China in the German Enlightenment ed. by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy

Reviewed by: China in the German Enlightenment ed. by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy Tanvi Solanki Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy, eds. China in the German Enlightenment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 224 pp. Bettina Brandt and Daniel Purdy have composed a concise yet comprehensive volume about the shifting perceptions, both favorable and unfavorable but all textually mediated, of China in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German intellectual landscape. A much-needed, important resource for historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, this volume is especially timely in examining a historical moment that witnessed heated philosophical debates about concepts foundational for contemporary race theory. The contributions show how political conditions in Europe such as shifting stances on absolutism and Christianity were projected onto preconceptions of China and the Chinese people. China functioned as an emblem of scholarship, of static and stable systems in governance. Confucianism and Daoism were often considered philosophical ideals in early modern Europe. In much of the accumulated knowledge about China transmitted by Jesuit missionaries, China came to represent the kind of morality, ethics, and government that Europeans yearned for themselves. As Brandt and Purdy clearly articulate in their introduction, writings on European relationships with the cultures of China and Asia have largely been influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism, resulting in an immense amount of scholarship devoted solely to the British empire. In German studies, from the 1990s onward, scholarship sought to work against the exclusion of Germany from discussions related to colonialism and orientalism during the Enlightenment; such work includes Suzanne Zantop's Colonial Fantasies (1997), Todd Kontje's German Orientalism (2004), and, more recently, Chunjie Zhang's Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (2017). Brandt and Purdy pinpoint a trend in eighteenth-century German studies to nonetheless remain "blissfully immune from the later evils of modernity." The scholars contributing to the volume question this tendency in their essays, as they do in their scholarship at large. Furthermore, the contributions succeed in fulfilling the editors' aim to "avoid generalizations that characterize the 18th century as a transition from the Sinophilia of Leibniz to the Sinophobia of Hegel." The book opens with the historian Walter Demel's 1992 canonical historical survey "How the Chinese became Yellow," first appearing in English as a skillful [End Page 374] translation by Brandt and Purdy. Demel's study compiles a comprehensive array of historical sources such as travel narratives by priests and merchants to recount the emergence of race theory in the late eighteenth century prior to Kant's two essays on race. With these sources, he evaluates the veracity of the narrative that identifies Kant as the inventor of skin-based racism. He situates the racial stereotypes toward Asians as "yellow" globally, exposing the connection between the discourse around slavery and late Enlightenment German thought which, as Brandt and Purdy aptly observe, is "an association that still suffers under the double burden of being both controversial and ignored." Philosopher Franklin Perkins's essay then asks why Chinese philosophy such as Confucianism is rarely taught or researched in philosophy departments in the West and is not even categorized as philosophy as it should be. He begins his study with Leibniz's favorable view of Confucianism, which Perkins attributes to his universalistic conception of philosophy based on the belief that everybody has the ability to think reasonably. Confucianism was centered upon practical ethics, which, while initially appreciated by European philosophers such as Leibniz, was later devalued, once philosophy was conceived as abstract, theoretical reflection. Hegel introduced a new moment in philosophy, the "science [Wissenschaft] of philosophy," from which he excluded the Chinese, which, as Perkins argues, expressed racial hierarchies within philosophical discourse. The racial components of Hegel's philosophy are likewise taken up again in this volume by Robert Bernasconi. We follow the thread of Leibniz with Michael Carhart's essay, which focuses on Leibniz as a Hanoverian courtier eager for knowledge on the "origins and migrations of the European nations." Carhart brings to life Leibniz's obsessive hunt for the letter of a Jesuit missionary in order to gather crucial information about Central Asian and Chinese linguistic history for his Novissima Sinica. He tells of...

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