Asien blickt auf Europa: Begegnungen und Irritationen.

• Author: Halbfass, Wilhelm

Europe is not accustomed to seeing itself as an object of curiosity and inquiry by non-European cultures and traditions. For many centuries, Europe has considered itself to be that part of the world which is destined to discover, understand, and explain the others. It is much more used to "look at" others than to be "looked at" by them. Indeed, this exposure of the whole world to European or Western "understanding," research, and objectification is one of the most conspicuous and significant phenomena of modern history. The foreign cultures that Europe has thus tried to understand and explain are only gradually finding the strength and freedom to call into question the European ways of looking at them, to subject Europe to their own ways of questioning and understanding, and to respond to the global process of Westernization and modernization. Likewise, Western or Westernized scholars are gradually and with some hesitation taking notice of a reverse process of inquiry and understanding, and they are learning to listen to the actual or potential responses of Asian or other non-Western ways of thought and orientation to the West and the process of Westernization.

The present volume makes a welcome, though modest and rather impressionistic, contribution to the study of these developments and their historical presuppositions and antecedents. It brings together a series of lectures delivered in 1987 in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the University of...