Shengren – Chapter 2.6 – The Spirit of the German People

“German culture is unique, not universal”

Wenn der Deutsche versucht, etwas zu machen, tut er das gründlich, mit Methoden und System […]. Und noch mehr: jeder Deutsche ist ein geborener Metaphysiker. Er wird nicht von common sense beherrscht wie der Engländer, er ist kein Rationalist wie der Franzose, er empfängt seine ganze Inspiration nicht von den grossen Traditionen seiner Vergangenheit wie der Italiener, und noch weniger überlässt er sich gedankenlos der Materialisation der Kräfte, die dem Leben des Staates immanent sind, wie die Russen. Im Gegensatz hierzu hat der Deutsche das unwiderstehliche Verlangen, jede große politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale Bewegung mit etwas Transzendentem zu verknüpfen oder sie transzendierend zu interpretieren.[1] [When a German tries to do something, he does it thoroughly, with method and system {…} More than that, every German is a born metaphysician. He is not dominated by common sense like the Englishman; he is not a rationalist like the Frenchman; he does not receive all his inspiration from the great traditions of the past like the Italian; and he could not give himself thoughtlessly to the materialization of the forces of life that are immanent in the state, like the Russians. In contrast, the German has the irresistible desire to link every major political, economic and social movement to something transcendent or to interpret them transcendent.]

– Unknown Japanese Source, OAG Notizen

German culture is unique, and not – as some world historians and political philosophers love to propagate – universal. Certain German characteristics explain why Germany could become what it became. Among those characteristics are: Germany’s perceived role as [one of] the bringer[s] of Civilization, Germany’s alliance with the holy, its Bildungsbürgertum (German educated middle-class), the longing for the East, and the Faustian nature of the German society.

The Bringers of Civilization: The Germans had their own technical term for sense of mission: Sendungsbewusstsein. If the German Sendungsbewusstsein had only been of a religious nature, Protestant ethics, for example, it would not have been considered unusual – other inherently intolerant religions other than Christianity were thinkable, for example Islam. The uniqueness of German Sendungsbewusstsein was its symbolic link to intellectual superiority, which entails everything from politics, education, sciences and economics, religion and tradition: the word Bewusstsein means consciousness; the Germans did not just “sense” their mission (as in sense of mission) – they “knew” it. For the British it was a matter of duty and a noble cause to bring civilization to the rest of the world; for the Germans it was a dead duck and dirty work. The travel writer Richard Katz once described the English in Hong Kong: “Englishmen carry their country with them wherever they go. […] They do nothing to combat smallpox in the syphilis-infested Chinese quarters and do nothing to stop Chinese immigration. As long as the European-city stays healthy and fit, the Englishmen care about the natives. […] The quantity may cut off their heads, wage war or do anything else they wanna do: as long as the quality prospers, there is no reason to become sentimental.”[2]

This tendency of the Englishmen (and later Americans) to let the colonized continue their own traditions (as long as the colonizer could trade and administer), has been seen as English carelessness, almost a mistake. The same rule of the mob the English promoted in Europe (that was early democracy), the same mob rule they now promoted in their colonies; and it angered the Germans immensely. Ku Hongming [辜鸿铭], one of China’s most eminent historians, once said the following about Germany with reference to Great Britain about the causes of the First World War:

The moral causes of this war, I have tried in my essay to show, are the worship of the mob in Great Britain and the worship of might in Germany. I have, in my essay, laid emphasis more upon the worship of the mob in Great Britain, than the worship of might in Germany, because looking impartially upon the question, it seems to be that it is the worship of the mob in Great Britain, which is responsible for the worship of might in Germany; in fact, the worship of the mob in all European countries and especially in Great Britain, it was this which has created the enormous German Militarism which everybody now hates and denounces.[3]

Ku’s influential work The Spirit of the Chinese people [中国人的精神] (1922) was in part a reaction on Arthur Smith’s Chinese characteristics (1900). Ku felt a great injustice had been done to the Chinese tradition and now entered the stage of world literature himself to get even, in a most eloquently and literate way, not only with the English but with all foreign imperialists. His insightful book was published bilingual, Chinese and English. And he continued about the Germans:

Now let me first of all say here that it is the moral fibre in the German nation, their intense love of righteousness and, as a consequence, their equally intense hatred of unrighteousness, hatred of all untidiness and disorder (Unzucht und Unordnung), which makes the German people believe in and worship might. All men who intensely love righteousness, who intensely hate unrighteousness are inclined to believe in and worship might. […] The intense hatred of unrighteousness, of untidiness and disorder in the German nation makes them hate the mob, the worship of the mob and the mob worshippers in Great Britain. […] made the whole German nation ready to starve themselves to create a Navy with the hope to put down the mob, the mob-worship and the mob-worshippers in Great Britain. […] made the German nation worship might as the only salvation for mankind.[4]

Ku Hongming was correct to suggest a religious context: “to worship might”. The German language itself was built on a religious fundament, Luther’s Bible translation. In his daring book The Germans (1982) which was translated into German in 1991 and published by the prominent academic Beck Verlag in Munich, the eminent German expert and professor emeritus of Stanford University, Gordon A. Craig, collected countless evidences of Germany’s obsession first with itself and second with holiness.[5] Craig also quoted Jörg von Uthmann’s Doppelgänger thesis,[6] according to which the Germans saw in the Jews their mirrow image and, in the manner of Edgar A. Poe’s William Wilson killed its doppelganger. The Germans had to destroy their doppelganger out of Selbstverachtung (the loathing for oneself). Uthmann was quoted: “the Germans’ worship of the Absolute was the obsession to eternally pursue every good thing until it has turned into an evil one.”[7]

