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The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant
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Here is the first volume of the 'Story of Civilization,' 'Our Oriental Heritage'. This volume deals first with the establishment of civilization, then takes up, in rich fascinating detail, the color complex dramas of the Near East, India and her neighbors, and the Far East. The story is carried up to mid-1930s.
Every one of the thousands of facts in this volume have been twice checked. It begins with a chapter on the nature and conditions of civilization: offers a 109-page Introduction on 'The Establishment of Civilization' ...an attempt to meet Voltaire's demand: 'I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.' It goes on to record the cultural history...the economic and political organization, the science and art, the religion and morals, the literature and philosophy, the customs and manners...of Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea, and Persia to their conquest by Alexander; and narrates the history of civilization in India from the Vedas to Mahatma Gandhi, in China from Confucius to Chiang Kai-shek, and in Japan from the earliest times to mid-1930s.
- Sales Rank: #974351 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon Schuster
- Published on: 1976
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.75" h x 6.75" w x 2.25" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 1049 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Most helpful customer reviews
168 of 176 people found the following review helpful.
The spirit of the Enlightenment lives
By Jean-Francois Virey
"A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean." - Will Durant
*Our Oriental Heritage* is the first volume in Will and Ariel Durant's eleven-volume history of civilization from the Sumerians to the Napoleonic era - the work of a lifetime, or rather two of them, as its publication spanned no less four decades (1935-1975) and eight years were spent on these first nine hundred pages alone.
Although well integrated by Durant's systematic approach, *Our Oriental Heritage* is actually four books in one (or five, if you include the opening ninety-page essay on the nature of civilization): the first one deals with the Near East - Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea and Persia - from the fourth millenium to the third century B.C. (275p); the second, with India from the Vedas to Gandhi, who was then still alive and, well, maybe not kicking (245p); the third, with China from the "Age of the Philosophers" to Sun Yat Sen (190p); and the fourth, with Japan from its mythical Shinto birth to the invasion of Manchuria (105p).
The organization of the book is more thematic than chronological. Though Durant does divide the histories of the various civilizations into periods and tries to follow their evolution, he limits himself to well-chosen historical highlights, seeking rather to understand the soul of each civilization by an analysis of its major cultural achievements. His focus is always on the big picture: as the title indicates, he is trying to assess the contribution of each major civilization to the progress of the human species (which he misleadingly refers to as "our race"), and never shies away from the kind of inter-cultural comparisons which our relativistic age stigmatizes (of Indian drama, he says for instance that "we cannot rank [it] on a plane with that of Greece or Elizabethan England; but it compares favorably with the theatre of China or Japan.")
Durant sees civilization as a complex of eight elements (economic, political, moral, religious, scientific, philosophical, literary and artistic) which serve as his conceptual framework to describe each era. His definitions of morality and religion reveal the most about his own outlook: the first he sees as merely instrumental to the cohesion and survival of the collective, defining it as "a law built into the spirit, and generating... that sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire, without which a society disintegrates into individuals, and falls forfeit to some coherent state"; and the second he defines most skeptically and cynically as "the use of man's supernatural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character and the strengthening of social instincts and order."
Durant's own philosophy is not stated explicitly, but it is certainly less corrupt than his calling this discipline "that brave stupidity" might suggest. Of all the philosophical schools presented in the volume, he seems to have the most sympathy for Confucianism, which is perfectly understandable given his conception of the functions of morality and religion, while the Upanishads, he says, "are full of absurdities and contradictions, and occasionally... anticipate all the wind of Hegelian verbiage".
Maybe Durant could best be defined as "Voltairean": his project is reminiscent of the Encyclopedie, and seems to be his own answer to Voltaire, who wanted "to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization"; the ninth volume of the series, dealing with the Enlightenment, is reverentially entitled *The Age of Voltaire*, and the complete works of the philosophe (in 32 volumes!) are one of the fifty or so bibliographical references Durant specifically recommends for further study.
