 Welcome everyone, I will just introduce the speaker who is Dr. Alexander Statman, Historian of Science and Intellectual History. He completed his PhD at Stanford University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Huntington Library and the University of Wisconsin. His book, which this talk is closely related to, a Global Enlightenment, Western Progress and Science, sorry and I missed out an important word there, Western Progress and Chinese Science, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Right, well I'm really delighted to be able to kick off this seminar on marks in Asia and Asia and marks and I guess I should point out at the beginning that in a way I'm going to be talking about a certain kind of understanding of Asia that marks himself will ultimately come to reject. This is really about Hegel's background to that but I think it's sort of crucial all the same because in a way it presents a certain set of problems in progress theory that later Marxists were going to have to confront and this is all the more true when it comes to Marxists in China itself in the early 20th century, people like Chengdu Xiu. As Nathan mentioned, this comes from a certain theme in my book, a Global Enlightenment, Western Progress and Chinese Science and it has to do with the part of that book that deals with the origins of modern academic philosophy and also professional Orientalism. So I sort of want to begin at the very end of my story which I evoke here with this first image, it's Paris and it's the summer of 1827. So Hegel was was in town in Paris visiting his friend Victor Cousin who was a lecturer in philosophy at the Economal and we have a bunch of records about Hegel's visit. It sounds like it was a very classic kind of first trip to Paris. He really comes off as a sort of a likable tourist type. It's like going to the Palais Royale shopping and visiting the Louvre and he's really sort of taken in by the whole cultural and intellectual scene. And part of what made the visit for him was meeting all of the academic friends of his host Victor Cousin. So on one day in late September we know that Hegel attended a meeting of the Académie d'Inscription which is one of the institutions of the Collège de France pictured here. You guys might have seen it. It's you know right there by the by the by the pointe and at this meeting Hegel spoke with the first professional sinologist in European history, Jean-Pierre Belré-Moussard who you see pictured sort of down in the right. And the two of them were discussing a question that was made famous by Cousin who was the mutual friend of both of them at the time. In his words the question was the following. Has there been or has there not been philosophy in the Orient? Well Jean-Pierre Belré-Moussard the sinologist specialist of China unsurprisingly said yes. He said that ancient China had what he called the doctrine of the Dao, Daoism. He described this as an ancient oriental wisdom and a sort of philosophical tradition that was fully equal to that of the Greeks with whom they were roughly contemporaneous. Hegel of course said no. He said that China had no philosophy at all but rather what he called in his words a developed religion of magic. So two weeks later Hegel returned to Berlin from Paris and there's no evidence that he and Aloem Moussard ever spoke again. And the wall that the two of them sort of constructed between sinology and philosophy I think remains in place essentially today to a really surprising degree. You see complaints about it all the time from specialists in non-western philosophy like according to the New York Times about five years ago only 10% of North American universities had a specialist in East Asian philosophy in the philosophy department. I imagine it's somewhat similar in Europe. But of course there are now new different places that you might go in the university if you want to learn about that. Not just East Asian studies but also religion, anthropology, sometimes even psychology to name just a few but really across the social sciences. So the end result of this sort of meeting in the early 19th century wasn't really that non-western knowledge was sort of expelled from modern thought but rather that it was sort of put in a new kind of place. And I want to tell you a little bit about how that happened. So I'm going to do that in two parts. First I'm going to talk a little bit about China and the Enlightenment in the 18th century and also about the Enlightenment in China sort of to help you understand sort of the state of the field of knowledge exchange between Europe and China in the sort of years leading up to Marx and sort of culminating with Hegel. And then I want to dig a little bit more deeply into Hegel's actual encounter with Chinese philosophy. And I'm going to show how for Hegel China really presents a sort of an important piece of evidence in articulating a kind of a vision of world history and also an understanding of what philosophy is that at this time I think was really quite novel and more so than you might expect. So our story of really early modern European engagement with China begins with the Jesuit missionaries. As I'm sure you all know that the first missionaries arrived in China in the late 16th century. I mean they were figures of the Renaissance. It was a long time ago already in the 18th century and it was immediately obvious to these missionaries people like Matteo Ricci most famously pictured here on the left that they were entering a place that had a really sophisticated and ancient culture that was in many ways quite comparable to their own. And they set about immediately to start learning about it. And I think it's really not an exaggeration to say that for the following 200 years until the late 18th century as we're going to see both sides Europe and China owed pretty much everything that they knew substantively about the written culture of the other to these Catholic missionaries. And as this illustration here also suggests these activities