The West that is not in the West: identifying the self in Oriental modernity

Abstract

This paper discusses the meaning of ‘the West’ in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, ‘the Chinese’ is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as ‘Other’ in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of ‘the Chinese’ in world politics. ‘The Chinese’ is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West.

Notes

¹ Takeuchi (2005, 52) detected an immortal element in this Chinese–barbarian frame, which he called ‘a body that never dies’. He believes that it was this frame that substituted the European for the Chinese culture to guide Japanese modernity, which he thought was no more than ‘extreme slavishness’.

² This is unfortunately against Takeuchi's wish (2004, 164–165), which was to break away from European partiality, pretended to be universal, by reviving Asian principles and reaching for a genuine universal spirit.