Orientalistika ir komparatyvistinės studijos

ENThe article begins with a concise history of oriental studies and of the comparative study of civilizations, and then proceeds to analyze the main stages of development of oriental studies with a due emphasis on national schools and individual scholars. The historical origins of oriental studies in the West are examined, including Marco Polo's contribution to the understanding of Pastern civilizations and the role of Chrislian missionaries (I. I oyola, L. Prois, R. de Nobili, M. Ricci) in the history of oriental studies and the comparative study of civilizations. A special attention is paid to the development of classical oriental studies (A. Anquelil Duperrone, J. P. Abel-Remusat, S. deSacy, W. Jones, H. T. Colebrooke, Ch. Wilkins). Consequently, it is shown how the notion of civilization evolved through the Age of Enlightenment (Voltaire, G. Leibniz, ]. W. Goethe, ]. Herder, W. Humboldt) and was modified by the Romantic reaction to the apparent contradictions of Western civilization in the form of "longing for the Last" (E-R. de Chateaubriand, T. Gauthier, F. Schlegel), the article attempts to reveal the innovative advance of comparative methodology in solving diverse cultural problems, as they were posed and considered in the works of such influential thinkers as A. Schlegel, A. Schopenhauer, F.Nietzsche, M. Muller, P. Deussen.Another problem touchedupon in the article is the uneven, cumulative character of the development of scientific knowledge along with a detailed consideration of writers who developed contemporary Western oriental studies, respectively, in Erench (A. Poucher, L. Renou, L. Chavannes, H. Cordier, P. Masson-Oursel, H. Corbin, L. Massignon), England (J. Perguson, J. Legge, H. A. Giles, J. Needham), German (R. Wilhelm, A. Forke, M. Hartmann), the United States (Ch. A. Moore, R. I. Ames, N. Sivin, H. Smith), Russia and the Soviet Union (O. Rozenberg, S. Oldenburg, V. Alekseev, N. Konrad), India (S. Radhakrishnan, P. T Raju, A. Coomaraswamy), China (I lu Shih, Fung Yu Lan), Japan (K. Nishida, T. Imamichi, D. T. Suzuki, T. Izutsu, D. Ikeda, H. Nakamura), Islam (S. H. Nasr, P.Said, A. Abdel-Malek).The deconstruction of the main concepts of classical oriental studies opens new methodological perspectives to the postmodern theory of civilization and oriental studies. By exploring the "marginal" cultures of the world and treating their symbols and forms as equal to those of the "central" cultures of the East and West, postmodern comparative studies look for more complex models of civilization. The latter should replace traditional ones, which seem too simplistic in their characteristic overestimation of the East and West dimension of world cultures. Comparative methodology accepts the relativism of postmodern mentality and admits that the traditional principles and methods of thinking yielded by Western civilization cannot be regarded as universal and encompassing all of human nature. Therefore, it supplements the traditional demand for impartiality with a new methodic stipulation that the cultural and social perspective of the student of culture should not influence the strategy of the comparative analysis.