When Max Weber announced German superiority because of its Christian set of values in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), it was easy to see how the religious theme was just a virtuous pretext for explaining Germany’s economical superiority and inventiveness, and at the same time was used to relativize cheating, chance and good luck. Other virtuous stories about Germany’s superiority had been around for quite a while and some are still encouraged, till today – German work ethics and German philosophy being just two of them. When the great philosopher Georg Hegel could write that the Germans and Europeans were entitled to subdue the world,[8] and the German biologist Ernst Haeckel could teach that the Caucasian race was the most beautiful and perfect one,[9] and the statesman Adolf Hitler could write that only the Aryan race was capable of creating Culture (Kulturbegründer],[10] and the German mathematician Edmund Husserl could say that Europeans would never Indianize themselves,[11] for example – if all those great German thinkers could say it and write it, then all other Germans could say and write it too. Once a Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the father of the philosophy of history, patronized and belittled India, it became much easier and, above all, was perfectly legitimate for the German orientalist to do so likewise. Hegel had such a low opinion about East-Asian cultures; he thought that the Asians contributed nothing to world history, only to history;[12] thus the German Sendungsbewusstsein was more than just patriotism and nationalism. A patriot loves his country and a nationalist worships it. But Germany’s Sendungsbewusstsein was not directed inwardly (the mere feeling that it was the chosen people) but outwardly toward other cultures (the hatred and rejection of otherness, and what to do about it):

Ebenso wie im Theoretischen strebt der europäische Geist auch im Praktischen nach der zwischen ihm und der Außenwelt hervorzubringenden Einheit; er unterwirft die Außenwelt seinen Zwecken mit einer Energie, welche im die Herrschaft der Welt gesichert hat.[13] [Just as it does in the theoretical, in the practical too the European spirits aims at the unit of itself with the outside world; it subjects the outside world to its purpose with an energy that has secured it the control of the world.]

Analyzing, finger-pointing and criticizing other cultures and people made the German thinkers feel modern and progressive. In 1841 Franz J. Haydn’s music and August H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s lyrics created the Das Lied der Deutschen [Song of the Germans]: “Deutschland Deutschland über alles… [Germany, Germany above all…], including the controversial third stanza about “German women and German wine and song”.[14] In 1861 the poet Emanuel Geibel wrote “Am deutschen Wesen mag die Welt genesen” [The German character may heal the world], which the German Emperor Wilhelm II famously changed into the imperative mood: He substituted “mögen”‘ (may) for “sollen” (ought, shall), thus the slogan was born: “Am Deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen”. As a Hochkultur or “High Culture”, Germany felt obliged to bring “Civilization” [with a capital ‘C’] to others: justice and order, philosophy and religion, with the sword if necessary.

Wilhelm II’s Hunnenrede called for the killing of as many Chinamen as possible “without mercy” in order to “open the way for civilization once and for all!”[15] Germany’s henchman in China was Alfred von Waldersee, a Prussian Generalfeldmarschall, who was renowned for his “bloody-minded attitude to native insubordination” and “drive for revenge” against the Chinese.[16] The German people had an almost pathological distrust in China since the late 19^th century when Prussia on behalf of the other German nations was more or less belittled (the German lands were not seen as important, nor Prussia as legitimate political representative, but not entirely rejected: a treaty was signed), in sharp contrast to Japan which embraced the new Imperial power as a vital ally and future potential rival of the Anglo-Saxons.[17] When the Boxer Rebellion took place, the Germans saw a golden opportunity for revenge: a Chinese protest movement against foreign Imperialists’ rule presented them with a fine reason for severe retribution: resistance to German and European rule in China was a crime to humanity.[18]

German thinkers had offered much justification for German superiority, even among its European competitors: Greek philosophy, Christian Faith, the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Nation State, the Will to Power, etc… The German philosopher Gottlieb Leibniz already in 1677 explained why the Teutsche Nation (the German Nation) should take leadership in the Christian world:

Die Teutsche Nation hat unter allen christlichen den Vorzug wegen des Heiligen Römischen Reichs, dessen Würde und Rechte sie auf sich und ihr Oberhaupt gebracht, welchem die Bestirmung des wahren Glaubens, die Vogthey (jurisdiction) der allgemeinen Kirche, und die Beförderung des Besten der ganzen Christenheit obliegt, daher ihm auch der Vorsitz über andere hohe Häupter ohnezweifentlich gebühret und gelassen worden.[19] [The German Nation is preferred among all Christian nations because of the Holy Roman Empire. The dignity and rights of the Holy Roman Empire affected the German Nation and its leadership that had become destined to promote the true Religion, the jurisdiction, the Church, and to support the best of Christianity. Therefore the German Nation is obliged to take the leadership and to preside over the other high chiefs, comfortable and deserved.]

Wherever the German philosophers and orientalists’s minds wandered, they understood themselves as Heilsbringer. Whenever they left their fatherland, as a general rule, they thought they were needed abroad, while an Asian in Europe was believed to have left his country because he wanted something in Europe. The German travel writers in China and Japan, missionaries, men of commerce, military men, bureaucrats, engineers, even botanists assumed the role of ‘foreign experts’, instructors, and reformers. Most believed that they were called; the rational Germans believed they were summoned by local governments, kings or emperors, or by God in order to bring order and to cultivate the local people. Reminiscences of the past abundant: even today the Germans, like other Europeans and Americans in Asia, call themselves “expatriates” or “expats”, which was nobler than the term “immigrants”, and certainly better than “Ausländer”.

The Germans in Asia believed that they brought something; they were bringers of German expert knowledge or technology; while – conversely – foreigners in Germany surely wanted something: German expert knowledge, technology, and welfare, all the same. The idea that Germany could learn anything from non-European societies was absurd. The storylines of many German travel writings were similar: the author (and his fellow expats) came to improve the situation in that Asian place. The narrator then went on to explain what he had achieved and where he fell short of his high expectations because of some strange local costume or superstition. In German language, to “have completed a work” and to “have done something right” is a single phrase: etwas gerichtet haben. The mere presence of a German doing his job is a statement about the person who needed the job done.

