Anti-Orientalists often relied on the very German scholarship they condemned

Evidence

Guénon thought the Germans grossly exaggerated the importance of Buddhism in the history of Indian culture and he thought that the notion of an Indo-Aryan group of languages was absurd. German Orientalism was ‘an instrument in the service of German national ambition’. … The irony is that his ideas about the primordial nature of the Vedanta derived ultimately from the theories of German Orientalists. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 574

Categorization

• SEED: The irony that critics of Orientalism depend on Orientalist scholarship is a strong essay angle on intellectual debt and denunciation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific German Orientalists supplied Guénon’s Vedanta theories?
• XREF: connects to: Occupation-era French intellectuals cultivated deliberate rudeness toward Germans as patriotic resistance — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 472

Related

• Sympathetic German Orientalism also enabled anti-imperialist critique of Western academia (similarity 0.83)
• Anti-Orientalist critics ignored the actual scholarly merits of Orientalist findings (similarity 0.81)
• German Orientalism was purely scholarly because Germany lacked imperial presence in the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• German Orientalists worst distorted Asian doctrines via Western philosophical frames (similarity 0.80)
• Guénon critiqued Orientalism from within yet sustained a lasting intellectual legacy (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars (similarity 0.80)
• German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire. (similarity 0.80)
• Learned Orientalist scholarship pressed ideological myths into service (similarity 0.80)
• Sustained national imperial interest was required for Orientalist scholarship to thrive (similarity 0.80)
• Guénon’s critique preceded and encompassed Said’s later conclusions about Orientalism. (similarity 0.79)
• German Orientalism stayed textual because Germany held no colonial presence in the Orient (similarity 0.79)
• Guénon foresaw that German Orientalism served Nazi political ambitions before Nazism arrived (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.79)
• German Orientalism’s weak colonial ties show interests did not drive sovereign thought (similarity 0.78)