Unfortunately, Durant's Voltaireanism also extends to his politics, and he seems to have a peculiar fondness for so-called "enlightened despots", the measure of their enlightenment being dictated by what we might call the author's acadian liberalism. Each time he finds an instance of a well-oiled bureaucratic machinery, fixing prices, taxing every single profession, managing the whole economy and throwing in a few welfare measures, he is ecstatic. He does care about "democracy" and "civil rights", but he has absorbed so many marxist fallacies (about "exploitation" and "imperialism" mostly) that he cannot help praising the planned economies of the oriental tyrants and always ascribes the disasters they caused to the ill-will of their opponents or some unfortunate combination of natural circumstances. I guess he must have been very satisfied with America's "enlightened" despot of the moment.
But politics and economics are only two of the seven elements of civilization, and Durant's treatment of the other five is brilliant. My main regret, actually, is that he spent too little time on the histories of China and Japan (he himself apologizes for his "unwilling haste".) The Ming Dynasty is dealt with in one paragraph, as are all the classics of the Chinese novel, which Durant lists without any summary, euphemistically commenting that "they are recommended to the reader's leisurely old age." As for Japan, neither Miyamoto's *Book of Five Rings* nor the *Heike Monogatari* are mentioned. I also think Korea would have deserved a chapter of its own, instead of being treated as Japan's distant cultural father.
But a book that should have been longer is a book that deserves to be read. In the words of the *New York Times*, *Our Oriental Heritage* is a "magnificent and monumental" work, which will appeal to those who are bored with today's hyper-specialized and minutely detailed factual history, and believe with Kaibara Ekken, a Japanese philosopher of the 17th century, that "The aim of learning is not merely to widen knowledge but to form character. Its object is to make us true men, rather than learned men." (p869)
79 of 84 people found the following review helpful.
A grand tour of Eastern Civilization
By Christopher
Imagine a man sat down to write the Story of Civilization. All civilization... its lessons, its poetry, its characters, its schemers, its action, and its wisdom. It will require a brave soul indeed. Picture that man at his desk.
We definitely do not want a cynic, a hermit with eyebrows curled tight in thoughts of literary vengeance or historical chicanery... let us shut that character down before the first dip of the pen. Instead, we fancy a skeptic, one who owns a moist twinkling eye that comes from perspective, and a slightly crooked smile of insight. We definitely want a man of confidence who has deep love for his undertaking, but maintains gentleness of speech and a crisp, discerning ear; a man with healthy complexion and moderately rounded belly that reflects the love of a caring, tender woman; a man with good humor and love for his neighbors and hometown that extends outward to embrace all of humanity.
A man that could write the following:
"It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves."
"Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice."
"Civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end."
You can feel the warmth of this man's breath as he reads close to your ear. You can see the proper adjustment of the spectacles; you can hear the wry grin in his voice. And passion is manifest in his full-bodied baritone.
Will Durant retrieved and dusted Voltaire's two-century old gauntlet, and found it to fit just fine. Voltaire would have approved wholesale of Durant, for he fit the wise joker's primary criteria that "only philosophers should write history". Durant had produced the master critique of philosophy, 1926's Story of Philosophy, which grandly culled the essences of Spinoza, Bacon, Aristotle, Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and all the other deities of thought. By Confucius' rule of learning, Durant himself became an adept.
Durant was a philosopher and a prototype skeptic. He also held a mild socialism and a sunny atheism, all in hopes of his fellow man's obtaining a few unreserved hours with which to sit back with a book written by a good friend. On all four characteristics, he still always willingly held objectivity's mirror close at hand:
"Fools can invent more hypotheses than philosophers can ever refute, and philosophers often join them in the game."
"Men are always readier to extend government functions than to pay for them."
Durant began his undertaking intending only to review 18th century Europe. However, the stories of the past, as well, certainly, as the subconscious calling of his unequivocal abilities, pulled Durant back further and convinced him that he may as well take on Everything while he was at it.