The European Bringers of Civilization brought their world view and their religion to Asia, and took away the names of the indigenous traditions, just like they had done before in America: “The strategy of the discoverer amounted to align the unfamiliar new with the familiar old and fit it into the existing world view”.[20] In that manner, the Germans took away the names of the Confucian tradition and – unlike the English-speakers who made some concessions for foreign cultures – never returned them to China. While the prominent Anglo-Saxon sinologist and missionaries James Legge, Augustus Loomis, Thomas Watters, and Herbert Giles translated shengren as sages, the prominent German sinologists and missionaries Wilhelm Schott, Wilhelm Grube, and Richard Wilhelm translated shengren as Heilige, or even Göttliche, thereby making it quite clear that Christianity and biblical vocabulary was the only terminology that should live on. While the English speaking world had abandoned its a priori (a Kantian term) ancient and biblical thinking and had replaced it with the reality of empirical investigation in China,[21] the German speaking world – against all empirical evidences – had not made that transition away from its ancient and biblical delusions. Thomas Mann called Germany’s biblical delusions the “German inwardness” and the German “Alliance with the Holy“:

German Romanticism, what is it but an expression of the finest German quality: German inwardness? Much that is longingly pensive, fantastically spectral, and deeply scurrilous, a high artistic refinement and all-pervading irony combine in the concept of Romanticism – I might say: antiquarianism – of soul that feels very close to the chthonian, irrational, and demonic forces of life, that is to say, the true sources of life; and it resists the purely rationalistic approach on the ground of its deeper knowledge, its deeper alliance with the holy.[22]

Holiness eats wisdom, wisdom beats knowledge, and knowledge destroys holiness. The German “Alliance with the Holy” impaired the quality of human sagacity and thus debased the sages and sagely teachings in general; it did not help much that sages (wisdom), stood well above the philosophers (knowledge), who in turn threatened the saints of Christianity (holiness). The Anglo-Saxons effortlessly translated shengren as sages, while the Germans willfully transformed shengren into holy men. “Sage” was appropriate, because shengren were indeed sagacious individuals, but “Heilige” or holy men would take away their humanity and puppeteer the Chinese people to God. God’s strings were divine, and so were the Chinese Classics. It was also true that Holiness, Wisdom, and Knowledge – a variant to the rock-paper-scissors game, as you wish – correspondents exactly to the three most common European translations/interpretations of Confucius and the shengren in general: saints, sages, and philosophers; indicating that the European scholars were a) playing a game of selection, and b) were players of aspects: when they wanted to refuse the notion that Confucius was a messiah, saint, or religious man (from the point of ‘knowledge’), they said he was a “philosopher”; when they thought to convey that what Confucius taught was not philosophy and not divine (from the point of ‘wisdom’), they called him a “sage”; and if – in the case of most Germans – they had no concept for sages and sagehood (from the point of ‘holiness’), they christened him “Heiliger” or saint instead.

The diagram below depicts why there can never be an eternal winner, as each of the three aspects beats one but is beaten by another:

The diagram shows why there can never be an eternal winner, as each of the three aspects beats one but is beaten by another.

Technically, the original shengren played no further role in this; all focus is now on whatever the Europeans liked to call it. The notion of Holiness was the key in German interpretations of Confucianism, and that holy notion was responsible for calling shengren “die Heiligen” (the holy men), and rejecting the Anglo-Saxon and French interpretations “the sages”. Christianity, as said before, has been discrediting the sages and their teachings for centuries, since highest wisdom was reserved for God, and God only. Christianity would never be the same again if someone dared to call Jesus Christ a sage. Nikolaos of Myra, better known as Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus, was called a saint, never a sage. Not even the great Meister Eckhart was called a “Weiser” or sage, letting alone the poets Schiller and Goethe. The Germans, descendants of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, were dead-serious about all this.

The question with regards to the diagram above is: are those three European terms “saints”, “sages”, and “philosophers” true translations of 圣人, or are they just practical definitions, each one rendering just one important aspect at a time – Confucius optional the divine, the sagacious, or the knowledgeable? One suspects, that could be so. The best “translation” of圣人, I think, was shengren (actually a transliteration); but few scholars minded. China looked pretty enough dressed in Western terminology, and more manageable:

The sage in the Chinese language is shengren, which means the sort of men who invented li (rituals) and yi (moral principles), and told people what righteousness and justice were.

The quote above is from a Chinese scholar, Zhao Yanxia. In the West he has to turn his name around: he becomes Yanxia Zhao. So we know what we can expect from his writings. He writes in English and compares the concept of Father and son in Confucianism and Christianity. That is a good one, if one recalls what the Comparative Method is really all about and what it was invented for, namely: making Western culture universal and permanently assigning all (inferior) foreign phenomena to the course of its own development. This may be done in a perfectly altruistic disguise, after all: Calling Confucius a saint or philosopher means that Westerners will love Confucius by association. We may try the Comparative Method ourselves any time, and see the marvelous effect it has on people. Take the following sentence, a variant of the Zhao’s statement above: “Germany has no shengren“. Who could disagree? Shengren looks foreign, it is foreign. And to those who understand shengren, it will be even more obvious that Germany has no such a person. Then a clever German comes by, a master in Comparative Cultural Studies, who translates shengren as “saints”. Watch the result: “Germany has no saints.” Now, that is ridiculous, everyone knows that Germany is a Christian society with saints all over its history, for example Aquilinus, Bonifatious, Wigbertus, or Kator von Trier. Will German scholarship now reject its shengren/Heilige translation, which is evidently suspicious and flawed? Of course, it will not. The shengren/Heilige translation is all right and will serve Germany’s cause and interest well; the problem lies with China which had not yet discovered the divine calling of Confucius, as Richard Wilhelm explains: “And Master Kung said: The noble man stands in awe of God’s will”.[23] Moreover, an army of German scholars will now descent upon China, feeling the urge to teach the Middle Kingdom about saints from a real Christian country’s perspective, and not just from a cheap copy like Chinese “philosophy” is of the West. In a nutshell, the moment the Asians or any other people let go their precious terminology, the West will replace it with familiar concept that inevitably makes the West the sole master and expert on that foreign culture. In Zhao’s statement above: which sage exactly in the West invented li and yi that makes him a shengren? His description “The sage in the Chinese language is shengren” is highly misleading. It sounds like the Chinese translated sages as shengren, while in fact it was quite the opposite: the European missionaries came to China and translated/interpreted shengren (erroneously) as philosophers, sages, or holy men. As I wrote this, a tsunami hit the coast of northeast Japan. If I said now: “A Flutwelle in Japanese language is called Tsunami,” that statement is misleading, too. Tsunami is a Japanese word, not the translation of German Flutwelle. Likewise, shengren is a Chinese word, not the translation of sage. The shengren are the best thing that ever happened to Chinese tradition. But until China starts believing in its own terminology, it won’t see its tradition stay alive.

