258 ORIENTALISM Therefore, in the best Orientalist work done during the interwar period—represented in the impressive careers of Massignon and Gibb himself—we will find elements in common with the best humanistic scholarship of the period. Thus the summational attitude of which I spoke earlier can be regarded as the Orientalist equivalent of attempts in the purely Western humanities to understand culture as a whole, antipositivistically, intuitively, sympathetically. Both the Orientalist and the non-Orientalist begin with the sense that Western culture is passing through an important phase, whose main feature is the crisis imposed on it by such threats as barbarism, narrow technical concerns, moral aridity, strident nationalism, and so forth. The idea of using specific texts, for instance, to work from the specific to the general (to understand the whole life of a period and consequently of a culture) is common to those humanists in the West inspired by the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, ds well as to towering Orientalist scholars like Massignon and Gibb. The project of revitalizing philology—as it is found in the work of Curtius, Vossler, Auerbach, Spitzer, Gundolf, Hofmannsthal®—has its counterpart therefore in the invigorations provided to strictly technical Orientalist philology by Massignon’s studies of what he called the mystical lexicon, the vocabulary of Islamic devotion, and so on. But there is another, more interesting conjunction between Orientalism in this phase of its history and the European sciences of man (sciences de 'homme), the Geisteswissenschaften contemporary with it. We must note, first, that non-Orientalist cultural studies were perforce more immediately responsive to the threats to humanistic culture of a self-aggrandizing, amoral technical specialization represented, in part at least, by the rise of fascism in Europe. This response extended the concerns of the interwar period into the period following World War I] as well. An eloquent scholarly and persona} testimonial to this response can be found in Erich Auerbach’s magisterial Mimesis, and in his last methodological reflections as a Philolog.” He tells us that Mimesis was written during his exile in Turkey and was meant to be in large measure an attempt virtually to see the development of Western culture at almost the last moment when that culture still had its integrity and civilizational coherence; therefore, he set himself the task of writing a general work based on specific textual analyses in such a way as to lay out the principles of Western literary performance in all their variety, richness, and fertility. The aim was a

Orientalism Now 259 synthesis of Western culture in which the synthesis itself was matched in importance by the very gesture of doing it, which Auerbach believed was made possible by what he called “late bourgeois humanism.’’** The discrete particular was thus converted into a highly mediated symbol of the world-historical process. No less important for Auerbach-—and this fact is of immediate relevance to Orientalism-——was the humanistic tradition of involvement in a national culture or Siterature not one’s own. Auerbach's example was Curtius, whose prodigious output testified to his deliberate choice as a German to dedicate himself professionally to the Romance literatures. Not for nothing, then, did Auerbach end his autumnal reffections with a significant quotation from Hugo of St. Victor’s Didascalicon: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance. No less important and methodologically formative a cultural force was the use in the social sciences of “types” both as an analytical device and as a way of seeing familiar things in a new way. The precise history of the “type” as it is to be found in earlytwentieth-century thinkers like Weber, Durkheim, Lukacs, Mannheim, and the other sociologists of knowledge has been examined often enough:”° yet it has not been remarked, J] think, that Weber’s studies of Protestantism, Judaism, and Buddhism blew him (perhaps unwittingly) into the very territory originally charted and claimed by the Orientalists. There he found encouragement amongst all those nineteenth-century thinkers who believed that there was a sortof ontological difference between Eastern and Western economic (as well-as religious) “mentalities.” Although he never thoroughly studied Islam, Weber nevertheless influenced the field considerably, mainly because his notions of type were simply an “outside” confirrnation of many of the canonical theses held by Orientalists, whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental’s fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality. In the Islamic field those clichés held good for literally hundreds of years—until Maxime Rodinson’s important study /slam and Capitalism appeared in 1966. Still, the notion of a type—