

Figure 16, Allegory of Good Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Publico, Siena

Figure 17, Allegory of Bad Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Publico, Siena

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The thesis of extra modernity is open to the assumption that in some respects and domains the non-Western countries can be more "advanced" and more "central" in their proximity to the values of modernity. For instance, unlike in the West, which formed its public sphere first as a bourgeois sphere excluding the working classes and women,12 in Muslim contexts of modernity, women were the markers of public space.13 The aim of Kemalist modernism for the public visibility of women and the social mixing of sexes implied a radical change in the definitions of the private/public spheres and in the practice of Islamic morality based on the control of female sexuality and the separation of the sexes. We can further argue that more than the construction of citizenship and human rights, it was the construction of women as public citizens and women's rights which made up the backbone of Turkish modernism. The taking off of the veil, the establishment of compulsory co-education for girls and boys, civil rights for women (such as electoral eligibility and voting), and lastly the abolishment of "Sharia", the Islamic law, and the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code (1926) guaranteed the public visibility and citizenship of women. In other words, women's corporal, social and political visibility define the public sphere. The grammar of Turkish modernization can best be grasped by the equation established between national progress and women's emancipation. In a Muslim context, women's visibility and the social mixing of men and women would endorse the existence of a public sphere. For the Turkish Kemalist Revolution in 1923, the central agents of modernism were women. Every revolution redefines the attributes of an "ideal man", yet the Kemalist revolution celebrates an "ideal woman". Within the emerging Kemalist paradigm, women will be bearers of Westernization, carriers of secularism, actresses in the public realm and will therefore incite a shift of civilization. Women played a very crucial role in the making of modernity in early Republican China as well. As Leo Ou-fan Lee has shown, the emergence of an urban style of life in Shangai since the early 1930s and 1940s is best depicted by a new range of sensibilities (such as fashion, conjugal family, domestic hygiene, physical health, emphasis on children) in the lives of urban women of the middle and upper classes.14 12 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1991. 13 Nilufer Gole, "Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere", in Public Culture, Volume 10, Number 1, Fall 1977, pp. 61-81. 14 Leo Ou-fan Lee, "The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Early Republic China: Some Research Notes on Urban Shanghai", paper presented for The Second International

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The perspective of extra modernity includes not only actors and agencies, but also '1'imaginaire social", that is the concepts which shape social change.15 When the concepts of Western modernity travel into different contexts, they often acquire a different meaning but also a more accentuated life. Nationalism and secularism can be such examples. Secularism, because of its origins in Western historical development, is expected to be an alien principle in other contexts, especially in Muslim ones. Yet in the Turkish case, not only do we observe its penetration into the nation-state building, shaping civil and military elite ideology, but also becoming part of "1'imaginaire social", of civil society and women's associations. In some ways we can speak of the excess of secularism to the extent that it becomes a fetish of modernity overriding from time to time the principle of liberal democracy and justifying authoritarian politics. Indian secularism, quite distinct from the Turkish, also played a central role in the foundational ideology of the Indian State, posited as a guarantee for peaceful cohabitation among different religions. A historical and cultural reading of concepts, a sort of "Begriffsgeschichte" as it has been done by Koselleck16 in the West, will guide us into the collective imagination of nonWestern modernities. 4. Dissonant traditions There is a particular dissonance between tradition and modernity in nonWestern contexts. Contrary to what is insinuated by the common label of traditional societies, these societies can be said to be de-traditionalized. Especially where the authoritarian forms of modernization prevailed, the rupture with the past, with the traditions is even more radical. Turkey and China can be taken as examples of voluntary de-traditionalization. Radical rejection of the past becomes an ideology of both revolutions in the name of "newness".17 Symposium on Cultural Criticism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Cultural Politics of Cosmopolitanism: Critiques of Modernity in the Non-Western Contexts, 4-6 January 1996. 15 Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la societe, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1975. For a discussion of a research agenda of multiple modernities on social imaginary, cf. Charles Taylor and Benjamin Lee, op. cit. 16 Reinhart Kossellek, L'experience de I'histoire, Paris, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1997. 17 For a discussion on cultural modernity in China, focusing on this radical rupture with the past, and "ruthless forgetting", see Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, "Beyond the Cultural Dominant: For a Textual Politics in Modern China", Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, New Series Vol. 19 No. 2, Dec. 1989, pp. 125-163.

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As the past traditions were considered to be obstacles on the road to modernization, traditions were ignored or destroyed. Consequently the impact of modernity didn't have any transformative effect on the traditions. Traditions were not reinterpreted, transformed, carried into modernity as a dynamic resource for change but instead they were rigidified. If they have survived, they survived at the edge of the system, or in juxtaposition with new forms of modernity. There is discontinuity between traditions and modernity in non-Western contexts: they appear as dissonant fragments, with weak or without any correspondence between them. The project of modernity as a radical cultural rupture between tradition and modernity and the silent coexistence between them has an impact on the sense of time. What Ackbar Abbas so well described of Hong Kong can also be said of Istanbul: "a space traversed by different times and speeds, where change has no clear direction ... a weakening of the sense of chronology, of historical sequentiality, so that old and new are easily contemporaneous and continuities and discontinuities can exist side by side ... pre-modern and post-modern join hands without having to acknowledge each other".18 The use of the urban space, architecture, also underscores this dissonance between traditions and modernity. The discontinuity between Turkish coffee houses and the recent trendy "cafes" in Istanbul for instance, exemplifies well the detraditionalization of the public space. Traditional coffee houses still survive in Istanbul here and there, almost invisible to the modern Turkish eye, forgotten within the boundaries of the local community life, enduring modern ephemeral trends, mainly man's space, where playing cards, backgammon, chatting about politics, watching football is a way of socialization. The more recent "cafes" which proliferate like mushrooms in Istanbul in the last two years signify the modern global way of life; that is they are public spaces for the socializing men and women. They drop in to bars in the late afternoon and live-music places in the late evening. There is no continuity whatsoever between the Turkish coffee houses and the "cafes"; neither at the level of language or the generic name (the pronunciation of the latter is in French). Even the famous Turkish coffee risks vanishing with the increasing popularity of espresso and cappuccino. There is almost a feeling of inescapability from "global" modernity at the expense of local habits. The use of the interior spaces follows a very similar pattern. The fragmented coexistence between traditional habits and fetish objects of modernity are juxtaposed almost without speaking to each other in the use of 18

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong, Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 1977. See also "Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City", Public Culture, 1994, No. 6, pp. 448-449.

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interior domestic spaces. The dinner table, with a buffet for instance, is part of a pattern of compulsive consumption even among the most modest social classes, a must for weddings, yet in the life of many, the dining table is still preserved for guests while the family continues to eat on their knees around the traditional round copper-tray. In a paradoxical way contemporary Islamism is more a product of modernization than the coming back of traditions. Furthermore, the link of new Islamist actors to traditions is very problematic. Actors of Islamism are trained by secular institutions among which engineers, social scientists, intellectuals, journalists constitute the majority. They are the product of urbanization and modern education. In their writings the more abundant references are to Western thinkers such as Foucault, Feyerabend, Illich, Gellner, Baudrillard, rather than to religious Islamic ones. Their radicalism, labeled as "fundamentalism", stems from their return to the past, to the fundamentals of Islam as it is preached in the Koran and was practiced during the time of the Prophet. But such a return does not suggest any continuity with traditions. On the contrary, a reference to fundamental sources is used to criticize the traditional practices and interpretations of Islam. Islamism problematizes the traditional Muslim identity which is considered to be subservient, passive and traditional. It chastises "traditional ways" as living Islam according to a "hearsay", that is as handed from one generation to another, a customary practice. Islamists reject the heritage of traditions in their endeavor to politicize Islam. It is ironic that Islamists thus contribute to the process of de-traditionalization of society. The mode of covering of Islamic women is another indicator of the dissonance between traditions and modernity. Covering oneself is a reminder of the traditional conceptions of gender identities and geographical segregation between the sexes. Yet not only does the new Islamist covering have nothing to do with the traditional way of covering, its fabric, colors, form, but Islamic women also represent a rupture with the traditional, docile, Muslim women of the interior. They are assertive (participating in collective political action), educated and visible in public spaces, in their newly acquired professional and political identities.19 The history of particular relations between tradition and modernity in non-Western contexts has to be pursued because it continues to surprise us. The moment we think that the modernist project of de-traditionalization comes further towards its end and globalism takes over local life-styles, a newfound interest for traditions, local aesthetics, past memory appear 19

Nilufer Gole, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1996.

GLOBAL EXPECTATIONS,LOCAL EXPERIENCESS t disguise). It is not the coming back of traditions, neither a return to the past, but a paradoxical search for harmony between subjectivity and modernity. To conclude one can say that the project of multiple modernities, or non-Western modernities is a search for a positive answer to the tensions between identity, difference and the converging forces of modernity. Can there be a creative tension between the affirmation of specificity and the general principles of modernity, without one annihilating the other? It is a project which tries to grasp the dialectical juxtapositions between modern temporality and the quest for ever-the-same. It is therefore a project which tries to excavate in the apparently distorted, pathological manifestations of social imagery, combinations of identity and modernity (such as nationalism, fundamentalism) and to decipher in cacophonic expressions (fields) notes of social innovation. Last but not least, one cannot envisage studying creative adaptations, reworkings of modernity without the presence of intellectuals who will address the normative issues in a structured communication, and engage a dialogical relation across the cultural and national boundaries.

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The Visual Arts Today Experiences and Expectations HANS BELTING 1. Experience and Expectation in the Global Age Our impatience to reach the end of the millennium is counterbalanced by our fear of losing direction in the recordable time construction which we call history. The term 'end', in this connection, is used as a tool for navigation, as it implies a safe experience of what is ending, and as it also makes a new beginning the focus of expectation. Such time constructions always satisfy our needs to live and act within a firm framework. They may also be the heritage of past traditions such as the history of salvation and the secular history of progress. A time beyond expectation however would threaten us as a symbol of death which we hoped to have overcome by that secular transcendance which we emphatically call 'future'. However, as we approach the turn of the century this time, we secretly doubt the values of our time construction. Given this uncertainty, we look out for icons of identity which were always expected to tell us who we are and where we stand. Such an icon, like 'History' or formerly the 'Art', has emerged as a symbol of progress and as the powerful self-expression of a given era. Unconsciously or consciously, religion's earlier promises to provide an all embracing sense were transferred to art. But our faith in art's capacity as an icon of identity has since been shattered. We therefore tend to speak easily of the end of art, as we have done in a repeated exercise. Whenever a new experience contradicted art's meaning in our culture, it also contradicted our expectation of what art should be and how it should behave. Expectation usually results from experience. Even the definition of art does not escape this pattern, as any definition protects our experience and guides our expectation. Art today, however, escapes any safe definition except an economic one. It loses its ties with the traditional museum and also its stance within an overall history of art. It finally spreads across the border of our culture and is reproduced in other parts of the world where identity is the concern of others. I will therefore explore some of the new activities of art which as yet resist our pattern of experience and expectation. The question is what we can expect when art no longer confirms our much trained experience. In this respect, art's relation to technology will offer us the first occasion to explore