Having observed in the available literature that there were now a suspiciously great number of “philosophers”, “saints”, and “sages” in the East, while there was not a single shengren or junzi or bodhisattva in the West, one may rightly conclude: there is very little or no possibility that Western scholarship is unbiased. Most scholars today agree. For example, the German historian Christian Lau, in an article about the recent creation of another “theological” academic discipline, “Islamic theology”, talked about German idealism, Protestant Theology, Life-Jesus-Research, historic-critical Bible-readings, and cynically called the entire German Orientalism “ein Nebenprojekt der protestantischen Universitätstheologie” [a side project of Protestant academic theology].[24] This all sounds like Orientalism as usual, at least in the Western academia.[25] If, in Lau’s words, the Eastern traditions are just permanent “side projects” of Christianity and Western philosophy, then Confucius and the shengren are meant to stay “Philosophen” or “Heilige” in Germany for a very long time. History does not necessarily repeat itself; if all goes well, it just rumbles on.

The pride and joy of Germany was its Mittelschicht (middle class). The Mittelschicht was invincible. In good time it expanded, in bad times it cut some back, but on the whole it was always solid and reliable. It should be. It was the backbone of a savior and monster. The education of the German middle class was called Bildungsbürgertum. It was the education of the Mittelschicht that mattered, because the education of the working class was solely domestication, not much beyond. The elite class liked education too, but it did not matter as much to them as it mattered to the bürgerliche Leistungsgesellschaft [civil society’s meritocracy]. Although all education in Germany is Wissenschaft (science), the Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), as opposed to the Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences), were and still are the most prestigious, as Christoph Markschies, the recent president of Berlin’s first university, the Humboldt University, (in English) explained: “I’m completely convinced that to this day the humanities are among the canon of disciplines that determine the elite; at least, at the university that I am the president of”.[26] The study of Eastern languages such as Japanology, Sinology, Sanskritoloy, as well as the Classics like Greek and Latin, are called Orchideenfächer (lit. orchid majors) first because they were rare, beautiful and difficult and second because orchids are parasitic plants meaning that students of Orchideenfächer usually came from well-to-do families or had rich patrons. Consequently, not only were those Classicists, Japanologists, Sinologists, and Sanskritologists highly respected members of the intellectual elite, they also had – their tiny number against the actual population of Asia – stupendous influence and power in the most disproportional way imaginable over history and how it was written. At the foundation, all German scholars were much alike, having enjoyed the same basis education that made them German and succeed in German academia. Konrad Jarausch, an expert on German history, in his book Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany – The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (1982) explained the Bildungsbürgertum as follows:

Formal institutionalized ‘cultivation’ determined the degree of prestige within the educated stratum, beginning with ‘academic’ (university) attendance and descending through higher technical training (during the empire engineers gradually achieved formal but not social equality) and the Gymnasium Abitur as prerequisite for ‘being gebildet’ (with lesser prestige for the modern school types). […] A marginal group was those with the certificate of intermediate maturity (Mittlere Reife) […], who obtained the privilege of one-year military service as preparation for reserve officer status. Although intellectuals with individual success as artists and poets might be included among the cultivated, academics were suspicious of the lack of educational credentials and bohemian social mores of the intelligentsia. […] As members of their own professional associations (such as the Ärzteverband) and sometimes as alumni of their student corporations, the educated set the general social tone of much urban life because their higher calling conferred superiority over the commercial middle class, who followed material pursuits.[27]

If a middle class is big enough, it produces all kinds of people. The German middle class produced most of the philosophers, orientalists, practitioners and sponsors of Orientalism, all essentially humanists, we have discussed so far. But why did the German middle class never produced any Weisen – sages? Assumingly, German education prevented the formation of a German sage culture, and the German middle class discouraged the development of sages. Additionally, the conventions of the Bildungsbürgertum were a sure vaccination against Oriental influences. Any educated German who grew up in the land of the ultra-conservative Germans Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, or Johann G. Fichte, Ernst Haeckel, Edmund Husserl, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche was sufficiently vaccinated against the influences of other, lesser cultures. The philosopher Fichte once addressed the Germans in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1818) as “das Urvolk” [the Original People], and the German langue was its “Ursprache” [the Original Language].[28] The German historian Christian Staas in an article on ‘Einheit durch Reinheit’ (2011) reminded his readers how deep-rooted German racism really was long before the rise of Nazism, for example in the writings the educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn who wrote that “Blendlingsvölker haben keine echte Fortpflanzungskraft” [mixed races have no true power of procreation], or the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, who wrote about the “hatred for foreigners” as if it were a state religion.[29] Needless to say that the Germans deeply believed in German philosophy, German mathematics, German physics, even German medicine as something superior to French or British, letting alone Asian ones; for good reason: the Europeans usually put their names onto everything that belonged to nature but was first discovered by a nationality, for example: Grimm’s law in linguistics (named after Jacob Grimm), the Gaussian integral in mathematics (after Carl Friedrich Gauss), Hertz in physics (after Heinrich Hertz), the Freudian slip in psychology (after Sigmund Freud), or the Bundle of His in medicine (after Wilhelm His), etc. Letting alone the many German expressions that are untranslatable, for example Ansatz, Übermensch, Weltschmerz, Geist, Biedermeier, Realpolitik, Überfremdung, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Angst, Zeitgeist, Blitzkrieg, Wunderkind, Schadenfreude, Ursprache, etc. Of such a society – like the disciplined and rational German one that knows very well of the importance of names or names associated with timeless things and concepts – we may assume an unspoken agreement at work, one may call it a group’s cultural survival instinct, that one’s own names are mentioned often and frequently while another one’s names are mentioned less frequently or not at all, especially in the case of China that has been around for millennia. At least that would clarify why those German “China specialists” like Wolff, Hegel, and Wilhelm, etc. explained the entire Confucian tradition exclusively in Latin or German terminology.

