Orientophilia and the Birth of Asian Hermeneutics

This book posits ‘orientophilia’ as a committed tendency among European Enlightenment philosophers to admire and appropriate the aesthetics of Asiatic religions—especially Indic, Chinese, and Far Eastern iconography—as a kind of art that could be understood with the help of a homegrown, mainly Northern-European spiritualist ontology. The author evinces references from Herder, Hegel, and impassioned orientalists like Schopenhauer and Ernest Fenollosa, to expose how European idealistic hermeneutics of Asiatic iconography suffers from limitations imposed by its own rational aesthetics and how it fails to connect with the deepest and most nuanced mythical ontology that defines these depictions. Yet, European philosophers provoked their Asian counterparts in the Anglophone world to write a neonarrative of pan-Asian hermeneutics. Philosophically astute, historical orientophilia bridges the immense philosophical traditions that Western thinkers have long imagined. In this bold and enlightening book, the author reminds us that the West could strive to truly “know” the East only by uniting ways of knowing.