Romantic Orientalism treated Asia as a means to regenerate Europe, not as an end

Evidence

What Bouvard has in mind—the regeneration of Europe by Asia—was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. And from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this prescription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly argued in La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia’s use to modern Europe. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 319

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Romantic Orientalist project as a foundational concept: Asia’s value measured purely by its utility to Europe’s regeneration.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit on how the West constructs the Orient; this ‘Asia for Europe’s use’ move prefigures later Islamophobia readings about instrumentalizing the Muslim world.
• SEED: Angle on how ‘revival through the East’ rhetoric — from Schlegel to New Age — always positions the East as raw material for Western renewal.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 319