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the issue. Technology and art were ever since the rise of modernity competing areas of discovery and progress. Today, technology seems to have won the traditional competition and even adopts the undisputed position an of icon of global identity. Technology also invented playgrounds for virtual reality, whose fascination makes us question art's age old claims of representing the realm of the imaginary. In my opinion, however, art still has a chance against technology when it redefines its territories and even its own definition. I maintain that we need art in order to resist the total surrender to a world wide reign of technological media. Already Marshall MacLuhan, the prophet of our media age, selected the artist as the protagonist of a creative response to technological reality. In order to justify my case, I have to speak of art as an attitude rather than of an action, and as within technology — not against technology — finally as the last expression of personal freedom in face of the closing horizon of technological globalisation. In order to recover the exercise of personal freedom, art has to give up the symbolic representation of history which also implied the avant-garde anticipation of the collective future. The 'end of art' of which Hegel spoke for the first time, in fact allows for the redefinition of art's scope. Utopia no longer remains one of art's claims but instead has turned into the privilege of technology. The latter not only conquered the world as a cybern space of instant information and communication but also started to invent an artificial world and a perfected body which is meant to be protected from death. Against this development, art restores our means of self expression and even reminds us of ourselves who are not welcome as individuals in this new glittering scenario. Artists today defend the inherited realm of our personal imagination and even create intimate private spaces which contradict the worldwide predominance and publicity of the technological media (this also implies the use of the Internet). The traditional licence of art's freedom allows for protected areas of private creativity and offers a new type of self experience which is slow (compared with the speed of image circulation) and not controlled by a general cliche. There are new types of art production where we are meeting a private voice (the artist) which restores a voice to ourselves as well. We are there given the opportunity of rediscovering the spell of uncertainty which unmasks the ideology of information. N. J. Paik even speaks of the necessity for art to give technology a human face. 2. Art as Anti-Environment This change of role implies art's choice of a subversive and playful attitude which contradicts the past authority of a solemn expert art with a professional profile. The professional always creates distance while the experimenter

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removes distance. Whereas art in high modernism wanted to be admired, art today invites mental interaction and critical response. There can no longer be talk of an 'art religion'. Instead, art, however restricted or distorted in its aims by the economic power of the art market, lends itself to a critical view of our reality which is justified by the artist's freedom. We must however accept that the new artistic activities often look poor, uncertain and even unlike anything we expected art to look like. We must accept that speech and movement, textual and visual expression, interact so as to destroy the visual art's traditional profile, as it used to be embodied in the exhibited work which was distinguished by a frame and a prize. To speak of art nowadays means to describe everything which represents the diminishing territory of culture in terms of Dutch, European or Western, or minority culture seen against the undefined space of a global world. I would like to go one step further. Art is either turning into something obsolete, into a mere memory of what it has been in other times, or is changing face and exchanging its realm of activities. This view may sound Utopian to someone who is used to seeing art in its firm institutional framework. It is, indeed, a strange thought to expect from art an uninstitutional behaviour despite its public, political and economic ties, not to speak of sponsored art. Nevertheless, it is this liberation from its institutional ties which happens in some of its most developed areas. Examples are close at hand. There is first the Non-Western art scene which does not have and does not want to have such institutional traditions and which even lacks our distinction of the Visual against the Performing Arts, not to speak of the distinction between High and Low Culture. There is, second, the shift from the solid, heavy museum pieces created for permanent exhibition, on the one hand, to the immaterial and temporal profile of multimedia production on the other hand — a shift from the cult of objects to the cult of events. There is, third, the dawn of a linear art history which assigns the single art work a predetermined position in a visible evolution which we have admired as art's mirror of Hegelian History. The universalism of the enlightenment age which promoted human rights no less than the ideal of an art representing all of humanity, has lost its past authority against an uncentered and unofficial diversity of art production which as yet defies any safe profile (and is even not accepted as art by the majority among us). In such terms, the end only comes in sight as the end of a master discourse which for a long time has directed our experience of art. Our usual expectation therefore needs a new experience to rediscover the significance of art in our time. In the age of global media, art is becoming as much a local as a critical answer to globalism and to technological conformism or submission.

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The new realm of art which I am describing here was once defined by M. McLuhan as anti-environment. Such an anti-environment, he says, enables us 'to perceive the environment' created by the society and by new technologies. In archaic times, art's situation was different. As the Balinese say: 'We have no art: we do everything as well as possible.' In highly developed societies, 'one of the peculiarities of art is to serve as an anti-environment, a probe that makes the environment visible.' The most interesting reference, in this issue, is McLuhan's remark that the antienvironment reappears 'in the age-old clash between professionalism and amateurism', as the latter acts against 'the merging of the individual in the mass' and creates what he calls 'critical awareness'. It is this capacity which forced the general audience either to dismiss art as marginal or to hate it as destructive. In modernism, art has lost the battle with life which was intended to be guided by an avant-garde. Today, art serves as a critical mirror which faces the majority with the offense of art's unfamiliar and even impolite freedom. The disintegration of art as an institution confirms the disintegration of the political body which, in the guise of the Nation, used to be art's public owner. The Museum, as the art institution par excellence, reveals this structural change most clearly. The museums created in the 19th century sheltered the nation's art treasures and represented national culture as a public authority, via high art as a moral authority. In the 20th century, museums turned into temples of modernism which blotted out national identity. Modernism was synonymous with a new international culture which defeated the old national ideologies, as we saw in the battle over degenerate art, a battle for protecting national German art. Today, such old issues no longer represent the ideas ruling the exhibition politics of our museums. Instead, the museum offers small dark environments, space units separated from the general museum rooms and reserved for a kind of private self awareness, or else encourages group experience by thematic exhibitions which address the minorities. The museums, instead of buying undisputed art works which already have found their place in art history, invites artists to create so-called 'site specific works' which are sponsored by the museums themselves and turn the latter into theaters of art events destined to promote discussion about the critical values of our society. The event replaces the spectacle of memory. The museum which once was both archive and treasury, now turns into an arena that attracts some of the public debates which used to be born in theaters. Public discussions which choose museum spaces indicate the museum's new attractivity as a public space open to everyone and which, paradoxically, as a site is more real and accessible than most of the public media which appear on your favorite TV channel.

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3. A Transcultural View [60]

In this connection, the rise of Art Biennials all over the world indicates a new development which relates to my topic. Such Biennials, on the one hand, may be classified as competing art fairs which are organized for the extension of the Western art market as well as for the creation of a new art audience which is expected to purchase art in other parts of the world. On the other hand, such events offer arenas for a public debate which uses the liberty of comments on whatever is exhibited for addressing the controversial issues of a local society. Such was the case with the Second Biennial of South Africa in Johannesburg which was curated by Okwui Enwezor, a born Nigerian who lives in New York. The artists shown at this occasion were by no means all born in Africa but came from all parts of the world, predominantly from the so-called third world. Diaspora was the underlying theme of many works — and thus an answer both to national cultures and to Western modernism. Diaspora, 'at the endpoint of modernity', was a keyword for constructing personal identity. Another main current 'was the image of home', displayed as the interiors of people's homes, principally shacks which were rebuilt in the exhibition halls or shown in photographs. Such choices are telling. No less interesting were the public debates organized in connection with the art exhibition. There, the question of identity provoked endless discussions without the aim of being finally resolved. 'Western cultural imperialism', it was said, 'is replaced by an African international trans-modernism' whatever this may mean. The interesting fact however was the choice of art, and the place of an art fair, to address the most urgent and vexing questions raised within a cultural elite which joined forces, it was hoped, within a global minority. But such events, in the future, may no longer be restricted to other parts of the world. You may have noticed that Enwezor, the curator of the Johannesburg fair, has recently been nominated curator of the next Documenta show at Kassel which traditionally is the most ambitious show of contemporary art in Europe, certainly in Germany. This surprising choice allows for different interpretations. It either indicates a loss of self confidence (meaning that only the sensational saves the continuity of the Kassel show), or else it reveals a change of mind in view of modernism as represented by Western art. In both cases, the transformation of the arts themselves spreads to the transformation of art's experience and meaning for a general audience. The Royal Tropical Institute of the Netherlands sponsored in 1992 a symposium after a now famous exhibition of the problems of exhibition which arise as soon as modern art of non-Western origin is being exhibited. The latter belongs traditionally neither to the Anthropological museum nor

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to the Art Museum, these being divided by fundamentally different ways of displaying their objects (information on cultural practice against introduction to a work of art). Such problems would have been gone unnoticed as recently as twenty years ago. Problems of another kind, which cannot be dismissed like those in marginal and exotic areas, also arise in contemporary Western art which forces the discussion into new directions, much as art itself opens up and crosses its former frontiers. The conclusion is that art can no longer only be the concern of the art experts but should also attract the attention of a more general discussion. 4.

Art after Philosophy

In this connection, I would like to remind you of a discussion in the 1960s which was centered arround the battle cry 'Art after philosophy'. The phrase, which reversed Hegel's famous dictum, came from the Hungarian born artist Joseph Kosuth who headed the then fashionable movement of Conceptual Art. 'In this period of man', he wrote in a famous essay of 1968, 'after philosophy and religion, art may possibly be one endeavor that fulfills what another age may have called man's spiritual needs.' A great majority of contemporary philosophers, he continued, 'are really little more than historians of philosophy, librarians of the truth, so to speak The 20th century brought in a time which could be called the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.' In order to make his case, Kosuth insisted on the separation between aesthetics and art. The latter, he said, is now asked to make an analytic proposition rather than to work for the art market. The conceptual artists, at that time, were still concerned with the definition of art and therefore questioned the nature of art, as they found it in art's tradition. Today, art is no longer confined to such self inspection but addresses issues of general concern for which art is just a chosen medium and not an end in itself. The unsaid and the unsayable are introduced in the visual and its playful or hermetic riddles. The change of authority which Kosuth wanted to announce was contradicted by philosophy itself as it invaded art's territory when my friend Arthur Danto, in the same period, became the spokesman of a new type of art criticism. Beginning with his essay 'The transformation of the commonplace', he questioned art's continuing history as an autonomous field of human self expression and proposed to call art a new type of practical philosophy which therefore needs the philosopher to comment on it even more than the artist to do it. However you turn the case and whether you apply Kosuth's or Danto's view, this discussion confirms my argument that art changes in a most fundamental way. I don't share Danto's view that the 'end of art' has come, nor

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Kosuth's view that 'the end of philosophy' has happened. It seems however evident that both philosophy and art, while they come closest in their mutual history, escape the narrow definitions in which they were imprisoned in their respective traditions. It goes without saying that Academic Philosophy has lost as much authority as the traditional modernist art of the art market. As our society needs new answers for its basic questions, it needs new ways of asking the questions. The Academic Scene, much as the Art Scene, lose their undisputed and privileged self sufficiency. Western philosophy and Western art, whose traditional frontiers no longer can be defended against outside demands, are faced with a crisis which may lead to their renewal. Hegel's 'pale of history' protected a privileged vantage point facing the rest of the world. It once marked a borderline beyond which history in Hegel's terms did not happen and could not happen. The 'pale of history' can no longer be identified in geographical terms but still continues to exist in Western mentality. We describe as 'hybrid' what in African or other contemporary art cannot be classified by Western notions and is therefore rejected as an art phenomenon altogether. Similary, the notion of an 'end of art' is a Western definition embedded in a Hegelian system of history which makes no sense in areas where art history, as we understand it, has never happened. The Western art market, no less than the Western institutions of art museum and art exhibition, is the last cry of a tradition of art which also made us distinguish High and Low Culture. The authority of the singular masterpiece of art belonged to the heritage of High Art, while the private or the political became progressively the topic of a visual language connected with the images of Mass Culture. In similar terms, art as an acclaimed symbol of cultural identity no longer works in the expected sense. Transcultural experiments more adequately represent our experience of the present world. They were inaugurated more than 25 years ago by Nam June Paik whose 'TV Buddha' will be chosen as a test case. This famous construction invites us to join a Buddha who no longer (or for ever) watches the TV with the expectation of seeing nothing or ever the same, i.e. himself. 5.

