Orientalism essays

Orientalism essays There is no way to divide the world into us and them and still avoid conflict between the two groups, yet this is how the world has been seen through the eyes of some for much of history. People try to define themselves by that which they are not, and in the case of the Orient, these people saw others who were completely different from them. The cultural and religious differences made it easy to separate themselves from the Orient, but according to the west, the differences did not stop there. The Oriental seemed physically or mentally different. The western world looked at the intricacies of the east, and labeled them different and inferior. The Newtonian Revolution presented a good argument for this point of view. The Orient was stuck in the past, and resistant to change. In this way, the people of the Orient seemed to be behind the rest of the world This supposed difference in thinking boiled down to how people viewed the world around them. Henry Kissinger describes it like this in his essay Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy. Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer... Bernard Cohen describes it in his book The Newtonian Revolution as follows. The signs of the revolution can also be seen in internal aspects of science: aims, methods, results. Bacon and Descartes agreed on one aim of the new science, that the fruits of scientific investigation would be the improvement of mans condition here on earth: agriculture, medicine, navigation and transportation, communication, warfare, manufacturing, mining. Many Scientists of the seventeenth century held an older point of view, that the pursuit of scientific understanding of nature was practical insofar as it might advance mans comprehen...