had a lot to do from the very beginning with the natural sciences. So the Jesuit missionaries primarily wanted to confer China to Catholicism but from the beginning it was pretty clear that Chinese people weren't all that interested in their religion. On the other hand they were very interested in certain kinds of technical expertise. Astronomical predictions in particular have long been important for the Chinese state still were for the Qing. And so just sort of as an indication of how significant this was you know until the 1820s right for a period of all actually nearly 200 years the top position in the Bureau of Astronomy in Beijing the Qing Tian Zhen which was like an organ of the Qing state was occupied by a European missionary. And that was true all the way until just before the opium one. So these missionaries were quite successful in teaching like some kinds of mathematical and astronomical techniques in China to their sort of literati interlocutors. But meanwhile they were also teaching Europeans about China. And I think this point really really bears emphasizing that really throughout the early modern period we can say that the importance of Chinese culture for Europe was far greater than the importance of European culture for China. So to show this and this is you know this is pretty well documented by early modern historians but the example is really powerful of Voltaire. All right Voltaire your most representative figure of the French Enlightenment was called by some historians the most famous figure in Europe of the mid-18th century and also a very great Sinophile. Voltaire tells us that he had only one painting in his office and it was a portrait of the philosopher Confucius quite possibly this one that was published in 1735. He said that China was the wisest and best governed polity in the world and for him this was this was based basically on their social and political philosophy the philosophy that that he attributed to this ancient philosopher Confucius. So Confucius for him represented a philosophy of right reason alone that didn't have a lot of the things that he disliked about his own time and place things like inherited positions things like a strong independent sort of church authority. And partially with Voltaire's encouragement but also in an era of increasingly globalized trade in the 1750s Sinophilia as historians sort of artlessly have called it really took off and it wasn't really restricted to France nor was it restricted to Philistos. It really extended across through national and confessional divides all across Europe. China informed Europe's material culture, its philosophy and actually even its very landscape. So let's just like look at a couple examples here. Here's the Chinese pagoda at Kew Gardens. I'm sure many of you have seen designed by William Chambers in 1763. A classic example of shi wasri or European interest in Chinese arts and design. Here's a sort of an interesting little story. The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was inspired by these reports of the ceremonies performed by the Qianlong Emperor at the Temple of Heaven. And he actually himself went out into the fields in his domains like in Moravia and he performed this plowing ceremony depicted here modeled directly off the rites that were performed by the Chinese emperors. So the point here is that in the 18th century, China wasn't only admired, although it was, it was also taken by many Europeans to be a model. And what I mean by that is that Europeans didn't just learn from China but they actually thought that Europe could and should be more like China. In this respect I think it's really the best example of what you might call a high-enlightenment cosmopolitanism, sort of universal approach to humanity and human nature. And in a way, this sort of sets up one of the greatest changes in high-enlightenment thought, one that historians have called sort of transitioned from enlightenment sinophilia to enlightenment sinophobia. You know, there's debates about the extent to which this is really accurate or all-encompassing. Obviously you can find exceptions but I think it's pretty hard to deny that there was sort of a general change in tenor of enlightenment discussions and contemporaries, people at the time, absolutely noticed this and they wrote about it. Explaining it on the other hand has been something of a difficulty. But to me, you know, the easiest way to think about it is to sort of look at this key date of 1773 because two things happened then that both sort of bore a long imprint on European sort of approaches to Chinese knowledge. On the one hand, this was the year of the global suppression of the Society of Jesus. This was the organization that had maintained cross-cultural communication for at this point nearly 200 years and after a series of extremely complicated and confusing sort of crises both in Europe and throughout their European global colonies, the Society was completely suppressed by the Pope in Rome 1773. So it was no more. And sort of related in a way to the fate of the Jesuits was a sort of a sharp turn in the approach that the phyllisocs took to Chinese knowledge. So also in 1773 we have the publication of this book here by a pretty significant phyllisof Cornelius de Paul, which is like 500 pages of incredibly vicious anti-Chinese diatribe. I mean, it's really obviously polemical. It's quite racist. It has a lot of tropes that will be familiar from 19th and 20th century European condemnations of Chinese culture. But in a way, I think it's interesting to note that this issue struck him, this major phyllisophist important enough to dedicate like half a thousand pages to writing about, to proving, because I mean it was still contentious at the time. It was a marked sort of attack on consensus opinions. Thinking more broadly about what's going on in sort of like enlightenment views of China during this time, I think it's impossible to understand it without thinking about a shift in what I consider to be sort