Paik's Visual Philosophy: 'TV-Buddha'

The chance to speak of Paik frees me from the burden of further explanations and offers me the playful opportunity to bring my argument to a close. Paik has created one of the most beautiful riddles in contemporary art. The work is contemplation in essence. It is truly Buddhist in spirit, not because it represents a Buddha but because it embodies a metaphor of Buddhist thinking. Paik's construction would easily qualify as a far Eastern temple image despite its use of new technologies and despite the fact that it has

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become a museum piece after its acquisition by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Korean born artist made it for a small exhibition which he showed in 1974 in New York. It consists of two main pieces, one of a wooden statue of an old Japanese Buddha which the artist had acquired with private money from his family, and one of a Japanese TV equipment which was produced at about the same time and which alluded to an astronaut's helmet. A video camera is connected with the TV screen on which it relentlessly reproduces shots of the Buddha statue. The closed circuit system is not just a tool of technology but carries a symbolic message. It connects the Buddha statue, the born image of immobility, with the TV, the opposite symbol whose speed however is collapsing, as the screen produces ever the same image, twenty five times a second. As a result, the TV medium suspends its own meaning and no longer serves our expectations but deceives our experience. It duplicates the spectator, i.e. ourselves, who ever so often expect to see what is never seen when we sit in front of the TV. What indeed are we meant to see when we look at Paik's construction? Its visible structure is as simple as its semantic complexity inexhaustible. The wooden image immediately becomes immaterial on the illuminated screen (maybe an ironic allusion to Buddha's enlightenment) where it is being reflected as a video image. Two culturally divided media, the old and unchangeable medium of art, embodied in a wooden statue, and the new electronic medium of technology, symbolized by the TV monitor, both share one and the same image in whatever transformation. The Buddha image, which traditionally was considered to sum up every possible image of the world and yet to transcend any mere surface appearance, is in this case migrating into the TV medium which we worship as the source of today's global imagery. The difference between the one and the other does not get lost during this procedure. The old wooden figure still represents a world of bodies and beautiful objects enshrined in holy places, i.e. a local culture, while the TV screen stands for immaterial image traffic across space and thus for our telematic culture. Nevertheless, the screen's endless repertory of flat and fleeting images in Paik's work is reduced to the same result, i.e. to the image incorporated in the old statue. The potentialities of the one and of the other medium ultimately coincide. The Buddha image cancels the TV program's promises when it enters the mirror of new technology. This philosophical view teaches us that technology only provides a new mirror without generating an entirely new world. After Paik finished this construction he created an almost endless series of similar works which vary and alter the original idea, as if he wanted to protect his own invention from becoming a dead memory in the guise of a dated work with a fixed place in art history. He even introduced a new

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spectator in Buddha's place in front of the TV. This time, it was Rodin's famous sculpture of the so-called Thinker', who in Rodin's view was meant to provide a veiled self-portrait of a modern Western artist. The Thinker', who rightly may be called a Western counterpart of the Buddha, generates his own images as works whereas the Buddha incorporates a total image of the world, as Buddhism understood it. The creation of a work of art, in the Western sense, is something other than the cosmic meditation which remains aloof from individual achievements. Buddha images anyway were copies of old archetypes and thus contradicted Western art's concern for events of novelties. Paik invited his audience to the deliberate comparison of the one with the other image when he exhibited both of them in the 'Kunstverein' at Cologne in 1976. We see him in a photograph posing in the middle of the two constructions. The Buddha constructions, in this view, is lined up with the Rodin constructions in such a way as to guide our eye from the one to the other. The artist not only keeps the center stage but suggests in an attitude of uncertainty where to belong and what to prefer. At the back, Paik exhibited an additional double screen which repeats the two Video images and, as it were, reflects their reflections again. In another photograph, the artist reappears between the two additional screens, as if to shift his attention between the two cultures which he embodies in his biography. The one culture is represented by the Buddha image, the other by the Rodin image. Technology is introduced as a double mirror of both. The two cultures also include religion against art as their creed. Technology may be called a third culture but a culture of a very different kind. Globality serves more as a traffic system which still needs places of arrival or places of identity. The art critics which Paik attracted to his work dismissed the possibility that the Buddha construction may reflect Buddhist thought. A modern artist, as they understand him, cannot in their eyes be rooted in Buddhism, which they simplify when they think of it simply as a religion. It was therefore a telling gesture when Paik introduced his collected writings with a quotation from a famous Japanese representative of Zen, Dogen Zenji who lived and wrote in the 13th century and whose monastery, Eihei-ji, Paik visited in order to produce a video. The quotation addresses the very situation which we find in Paik's TV Buddha — the situation of Buddha and the mirror. The Ancient Mirror and the Buddhas', the old text says, 'are one and the same; outside the mirror there are no Buddhas' and vice versa. The one who sees and the one who is seen, the reflecting one and the reflected are one and the same.' These remarks come from chapter 19 which is entitled 'Kokyo', i.e. the 'Ancient Mirror' which is synonymous with the world as such.

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To be sure the 'Ancient Mirror' explains in the old writings the practice of meditation which they consider an end in itself and not as a help to reaching Enlightenment. Since everybody owns the Buddha nature from birth, to search for it, they say, is nothing but to look into the mirror and there to discover the reflection of oneself. The Zen training, they conclude, amounts to the polishing of one's personal mirror. Unlike in the old writings, Paik's view is not commented upon in his own texts but instead veiled in the 'obscurity and complexity' (which Peter Sellars has called the aim of art in our time in his 1998 Amsterdam address on the occasion of receiving the Erasmus prize) of a visual metaphor which at the same time works as a paradox. We are not encouraged to think that Buddha (who in this case is himself an image) is looking at the TV at all. Would he do it, then he would only see himself. Would he not do so, then he would just be himself. Between the one and the other there is no big choice. The 'Ancient Mirror', as the old texts say, 'is functioning in all things and in all the changing phenomena'. Imagination and the world of appearances collapse into one. 'Mind and eye are mutually each other.' Whatever appears in the world, is being reflected in our mind. 'Outside the mirror there is neither appearing nor reflecting.' Again I use quotations from the ancient writings, but as they invite a thorough revision, as soon as they are referred to art, they lead us to Paik's own position vis-a-vis a technological society. To practice art, he could have said, is to polish one's own mirror. The mirror anyway is the oldest medium of images which Paik reintroduced in the realm of art's repertory: images in the double sense of visual metaphors and mental images, images which I usually call the guests or the nomads in a world of ever changing media. But there is another side to it which is addressed by Paik's work. The Buddha statue and the TV screen, in our eyes, are totally divided by their respective notion of time: the one is time remembered, the other is time happening. It therefore is telling that the next chapter in Dogen Zenji's writings speaks of 'Being' and Time' as synonymous and thus sharply contradicts our ordinary time experience. 'Time', we read, 'is existence or being' and vice versa. The shape of a Buddha statue is time.' If this is true, then we must reconsider our notion of time. The old text rejects 'any difference between your mind and time.... We, ourselves, are time.' We therefore should not separate time from us and feel ourselves as victims of fleeting time. 'Being is time and therefore it is my own true time.' It may now become evident why Paik equates the sleeping time of the Buddha with the flying time of the TV imagery: their mutual relation to us is about the same. 'Do not think', we read in the Zen text, 'that being is a stable concept.' Time is passing, but there is also 'an aspect which is not passing. To realize this is

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to comprehend being'. In Paik's terms, both the wooden and the electronic image reflect being. Paik once published a beautiful text which deals with the editing of video tapes by artists who either compress or extend the 'input-time' in the time-structure of their finished video (which Paik calls 'output-time'). He compares this time practice with the activity of our brains and especially in our dreams ('Input-Time and Output-Time', 1976). In the case of the Buddha construction, input and output, time on the video screen fall into one another so as no longer to be distinguishable, while in the case of the statue, the old input time, which the sculptor applied when working at the statue, extends into such an age of old output time, the time of its being and visibility, that we no longer perceive any time quality at all except that of memory. Paik, irrespective of the flood of rapid images (which he sometimes parodies himself), insists on the existence of slow, i.e. boring art as a neutral quality which is not determinative of a work's artfulness. (He even distinguishes good and boring art from bad and boring art.) 'Boredom', he says, 'is rather a sign of aristocracy in Asia.' Paik has a voice which we had never heard before in contemporary art. He is often called the father of video art or the founder of technological art. But he also is a philosopher who does not write but speaks in visual manifestations. He introduces another mentality which in turn is rooted in another culture, but he does so as an artist who lives in the West and there reinterprets the notion of art in the contemporary society. He not only changes our experience but also our expectation of art's contribution to an extended discourse about the present world, a discourse which crosses cultural boundaries. In the case of the TV Buddha', he actually reintroduces an old Eastern work of art, a work possibly more rooted in religion than in art, into a new Western context which at the same time connects the context of technology with the new and unexpected context of visual philosophy.

Old Virtues and Vices as Icons for a New Morality HARRY PEETERS The Image as a Mirror of Virtue In his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells of a man whose outward appearance gives no sign of his licentious life, but whose debauchery is registered by the youthful portrait that stands hidden in the attic. Day by day, the painting becomes more hideous. The moment that Dorian Gray goes up to rid himself of this witness to his amoral life, the painting regains its youthful splendour while the man himself shrivels into a monstrous, corrupted figure. When I first read the book some fifty years ago — it is an old book — it made an enormous impression on me. Imagine it happening to you: all your vices and sins mirrored and then, all at once, without warning, there they are, revealed on your face. The picture came to haunt me. For years I searched for that self-image, though of course I never came across it; which is not so strange, since I never again lived in a house with an attic. But meanwhile, although it was nowhere to be found, the invisible painting was doing its instructive work. The threat of disclosure restrained me from all kinds of wicked deeds, and those temptations and lapses that I was regrettably unable to avoid I had to try to expunge by unburdening myself, first in the confessional and later in therapy. I have to bear in mind, however, that this has not been entirely successful; today or tomorrow I could still be confronted with the real life portrait. I was forced to think about that visual moral lesson again recently when I read in the paper that an American admiral had shot himself with his service revolver rather than face the exposure that he had improperly worn a wartime decoration. For a civilian, something like that is incomprehensible. Who nowadays shoots himself in the head for a simple strip of ribbon on his chest? No civilian, certainly, but a real military man would. As an expert in the system of decoration expressed it: "soldiers wear their career history on their chest". Paintings in the attic and decorations on the chest ensure that people are kept to the straight and narrow path and see that there is no cheating. The moral points toward a visual culture, but narrative also has its part to play.

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No Moral Without a Story [68]

It begins at the beginning. The origin of good and evil is so dimly obscure that only stories can be told about it. Everywhere and in all cultures, people have in their myths told stories about the beginning of good and evil. There are myths in which that beginning coincides with chaos which is subsequently superseded by an act of creation; salvation and creation here are identical. There are also myths, the Judaic-Christian myths, for example, in which the origin of good and evil manifests itself as a fall in an already complete and perfect creation. In yet other myths, man is led into temptation by the gods, or the soul has come from elsewhere and lost its way among earthly things. In all these mythological representations, men have constructed stories because for them the origin of good and evil defied explanation.1 The story still does service. The distance between civility and barbarism is often so small and at the same time the opposition between good and evil so great that only a story can portray these. Thinking About Morality Insight into morality is not naturally given to us. Image and narrative are not enough, ideas are needed for structure and signification. For more than two thousand years, western philosophers have tried to articulate a theoretical and systematic framework for morality, for values and norms, principles and rules by which men could govern their behaviour, judge the behaviour of others and where possible or necessary influence that behaviour. In this philosophical beginning, known as moral philosophy or ethics, profound questions have been posed over the course of centuries concerning how people should live and act. In judging behaviour should we attend to the consequences of that behaviour or should obligations be our starting point? Can these two ways of approach, the consequentialist and the deontological, be reconciled in an ethic such that the consequences are always interpreted in terms of obligations? Are moral arguments based on intuition, on feeling or on reason? Is morality bound to time and place or is it independent of historical contingency? Is morality subjective or objective, changeable or fixed, particular or universal? Although the philosophers have given answers to all these questions, the answers have often been very different ones; besides which, they must have found that it was not easy to translate these answers into everyday living. Particularly in times of moral reorientation and revision, the distance between theory and practice, between the general and 1

Paul Ricoeur, La Symbolique du Mal, Paul Aubier, Paris, 1960.