Germanism, the deliberate use of only German words, is a cultural extreme: Our names make us proud; your names make us… translate them. The German educated class, the Bildungsbürgertum, was anti-foreign, weltfremd, full of itself, and thus biased against everything un-German. By the year 2005, all Asian traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism etc.) combined had a less than 1% share in the German population,[30] according to the Wissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst e. V. (REMID). The institution only distinguishes between various Christian categories: Glauben (confession) or Religionen (religions), not Kulturen (cultures). There is only one culture in Germany – German. Even the recent chancellor, Angela Merkel of the CDU (yes, Germany is governed by the Christian Democratic Union), openly declared multiculturalism dead: “Multikulti-Gesellschaft ist gescheitert”.[31] And those less than 1% Asian traditions assembled in Germany: mostly Asian immigrants, not native Germans. Germany does not know about multiculturism, only about assimilation – this is true in cultural matters, too: In Germany, Confucius is still a Philosoph; the shengren are still Heilige, the junzi some kind of edle Menschen.[32] Shengren, this central Chinese concept, is unreported. Granted, the German language is now under siege by American anglicisms: words like power, internet, statement, event, professional, news or highlights (but also Asian loanwords that were transmitted via America, like kungfu, pundit, guru or yoga) flooding the German mainstream culture – mainstream being an anglicism as well. Anglicisms are largely accepted because the German public is now informed about America, but knows little or nothing about the East. Already in the natural sciences, the life sciences, but also in finance, business, administration, journalism, entertainment, music, fashion and life-style, the German language has lost its standing. The true scale of German-language backwardness in the humanities, for example in Japanese or Chinese Studies, is outrageous. It has gotten so bad, that the German scholars abroad (just like the journalists) now prefer to say “We are the West” with the “United States is our closest ally”, talking, writing (or at least copying), and publishing entirely in English (at least this way they can communicate with the Japanese and Chinese scholars; that was impossible for the last 400 years), rather than having any further delusions about German-language scholarship. The German language in the past never related to anything; today no one wants to relate to German language. Hundreds of foreign terminologies were simply ignored or translated into familiar German terminology to create the illusion that German language accommodates all thought, cultures, and traditions of the planet. Even the Germans with the highest education, if they are not sinologists, they have probably never heard about tian, liyi, junzi, de, nor can they name three Chinese Dynasties, not have they ever heard about Li Bai, Xu Guangqi, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, not do they know who the legendary Liu Bei or Cao Cao are; and they almost certainly have no idea what the Xi You Ji is. No surprise that the Germans – from Hegel to the Nazis – thought (and many Westerners still think) that other cultures were unnecessary and redundant. It was plausible, in the words of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to “bring Civilization” to China – the Germans had always denied China to be one. Now that cradle of ignorance (the Holy Roman Empire, the legacy of the Dark Ages, the failure of Enlightenment in Germany, the Lutheran biblical German language, German philosophy, the Third Reich, etc.) has fallen, German military left toothless, and its ambitions of world domination temporary shattered, Germany faces a world, the Age of Humanity, in which foreign cultures and languages do not simply cancel each other out, they add up. Moreover, the Eastern traditions are all sage cultures; in particular Confucianism is all about knowing one’s place. Can Germany relate?

In The Politics of Post-Modernism (1989), Linda Hutcheon argued that Orientalism, the study of Eastern cultures, religions and languages, was the creation of Western scholarship. Human beings cannot not create; the emphasis is on what exactly is created, why, and how it is used: nation states, industries, overseas empires and world languages were a good start. Western societies searched for new knowledge, while Eastern societies tried to memories it; thus – despite its smaller populations – the West had amassed more knowledge than the East, the master of tradition and repetition, could ever commit to memory. The Western people had allied with the machines and sought to conquer nature, while the Eastern people had put humans first and sought harmoniousness among its people. Both sides practiced their ways to extremes, developed significantly apart, with different strengths, but also weaknesses, so that when East and West finally found each other, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz cried:

But who would have believed that there is on earth a people who, though we are in our view so very advanced in every branch of behavior, still surpasses us in comprehending the precepts of civil life? Yet now we find this to be so among the Chinese, as we learn to know them better.[33]

The philosophers Leibniz, Wolff, Hegel, Herder, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all took the role of witnesses who saw nothing yet wanted to declare something about the East. They played with the imaginations of their German audiences, yet had never seen nor experienced anyone unlike them. Their philosophies helped fashioning Buddhism and Indian philosophy and the Chinese traditions in such ways that it sounded most familiar and comprehensible (albeit cheap and counterfeit) to the German-speaking world: a magical, pre-Christian world deconstructed and thoroughly analyzed through philosophical reflection and critical monologue: China has philosophers, but not in a Western sense. China has human rights, but not in a Western sense. China embraces the rule of the people, but not in a Western sense. China has a religion, many religions, but not in a Western sense – no matter what happened in China, it all sounded half-baked, imperfect, and unenlightened.

When German scholarship used biblical vocabulary to describe the Orient, it unconsciously supported Christianity and its aims at world domination; when they used folkloric vocabulary, they unconsciously supported the exotic ‘Otherness’ of a magical and spiritualized East. And had they – only hypothetically since the German philosophers did not know the indigenous names – used the true names for sheng(ren), rishi, bodhisattva and all the other Oriental concepts, the Germans and Europeans would have risked to build sovereign competitors in Asia and to hold a candle to them, too. One may compare it to a marriage of cultures in which the West would voluntarily take on the family name of the East, thereby discontinue its own family heritage: Goethe ein Shengren? No, it had to be the correct way: Konfuzius der Philosoph!

