Ernest Gellner and the Limits of Understanding

Abstract

This chapter argues that while Ernest Gellner was a polymath who was one of the world’s leading authorities on many Western ideological systems—Enlightenment philosophy, Islam and communism among them—he found it difficult to deal with relativism and particularly with contradictory thought systems. This made him unsympathetic to Eastern thought, for instance in China and Japan. So while his ideas are an extraordinarily rich start to our understanding of the world, they have to be revised and extended to the multi-polar world of today.

Comment on Alan Macfarlane’s ‘Ernest Gellner and the Limits of Understanding’

Adam Horálek

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

adam.horalek@upce.cz

The chapter by Alan Macfarlane is one which will resonate in my head for some time. Even though Alan and I stand on different sides of the spectrum of approaches to Ernest Gellner’s work and I find Alan’s text very provocative and perhaps too critical or averse, it was very stimulating for me to read the text for at least two different reasons. First, it has shown me a different perspective that I do not agree much with, though I still have to admit there is a lot of truth in it. Second, Alan rejects Gellner’s modernist approach and provides his own, in Weberian tradition, inspired enchantment philosophy. As mentioned above, despite disagreement between the two of us, I think his chapter will remain in my thoughts for a long time.

For me, it was a great comfort to see similarities in the troubles Alan Macfarlane and I have faced when studying Far Eastern societies. When I was reading about Alan’s fruitless search for modernity in Japanese society, it immediately reminded me of my own research on both sides of the Taiwan Strait between Mainland China and Taiwan. Alan’s transition from Gurungs to Japanese and Chinese is also similar to my own development—from Chinese Muslims (the Hui) to Chinese and Han and finally to Taiwanese. I mention these similarities because the chapter points out so many crucial issues one has to take into account if one wants to study such different cultures like China. And I found the approach from the enchantment perspective very inspiring.

The Weberian idea of disenchantment in modern societies has been neglected in my work, and by reading this chapter I realize that I really missed out on a crucial aspect of Gellner’s (and Weber’s) modernization theory. Or, to be more precise, I may have overlooked it as obvious and not worth mentioning. What a Eurocentric perspective.

What I do not agree with so much is the extent or exclusivity of enchantment as the only and true perspective to understand Far Eastern societies, or better, the extent of explanation we can make through the concept of enchanted modern societies, especially in the case of China. Yes, it is true that ‘they do not separate off people and things, mind and spirit, reason and emotion’. I would add: not as much as we (the West) do. The Chinese cultural revitalization and movements present in current China (as, e.g., Kevin Carrico describes regarding the Han clothing movement) do refill the separated with the enchanted, but how does this differ from the search for enchantment through yoga, Buddhist mysticism, and so on, among Westerners? Or, in my research, how does this differ from the search for true Taiwaneseness through re-rooting with a Japanese or aboriginal past?

From my perspective, I switched from studying the, let’s say, ‘core’ civilizations towards the borderlands of Taiwan and Korea. And in this frame, I think Japan is not like China or otherwise. The case of Taiwan shows that the modernist approach may have limits in explaining the origins of nationalism, but can still be a valid perspective for understanding the mechanism of nationalism in the Eastern context. At the same time, the Taiwanese case shows me that enchantment in Japanese and Chinese traditions are two different cases. It might remind me of the Eurocentric orientalist limitations with which we treat the East as a homogenous, in Gellnerian words, ‘Modiglianian’ civilizational space. As Alan points out very correctly, even China is not homogenous, and we do not have to take this into account only with its countless (while rejecting China’s classification of fifty-five minzu) ethnic minorities, but even when studying the majority of Hans only. The idea (or ideology) of Han-ness is still a nationalistic project rather than an intrinsic identity matrix.

On the other hand, I regularly teach at Taiwanese universities about their Taiwaneseness and their nationalism. The discussions after lectures always open eyes and minds on both sides. And in these moments, I fully embrace the enchantment and the students leave their world for a while and watch it from a ‘modernist surface’. Only through this lens can we better understand a concept like guangxi, which can be translated as ‘connections’—but is of a completely different tangled web of meanings, symbols, and so on than in Western tradition. The ‘bribe’ there is not a ‘bribe’ here. But we must be careful. I’ve faced many attempts by Westerners to enchant the disenchanted only because it is from the East. I think we always face the ambivalent position in which we try to avoid our Eurocentric Western modernist scientific dogmatism on the one hand while simultaneously trying to avoid Western Romanticism and Orientalism on the other.

In Alan’s chapter, he mentions that ‘China, like Japan, shows that Magic and Modernity … are compatible’. Is this really so? In my opinion, they are not compatible, but rather combatable … but the battle is never-ending. If modernity were to suddenly replace enchantment and empty the enchanted land, then there would be only one positivistic scientific modern culture, wouldn’t there? The cultural differences even among highly modern societies are results of remaining enchantment in them, not of their different modernities. I think that while we are trying to include enchantment in our understanding of Eastern modernity, we forget that we thereby unintentionally develop binarism between the enchanted East and modern West. But isn’t it a rather artificial delimitation? And, in Said’s words, where is the West and the East? Where do we draw the border between the enchanted and disenchanted worlds? Isn’t this line rather spaceless and present in all cultures and societies regardless of cardinal directions, though with stronger presence of enchantment in Eastern societies?

While thinking about Alan’s chapter, I conclude that the major objective of it is to provoke in a stimulating way. And this is done marvellously. It shows clearly where the limits of Gellner’s legacy are—they are geographical and ontological. The clear binary opposition and separation are not present in the modern Eastern world. Or it is not present in the same way we are used to. I also admire Alan’s deep and structured focus on the dichotomy between modernity and enchantment, but at the same time I think the East–West binarism, which is much emphasized in the chapter, is based on what Alan himself is aware of as a limit of understanding the East—by creating the East through the Western concept of enchantment.