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the particular rapidly widens. Indeed, the gulf soon becomes too wide for ethics to be able to serve as a guideline for action in concrete situations. Something like this happened in the sixties in our own century when ethics, still known then as moral philosophy, suddenly found itself running out of wind. The metaphysical and supernatural foundation of morality and the dogmatic theology tied to it, for example in catholic circles, ran aground on wholesale moral resistance. There was clearly a need for a more concrete ethics. When this arrived, it was in the form of practical or applied ethics, which was able to take human failings into account and cast a rather different light on received moral attitudes, illuminating them in relation to actual situations. We have this shift to thank for a powerful medical ethics, which has to take on such — by no means minor — moral problems as experimentation with embryos, prenatal diagnostics, genetic technology, in vitro fertilization, abortion and euthanasia. Gradually, every sector of society is having to develop and formulate its own ethics. It is hardly surprising, then, with this multiplicity of ethics and the differences in quality and level of discourse, that coherence is rather lacking and that transparency has not been a strong point. There have also arisen virgin territories where, as it is phrased, no "specific moral code of behaviour' has yet been developed. It can thus happen in this moral no-man's land that carte blanche is given where an old-fashioned general ethics based on obligations or consequences would have been much better advised. Is Virtue a Thing of the Past? Since time immemorial, virtues have been deployed to keep men on the straight and narrow path. From classical antiquity they served, together with vices as their deterrent counterparts, as the guardians of morality, a task for which they were extremely well suited. They appealed to the fear of punishment, the hope of reward and to communal expectations. They located people on the ladder of a morality play. They ensured that the accent lay on the moral content of one's own and others' behaviour and set guidelines for that behaviour. They met the need for meaning and significance; they helped to understand the world and to get a grip on it. And in addition to this functional aspect they lent themselves pre-eminently to image and narrative. The insistent question then is why today are not virtues given centre stage to give content to the modern debate on morality. More than a hundred generations in western history have developed, by means of the doctrine of virtues, lessons for living that have been tested with more rigor than modern sciences and ideologies could achieve. The values and norms developed and handed down by these generations through a process of selection, have

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clearly demonstrated their survival value. But this evolutionary 'respect for tradition' argument would seem to have lost its value in our own time; the age-old representations of good and evil are no longer self-evident. Virtues no longer count; not even the word 'virtue'. 'Das Wort Tugend ist so miszliebig geworden, dass wir uns eines Lachelns kaum erwehren konnen" observed Max Scheler as long as eighty years ago.2 There is nothing wrong with the German word Tugend, derived from the Greek tuchentei, to take courage. The English virtue (and the French vertu), which can also appeal to a powerful and virile etymological past, have also fallen into discredit. The old shine is gone. Virtue is equated with a bourgeois mentality, with stuffiness, decency, passivity, pious Christianity — identifications which these days, to say the least, do not instantly compel. Attempts at rehabilitation, including such celebrated essays as those by Scheler, Guardini and Bollnow, have found themselves in a cul-de-sac. Admittedly, the lyrical, phenomenological language they used did not enhance the intelligibility of their message. A History of Ideas and Practices The history of the ideas of virtue and vice is one of an unbroken chain passed from person to person and from group to group. The erudite work of scribes and scholars has laid bare the outlines of this age-old network of connections in the most thorough Dictionnaires, Handworterbucher, Lexicons, encyclopedias, monographs and articles. The vices are unmistakably of classical and worldly origin. They acquire their first recognizable form with Plato (427-347 B.C.) who linked the virtues Wisdom, Courage and Temperance as qualities and guardians with the thinking, striving and desiring aspects of the human soul. At the same time, and in the same order they also reflect the hierarchy of the three orders, or estates: the Philosophers, the Warriors and the Manual Workers. The fourth virtue, Justice, ensures their coherence and harmony in personal and political life. The next main link is stoicism (from c. 300 B.C.), which aimed to give individuals an inner security based on the conviction that everything which happens is rational. The virtues, operating under the direction of rationality, thus give mind and spirit something to hold on to. The line meanwhile runs through to Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.) and Macrobius (c. 400 A.D.), Roman authors who have been a source of reference and citation right up to the present day. 2

Max Scheler, Von Umsturz der Werte, Francke, Bern, 1955, p. 15-17.

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The virtues are thus by no means of biblical origin as is often thought. The Bible as we know it rests on a selection or 'canon' that dates mainly from the second century. The first Christians in the period 50-150 A.D. were anticipating the end of time. With such a tense expectation of the last days a man did not construct a morality, or build for a 'better world'. Initially, there was therefore absolutely no considered ethical system for improving the world. Only when it became clear that these last days were reluctant to appear were men able to realize the importance of Greco-Roman moral thought for the organization of daily life. The Christian moralists at once insisted that the virtues could not remain on the natural plane, but must lead to God, the highest good. The virtues also derive from God, not from man. They presuppose faith, hope and humility and are as nothing without the love that inspires and guides them. There thus came into being a new ranking with the four cardinal virtues Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude under the direction of Humility, and the three Theological Virtues Faith, Hope and Charity — above all through the classification of Ambrosius (c. 334-397), who for the first time spoke of the four cardinal virtues (cardo = hinge), and Gregory the Great (c. 540-604). Aristotle's (385-322 B.C.) doctrine of virtue, the other classical source of ethics, penetrated the western world only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. His ideas concerning what virtue actually is and how it is related to human activities in particular found a resonance first in the encompassing wok of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1276 B.C.), and subsequently in many works on ethics written both within and outside the scholastic tradition. All men, according to Aristotle, strive for happiness (eudaimonid) and that happiness can be achieved by cultivating the virtues. Neither virtue nor vice is a natural characteristic of man. They are both the fruits of practise and habit. Men learn virtue by putting them into practise. They must learn to follow the 'golden mean', keeping a straight middle course between two mistaken extremes. This disposition and attitude he called a virtue. Aristotle's bequest was extended by Thomas into a system where natural and supernatural, reason and the divine nature all have their place. This balance was disturbed after the middle ages, outside the catholic and protestant churches at least, by a revival of the classical positions in ethics. But not for long — the Enlightenment reduced virtue to one of the servants of the rational and bourgeois ideology, while the subsequent Romantic reaction reduced virtue to dullness, respectability and bourgeois small-mindedness. No sooner had the virtues and their teaching been freed from an all too ardent embrace by Christendom than, through short-sightedness and ressentiment, they had to endure a mauling at the hands of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement. Their fate in the twentieth century was no better,

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what with the confusion of norm with fact and the denial of the actuality of morality in the so-called empirical behavioral sciences. The vices have fared rather better in their own struggle for existence. Under the wings of psychiatry and psychology they live on quietly in the form of clinical syndromes and behavioral disturbances. This is a remarkable paradox. While in our secularized world the 'pagan' virtues are no longer considered worthy of respect, the Christian seven deadly sins get all the care and attention. The desert monks of Egypt and their representative Evragius back in the fourth century did their work thoroughly. Their list of the vices survives in the psychiatric handbooks and in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM). Intemperance has become an impulse neurosis, Pride or Vanity are narcissistic disorders, Envy is penis envy and anal fixation, Wrath and Anger are anti-social personality disorders, Idleness or Sloth a fixation in or regression to the oral phase. Avarice and Lewdness can no longer be accommodated. They are so general and widespread that the 'hidden priest' in psychiatry and psychology no longer sees any mileage in them and lets them pass. Modernity and Its Moral Dilemmas Times are hard, but times are modern. What this Italian saying means is that in our complex society with all its problems we should not surrender to nostalgia and regret but rather, with sober and sometimes cynical realism, we must simply get stuck in. The ailments of modern society are well enough known: the loss of social connection, an unhinged and unrestrained individualism, the primacy of instrumental reason at the cost of substantial values and norms, the blurring of moral horizons, the lost of any reference base. People are today witnesses of what is sometimes called "the dialectic of the Enlightenment", the Enlightenment that has become its own adversary. What was intended as human improvement has all too often turned into the opposite — the disastrous applications and developments of the natural sciences and technologies, of an unbridled free market economy. At the same time, one cannot ignore the huge moral successes of Enlightenment thought with its extension of moral rights and obligations beyond the immediate community, its abolition of the slave trade and the many other liberations and emancipations to its credit. The ambivalence of the Enlightenment's legacy is merely one example of the pluralism in moral values and objectives in our society.3 People in western cultures had long lived in a system of irreconcilable values. In addition to the Christian virtues there were the Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, John Murray, London, 1990.

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classical virtues, beside the public there were private virtues and as well as socialist there were liberal virtues; what were virtues for some were vices for others. This pluralism has been assimilated over a long time into institutions, ranks and classes. The difference of our own time is that this pluralism has lodged in people themselves. Without moral horizons and without ethical authorities we now have to make a choice between incompatible value systems and, consequently, we have ourselves to bear the responsibility. What these new challenges signify, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, is that we are now living the evening of the epoch of morality.4 But are people equipped to face this? Can they, fragmented as they are, assume responsibility for themselves and others? Are they still capable of making moral choices? Rehabilitation of the Doctrine of Virtues A heading like this is not likely to engender must confidence in what is to come. Each word reeks of the past. 'Rehabilitation': Is this the return to society of invalid or outmoded thought? 'Doctrine', 'virtue': is there really place in the modern intellectual landscape for a doctrine of virtues? Maclntyre thinks not. After a brilliant expose of the history of morals, he is of the opinion that their time is past. They had their function in times when social cohesion could be constructed around them, when they were the expression of values and norms shared by large sections of society. They are no longer suitable to the present time with its multiplicity and diversity of moral concepts. Moral outlooks and ways of behaving are distributed over institutions and over the functions and roles that individuals have to fulfil. People are 'temporalized' and fragmented; their lives are split up into episodes, into a series of jobs and a series of relationships. They are cut off from their own past just as society is cut off from its traditions. There is no more narrative unity, no story that can link together the diversity of concepts and practises within a single, embracing moral framework. The era after virtue is already upon us.5 Tradition, however, is not so easily discarded. So long as national stereotypes survive, and as long as differences continue to exist in relation to various behavioral dimensions — e.g. of power differentials and avoidance of insecurity — the vitality of tradition is ensured. Tradition still possesses good instruments to remain active, in the form of social learning, cultural narrative constructions, communities of memory and lieux de memoire. The visual culture, finally, will ensure that the past will more secure in the

5

Z. Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Post Modern Morality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995. A. Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Butterworth, London, 1981.

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future than is perhaps the case at present. We can also count on the 'bag of virtues' remaining available. And where historical reality shows gaps, the historian knows these have to be filled. For the historian, the past remains an incomplete past that has to be constantly retold. The lack of narrative unity is thus all grist to the historian's mill. The doctrine of virtues, with its rich tradition of stories and images heals many fractures. It speaks a history of new moral concepts sedimenting with the old so that both live on together in the selfsame person. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new civic virtues like industry and thrift settled into the old Christian virtues of diligence and temperance, just as, for centuries, the former classical virtues had been incorporated into the Christian. In our own time, personal virtues supported by image and narrative encroach on the public sphere ('the personal is political') and on professional and institutional worlds. Specific behavioral and professional codes are accompanied by the expectation that people, regardless of their status and function, will be accorded individual recognition — not only as a person but a person with a face. The driving force behind these demands and expectations is the need for 'authenticity', a virtue which manifests itself in confidence in oneself and in honesty, openness and integrity vis-a-vis others. It is a virtue which, like other virtues, has its antithesis and its aberrations — narcissistic self-fulfilment, for example — but which has become for modern man a cardinal virtue, because it brings together and unifies what otherwise is scattered in fragments. It refers only in its form to itself but that does not mean, as Charles Taylor argues, that at another level the content must refer to itself. The rights of fellow-men, the demands of nature, the obligations of citizenship, affiliation to a political party, the voice of God can express aspirations and longings that actually exist for themselves.6 A Historical Battle of Images Ten years before the outbreak of the Great Plague of Sienna, the governing body of the city, the Nine, gave Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c. 1295-1348) the task of painting an allegory on the walls of the Assembly Hall, an allegory of Good and Bad Government and its consequences for city and countryside. These murals are some of the most artistic frescoes from the Trecento. They are also unique in that, unlike almost all other paintings of the time, they are an expression of worldly affairs. The frescoes in the Sala dei Nove in 6

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.