Oriental traditions had to be discontinued. Eastern thought now became part of the Western family and its system of classification. The foreign names were dealt this way, but how about traditional Eastern concepts, were they just re-named so that they now looked Western? Had Oriental concepts been incorporated into the Western mainstream without mentioning its source? Sure that happened: Many German thinkers indeed integrated Eastern thought into their own philosophies. Wolff’s practical philosophy or moral philosophy was in parts inspired by the Confucian classics.[34] Hegel’s philosophy of history and Weltgeist or “world-spirit”, and “Great Man Theory”, which took Europe’s intelligentsia by storm, were indeed extension of Mahayana Buddhism’s concepts such as Brahmatmaikyam (the merge of Brahman and atman) and Hindu tradition of Vardhamana Mahavira (The Great Hero) or the Tirthankaras (Sanskrit for ford makers). In his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819), Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Wollte ich die Resultate meiner Philosophie zum Maßstab der Wahrheit nehmen, so müßte ich dem Buddhismus den Vorzug vor anderen Religionen zugestehn” [If I wanted to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I would have to concede to Buddhism in preference to other religions]. Nietzsche’s concepts of Übermensch (over-man, super-human) and Meister- und Sklavenmoral (master- and slave-morality) were heavily influenced by the Hindu concepts of vasudeva (god-like persons) or and jatis (hereditary groups or castes). Nietzsche confessed that, after having read Louis Jacolliot’s 1876 translation of the Manava Dharmasastra, the Laws of Manu became his “epitome of all civic moral order”[35]. Martin Heidegger and his philosophy of Western being-ness and time was a direct response to Eastern concepts of non-being-ness and non-time. His “Hammer” reminds us of the cook Pao’s knife in Taoism. Heidegger stayed faithful to the Western philosophical approach, yet he confessed that there were other, more comprehensive, ways of thinking that had been lost to the West during the Greek antiquity, but needed to be re-considered in time:

No one knows what the fate of thinking will look like. In a lecture in Paris in 1964, which I did not give myself but was presented in a French translation, I spoke under the title: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” I thus make a *distinction* between philosophy, that is metaphysics, and thinking as I understand it. The thinking that I contrast with philosophy in this lecture—which is principally done by an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek “aletheia” (unhiddenness) — this thinking is, compared to metaphysical thinking, much simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity it is much more difficult to carry out. And it calls for new care with language, not the invention of new terms, as I once thought, but a return to the primordial content of our own language, which is, however, constantly in the process of dying off. A coming thinker, who will perhaps be faced with the task of really taking over this thinking that I am attempting to *prepare,* will have to obey a sentence Heinrich von Kleist once wrote, and that reads “I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit.[36]

The next “thinking” – that Heidegger contrasted with philosophy -was a “simpler” one, “not relying on the invention of new terms”; it was expressed in pure language, and therefore “more difficult” to express? Is that not a description of the sagacious approach to thinking? Heidegger was talking about the sage’s thinking. Was Heidegger’s “return to the primordial content” of language not similar in essence to a lecture on the language of the Confucian Classics or the Vedic Rigveda? Possibly, but he would never say that explicitly. Just like Kant and Hegel before him, Heidegger invented thousands of new philosophical word-monsters – a great gift to Germanism: Sprachursprungsgeschehen, Spielbewegung, Schickung, Techno-Logie, dichterisches Bewohnen, Sein, etc.[37] His idea, in accordance with the Imperial spirit of his time, was to Germanize all the important development milestones in human history, the cultural version of copyrighting and patenting – the above mentioned terminology being a case in point: they served his philosophy about the Ursprung der Sprache (The Origin of Language). Heidegger certainly knew that the relentless expansion of one’s own language was just as vital for Germany as the discouragement of foreign languages: “Language creates world”, “The essence of language is the ‘name'” and naming is “the establishing of being by means of the word”.[38] The Third Reich took Heidegger’s advice very serious and created tens of thousands new monsters like Endsieg, Vernichtungsschlacht, Einkesselungen, Konzentrationslager, Totaler Krieg, Untermensch, reinrassig, Sonderbehandlung, Volk ohne Raum, Drang nach Osten, etc.[39] which Gordon Craig once described as the “sinister combination of the language of might and the language of philosophy”,[40] and Victor Klemperer wished it would vanished to rescue the German soul: “it isn’t only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind […]: the language of Nazism”.[41] There is no doubt that a people’s culture affects that people’s language and thought. The Germans were always eager to expand their own vocabulary and concept collection; just as eager as they avoided the vocabulary and concepts of other people. It is therefore self-evident that German Kulturwissenschaften (the humanities) about really any other culture such as China or India cannot be accurate – it will always be a German version of some original. If China or India or the United States or any other people understand themselves and know who they are, and value their own names and concepts just as much as the Germans do theirs, then any German version of their culture cannot be good enough.

The Chinese shengren who had composed the Confucian Classics and the Vedic rishis who had composed the Rigveda were not Philosophen but shengren and rishis, and they used a simpler yet more complex language, just as Heidegger has called for: “because of its simplicity, it is much more difficult to carry out”. Heidegger did not call the way of thinking he had in mind sageness or sagacity or the sage’s way, and he would be out of his mind, according to his own ideas about language, world-creation, and names, to use foreign terminology, Chinese or Indian ones; yet what he described looked a lot like it: “the essence of Greek aletheia”? Heidegger was dying to become more than just a philosopher – a sagely, spiritual being perhaps. Germany, of course, would never let him have his way – he became the first Nazi philosopher instead and recommended Adolf Hitler as the savior of the German nation.[42]

The philosophical approach to knowledge, like the scientific approach, does not know of ethics. While in the teachings of the sages, the sage’s own moral composition is of vital importance, in philosophy the identity of the thinking subject is irrelevant. We hear wisdom, and we ask from whom. We hear philosophy, and we ask about what. For a philosophical argument to be logical and sound, ethics are quite irrelevant. Even when ethics become the object of the philosophical enquiry, that enquiry is neither bound nor limited by ethics. That is why in science and philosophy – unlike the teaching by the sages – the human world and human beings are treated as mere objects at best. Heidegger introduced Nazism into philosophy and supported Nazi ideology[43]; yet his life work is considered philosophy and Heidegger himself is considered one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His philosophical writings are difficult to read, and in his interview on the future of thinking, he expressed his longing for a much simpler, less metaphysical language to express his thoughts. Would he have liked to be called einen Weisen? In another famous lecture, ‘Germania’, he suggests the world is a creation of the poets.[44] With so many word creations on his own, surely Heidegger saw himself as a poetic being. The interview ‘On the Future of Thinking’ above suggested he would, and Heidegger’s many essays on “spirituality”, “spiritual being(s)” and “one’s spiritual being”[45] confirmed that he had always been a humanist and aesthete at heart; and to him “the defining of relationship” was the “last word in wisdom”.[46] But then, modern Germany did not have such a title, die Weisen, and no concept for sagehood either; already Goethe who had earlier suggested that among the many philosophers those few who embraced the Mittelweg truly deserved to be called die Weisen[47] had been ignored by German society. Philosophers had always been the end of the flagpole in Germany. Above them are only clouds and the sky.