of the paramount value of the Enlightenment. And we can describe that shift as one from reason to progress. There's this, you know, the idea of progress famously defined like more than 100 years ago was the idea that society is getting better and will continue to get better. And this idea has a history all of its own. It really dates to the late 18th century. And in that story, the development of the natural sciences, sort of identification of the scientific revolution in 16th century Europe is really key. The sciences feature is sort of the mark and the guarantor of progress. They're the way that you know progress is happening and they're also what makes it happen because as we learn more about the natural world, we can better kind of control it. And when science became important, it increasingly seemed like this was like a kind of knowledge that was unique to Europe alone. And it left really little space to admire Chinese thought, even Confucius, who didn't have much to say about scientific matters. So China was still considered during this time ancient and unchanging. This is like what Voltaire had admired about it. But in a way, those very features became a liability. And it was reframed from being stable to being static. And in a way, this sort of marks like the beginning of the end of enlightenment cosmopolitanism, which I think won't be very surprising to many of you, because you all know what came almost immediately after. Orientalism, Edward Said, essentially describing what you might think of as the modern approach to non-western cultures. And it emerged very quickly from the late 18th century to the early 19th. Already in like the 1810s, we have this sort of full blown orient, as Edward Said describes it, this idea of the East as other or mysterious or like my favorite of these terms, inscrutable, impossible to see or to know. And this is a very different kind of view of Asia. It's one that's opposed not to backwardness as some of the philosophes were thinking about progress, what it said, but rather to something quite different, to timelessness, to being actually outside of time. And that's sort of the view of Hegel and Abel Reymuzal, the one with which we began. But this view emerged really quickly, and it comes as part of a package. It got wrapped up so tight and so quickly that it's easy, I think, to overlook what an important transformation it really was. And where did that idea come from? And that story is really the focus of the rest of this talk. So I want to begin that part with a little bit about like how Europeans actually learned about Chinese knowledge and mechanics of it at the end of the Enlightenment. And that story has a protagonist whose name is Joseph Marie Amio, pictured here. Amio was born in 1718. He was trained in the Jesuit novitiates of southern France. And he had a very sort of typical kind of career trajectory for Jesuit missionary. He went to China at the age of 34 in 1752, right about when sort of Enlightenment Sinophilia was at its height. Amio lived in Beijing at the North Church. We have this wonderful 18th century illustration of it, contemporaneous of what it might look like. It's just a couple blocks from the Forbidden City. And it's no longer standing today, but you can see the site. And he was employed, like many of the Jesuits had been before him, at the Qing Court. He worked as a part-time translator for these trade missions that would come in and have to deliver their messages for the Qianlong Emperor. So Amio was translating mostly from Latin into Manchu, and then back from Manchu into Latin. So he had this sort of comfortable Jesuit missionary life into the 1760s and 1760s. And in fact, he became quite famous during this period in Europe. Amio wrote the first European language translation of the Art of War, the Swins of Bin Fa. And it was widely read, as were his translations of various poems and studies of ancient court music. So Voltaire, who again was following his issues quite closely, said in a letter to Frederick the Great about how great Amio was as a translator of Chinese sources. We have texts of Diderot and Ramo, also talking about him. And really, the guy became a sort of an intellectual and international celebrity. And what happened in the 1770s with the suppression of the Society of Jesus and with the sort of change in enlightenment views is that his identity and his celebrity kind of collapsed. He was literally no longer a Jesuit. And from this period forward, he would call himself actually an ex-Jesuit in his own writings. And his expertise on China was significantly less valuable in Europe than it had once been. It was sort of antiquated. I mean, he kind of had this obsolete kind of specialty. And the result of this was that Amio had to sort of form a new scholarly identity for himself, which involved sort of beginning new research projects that took these sort of new realities into his account. And I think that the most sort of marked differentiation of his work during this period that set him apart from all the previous missionaries was the extent to which it was really concerned with the idea of progress. So Amio was not surprisingly not very happy about these progress theories that discounted Chinese knowledge and that sort of set Europe apart from them. And so what he began to argue during this period was that, in fact, he said, ancient knowledge of China was in some ways more valuable than modern science in Europe. And that in some cases, according to him, it was actually the same thing. He became interested in all kinds of sort of aspects of Chinese culture that the previous Jesuit missionaries hadn't really been very, been very motivated to pursue. So like all of these identities up until this point had been sort of formed by a commitment to Confucianism, right? This was, in a way, the orthodox doctrine of the literati elite, who had always been the main interlocutors of Jesuit missionaries in China. It was also intellectually the foundation of what historians have called