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the Palazzo Pubblico serve as a good illustration of the dominant republican outlook. The city should not be governed by any single person, a monarch or even worse a tyrant who, driven by vanity, pride and greed, would plunge city and country into ruin, but by the Ben Commune, which would rise above particular interests and bring peace and well-being to its citizens. In image and in word — in the Latin of the clerics and lawyers and in the vernacular of the ordinary citizen — it was made clear that the state itself should be sovereign: civitas sibi princeps. Everyone could read this ideal in the narrative image. The representation of moral world views already had a 2000 year history by the time Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in his own fashion, gave it form and content in the murals of the Sala dei Nove. Mythological stories of the struggle between Zeus and the Titans and historical stories of the Greeks' and Romans' struggle against the barbarians had been repeatedly portrayed over the centuries. The story always provided the impulse, and so too with the struggle between virtues and vices. Early in the fifth century, Prudentius wrote his Psychomachia, the battle for the soul between virtue and vice, a struggle described in such graphic terms that the visual image could not be ignored. In more then 300 preserved manuscripts from the ninth to the late thirteenth century this struggle is either partly or wholly illustrated. On the basis of the original text the virtues and vices are represented as women who are only to be distinguished from each other by their actions and not by their outward appearance: the vices appear just as attractive as the virtues. The distribution of the image on the surface is clearly based on classical illustration. The march of the virtues in a manuscript from the tenth century thus shows the same design as the march of the Romans on Trajan's Column in Rome. The struggle was pursued in various ways. In the splendid Hortus Deliciarum of the abbess Herrad van Landsberg (late twelfth century) we see how the two sides advance in closed ranks, the virtues led by Humilitas, with Superbia mounted on horseback at the head of the adversary. But the struggle is not in itself always enough; there has to be a victory, the vices have to be vanquished and preferably it is Superbia, who stands at the head of all evil, who must be vanquished. In a miniature from the Speculum Virginum attributed to Konrad von Hirsau (c. 1070-1150), we thus see Superbia impaled by Humilitas who, assisted by the old testament figures of Jael and Judith, stands triumphant on the bodies of her slain enemies. The arches of doorways and windows in gothic churches offered new possibilities for the visual representation of victorious virtue standing above supine vices, as witness countless churches in France and Germany, such as in Aulnay, Argenton-Chateau and Trier. The ladder also provided a new metaphor for the expression of this victory and subordination. Whereas

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in previous forms of image man stood aside while a battle was fought over him, he now enters the picture. The abbess Herrad von Landsberg also gives a magnificent illustration of this battle. In the Ladder of Virtue priests and laymen, assisted by angels, try to ascend while devils shoot arrows at them. It would appear to be a difficult and laborious business; quite a few figures can be seen tumbling below, seduced by the temptations of worldly existence. It was not for nothing that Herrad entered into a nunnery. In the meantime, theologians and philosophers had made the doctrine of virtue so complicated, with various main and subdivisions, differentiations and subtle distinctions, correspondences and differences, relationships, derivations and consequences that metaphors of battles and ladders were no longer adequate to give expression to all this. Just as modern scientists in our own time try to convey their specialist sophistication in diagrams and models, so too the medieval scholars had recourse to forms that could instantly make clear what they had contrived. The tree with its branches and leaves showed everything they wished to show: the genealogy of virtues and vices, their connections and ramifications, major and sub-categories, all could be surveyed in a single representation. After almost 6000 years, the tree had once again become the tree of good and evil. The tree and the battle of the virgins did not survive the middle ages. The moral battle continued unabated in images, however, though the roles of the virgins, angels and devils were now assumed by figures from classical mythology, by more worldly and coarser figures, by emblems, an exemplary ruler or a solid citizen. The pictorial moralizing role of miniatures, frescoes and paintings in our own time is fulfilled by photographs, films and television. Nowadays, it is images of the Holocaust, of My Lai in Vietnam, the shelling of the market in Sarajevo, the massacres in Ruanda that move us to reflect on good and evil. Films like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs or Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs — to name only the classics of violent films — merely underscore in fiction what the news shows us happening in fact. The fact that these faction images tend to overshoot their makers' best intentions, to open viewers' eyes to senseless violence and parodies of aggression, will scarcely surprise anyone. After Ira, or violence, other vices are also a richly represented in film, from Luxuria or lewdness, which comes a good second, to the unfortunately rarer but no less vitally imagined gula or gluttony in the film La Grande Bouffe. The seven deadly sins have recently all been paraded once more before the footlights in the horror film Seven. And what perhaps evades the

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eye of film and television is certainly seized on by video, the advertising industry and the internet. From the Virtual State to a State of Virtue When in earlier ages men imagined the future, they frequently projected some kind of social Utopia. It was a narrative form in which they could uninhibitedly fantasize what a future society should look like. But what is striking here is that one finds among these Utopians so many notorious melancholies who could see absolutely no more hope for their own societies. Without obstruction from anything or anyone, they could construct in their own imaginations a new order beyond a present order become impossible. Contemporary narratives of the future, however, are no longer written by melancholies; it is rather high-spirited youth that cultivates the futuristic genre. Inspired by information and communication technology, ICT to them, they serve up the new society as a virtual reality. They have little enough reason to feel despondent, since their future has already begun. The ICT-developments generate, so they claim, a society in which the old hierarchy gives way to equality and central government to self-government. Public administration will be more like an archipelago than the pyramid known so far. Networks, multi-media techniques, telecommunications and virtual reality will all emphasize the communicative aspects of the provision of information and less the technical-functional aspects. This grassroots technology is also going to create a new ethos. The metaphor of the Internet makes it clear what we have to expect: anarchy, self-regulation, fragmentation and decentralization. All forms of totalitarian normativity will disappear. A hedonistic morality will prevail which will strive for the pleasing and the congenial as the highest good. What this would come down to in political terms is the 'prevention of exclusion, of aggression, of needless conflict, but also the promotion of creativity, autonomy and learning capacities'. If all this is soon to become reality it is high time that the virtues made their appearance on the stage of battle again. Under the leadership of Prudentia and Temperantia, they should be able to tone down some of these excessive expectations and put them into perspective and, above all, they are better equipped than anyone or anything to combat the old vices, for they will most certainly benefit from the new freedoms. They are representations of representations, they are personal, they ramify and are fragmented, they combine and form alliances, they force one into narrative and image-making. In this new culture, nostalgia and a touch of melancholia — not too much, because it is an old vice — might perhaps bring to mind such

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old virtues as humility and magnanimity, virtues which, with the loss of relationship and the diminishing effect of distance, have disappeared over the horizon. And if the new morality really wants to strive for the pleasing, why should we not be led by the love which says, 'Your sins are forgiven, because you have loved so much'. This poetic justice would also immediately put paid to that spectre in the attic.

Pursuing the Spirit of the Laws An Epilogue WILLEM J. WITTEVEEN 1. The Power of Abstract Words In one of his novels, Gyorgy Konrad captures the spirit of the age: We are trapped by abstract words: when I use one of these words another one forces itself upon me. Abstract language leads man to conference rooms and produces a complete lifestyle. Our talking becomes normative and the images of what 'is' are supplanted by the abstractions of what 'is to be done'.1 Abstract words abound in the essays that make up this book. They were produced for a conference. 'Globalization', 'modernity', 'enlightenment' are only some of the abstractions that circulated there, accompanied by their opposites and extensions. Opposing terms comprise 'tradition', 'fundamentalism', 'particularism'. Gole offers a nice set of extensions of the idea of 'modernity': 'multiple modernities', 'alternative modernities', 'local modernity', 'non-western modernity', and even 'extra modernity'. This is definitely a case of one abstract word conjuring up many others. The big question that keeps intruding is whether the abstractions themselves are not so many entrapments, whether they are leading us away from serious contemplation of 'what is' into premature commitments on 'what is to be done'. The authors of the essays that make up this book show no sign, I hasten to add, of having entrapped themselves in this way. Their normative proposals remain anchored in various objects of contemplation, from Hans Belting's interpretation of Nam June Paik's video art to Wolf Lepenies analysis of two psychological intellectual types (the melancholic and the Utopian), from Harry Peeters interest in the narrative power of images, especially the Siennese allegory of Good and Bad Government to Nilufer Gole's grip on the facts of Turkish modernization processes and Jack Goody's historical overview of Chinese technological and scientific progress. These authors have extended their considerations from a domain that was theirs to begin with and this is one reason for their appeal; they have stayed in the conference room long enough to make abstract concepts and ideas come alive through attention for the concrete and the particular. And yet, the question remains. Is 1

G. Konrad, Tuinfeest, Amsterdam, Van Gennep, 1989: 146; my — tentative — translation.

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the power of abstract language perhaps so strong as to survive balancing acts that mix abstract general statements with careful analyses of bounded topics? The abstractions do their work in the background of the discourse. They structure what can meaningfully be communicated. They exclude everything that does not fit their mould. Abstractions produce a tension that is released in the call for action, the proposal for change, the plea for a better world (even a boring one). The normative takes precedence over the empirical. As a result, abstract language is not understood outside the community of participants in the conference rooms. The intellectuals of the global village discuss globalization and modernity and what is urgently to be done but there are no citizens, out there in the world, to hear and heed their calls. In his introductory essay, Wil Arts concludes that all authors in this book argue that 'the West has tended to misunderstand even itself in drawing too sharp a contrast between its own individualism, rationality, universalism, and their collectivism, traditionality, particularism.' He adds that 'modernity must not be described in monolithic terms and the ambiguities inherent in the project must be recognized; there were earlier modernities and there are other modernities.' This is a fair summary. But what it also shows is that some abstractions are more firmly established than others. While the ambiguities are recognized, there is still the assumption of a unifying 'project' of western culture ('the West'). While earlier and different modernities are acknowledged, there is still something called 'modernity' around. These abstract words have power. They make us think and see differently. In this epilogue, I will take this power of organizing our discourse as my starting point. The Enlightenment, source of our modern culture, can only be called a unified project in retrospect, with the power of hindsight. Arts is undoubtedly aware of this and yet his abstract language makes him (and all of us) say otherwise. At the time when the many changes (cultural, social, economical, psychological, political, ethical, legal) started to occur that later merited to be called 'enlightened' there was no coherent campaign, no organized procedure, no rational strategy, no game plan, in short: no unified project. It is instructive to go back to Montesquieu who, as one of the 'founding fathers' (in retrospect, at least), undertook a rather succesful attempt to change the prevailing mode of discourse and so opened up the way to a better and multi-faceted understanding of the changes that were taking place. I call this Montesquieu's perspectivism, It would be similarly misleading to suggest that the changes set in motion during the period of the Enlightenment (after 1650) are all conscious attempts at achieving something called 'modernity'. Arts, summarizing the authors of this book, is right to call our attention to the tensions, oppositions and ambiguities at work during the Enlightenment. These are

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already clearly visible in Montesquieu, as in other Enlightenment thinkers. Montesquieu developed in his mature work a strategy for coping with the desire to understand and rationally improve whole societies and their political systems. His quest for the spirit of the laws remains of great relevance, in a time that tends to underrate differences between cultures in the name of the 'global village' and at the same time expects local differences to provide the impetus for better kinds of modernity. This is Montesquieu's contextualism. 2. Montesquieu's Perspectivism If many people nowadays feel they are living in a world undergoing rapid and unpredictable changes, in which familiar borders open up, and unheard of possibilities for communication and commerce present themselves, promising even greater changes in the future, the experience is not without precedent. When Montesquieu had become a magistrate in Bordeaux, early in his life, the political and social climate in France changed drastically. Following the death of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who had seen himself and his court as the centre of the state, government was weakened, it was suddenly easier to make public one's dissenting views, and at the Parisian salons conversations could take place in a spirit of relaxation and freedom. While many institutions and traditions remained in force (censorship among them), the world became a bigger place in which suddenly minds opened to speculation and wonder. Montesquieu's Persian Letters was published in this climate of social change, in 1721, for safety reasons with a printer in Amsterdam. It was a big success in the Parision salons, providing food for thought and topics for conversation, and it became an example to be emulated. It is a highly unusual book. Persian Letters consists of letters exchanged mainly between two Persian visitors, Uzbek and Rica, who are travelling in France and their friends, wives, eunuchs and servants at home. The letters cover a large number of topics. A French audience is introduced to what we would call 'cultural difference', to the ways of thinking and of living that are particular for an 'exotic' milieu. The alien and barbaric are made interesting, lively, alluring. The familiar social customs of France, on the other hand, look strange when they are seen through Rica's and Uzbek's eyes. The audience is subtly estranged from traditions and institutions that seemed sacrosanct. Incisive criticisms are made through the letters of social practices, especially those of the Church. Gradually it turns out that the life of Uzbek is in turmoil and that while he is away there are all kinds of morally troublesome developments in his Persian harem. Uzbek praises the liberty of the French while suppressing the women of his harem. The exploits of Uzbek form a novel within the novel