The longing for the East is first a longing for adventure and second a soul search; the first is the escape, the latter from failure. The European romantics looked eastwards for an exotic adventure and escape from the rigidness and boredoms of European life. The Germans in particular looked eastwards for a substitute that could replace their lost soul. The soullessness of the Germans had been given a wretched face in Faust (1808). Goethe’s revival of an old 16^th century German legend of a sad man, Faustus, who made a pact with the devil and sold his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge (again, knowledge as the Western promise) and thus power, became the symbol of the inhumanity of a cold, rationalized German society and the results of Western egoism, individualism, materialism, and a total disregard for the sufferings of others – for example the innocent girl Gretchen whose life was shattered by Faust – caused by the urge to either manipulate and control people or else destroy them.

Goethe’s drama is a Christian one, and Faust is – maybe disappointingly so – saved by the interventions of some angels and God Himself. Regardless of the happy ending, the primordial fear of the Germans is well captured: the fear of going to hell for one’s evil deeds not because of the evilness of the deeds, but because one wanted to have the power to do evil in first place.

The Faustian nature was the allegorical, unstable psychology of Europe that swung from brutal animalism to divine delusions but never settled its Mittelweg or middle way. Faust’s faith is decided by the interplay of Mephistopheles and God (the divine) and humanity’s unbearable littleness. The idea that the affairs of men could be guided by the wisdom of man, among the people, and that men of highest virtues could cultivate themselves into good-natured beings, sages, was evidently absent in German culture. Faust could be seen as philosopher or scientist, but not as a sage. Wisdom in Goethe’s play is supernatural and divine. Faust ignored the wisdom accumulated by humanity, and instead desired quick knowledge and the short-sighted power over his fellow human beings that comes with it. All Western society is a bit like this: short-sighted, short-tempered, impatient, and ignorant. The Western society lead by philosophers sees a problem, isolates it, and proposes a quick solution. The Eastern society lead by sages however sees the past, the people, the family, the history, the living reality, and thus it adjusts to and learns from it.

In Christianity, humanity has been dispossessed of its wisdom: “If you need wisdom, ask your generous God” or “For the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding”.[48] That is why the missionaries Gützlaff and Grünwedel, for example, permanently confused the wise with the divine and the ethical with the sacred. They saw holiness everywhere, and China and India were holy place.

Hence Christianity’s contempt for those “arrogant Asian elites”, including Chinese or Japanese Emperors, who virtuously and wisely guided their people, who evidently thought of themselves as god-like beings on the one hand, and Christianity’s silent sympathy with the same elites of the East once the missionaries in Asia were treated like little human gods themselves:

Wir sind […] zunächst einmal erstaunt darüber, dass es zwei Künste mit unterschiedlichen Eigenschaften gibt: die [griechische] Kunst, die aus der menschlichen Gestalt Götter erschuf, und die [asiatische] Kunst, die Götter in Menschengestalt darstellte. [We are (…) first of all surprised that there are two arts with different properties: the (Greek) art which created gods based on the human form, and the (Asian) art which represented humans as gods.[49]

Apart from morality and wisdom, teaching in Christianity was a matter of the Lord, too. Only God could teach humanity, the Word of God conveniently spread through his mouthpieces and servants: those saints and priests and missionaries. So, the missionaries in China taught; they never learned as much. Unsurprisingly, the Christians themselves and their homelands in Europe never became an edge more Asian, neither culturally nor mentally.

In the German speaking world Weisheit was understood as “göttliche Weisheit” and “Gottes Weisheit”,[50] with fatal consequences for the project of German orientalism. While those European languages that continued the Latin tradition of the word sapientia for sagacity had a useful synonym for wisdom that was without biblical-religious connotation, the German speaking world – the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations – on the other hand discontinued the Latin original tradition of the word sapientia which became synonymous with myth or legend, and instead over-burdened the German word for wisdom, Weisheit, with biblical-religious meaning. A retardation is usually a delaying. It seems retarded that the Germans travelled so far, to see a China that was so different from their own German culture, with tens of thousand new names and unheard concepts, and nevertheless used the most boring, stale, and familiar words like “Weisheit” and “Philosophen” and “Heilige” to describe it. Yet, that is what they did, virtually all of them. It was a risky Faustian bargain, no less: The Germans – in alliance with other European powers if necessary – willfully re-invented foreign traditions and replaced all the correct names with European terminology out of love for Jesus Christ and humankind. After all, what could China do if it was constantly accused of being a Christian nation all along? If the Germans succeeded it would give them unprecedented power and control over the kaput cultures of the East. If not, well, the Europeans were always prepared to use force.

This at first seemed like a triviality, but after hundred of years of German and English Oriental studies, a gargantuan pattern emerged: To the Germans, Confucius was a holy man; to the Anglo-Americans, Confucius was a sage. The problem of meaning and correct translation was most striking when the German and English terms were cross-translated: German Heilige became English “Holy man” (or saints), but that could not be correct because Confucius was a sage, not a holy man. Likewise, English sage became German “Weiser”, but that could not be correct because Confucius was a Heiliger. Standard Comparative Studies between two cultures (Chinese-German, Chinese-English, or German-English) was oblivious to the problem. Only when comparing three cultures, the great disparity of translation and meaning posed a problem. The English translation or the German translation, one of them or both reflected a grave misunderstanding of Chinese culture. They could not be both right: there is a great difference between a saint and a sage. Besides, in Cultural Studies the key terminology should not be relative to the culture of the observer, German or English, otherwise global scholarship would end up with hundreds of variations of what is called Chinese Studies. It is truly an impossible situation: in Germany the shengren are Heilige (saints); in America the shengren are sages (Weisen).