Jesuit accommodationism, this idea that there was something about indigenous Chinese beliefs that made it open to Christianity, that it was at least, at any rate, not pagan or not idolatrous. And of course, it was also the foundation of this high enlightenment interest of people like Voltaire. So when Amio began to build a new identity, also free of the restrictions that the Jesuit mission had previously placed on him, he became one of the first Europeans to really look in detail at Chinese traditions that went beyond Confucianism. And this led him in particular to take seriously both the religion and philosophy of Taoism. So the root to that is pretty unusual. It seems that Amio first became interested in Taoism when he heard about a new European theory called animal magnetism. This was described here, you see this image here on the right, Franz Mesmer, whose name gives English the word mesmerize, who promoted in Paris in the late 1770s this theory that he called animal magnetism, that like all of the bodies in nature were connected by this subtle fluid called animal magnetism, that in particular ran between the heavens and earthly bodies and human bodies. And so here in this statistical illustration, you see here's like Mesmer himself calling down animal magnetism from the moon and directing it into this woman's body for healing. And Amio, as well as other Europeans at the time, saw certain sort of similarities between this and aspects of Chinese medicine, which they associated with Taoism. So this is on the left an image from 1779 that was published in a European publication. It's the first description of something that was called, I mean, what this says in the book is that it's a description of Kung Fu, but actually what it is is Qigong, these like breathing exercises that are kind of part of Taoist self cultivation techniques. And I think that the resemblances, I mean, the reasons to think there were some similarity between Taoism and Mesmerism weren't quite as absurd as they might seem. Both of them are built on kind of notions of universal correspondence. They involved these physical and spiritual cultivation exercises. And so Amio sort of saw this, and he began to look more deeply into it to write a ton about what he thought was this correspondence between Mesmerism and Taoism. One thing that this led him to do, this really quite quite unprecedented in the history of early modern exchange, was to develop a kind of an account of natural philosophy that really took Chinese traditional cosmology seriously. I point this out mostly for interest, although it's going to come back a little bit for Hegel, but it's really quite fascinating. So this is one of Amio's letters where he includes an image of the Taiji too, this sort of cosmological diagram from the Song period. And he explains how you can understand it as sort of a prefiguring of Franz Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism. He says, in place of animal magnetism and its two poles, I quite simply substitute Taiji for animal magnetism, Yin and Yang, these polar forces that are sort of opposed to each other and that are operating in all of the kind of functions of nature. This Amio says was the key to all the sciences. And the key point is that because it had been known in China since the origins of Yin-Yang theory, in the, well, let's say in the Zhou period, that therefore you could actually learn more about contemporary European science by studying ancient Chinese texts. Again, this is a sort of part of an argument against progress. And this is really the key point. Amio was insisting that the knowledge of the distant past was superior to or in some cases the same as the knowledge of the modern Western present. And that's the way to sort of think about his new interest in Taoism. And in Europe, this did have some contemporaneous influence. Here are just two publications from the 1780s and 1790s by various European mesmerist disciples that include images of Chinese cosmology that had been sent to Europe by Amio to explain how mesmerism was supposed to work. These authors also argued that Chinese knowledge had a sort of like scientific kind of premonition of what Europe would discover later. Something that was this valuable ancient wisdom that could be recovered from investigating the Chinese past. But in making that point, these authors inadvertently had the result of associating Chinese philosophy with things that most of the European scientific establishment at this time simply couldn't accept. And in particular, making it look increasingly kind of like occult science, magic, alchemy, astrology, which some of them were themselves kind of like leftover believers in, but which were increasingly out of favor as the Enlightenment wore on. So by the 1780s, 1790s, all of the newest research on China, in particular this new work on Taoism, was associated with sort of aspects of the European intellectual tradition that seemed really obsolete and antiquated. And that was kind of the state of the field in the 1810s and 1820s because all of this exchange was completely disrupted by the French Revolution. There was about 15 years in which there's very little work on China published in France and during which the sort of remaining Jesuits who were in China were unable to get their communications across. So you got to see this as kind of the intellectual and material apparatus for European studies of China when it was sort of revived in the 1810s and 1820s, which brings us to the period when Hegel became interested. So here we get to Hegel for the second half of this talk. And I want to look kind of closely at his main sources on Chinese philosophy and show you how original his interpretations of it actually were with respect to those that had come before him. You know, Hegel's often considered to have been somewhat responsible for the European rejection of non-Western philosophy. And I think there's some truth to that. You know, you could see it as somewhat over-determined by the rise