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of letters. As Judith Shklar points out, it is not the form of the book that was revolutionary (there were earlier examples) but its content. [82]

The device of a many-sided correspondence (...) made possible the seemingly spontaneous expression of a plurality of opinions and voices, all speaking simultaneously. The characters develop, change, and reveal themselves directly without the author intruding upon their conversation with comments or descriptions. This offers an appearance of verisimilitude.2

This judicious characterization hints at all aspects of perspectivism. 'Manysided correspondence': this is where Montesquieu's perspectivism begins. By including in his book a variety of voices, perspectives, authors, people with their own unique identities, Montesquieu makes the reader shift attention from one point of view to another. 'Plurality of opinions and voices': this is the general condition of the social world such a reader enters, it is the condition that mirrors the real condition of men in the world, which according to Hannah Arendt, is characterized by plurality.3 'Speaking simultaneously': there is no privileged position, no 'view from nowhere'4, no transcendence, just immersion in an ongoing conversation, while life in the real world goes on in the same manner, in bits and pieces, and without definitive conclusions. 'Characters develop, change, and reveal themselves': the wisdom of perspectivism, with its continual shifting between standpoints and persons speaking and showing themselves, is manifested in its openness to the development of character.5 'Without intrusion of the author': while the seeming lack of authorial intrusions is itself artificial, contrived, an effect of autorial intention, this perspectivist strategy invites readers to become their own judges of the events, of the people involved, of the developing plot. 'An appearance of verisimilitude': perspectivism resembles life and so is a form of mimesis. Montesquieu's perspectivism involves its readers but does not make them passive. It leads them through a plot they have to construct for themselves, and it lets them see through the eyes of a plurality of people. It mimics life in its continual shifts of perspective. Its greatest strength is its portrayal of character. Who is Uzbek, this displaced Persian traveller? The members of Montesquieu's Parisian audience were certain Uzbek was Montesquieu's mouthpiece, uttering audacious opinions. The author had turned himself into 'a double outsider, first as a Persian in Paris, and then as this same man at home in his exotic harem', writes Shklar. This is clearly an assertion 2

Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987: 30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1958: 50-58. 4 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986. 5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990. 3

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of imaginative freedom. The seraglio stands for court and monastic life in France, where all kinds of excesses are said to occur, but at the same time the seraglio refers to the dark realities of despotic rule and to the very real practices of abuse of women. Interestingly, Montesquieu's Uzbek is able to understand French culture and to give liberal and moderate opinions about it, while being blind to his own despotic rule over the women in his harem. Uzbek is 'both an enlightened philosopher and a despot'. Uzbek was Montesquieu's way of imagining the dreaded regime of despotism and confronting this with liberalism; by this perspectivist imagining, Montesquieu created a persona that was very dear to him. Shklar sums up his perspectivist achievement thus: Uzbek is the ironic proof that a man might see a foreign cultural universe clearly and rationally, but not his own. Uzbek's creator, however, in the very act of inventing him, also demonstrated that one can rise above one's normal condition of inherited prejudice and credulity and see things as they are. For Montesquieu it was a moral and intellectual victory.6

Perspectivism is a process that is usually interrupted at an early stage. The experience of putting oneself in someone else's shoes, of seeing things the way others would see them, is part of growing up and it is stimulated by a liberal education. In Uzbek we see the person who is able to achieve some empathy with others, but is unable to reflect critically on his own prejudices. Real perspectivism also takes this second step. It makes people into critical, self-reflecting citizens, fit to take part in public life. 3.

Morals from Montesquieu (1)

What can we learn from Montesquieu's perspectivism in our own conditions, facing the uncertain future of the global village? And what does perspectivism — which was developed and transformed by so many later thinkers — mean in our time? I can only give tentative and partial answers to these big questions, limiting myself to issues raised in this book. For Gole the intricate developments labelled, abstractly, as 'globalization' challenge intellectuals to 'rethink modernity from the vantage point of its encounter with non-Western experiences'. Montesquieu's perspectivism is very much to the point in such an undertaking. We can read Persian Letters as an experiment in attitude formation. In it we find many of the themes Gole identifies as part of the conflicts between global expecations and local experiences out of which a multiplicity of modern identities are forged. The travel 6

Shklar, op. cit.: 32.

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letters of Uzbek and Rica, in their open-endedness, are no less 'a social adventure which oscillates between borrowing, blending, hybridization on the one hand, and affirmation of authenticity on the other hand'. Moroever, when the experience of modernity is to be 'localized', as Gole clearly thinks desirable, only the actual effort of imagining the perspectives and the lives of other people in different circumstances but facing the same kinds of conflicts and challenges can really effectuate a revaluation of 'the particularistic, native, multivocal aspects of modernity' (to quote Gole once again). The important theme of power relations — within and between cultures that each are involved in their own projects of modernization — is made more concrete and dramatic when we ponder the characteristics of despotism, especially of the enlightened, patronizing kind. Uzbek's intriguing and complex personality reflects the tensions that are part of a politics of identity everywhere. Montesquieu's perspectivism did not end with Persian Letters. It was more than a literary device. Perspectivism is clearly an important instrument in coming to terms with a social environment which is in turmoil and where incisive changes can be expected to take place, in directions which are often hard to foretell. In his later book The Spirit of the Laws, the magnum opus of 1748, perspectivism has become part of a method of social investigation that is systematically applied. It is part of Montesquieu's own preferred style of politics which, while it takes various practical forms, can be called moderate and republican. Perspectivism in this vein is an indispensable learning process that produces good citizens. From literature and knowledge of the world we have come to law and the arenas of political action. Citizens, as people of action, reveal through acting together who they are (Hannah Arendt).7 This raises again the question of the construction of identity and of the kinds of profiles that good citizens show when they enter the public sphere, the 'sphere of appearances'. Lepenies argues that when intellectuals deal with political concerns they tend to become either Utopians or melancholies. There are basically two kinds of European intellectuals: 'the self-confident and agressive sanguine type, the man of deeds, who wants to proselityze, convert, and conquer the rest of the world' as opposed to 'those who constantly brood and doubt everything, those caught in reflection, who withdraw from the world into the self. But this is no simple eitheror opposition. Lepenies claims that intellectuals are not always melancholic and do not necessarily turn into Utopians, but that 'as a rule, their existence swings between these two poles'. We see here at least the beginning of perspectivism. Someone who 'swings between two poles' is at least aware 7

Arendt, op. cit.: 175-181.

PURSUING THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

of the differences in outlook, in moral attitude, in emotional quality of these two stances. In line with Montesquieu's perspectivism, this would only be the beginning of wisdom. True intellectuals develop their own attitude through imaginative shifts from perspective to perspective. They are not narcissistic, suffering from the world, or making themselves into its moving centre. By reasoning in a perspectivist way, intellectuals will discover other ways of being in the world. Some of these are actually suggested in the example of intellectuals at the start of the Enlightenment, when we see a combination of analytical skills, ironical detachment, practical wisdom and optimism about the future. We can here think of Montesquieu, but also of Diderot, Voltaire, their Scottisch conterparts (Hume, Smith, Blair): with all their differences in personality, none of these intellectuals of the Enlightenment strikes me as typically melancholic or Utopian. It seems there is much more variety available for intellectual roles than is contained in the spectrum between melancholy and utopianism. The crux of the matter is that these modes have been too constricting and that through perspectivism the range can be significantly enlarged. Such expansion is needed precisely to move towards a 'politics of mentalities' for the 'boring world' movingly advocated by Lepenies. Meanwhile, the perspectivism that is needed goes beyond that advocated by Montesquieu in Persian Letters and implicit in The Spirit of the Laws. It must be not only a cognitive but also a moral stance, not only a reader's attitude but also a citizen's attitude. Summarizing Montesquieu's but also other author's perspectivisms (especially that of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where the virtue of 'sympathy' plays such a crucial part in the development of the personality), it is clear that citizens of the global village must at all times be prepared to imaginatively entertain points of view that are foreign to their own in order to consciously reflect on the different cognitive, moral and political organisations of the world these different points of view or perspectives make possible. Perspectivism stands for a citizen's attitude of full acceptance of the legitimacy of two or more different points of view that allow for correspondingly different understandings of some topic or theme. It requires the acknowledgment that it is not possible and not desirable to eliminate the plurality of perspectives and choose for one coherent, theoretically superior, perspective that transcends all the others. Choices are not definitive, they are not deeply grounded, they are open to counter-considerations. Perspectives are points of view in a literal sense: they make something visible that otherwise would be covered in darkness. Points of view that are entertained in a perspectivist manner are like mountain tops. From each point of view, laboriously achieved, the traveller sees the landscape in a diffent way, in a different light, but none of these visions is the

WILLEM J. WITTEVEEN

best one, the final one, the 'view from nowhere' (Nagel). Only by making the whole trip and entering the landscape from a number of perspectives can the journey be meaningful. [86]theperspectivistprocedure leads to comparison of arguments and it ends in a choice for one of the positions visited. (This is where the walk ends, to be resumed at a later time.) Perspectivism is not relativism, opportunism or cynicism. Perspectivist choices are broadly informed, are made out of conviction, but even though the choices are rationally supported, the perspectivist does not suppose that arguments convincing her are absolute truths which must be accepted by everyone. As a principle, perspectivism requires that future judgments are not prejudged in the light of present judgments. In the long run the reasoned decision of today may turn out to have been a prejudiced decision. Perspectivism requires the readiness to weigh different principles in new circumstances. It requires opennes to new participants in the ongoing conversations. Martha Minow has stated the basic idea of perspectivism well: We cannot know without standing somewhere, and because we are situated somewhere, we cannot see everything. Once we have considered this challenge, it is hard, if not impossible, to resume a faith in a reason that would transcend the situation of the reasoner.8

Perspectivism leads to modesty, to compromise, to openness for what the future brings and it fosters an attitude of responsibility. Perhaps the most striking aspect of perspectivism as a political virtue of self-reflective citizens is that it acknowledges not an absolute but only a 'partial' justice. This requires dynamism. One has to go on changing perspectives, seeing new orderings of the world. One must respect all claims for points of view that are supposedly misrepresented or forcefully repressed. 'Attention to inevitable partiality means resisting the temptation to adopt the standpoint of the excluded as the new truth. It is a corrective lens, but leads to another partial view.'9 Perspectivism remains a journey through an unknown country. It is the perfect antidote to the power of abstract language which tends to ossify a point of view into a stony structure. It is the cure for the malady Konrad alludes to when he speaks about 'abstractions about what is to be done' taking the place of 'images of what is'. 8

Martha Minow, Partial justice, in: Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds.), The fate of law, Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, 1991: 50. 9 Minow op. cit.: 62.

PURSUING THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

4.

