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Editor's Introduction: When East Meets West
- Northwestern University Press
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Editor’s Introduction: When East Meets West ix Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs in the last decade of the twentieth century, the American scholar Samuel Huntington cautioned against overly optimistic assessments of globalization’s progress, asserting in his nowfamous article “The Clash of Civilizations” that the political and cultural distinctions appearing most prominently at a number of “fault lines” between historical Western, Middle Eastern, African, and Sinic civilizations would inevitably undermine prospects for global unity as tensions built at these junctures, leading to more and not less conXict.1 But there is nothing really novel in Huntington’s words of warning about such disparities working against greater global unity: in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir S. Soloviev argued in several different contexts how the growing possibility of a future clash of cultures between East and West threatened European civilization and human progress toward a harmonic unity that represented the ultimate human telos, which he termed vseedinstvo—“all-unity,” or “unity-of-everything.” My decision to compile a third volume of Soloviev’s essays had its roots in the Wrst two: Politics, Law, and Morality: Essays by V. S. Soloviev (2000) and The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics by V. S. Soloviev (2003). While I was browsing his publitsistika to select appropriate candidates for inclusion in these collections, I came across an article with the ominous title “Enemy from the East,” which at Wrst glance I took to be an apocalyptic reference to a future clash of civilizations, suggestive of Huntington’s bleak analysis. I thought my expectations fulWlled as I began reading the piece: There is a basis for thinking that the Far East, which has sent devastating masses of its nomads upon the Christian world, is preparing to set out against it one Wnal time from a completely different quarter: it is preparing to conquer us by our own cultural and spiritual forces, concentrated in the Chinese state and the Buddhist religion.2 But it soon became clear in this essay that Soloviev was demonstrating his well-known proclivity to joke, in this case about explanations apparently circulating at the time that sought to link the environmental degradation creating famine conditions in Russia with poor weather sweeping in from central and eastern Asia. However, in this little joke Soloviev was tapping into a deep root of general apprehension about the East, which Russia’s geographic and geopolitical position inevitably fostered, like it or not. And so I decided to adapt the title of Soloviev’s article (not included here) to the present anthology, which is intended to help clarify the Russian religious philosopher’s views of the East. The six essays included in this book come close to spanning Soloviev’s entire publishing career, beginning with “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism,” written at the tender age of twenty (in 1873), and ending with “Muhammad: His Life and Religious Teaching” (1896), which appeared just four years before his death at age forty-seven. The four essays sandwiched in between these two bookends are “Three Forces,” originally presented as a public lecture in 1877; and “China and Europe,” “Japan: A Historical Sketch,” and “Primitive Paganism: Its Living and Dead Remnants ,” all published in 1890, just after Soloviev had given up on his nearly decade-long effort to justify a “free” theocratic polity—what he had referred to as his “theocratic leviathan” project.3 It seems clear from this record that Soloviev’s interest in the East represented more than just a phase in his intellectual development. These essays underscore the signiWcance Soloviev attached to understanding more clearly the development of ancient polytheism and Eastern belief systems and their relationship to Western monotheism and despotism. In these essays, Soloviev seems especially interested in pointing out similarities in the ancient nomenclatures concerned with religious and cultural practices, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, without, however, actually attributing any similarities in linguistic and ethnological phenomena to an overarching syncretism or a single-origin theory of civilization. One of his basic purposes was to elaborate on a quality he understood as common to many of the belief systems in question: an insistence on sameness, homogeneity, or what he referred to as “indifference.”4 Soloviev’s discussion of Asian civilizations and cultures resonated with the same moral concerns that he voiced with regard to European imperialism and realpolitik, driven as these forces were by divisive and dangerous nationalistic impulses. To what...