Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy

Abstract

This paper aims to shed new light on Hegel’s rather problematic statements about Asian thinking and Chinese philosophy by disclosing the Orientalist antecedents found in Kant’s anthropological works. First, the notion of Orientalism will be defined with reference to Orientalism (1977) and “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985) by Edward Said. Second, an exploration of Kant’s anthropological research will show that this constituted the turning point in the Western Orientalist perception of China which had a strong influence on Hegel Finally, it will be claimed that Hegel’s Orientalist perception of China rests on a definition of culture as the expression of the “spirit of a people” (Volksgeist) that has recently been revised by contemporary post-colonial anthropologists.