Montesquieu's Contextualism

Up to now I have only hinted at the further development of Montesquieu's perspectivism after Persian Letters. In The Spirit of the Laws its basic intuitions and procedures develop into a methodology for what later would be called social research. This is Montesquieu's contextualism. It has been studied more by lawyers than by social scientists or philosophers and the lawyers have tended to misunderstand him. Yet, an insight in Montesquieu's contextualism begins with his conception of law. It is a conception both general and particular, both interested in legal systems as a whole and in their dependence on 'local knowledge'.10 Take this principled statement: Law in general is human reason insofar as it governs all the peoples of the earth; and the political and civil laws of each nation should be only the particular cases to which human reason is applied. Laws should be so appropriate to the people for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws of one nation can suit another. Laws must relate to the nature and the principle of the government that is established.11 The inner tension in this view of law is obvious. How can law both be the application of human reason, syllogistically even, and tailor made to fit unique nations? How can it both come from rational considerations and result from social interactions? The tension is resolved by Montesquieu's quest for the 'spirit' of the laws. This word 'spirit' (in French esprit) is a difficult one, since Montesquieu does not only mean the deeper meaning as opposed to the surface meaning (the 'letter') of the laws, but takes the 'spirit of the laws' in a sociological sense as the 'driving force' of a system, as a principle that animates people and organizes social and political orders. Montesquieu adds to his first statement the following, as a kind of afterthought revealing his true intentions: The laws should be related to the physical aspect of the country; to the climate (...); to the properties of the terrain, its location and extent; to the way of life of the peoples (...); they should relate to the degree of liberty that the constitution can sustain, to the religion of the inhabitants, their inclinations, their wealth, their number, their commerce, their mores and their manners; finally, the laws are related to one another, to their origin, to the purpose of the legislator, and to 10

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York, Basic Books, 1983. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989: Part 1 Book 1, at 8. 11

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the order of things on which they are established. They must be considered from all these points of view. 12 [88]

To discover the interrelations between this huge number of factors affecting law, one needs to consider them from all points of view, that is, one must approach them in a perspectivist manner. The totality of all the relations that are in this way apprehended, by shifting from aspect to aspect, make up 'the spirit of the laws'. Lawyers have considered mostly the typology of political systems Montesquieu develops (aristocratic republic, democratic republic, monarchy, despotism) and have noticed that the 'spirit' of the laws, its driving force, is every time a different overarching motivation: moderation is needed in aristocratic regimes, virtue is necessary in democracies, honour governs monarchies, and fear pervades despotic regimes. So these were supposedly the 'driving forces'. Because they were psychological in nature, lawyers have tended to pass them by and look to more legal criteria for fitting laws. This waters down to conclusions such as this one: in monarchies, where conflicts about matters of honour abound, more detailed rules are needed than in democratic regimes which can function well under simple laws applying to all citizens equally. And so they missed the point of the 'spirit of the laws' entirely. Because for Montesquieu the 'spirit of the laws' is the compound of driving forces, it is the complex interrelationship that can only be grasped by the mind who has traversed all relevant points of view. The 'spirit of the laws' is something that can only be pursued and of which one can never be certain. It is at once the most important and the most elusive insight into a whole legal and political culture. 'Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result.'13 5.

Morals from Montesquieu (2)

It can again be asked what relevance Montesquieu's contextualism, which completes his perspectivism, can have today. And again I will reduce this big question into a much narrower one. How does contextualism relate to the concerns of this book? In juxtaposing western modernity with modernities elsewhere and with systems that are not perceived as modernized, many observers are guilty of ethnocentrism. This is Goody's contention. Especially in the comparison between western countries on the one side and India and China on the other, 12

13

Montesquieu, op. cit.: at 9. Montesquieu, op. cit.: Part 3 Book 19, at 310.

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mistaken expectations have been created and maintained about the performances of these societies vis a vis each other. In his survey of historical developments, Goody concludes that 'there are no grounds for thinking of the east as stagnant, traditional, authoritarian, any more than the earlier west.' Contextualism has become the root method of both sociology and anthropology and Goody approaches his subject accordingly in a contextualist manner. But can anthropologists today still find something of value in Montesquieu? Is it not true that many of the observations Montesquieu himself makes about non-Western systems, often on the basis of bad empirical or even fictional work by other authors, conform to the prevailing image of the Chinese as 'different' and 'authoritarian'? But on a closer look, his contextualism is here also aiming at pursuing the spirit of the laws, the true driving forces of societies. Montesquieu makes a distinction between laws, morals, and manners. In western societies legislators generally do not confuse these categories, because laws concern the actions of citizens, mores the internal conduct of men and manners their external conduct. The Spartans under Lycurgus and the Chinese have, however, made one code encompassing laws, manners, and mores. Why is this? Rather than explaining the Chinese strategy as a result of backwardness, Montesquieu sees its positive contribution to a particular kind of society, a society in which wise governors aimed at tranquility (like Sparta, China has the air of the closed society), mutual respect among the inhabitants, and mutual interdependence, thus social peace and economic prosperity; all of these objectives could be achieved by concentrating on external conduct, on appearances. This normative background to the 'foreign' practice of confusing categories which in western minds are firmly distinct, yields for Montesquieu a positive insight into the particular strength of Chinese society. The result of this is that conquest does not make China lose its laws. As manners, mores, laws, and religion are but the same thing there, they cannot change all that at once. And, as either the vanquisher or the vanquished must change, in China it has always had to be the vanquisher; for, as the mores of the vanquishers are not their manners, nor their manners, their laws, not their laws, their religion, it has been easier for the vanquishers to bend slowly to the vanquished people than for the vanquished people to bend to the vanquishers.14

Even when the Chinese were subdued in war, their culture would be victorious, Montesquieu saw. In our own context, we may well ask, following Montesquieu, what is the peculiar resilience of Chinese culture, a culture 14

Montesquieu, op. cit.: at 319.

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that even after many modernizing tendencies — and with marxism rather than Confucianism as the official religion — is still very much concerned with regulating and controlling outward behaviour. Maybe, in an analogous reasoning, it can be doubted whether western style liberal democracy can in these circumstances ever be victorious there. Montesquieu's contextualism makes one wary of contemporary notions as the end of ideology, the end of history, the emergence of a uniform global culture. Montesquieu's contextualism rather points to the differences between locally anchored cultures and admonishes the observer to keep on pursuing all the driving forces and their interrelations, in hope of better understanding 'the spirit of the laws'. From the spirit of the laws to the laws of the spirit is more than an inversion (the rhetorical figure of chiasmus), it is a bold step. This move is really an attempt to change the rules of the game. Characteristically, such a move is made in times of transition, when experiences are unreliable and expectations change. In all kinds of moral languages it is then proclaimed we need a new man, or at least new symbols for contemplation, and new opportunities and media for spiritual growth. Peeters and Belting offer their reflections from within the field constituted by this rhetoric. Peeters draws attention to forgotten resources of western culture, contained in the old narratives and icons of the virtues and vices, deriving not only from Christianity but from the classical world. He argues for a recovery of the 'laws of the spirit' (my translation of his endeavour) by a return to the doctrine of the virtues, expecting from this a healing effect. But this is no mere backward-looking movement, but it is also contemporary, forwardlooking, open-ended, giving the virtue of authenticity a central place. Authenticity is, for Peeters, the 'driving force' behind the movement towards new behavioural and professional codes that promise each individual recognition, and this 'not only as a person but a person with a face'. Belting sees in Nam June Paik's 'TV-Buddha' an icon for today's world, connecting the Buddha statue, 'the born image of immobility', with the TV screen, the moving icon of quickly emerging and disappearing images, 'suspending its own meaning'. TV Buddha is an art work that lends itself to contemplation in the spirit of the Zen masters but it is also an artefact of modern technology. Paiks philosophy connects different worlds, the East and the West, past and present, religion and art. Belting and Peeters discuss different icons and adduce different contexts for their interpretations, but they share the attempt to capture new meanings, to connect disparate bits of information into a meaningful image which promises to be productive in people's lives. Surely these attempts are acts of contextualism, broadening the immediate focus of con-

PURSUING THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

cern to introduce history and morality (Peeters) and cross-cultural philosophy (Belting). At the same time, they are expressions of perspectivism in showing how to take up different points of view. And perspectivism and contextualism lead us back to Montesquieu. How would Uzbek have understood the allegory of Good and Bad Government, then already in existence in the city of Siena that Montesquieu did not make him visit? How would Uzbek have reacted to the godhead facing his own image on a television screen?

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Wil Arts: studied social and cultural sciences at Utrecht University and the Netherlands School of Economics. He is a professor of General and Theoretical Sociology at Tilburg University and a visiting professor of Modern Sociology at Utrecht University College both in the Netherlands. Taught previously at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the Economic University of Bratislava (Slovakia). He is involved in a number of comparative crossnational research projects on distributive justice and values and has published numerous articles and several books on these topics. Most recent publications: Wil Arts and Merove Gijsberts, After the Velvet Revolutions: Altered life-chances, fragile legitimacy, and split-consciousness in post-communist Eastern Europe, Social Justice Research (1998); Wil Arts & Lock Halman (eds.), New Directions in Quantitative Comparative Sociology, special issue of International Journal of Comparative Sociology (1999). Hans Belting: Professor of Theory of Arts, Science and Media at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He was previously professor of Art History at the University of Munich. His most important works are Das Bild und sein Publikum in Mittelalter: Form und Funktion fruher Bildtafeln der Passion (1981); Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (1990); Die Deutschen und ihre Kunst. Ein schwieriges Erbe (1992); Die Erfindung des Gemaldes: das erste jahrhundert der niederladischen Malerei (1994); Das Ende des Kunstgeschichte: eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (1995). Niluler Gole: Professor of Sociology at the Bosphorus University in Istanbul and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales in Paris. She previously taught in Michigan. She is the author of The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (1996), Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The Making of Elites and Counter-Elites (1997) and The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere (1997).

LISTOFCONTRIBUTORS Jack Goody: Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, England. He was Professor of Social Anthropology until 1985. Goody is an anthropologist who began his career in Ghana. In this 'African' period he wrote Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962). In Technology, Tradition and the State (1971] he for the first time drew a comparison between Africa and Europe. His other books include Production and Reproduction (1976), The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), The Culture of Flowers (1993), The Expansive Moment: the Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918-1970 (1995) and the recent The East in the West (1996) and Representation and Contradiction (1997). Wolf Lepenies: Rector of the Wissenschaftkolleg Berlin. His doctorate from the University of Munster was in Sociology and in 1971 he was appointed Professor of Sociology at the Freie Universitat, Berlin. He also has been associated with the universities of Texas, Vienna, Paris and Princeton. In 1994, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Paris Sorbonne. He has dozens of articles and books to his name, including Melancholie und Gesellschaft (his dissertation, 1969). Soziologische Anthropologie (1971), Das Ende der Naturgeschichte (1976), Between Literature and Science: the Rise of Sociology (1987) and Von der Geschichte zur Politik der Mentalitdten (1995). Lepenies is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Deutsche Akademie fur Sprache und Dichtung. Harry Peeters: Emeritus Professor of Historical Psychology and the History of Psychology at Tilburg University and former dean of the Tilburg Institute of Advanced Studies. He has published a range of books about continuity and change in human behaviour, including studies of becoming adult in the 16th and 17th centuries, family life in Holland, and of mental illness. Some recent publications: The historical vicissitudes of mental diseases, in: Carl F. Grauman & Kenneth J. Gergen, Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (1996), Psychology: The Historical Dimension (1996), and (editor) Europe in Transition (1997). Willem Witteveen: Professor of Jurisprudence at Tilburg University. He wrote books (in Dutch) on law and rhetoric, on the theatre of politics, on the doctrine of the separation of powers, and on jurisprudential approaches to legality. He is chairman of the editorial board of the journal Nexus. Recent publications: Enacting Law: Ritual Performances in Dutch Political Culture, in: J. Ralph Lindgren and J. Knaak (eds.), Ritual and Semiotics (1997); (with Wybren van der Burg [eds.]), Rediscovering Fuller: Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design, Amsterdam, 1999.