of European empires during this time, by the emergence of full-blown racism, which of course is connected to the rise of empires. So there's no doubt that Hegel did reject non-Western philosophy from this sort of canonical story that we know from ancient Greece on. But on the other hand, I think what's equally important about Hegel's comments on the rest of the world isn't what he said that it lacked, but rather what he said that it had. And this part actually was a lot more original and especially more original in the sense in which it departed from the work of some of the earlier philosophers who had come before him, people like Diderot or Condorce, who also sort of fully bought into this late enlightenment progress paradigm. And so tracking with that, what we see is that early in his career when Hegel started writing in the early, around the turn of the 19th century, he was really not very interested in the rest of the world. And he became so only later in the 1810s and 20s. And when he did, he had two main sources on China. And those sources were again, Amio and Abarimuzan. So let's look briefly at each. This is an essay that was published around 1790 that was written by Amio in 1787. In Hegel's first detailed writings on Chinese thought, which come in the lectures on the philosophy of religion, well, not writings in the lectures, but his first known consideration of it. This is almost the exclusive source on Chinese philosophy. This is really the one thing that he's referring to. He in fact tells the story really quite closely following Amio's essay. And in a way, again, just that decision itself is really significant because it involved embracing this picture of Chinese philosophy that was based not on Confucius, but on Laozi, on Daoism. Hegel says that in Confucius, there is no speculative philosophy and that his reputation would have been better in Europe if he'd never been translated at all. Again, this is a really big move. It's a rejection of hundreds of years of precedent of European writings on China. What does this essay actually say by Amio? Well, it's purported, as you see from this sort of subtitle, to be a sort of a description of the doctrine of the sect of Taosei, which is the sort of romanization for Daoist master. So basically it's about religious Daoism, not the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi, but this sort of religion that emerged in the early years of the first during the Han period. And the essay, interestingly enough, is in fact almost a word-for-word translation, not of any text from the Daoist canon, the Daozong, from any religious scripture, but rather the story of a late imperial Chinese novel, the investiture of the gods, the fengshan yinni. So this is one of the famous Chinese novels and I'm sure some of you know the story. It's about the fall of the shang, sort of a legendary event that took place in the 11th century BCE and the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty. So the way the story goes is after the overthrowing of this last tyrant emperor, the new king of Zhou, King Wu of Zhou, receives a magical book from an immortal being, the eponymous investiture of the gods, and he uses it to establish this new dynasty, the Zhou, in the process of investing the gods or spirits, which are called shun, with their various powers and their titles and their functions in the heavenly bureaucracy, as well as in the earthly one. And for Hegel, that's really the key point. It's that in sort of what he takes to be the representation of traditional Chinese thought that the heavens and the earth mirror each other and the emperor is the only person with the power to mediate between them. It makes him, in Hegel's words, a magician. The emperor, Hegel says, is lord over the visible world of the mandarins just as he is over the invisible shun. And the conclusion of this, based again on Amiya's story, is that the Chinese are the most superstitious people in the world. China has no philosophy, only magic. Again, a complete reversal of what the late enlightenment had said, even people who are not interested in China at the time. But for Hegel this caused a certain problem, because it wasn't obvious where then this kind of magic was going to fit into his historical typology, his sort of development of the spirit through time, which we'll come to in a bit. And to answer that question, Hegel turned to even newer work on China, really the only thing that had been published since Amiya's essay, and that was the work of Abba Rehmuzah. So here we have Abba Rehmuzah's most successful work, this 1823 study of the life and opinions of the philosopher Laozi. This is also a study of Taoism, it was presented that way. But this time we're talking about the philosophy of Taoism, the Taoist classics. Abba Rehmuzah, like Hegel, was relying on the sources that were most recent and most available to him. And that largely meant the works of Amiya and the other ex-Jazwits who had written in the 1780s and 90s. And that's why he was sort of inclined to move in this direction, to consider new kinds of sources from Chinese intellectual culture. And the argument here was that if you really want to understand ancient China, you have to get beyond Confucius. And you have to look at Taoism and at Laozi. So this is really the first major study of Taoist philosophy published in a European language. And according to Abba Rehmuzah, Taoism is just a philosophy of reason, the Tao, the reason, Taoism. The most important point that he made in this memoir, and this is actually known by his contemporaries, is actually in the subtitle. So if you look closely there, he says that this is a doctrine that was commonly attributed to Pythagoras, Plato, and their disciples. If you think about it for a minute, it's a pretty far out claim. And as described by one of Abba Rehmuzah's main students, he says the following. He says, to tell the truth, the principal point of this memoir on Laozi is to establish that there were communications between the