In Paris on September 21, 1827, Europe’s most famous philosopher and France’s first professional sinologist met to discuss the intellectual traditions of China. The sinologist, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, lauded the “ancient oriental doctrine” of Daoism, which he claimed had been known to all the peoples of the pre-Christian world. The philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, accepted that Daoism was the fully realized expression of Chinese thought – but for him, it was not philosophy at all, only a “developed religion of magic.” This marked the end of a transformation in European engagement with the China. Just a generation earlier, the philosophes of the French Enlightenment had looked there for familiar models of Confucian reason. How, then, had China become a location of exotic alternatives of Daoist wisdom?
In this paper, I argue that professional sinologists and philosophers together built their idea of sagesse orientale, or “eastern wisdom,” on the foundations of the Jesuit missionaries’ search for divinely-inspired prisca sapientia, or “ancient wisdom,” reworked through the interpretive lens of the late Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment ended with the disenchantment of the West, it also led to the enchantment of the East. In this way, China posed new questions that independent academic disciplines including both philosophy and orientalism were set up to answer. Both exponents of progress and admirers of the past converged on the idea of a monolithic East as an enchanted and ancient land, incommensurate with the modern West.
