The Ethical Premise

          Yet this is Said’s next step.  More disconcerting to him than Orientalism’s questionable ‘essentialist’ assumptions is his belief that this academic discipline “hides the interests of the Orientalist,”[4] whose guild’s veneer of unbiased scholarship supposedly masks its ancient “history of complicity with [Western] imperial power.”[5]  Although the evidence he marshals in support of this claim is neither comprehensive[6] nor demonstrably representative of the Western Orientalist literature[7] – and although he uses this evidence to sketch his own ‘essentialist’ image of Western attitudes toward the Orient[8] – these inconsistencies and methodological imperfections obscure a deeper flaw:

          Even if Said had incontrovertibly demonstrated that all Orientalists have an interest in, and serve as accomplices to, Western imperialism, he still would fail to invalidate Orientalist scholarship.  No criticism of Orientalist motives or ethics can disprove Orientalist-produced knowledge[9] – so long as such scholarship is judged on its accuracy alone.  Yet by postulating a poststructuralist epistemology, Said can ignore the factual validity of a scholar’s work – and can choose instead to judge it according to the ethical validity of his motives.  And measured against the yardstick of Said’s anti-imperialist moral views, Orientalists tend to come up short.  In sum, by eliminating any epistemological criteria for judging scholarship, Said becomes free to judge it on its ethical underpinnings or implications.[10]

The Ontological Premise Set

          In this context, Said criticizes four “principal dogmas of Orientalism”: first, the assumption of an ahistorical and ontological difference between Occident and Orient; second, a preference for classical Oriental texts over modern Oriental evidence; third, the assertion of the Orient’s monolithic nature; and fourth, an underlying fear of, or will to dominate, the Orient.[11]  The fourth ‘dogma’ is only an ethical prescription, not an academic premise, but the remaining three are, as he argues, questionable assumptions.  Still, his obvious misinterpretations of Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis[12] suggest that Said is prone to misreading Orientalist scholarship, which may discredit even this portion of his argument.

          Yet Said himself subordinates this ontological critique to the epistemological and ethical premises discussed above.  He acknowledges that “the mind requires order,”[13] that Orientalism fulfills this need through its “schematization of the entire Orient,”[14] and that “cultural differences” play a “constitutive role” in human relations[15] – revealing how a reformed Orientalism, at least, might attain empirical accuracy.  Nevertheless, Said keeps judging scholarship on the basis of its ethical implications rather than its objectivity:

          “[The] main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism,” he believes, is whether one can “divide human society, as indeed human society seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures…and survive the consequences humanly....I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding…hostility” among these groups.[16]  Thus, although such queries yield a detailed exposition of Edward Said’s moral philosophy, Orientalism is hardly a substantive critique of Orientalist scholarship.