West and China from the sixth century before Christ onward. That's really the point that Abba Rehmuzah was trying to make. This sort of historical theory of a Paneurasian interaction and exchange, and kind of a common ancient wisdom that he thought had been at its root. I think that the evidence for this is pretty interesting, too. That's what you see on the right here. This is a famous passage from the Dao De Jing, which describes things that are ineffable. Yi, Xi, and Wei, these three characters. And according to Abba Rehmuzah, these characters Yi, Xi, and Wei had been misunderstood by previous generations of European commentators because they weren't actually Chinese. He said Yi, Xi, Wei were actually a Chinese transliteration from Hebrew. And then if you put them together, Yi, Xi, Wei, it's Jehovah or Yahweh, the tetragrammaton, the biblical name of God. And this is sort of the proof for Abba Rehmuzah that these ancient peoples had this kind of common ancient Oriental wisdom that was shared in common between them all. And for Abba Rehmuzah, this was kind of part of an argument against progress. He said, a bright light illuminated high antiquity. Man is a child born at midnight. When he sees the sunrise, he believes that yesterday never existed. The idea was there's ancient knowledge and we can recover it by looking into Eastern and other sorts of ancient texts. So finally, Hegel revisited his sort of writings on China when he got back to Berlin after having met with Abba Rehmuzah. And especially we see that in his philosophy of history. And what happens there is that you see that he's reading Amio again, but now in the light of Abba Rehmuzah's work on Lao Zai and on this ancient Eastern wisdom. Hegel correctly identified Abba Rehmuzah's ambition. He fully got the point. He said that what Abba Rehmuzah really wanted to do was to recover, in Hegel's terms, the advanced condition of the knowledge of God and other scientific knowledge in ancient times. And Hegel knew what was up here. And in fact, Hegel agreed that there had been this ancient contact between East and West. He conceded that there was some connection between Taoism and Pythagoreanism and Platonism. And he even agreed with Abba Rehmuzah that it was very possible that the Hebrew Tetragrammaton was there in the Tao De Jing, if you read these words correctly. This was part of a particular moment in the development of spirit and time. This sort of ancient one that preceded the sort of real birth of Greek philosophy, according to him, and was sort of outside of where he stood in the history of philosophy. So now we're kind of, I think, in a position to kind of holistically come back to Hegel and to think about what really he's saying when he talks about rejecting Asia from the history of philosophy. The key thing to remember here, I think, is that Hegel's mature theory of progress isn't quite like that of the Phyllisos. It's not exactly stegist because for Hegel, reason itself changes over time. The subject itself is changing. And history, which Hegel defines as the development of spirit and time, is somewhat indistinguishable from philosophy itself. So to lack one is really to lack the other. So in a way, this creates a new role for this trope of static China. That trope was old. Hegel didn't invent it. And people already in the early 19th century considered it to be sort of a cliche. This sort of immobile orient was really a part of Enlightenment conversations. But Hegel's original concept of history, like with a capital H, led him to develop this in a new direction. Most importantly, I think it meant for Hegel that China wasn't just like an early stage in the story of progress, but something that was truly outside of it. So he says, Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia, the beginning. But I think that absolute really carries a lot of weight there. That's what bears the thrust to the point. And Hegel has a million really creative ways of describing. He says, China and India lie as that were still outside the world's history, outside it. He says China was an immovable unity, belonging to mere space and not time, not in history. In other words, as he says elsewhere, China was a part of what he calls unhistorical history. And in this way, I want to say the East was no longer really understood as merely stuck in time. That was already familiar even for Voltaire. It's rather that the East was now truly timeless. That's what it means for Hegel. But I think that the important thing to remember here, actually kind of a remarkable thing is that in the process of coming to this conclusion, Hegel said more about Chinese philosophy than basically any of the philosophes had for the previous half century since the age of Voltaire. It was an important question for him, one that he had to figure out the answer to. So, you know, historians have been focused on the negative results of Hegel's project, you know, that rejected Asia from history and philosophy. But at the same time, I think the positive element is really important too, this, I mean, by positive by mean constructive, not good. This idea of East Asia and the past together as being kind of timeless and opaque with this doctrine that was metaphysical rather than sort of founded in reason and non-scientific. And this is the sort of the part of his project that really required the work of both Amiel and Abba Reymuzar. And both of these, both of these aspects, you know, both the sort of constructive and the destructive project, I think cast a long shadow in the modern period. You know, I started off by telling you about this sort of parting of the ways between psychology and philosophy. But, you know, Chinese and non-Western thought more generally in the modern period did take on not only in the academy, but outside of it to a separate kind of appeal. So, you know, today, if you go and you walk into a bookstore, right, and you look for the metaphysical shelf, like I did here in Pasadena, right, you're going to find it right next