AUTHOR INDEX

Abbas, A., 53 Ahrend, H., 82, 84 Ambrosius, 71 Aquinas, T., 71 Aristoteles, 19, 71 Arts, W., 1, 80, 92 Asad, T., 44, 49 Augustijn, C., 1 Bacon, F, 15, 25, 38 Barot, O., 24 Barres, M., 19 Baudrillard, J., 54 Bauman, Z., 73 Belting, H., 9, 56, 79, 90, 91, 92 Benda, J., 21 Benedict, P., 50 Blair, 7 Blok, A., 21 Blumberg, H., 14 Bollnow, 70 Burckhardt, J., 17, 27 Burton, R., 20, 21 Cabet, 21 Caesar, J., 19 Campanella, T., 20, 21 Carlyle, T., 19 Castoriades, C., 52 Chan, S., 52 Charles V., 19 Cicero, 70 Colbert, 38 Colet, J., 1 Condorcet, 15 Cortes, D., 22 Danto, A., 61 Daudet. L., 17

Descartes, 17, 19 Delors, J., 19 Diderot, 22, 85 Dreyfus, 20 Dubois-Reymond, E., 17 Duby, G., 30 Dumont, L., 31 Elias,N.,20, 26, 31 Enwezor, O., 60 Erasmus, D., 1, 7, 11 Evagrius, 72 Fabian, J., 47 Feyerabend, P., 54 Foucault, M., 54 Frank, A., 46 Fukuyama, E, 4 Gaonkar, D., 43 Gellner, E., 54 Giddens, A., 8, 44, 45, 47 Gole, N., 6, 40, 56, 59, 79, 83, 92 Goethe, J., 28 Goody, J., 7, 30, 79, 88, 89, 93 Gorki, M., 21 Gregory the Great, 71 Guardini, R., 70 Habermas, J., 51 Hirsau, K., 75 Huizinga, J., 1 Hume, D., 85 Huntington, S., 4 Husserl, E., 27 Illich, L, 54 Joubert, 17, 21 Jacobsen, J., 20

AUTHOR INDEX

Kant, I., 15, 22 Kierkegaard, S., 17 Konrad, G., 79, 86 Kosseleck, R., 52 Kosuth, J., 61,62 Landsberg, H., 75, 76 Lee, B., 42, 52 Lee, L., 51 Leibniz, G., 16 Lepenies, W., 4, 5, 12, 79, 84, 93 Linne, C, 16, 18 Lorenzetti, A., 74, 75 Lycurgus, 89 Macrobius, 70 Malthus, T., 15, 16 Mardin, S., 50 Marinetti, 19 Marx,K., 31,36, 38 McLuhan, M., 59 Merton, R., 27 Minnow, M., 86 Montesquieu, 80-91 More, T., 1,20 Needham, J., 31 Nietzsche, F, 17 Nussbaum, M., 82

Paik, N., 9, 57, 62-66, 79, 90 Peeters, H., 7, 8, 67, 79, 90, 91, 93 Plato, 70 Prudentius, 75 Queneau, R., 22 Rochefoucauld, 20 Rougemont, 30, 33 Scheler, M., 70 Seneca, 70 Shayegan, D., 48 Shklar, J., 82, 83 Siemens, W., 14-18 Simmel, G., 47 Smith, A., 85 Stone, L., 30 Tarantino, 76 Taylor, C., 42, 52, 74 Tocqueville, A., 25 Toynbee, A., 23 Valery, P., 14, 16-19, 22, 27 Voltaire, 15, 85

Orwell, G., 20

Weber, M., 24, 31,33, 36, 38 Witteveen, W., 79, 93 Wittgenstein, L., 27 Wilde, O., 67

Paul, St., 1

Zenji, D., 64, 65

SUBJECT INDEX

Anti-environment, 57, 59 art(s), 2, 9, 32, 56-66 aspirations, 50 Boredom/boring, 12, 29, 66, 80, 85 Buddhist, 62 Capitalism, 20,23,24,30, 31,37,41, 43,47 Christendom, 1, 9 class, 17-20, 23 coeval time, 46 collectivism, 10, 80 communism, 5, 21-25, 28 Confucianism, 9 conscience, 14, 17, 18, 22, 24 contextualism, 81, 87-90 Corinthians, 1,2 counter-enlightenment, 28 culturalism, 31 culture, 3, 7-9, 17, 23, 30, 33, 43, 56, 62, 63, 67, 80, 82 Decentering the West, 45, 46 democracy/democratization, 23, 26 diaspora, 59, 60 Enlightenment, 6, 10, 15, 18, 28, 30, 38,58,65,71,72,80,85 ethics, 68, 69 ethnocentrism, 30, 32, 38 expectations, 2-4, 6, 7,13, 30, 37-40, 56, 58, 62, 63, 79, 88 experiences, 2-4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 28, 30, 32, 39, 40, 41, 44, 56, 58, 63, 83, 84 Fascism, 5 fundamentalism, 26, 43, 79

future, 3, 4, 7, 8, 56, 79 Global(ization), 3, 9, 40, 41, 47, 57, 64,79-81,83,90 History, 9, 22, 25, 27-29, 41, 56, 57, 62,90 homo americanus, 19 homo europaeus, 18, 19 Icons, 56, 57, 67, 90 images, 9, 67-78 imperialism, 60 individualism, 10, 33, 80 industrialisation, 25, 31, 34, 35, 38 innovation, 10, 43 intellectuals, 4, 5, 18, 20-23, 84, 85 Islam, 6 islamism, 42, 49, 54 Law, spirit of, 79, 81, 84, 87, 88 local(ization), 40, 43, 58, 60, 63, 84, 85 Materialism, 10 melancholy, 4, 5, 18-21, 24, 29, 77, 79, 84, 85 modernisation, 3,7, 8,10, 31, 38,41, 48,84 modernism, 9, 27, 82, 83, 85 modernity, 2-7, 9, 10, 20, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 40-55, 72, 79, 80, 83, 84, 88 morality, 67, 68, 91 Narrative, 67-78 nationalism, 52 norms, 8, 68 Past, 2, 3, 4

SUBJECT INDEX

particularism, 10, 79, 80 perspectivism, 80-86, 90 pluralism, 11 plurality, 82, 85 politics of mentality, 25-27, 85 63-66, present, 2-4

secularization, 26 socialism, 23 stoicism, 70 Technology, 7-9, 15, 17, 26, 56, 57, 91

traditionality, 10, 80 Rationality, 10, 18, 31, 32, 80 tradition(s), 2-4, 7-10, 27, 34,41,52relativism, 11,86 53,73,79,81 renaissance, 7, 8, 10, 18, 21, 22, 30, transcultural, 60, 62 31,34,38 transmodernism, 60 revolution French, 24 Universalism, 44, 80 industrial, 30, 34 urbanization, 54 Russian, 21 Utopia, 4, 5, 20-24, 28, 29, 43, 57, scientific, 10 58, 79, 84, 85 urban, 37 velvet, 5 Values, 7, 8, 68 romanticism, 71 vices, 7, 67-78, 91 virtues, 7, 8, 67-78, 87, 91 Science(s), 2, 14, 17, 20, 24, 29, 31 secularism, 10, 52 World system, 35

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INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY EDITED BY S. ISHWARAN 21. FUSE, T. (ed.). Modernization and Stress in Japan. 1975. ISBN 90 04 04344 6 22. SMITH, B.L. (ed.). Religion and Social Conflict in South Asia. 1976. ISBN 90 04 04510 4 23. MAZRUI, A.A. (ed.). The Warrior Tradition in Modern Africa. 1977. ISBN 90 04 05646 7 25. SMITH, B.L. (ed.). Religion and the Legitimation of Power in South Asia. 1978. ISBN 90 04 05674 2 31. LELE, J. (ed.). Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements. 1981. ISBN 90 04 06370 6 32. ARMER, J.M. Comparative Sociological Research in the 1960s and 1970s. 1982. ISBN 90 04 06487 7 33. GALATY, J.G. & P.G. SALZMAN (eds.). Change and Development in Nomadic and Pastoral Societies. 1981. ISBN 90 04 06587 3 34. LUPRI, E. (ed.). The Changing Position of Women in Family and Society. A Cross-National Comparison. 1983. ISBN 90 04 06845 7 35. IVERSON, N. (ed.). Urbanism and Urbanization. Views, Aspects and Dimensions. 1984. ISBN 90 04 06920 8 36. MALIK, Y.K. Politics, Technology, and Bureaucracy in South Asia. 1983. ISBN 90 04 07027 3 37. LENSKI, G. (ed.). Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology. 1984. ISBN 90 04 07052 4 39. TIRYAKIAN, E.A. (ed.). The Global Crisis. Sociological Analyses and Responses. 1984. ISBN 90 04 07284 5 40. LAWRENCE, B. (ed.). Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology. 1984. ISBN 90 04 07567 4 41. HAJJAR, S.G. (ed.). The Middle East: from Transition to Development. 1985. ISBN 90 04 07694 8 43. CARMAN, J.B. & F.A. MARGLIN (eds.). Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society. 1985. ISBN 90 04 07789 8 46. SMITH, B.L. & H.B. REYNOLDS (eds.). The City as a Sacred Center. Essays on Six Asian Contexts. 1987. ISBN 90 04 08471 1 47. MALIK, Y.K. & D.K. VAJPEYI (eds.). India. The Years of Indira Ghandi. 1988. ISBN 90 04 08681 1 48. CLARK, C. & J. LEMCO (eds.). State and Development. 1988. ISBN 90 04 08833 4 49. GUTKIND, P.C.W. (ed.). Third World Workers. Comparative International Labour Studies. 1988. ISBN 90 04 08788 5 50. SELIGMAN, A.B. Order and Transcendence. The Role of Utopias and the Dynamics of Civilization. 1989. ISBN 90 04 08975 6 51. JABBRA, J.G. Bureaucracy and Development in the Arab World. 1989. ISBN 90 04 09194 7

52. KAUTSKY, J.H. (ed.). Karl Kautsky and the Social Science of Classical Marxism. 1989. ISBN 90 04 09193 9 53. KAPUR, A. (ed.). The Diplomatic Ideas and Practices of Asian States. 1990. ISBN 90 04 09289 7 54. KIM, Q..-Y. (ed.). Revolutions in the Third World. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09355 9 55. KENNEDY, C.H. & D.J. LOUSCHER (eds.). Civil Military Interaction in Asia and Africa. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09359 1 56. RAGIN, C.C. (ed.). Issues and Alternatives in Comparative Social Research. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09360 5 57. CHOUDHRY, N.K. (ed.). Canada and South Asian Development. Trade and Aid. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09416 4 58. RAZIA AKTER BANU, U.A.B. (ed.). Islam in Bangladesh. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09497 0 61. AHMAD, A. (ed.). Science and Technology Policy for Economic Development in Africa. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09659 0 62. VAJPEYI, D.K. (ed.). Modernizing China. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10046 6 63. BRADSHAW, Y.W. (ed.). Education in Comparative Perspective. New Lessons from around the World. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10734 7 64. UDOGU, E.I. (ed.). Democracy and Democratization in Africa. Toward the 21st Century. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10733 9 65. BEHAR, J.E. & A.G. CUZAN (eds.). At the Crossroads of Development. Trans-national Challenges to Developed and Developing Societies. 1997. ISBN 90 04 107320 66. LAUDERDALE, P. & R. AMSTER (eds.). Lives in the Balance. Perspectives on Global Injustice and Inequality. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10875 0 67. LOVEJOY, P.E. & P.A.T. WILLIAMS (eds.). Displacement and the Politics of Violence in Nigeria. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10876 9 68. JABBRA,J.G. &JABBRA, N.W. (eds.). Challenging Environmental Issues. Middle Eastern Perspectives. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10877 7 69. SASAKI, M. (ed.). Values and Attitudes Across Nations and Time. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11219 7 70. SPERLING, J., Y. MALIK & D. LOUSCHER (eds.). Zones of Amity, Zones of Enmity. The Prospects for Economic and Military Security in Asia. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11218 9 71. NANDI, P.K. & S.M. SHAHIDULLAH (eds.). Globalization and the Evolving World Society. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11247 2 72. ARTS, W. & HALMAN, L. (eds.). New Directions in Quantitative Comparative Sociology, 1999. ISBN 90 04 11411 4 73. ISHWARAN, K. (ed.). Ascetic Culture: Renunciation and Worldly Engagement, 1999. ISBN 90 04 11412 2 74. PATTERSON, R. (ed.). Science and Technology in Southern Africa and East and South Asia, 1999. ISBN 90 04 11413 0 75. ARTS, W. (ed.). Through a Glass, Darkly. Blurred images of cultural tradition and modernity over distance and time, 2000. ISBN 90 04 11597 8