The centerpiece of the 11-book set is the grand introduction to Volume 1, Our Oriental Heritage. Here, Durant surveys all of time and humanity for 109 sweeping pages, and does so with such flourish that we may collectively be tempted to inquire of Olympus for Papa Will's reincarnation:
"To transmutate greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization."
"Legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few individuals the laborious advances of many generations."
Proceeding forward, Durant resolved himself to remedy the primary deficiency in our so-called liberal Western education: the history of the non-white man:
"[In China,] the patriarchal family could not be democratic, much less egalitarian, because the state left to the family the task of maintaining social order; the home was at once a nursery, a school, a workshop and a government. "
Naturally, the Eastward expedition begins at the same point of all our Westward jaunts: Sumeria. Egypt provides the first semblance of the organization to which we are accustomed, but Durant tarries not long. Babylonia, Assyria, Judea, and Persia are all recounted in this efficient manner. Durant reassembles us quickly and urges us forward into the real cultural goldmines: India and China.
"'Better thine own work is, though done with fault,' said the Bhagavad-Gita, 'than doing others' work, even excellently.'"
"'What is the most wonderful thing in the world?' asks Yama of Yudishthira; and Yudishsthira replies: 'Man after man dies; seeing this men still move about as if they were immortal.'"
"It is not logic that we need, says Shankara, it is insight, the faculty (akin to art) of grasping at once the essential out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the whole out of the part: this is the first prerequisite to philosophy."
In Volume 1, Durant not only guided us into these Eastern lands, he also resolved his style to include every possible element of relevance that would paint the ancient cities and cultures most strikingly in our minds. His vision was simply not to miss a single romantic element... if the charm lay in a village or on a mountainside, then let us fold our arms and quiet ourselves so that we may admire; if instead history shone in the aura of a politician or philosopher, then let us sit for a spell and listen in; if a sculptor or poet, then let us introduce ourselves; if a document on clay or papyrus, then we should absorb as many lessons as possible. Will Durant knew how to embrace and admire a culture before the now-clichéd concept was forced upon us.
One of the highest praises that can be bestowed upon an author was most deserved by Will Durant... he was a crafter of splendid sentences. Whether you digest this tome in a month or in a year, your heart, memory, and reason will be finely tuned to the chords of mankind.
52 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
A daunting, but enjoyable read
By Robert Wynkoop
Since college, I have wanted to own the ten volume The Story of Civilization by Will Durant. It simply was a purchase that a poor student or a novice pastor could afford. My father-in-law Melvin Gosser, found a set at a garage sale and purchased them for me as a Christmas present. Now, I have the daunting job of reading them. Will and Ariel Durant spent a lifetime in research and writing to complete this set, beginning with the publication of Our Oriental Heritage in 1935 and concluding in 1967 with Rousseau and Revolution. Each of these volumes are massive, between 800 and 1200 pages each.
I have to admit, I was tempted to skip over Our Oriental Heritage and begin reading where "real" history begins with ancient Greece. I am so glad I didn't. More than information, the Durants are delightfully politically incorrect. Any historian can give you the facts, a good one will do so with style, but a great historian gives himself. That is exactly what the Durants have done. As I started reading, I made myself review the first two hundred pages and began to underline delightful insights, and the beautiful prose of the authors.
Here is an example of their prose: "The scenes of your youth, like the past, are always beautiful
if we do not have to live in them again"
Example of their insights: "It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produce ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths."
That is not to say that every chapter was spell binding, they were not. There were whole sections that I had to discipline myself to read. I won't fault the author's, however. Reading about ancient Persia, India and China, left me somewhat perplexed. My lack of knowledge of these cultures made it difficult for me to appreciate the author's insights.
As I read about the rise and fall of civilizations, I could not help but worry about our own. His insights seem to be coming true every day. Not a read for everyone, but if you have a long cold winter to endure, I can think of no better way to pass the time than by reading this book.
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