to the section on East Asian thought, right, philosophy, Eastern. You're going to find these books on mesmerism right next to the ones on Taoism, right where Hegel, along with these sort of other figures of the late enlightenment, left them. They were really the first to put them there. So, I want to sort of say, you know, in conclusion, that really what this conversation is about, in my view, is about how much the sort of idea of progress changed from the late enlightenment to the early 19th century. And both of these are sort of resources that Marx is going to draw on. You know, in the early modern period, and for the Enlightenment more broadly, all knowledge essentially had been the same by definition. Like, that was what made it knowledge, was that everybody could understand it, that it was perfect, complete, universal, and very Aristotelian. But now, kind of in the modern period, distant times like the past and distant places like China, were we recast as totally outside of it. It wasn't even clear if they were true knowledge at all. They weren't part of what, you know, what Hegel called the development of spirit in time. And, you know, for certain philosophers, that's been a problem. But for other people, both in and outside of academia, that including Abba Reymuzah, that was very much the point. You know, coming back to this word, inscrutable. In the early modern period, that word was common. It was often used to refer to God. God was inscrutable. But in the modern period, humans became inscrutable too. And I think that's where this conversation really, really concluded. All right, thanks so much. Love to talk about any questions that you all might have about, you know, Hegel, Abba Reymuzah, Amio, and the Enlightenment idea of progress. The word on the street is that Kant was a terrible racist. But that Hegel was not so bad. And that in particular, Hegel was inspired by the Haitian Revolution. How does racism fit into the picture of Hegel's understanding of non-European countries? The one thing that I've learned, you know, in reading late 18th century comments on the rest of the world is that their approach to questions of race is really foreign. I think remarkably difficult for us to fully get our get our minds around. A lot of the intellectual apparatus that forms the core of modern racism in the modern period is developed by people like Hegel and Kant at this time. And, you know, whether or not Hegel was more racist than Kant or less racist than Kant is a question that I think is actually impossible to answer. Because, you know, I mean, both of them, if you saw them today, you know, and could ask their opinions about race would strike you, I'm quite sure is pretty racist. But on the other hand, you know, the way that they were thinking about this was very different from ours, basically because there was no sort of biological science that was able to like make race, that was able to sort of make race a part of their worldview in the way that it became in the 19th century. So, I mean, I think, I think Eurocentric is actually probably a better a better way to think about it. You know, Eurocentricism is alive and well in the late 18th century, even in the modern sense. And, you know, that's that's the way people will talk about this. We'll say, you know, who was more, I mean, Hegel was clearly Eurocentric in a pretty direct way. I don't know if that really gets to the, oh, you want to know about the Haitian Revolution? Yeah. Oh, well, I think you've just sort of said it, which is that the Haitian Revolution can be historically progressive because it was inspired by the French Revolution, right? Like that it's possible to see the Haitian Revolution as progressive if you're Eurocentric, but not racist in the modern sense. Yeah. Yeah, diffusion, diffusionism in general is a part of a Eurocentric vision. And it's one that sort of works independently in a way from you don't need to have racist views in order to believe in diffusion in that sense. So that's a, that's a really, I mean, that's a really cool research project. And, and I think that I think that you could do a lot with it. But unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find much. Let's take a step back. There's this question of like formal logic, you know, for formal logic that in European tradition, you know, is considered to be in with Aristotle. And this kind of formal logic actually has a has a parallel in ancient Chinese thought school of names, the Ming Jia and Moism as well. These two of the of the classical schools that have logical traditions, but these were not known in Europe at all at this time, and wouldn't be for another hundred years. When you want to think about the I Ching as sort of a metaphysical view, well, I mean, basically, you know, what what Hegel will say about that, and he comments about the I Ching rather a lot is that what it shows is that Eastern thought for Hegel is is actually too metaphysical that it doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the sort of manifestation of spirit in the world. That's the problem that Hegel has. So it's like, in a way, you would expect, and this is surprising, this is what I think would be the cool research project on Hegel, in a way, it's surprising because you would expect him to be like, oh, metaphysics, that's like the distinctive thing about ancient Greek philosophy, you'd think that he'd get really into it. But no, he says like they've gone too far. So OK, if we just say, you know, Marx was turning Hegel on his head, this cute, cute phrase that people say, then for him, the development of the productive forces, it stands in for the development of spirit, right? And in a class, I'm reading Kenneth Pomerance's book. And so then, you know, one is tempted to say, I don't know if I want to say anyone has ever said this, that that Hegel is right in the sense that the productive forces start developing with capitalism around, you know, I don't know, 1750. So before then, China was really impressive to