Throughout European orientalism it seemed inevitable that the discoverers, missionaries and scholars gave familiar names to the unfamiliar. The first reason was physiological: All languages in the world had roughly the same amount of vocabulary, which lead the people in the past believe that – in line with the Tower of Babel legend – all languages were just translations of each other. So, why not conveniently sticking to the familiar in a country far away from home. Today, in the computer age, we know that the old thinking was fallacious: vocabularies do not cancel each other out, they add up. The sole reason why all languages in the world had roughly the same amount of vocabulary was the cognitive limitation of the human brain. Only if we don’t know a word do we translate. If we knew all words, we would never translate at all. The second reason was sociological: The first Portuguese missions to India, for example, called Hindu temples just churches.[51] Likewise, the German thinkers, since they had no concept of sages, simply called the sages gods (Götter) or god-like (Göttliche). And because calling apples mushrooms feels awkward, those scholars could not help but feeling rigorously appalled by their own misinterpretations:

Damit sind wir zu dem Reich des Dalai Lama gekommen, wo der Mensch als Gott verehrt wird, was dem abstrakten Verstandes ganz zuwider ist, auch am Christentum.[52] [This brings us to the kingdom of the Dalai Lama who is worshipped as God, which is quite contrary to [our] abstract reasoning, even in Christianity.]

The Dalai Lama is not worshipped as God, but worshipped as the Dalai Lama. God is not the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama is not God. Kant, who as a good Christian believes in God but not in the Dalai Lama, is the problem here, not Tibetan Buddhism.

Edward Said called such European naming practice the “repetitious pseudo-incarnations of some great original (Christ, Europe, the West) they [the Orientals] were supposed to have been imitating”.[53] For Richard Wilhelm, the Chinese sages were “Gottmenschen” (God-men),[54] and Confucius was “inspired to become a God”.[55] For Walther Darré, Confucius was the “founder of a doctrine of God based on ethics”,[56] and so on.

The unsuitability of German terminology for obviously un-European concepts was rarely addressed. The German philosophers, orientalists, and sponsors of Oriental thought could have adopted the transliterated and Germanized Chinese terms: Konfuzius der Shengren. But they refused to do that. Instead they kept calling Confucius and the sages die Heiligen and projected their incompetence onto the Chinese culture itself that now seemed wrong, irrational, backward, and incorrect.[57] Hegel’s account of Sino-Tibetan culture, Das Mongolische Prinzip (1837), was certainly not written for his Sino-Tibetan friends – he had none. In his text, the philosopher described the Chinese people who all venerated the Buddha or the Lama as God, and then went on to describe the “Unwahrheit” [Untruthfulness] of the Chinese system (religion/tradition).[58] Again, Hegel – following the tradition of Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant – had probably never heard of a single Chinese Buddhist term like 二觀 (er guan), 輪 (lun), 人因 (ren yin), 皆空 (jie kong), 相續心 (xiang xu xin), etc. – I have Soothill and Hodous’ Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms (1934) in mind -, had never been to China, and he was ignorant of those foreign languages.

The German writer Thomas Mann (1942), the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky (1999, 2008), the Nobel Prize Laureate Elias Canetti (1992), and the historians Suzanne Marchand (2009) and Kamakshi Murti (2001) all had wrote about the violent psychological nature of the Europeans in general and of the Germans in particular that called for a set of national characteristics, the spirit of those people, which in turn could explain their violent actions against others:

The soulless modern age that haunts the Germans. […] Pessimism, skepticism, rationalism, Protestantism, Bildungsbürgertum, the Humboldt’sche University Reform, professionalism, philosophers… all that gargantuan strength of the German nation in the 18^th-20^th centuries of totalities, violence and war is also her downfall in times of peace: the condemnation of the German national character and its soullessness.[59]

The cultural critic George Santayana in his The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis (1968) called the true source of German power “German philosophy”. German philosophy was void of actual experience, cold and ruthless, rational, logical and it did not allow other forces to interfere with it. It suited their ignorance. There was no doubt that a country’s national character also formed that nation’s philosophy, as the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte famously remarked:

Was für eine Philosophie man wähle, hängt sonach davon ab, was man für ein Mensch ist: denn ein philosophisches System ist nicht ein todter Hausrath, den man ablegen oder annehmen könnte, wie es uns beliebte, sondern es ist beseelt durch die Seele des Menschen, der es hat.[60] [What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.][61]

George Santayna even created a new social theory: the German “state of mind that places itself at the center of all the people of the world and pretends to think for them, with little or no concern for the emotional, psychological or even physical damage that is done to others” otherwise known as egotism. Germany was constantly in the survival mode.

The use of physical and psychological violence: constant aggressiveness, Sendungsbewusstsein, and the conquest of nature (and to secure that conquest by occupation and policies that make it difficult for the conquered to get atop of the situation, for years and decades) and the people that live in conjunction with nature, and materialism had all been major themes in Western history. Eastern history in comparison seemed less adventurous and more passive; or less successful, depending on asking the victors.

Imperial Japan’s last resort to despicable measure of violence in the war against China could be traced back to its coercion by Western powers and the rapid Westernization and – after the model of Prussia – militarizing of its forces in order to either also become an imperial power or else subject to Western rule. The Western powers in Asia had not only brought war machinery with them, the lesser evil. They also brought with them the most violent psychologies: Hegel’s Weltgeist (world spirit) and the idea that Asia has to submit to the superior European civilization and its history, Prussian Realpolitik that considered all relations as power relations, Weber’s “Ideal Culture”, Nietzsche’s Das blonde Biest (the Blond Beast, meaning the conquering Aryans), Marx “Communist Manifesto”, and Spencer’s “Social Darwinism”: In the great struggle among nations for their survival the inferior culture was – at the slightest sign of weakness – believed to be surely eliminated:[62]

Edward Said had demonstrated how academic Orientalism was subject to the European imperialistic approach to control and subjugate the Middle and Far East. Had the Germans in the 17^th and 18^th centuries been weak and erroneous in calling Oriental sages “Heilige”; the ongoing Western imperialism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries gave them no reason to correct the mistake – it served Christianity well: Confucian China had been Evangelized already: Confucius was ein Heiliger, Heilige are shengren, The Bible is sheng jing, the Holy Spirit is sheng ling, Christmas is sheng dan jieand so on. Why taking it back?