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Orientophilia and the Birth of Asian Hermeneutics
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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.
Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay, Ph.D. (2005), University of Texas at Dallas, is Professor of Digital Art and Aesthetics at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. He has published many essays and monographs in arts and humanities, and is author of Affective States in Art (2005).
This book is an indispensable reading for scholars and students of Indian and Asiatic arts collections in Europe and America. Scholars, aficionados, general readers interested in museums and academic art institutes will benefit from the new hermeneutics of Asiatic art. It is appropriate reading material for university libraries, specialists in humanities, (post-graduate) students of art, philosophy, art history, and for artists and collectors, as well as for general readers of Asian and comparative philosophy and religion.