Europeans and its stability, its cultural achievements were very impressive. But then after then, it's not developing the productive forces, it doesn't have capitalism. And so if those are things you like, then yeah, this is my attempt to offer a sort of materialist account of how both, you know, why this change made sense and that it was right. Yeah, I like I like to how, you know, you end up this this material, it's like your comment on Marx is also a sort of an application of Marx's own philosophy of history to the situation. And I think it's totally right. I mean, I think I'm nice and all I can do is on board that proposal Nathan and say, I think that that's true. And you know, these are all these are all kind of feeding feeding into each other, you know, there's, there's an interesting. So, okay, if you want to look at so, we can comment on the relationship between these sort of intellectual transformations and material configurations that we're taking place at roughly the same time. But what I think is sort of here's, here's the sort of the little little puzzle. The puzzle is that if you want to say that the material sort of transformations caused the intellectual ones, I would have no problem with that. I mean, in a macroscopic way that that seems plausible to me. But what you then have to explain is how that was the case, given the fact that in the late 18th century, the material transformations were not yet actually apparent. That is to say, you know, commentators, you know, including people like DePaul, but I mean, more obviously say, you know, Diderot or or or Condorcet, they were not yet aware of the macroeconomic transformation that they were living through between them and China. Now, I mean, there were issues in, you know, in non European economies that they were very astute to, but they didn't have this. I mean, they certainly did not conceive of a great divergence, you know, by any means. So bridging that, bridging that I mean, there's kind of a Cartesian problem almost in a way, then becomes, I think the kind of interesting question. So can I just see if I understand correctly, you're saying basically that this move against China at the level of the superstructure happened a little too early, like sort of 20, 30 years too early to be easy to explain. What I'm saying is that the the move at the level of the superstructure was happening at roughly the same time as the as the move at the at the at the substructure, but commentators didn't realize the connection. Yeah. So which is to say, yeah, it would be easier to understand the superstructural change if we allowed for some delay, because then then people would have understood the story I told you today happened 50 years later, then then then your proposal would be even stronger. Well, the physiocrats were had a pretty good handle on the fact that that England had agricultural capitalism in a way that France didn't. And I think that solves your chronological gap. But no, no, but Nathan, you've actually said, now you want to get into the weeds here, you've actually just revealed the biggest problem of all. Oh, okay. There was the physics, according to Tocqueville, you know, who was writing on the physiocrats. Tocqueville says, and this is actually true, he says that there was that that in that in European history, there were no greater sinophiles than the economists. And he says, every one of them somewhere or other, there's almost a direct quote from Tocqueville, almost every one of them somewhere or other wrote an absurd encomium to China. And in fact, that's true from Turgo to Cannae, enormously interested in it. So, I mean, this is, this is a great problem. Now we have the people who are both who are identity, I mean, who, the only people who you're saying is identify the substructure change are the ones who are not making that superstructure move. In fact, they're actively throughout the 1760s and 70s fighting against it. Super interesting. If you want to read Hegel on China, in particular, I would recommend the works of Anne Chung, who teaches at the Collège de France, but they're mostly in French. There's a few things I think that are in English, but not much. If you want a book that's a kind of a broader overview on Hegel and the rest of the world, it's a little bit polemical but quite good by Peter K. N. Park called something like philosophy and racism, which deals a lot with Hegel excluding the rest of the world from Western philosophy. If you write me, I can probably come up with some more tailored recommendation. So, now we know that both the ancient Greeks and the Chinese had the steam engine, which is like the technology par excellence of European industrialization. I guess people didn't know that back then. I don't want to say for sure that they didn't know that there had been experiments with steam. There's one of the Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century, Adam Scholl von Bell, published in Chinese a book of mechanical inventions. It's a very kind of Leonardo-esque kind of thing with all these illustrations. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's some kind of steam-powered object in there. In fact, I kind of think that there is. I can tell you this much. It was very clear already at this time that the ancient Chinese technological innovations were worth studying. I do have an article about that, actually, in the Journal of World History. Who is it? Francis Bacon, who said everything great comes from China. He was a terrible racist incident. I just read something that he said that was just appalling. Yes, so Francis Bacon didn't know that his contemporaries did. I didn't realize that. So this famous association of Francis Bacon with gunpowder, was it the gunpowder printing in the compass? Yes, he didn't realize those were all invented in China. Not clear. Okay, then I will just end by thanking Alex. Thank you very much for this extremely interesting talk. I see that several people in the chat have joined me in offering those thanks.