The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  32 As Herder had put it in his essay on philosophy, the philosopher needs to be educated as a human being before he is educated as scholar (PW 22).

  33 In his posthumously published work on the Kawi language, Humboldt discusses the sociality of thought (as mediated through language) and suggests that “[t]‌he power to think requires something equal to yet differentiated from itself. It is fired up by its equivalent; from its counterpart it acquires a touchstone for its innermost products.” See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The Nature and Conformation of Language,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1989), 102.

  34 For a discussion of this point, see Gunter Scholtz, “Humboldt und Schleiermacher. Anregungen für einen Humanismus der Gegenwart,” in Humanism in the Era of Globalization: An Intercultural Dialogue on Culture, Humanities, and Value, ed. Jörn Rusen, Working Papers, no. 14, available at http://www.kwi-humanismus.de/cms/download.php.

  35 Friedrich Schiller, Letters on Aesthetic Education, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2005), 87. Further references to this work will be abbreviated LAE, followed by page number.

  36 For a discussion of Schiller’s disputes with Kant, see Frederick C. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169–90.

  37 This is further analyzed in Bruford’s discussion of Mann in The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, 226–63. For a less charitable reading of the tradition of Bildung (in its particular, German form), see Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins.

  38 For an overview of Hegel’s objections, see Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70–98.

  39 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 164–97. See also my discussion of this point in Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 50–60 and 155–85.

  40 The philosophical relevance of the Romantic salons is expounded in Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1974). For an overview of the culture of the Romantic salon, see Konrad Feilchenfeldt, “Die Berliner Salons der Romantik,” in Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Die Wiederentdeckung einer Schriftstellerin, ed. Barbara Hahn and Ursula Isselstein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 152–64.

  41 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Essay on a Theory of Social Behavior (1799), trans. Peter Foley (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

  42 See Hannah Arendt, “Berlin Salon,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 57–66. Arendt convincingly situates the salon in the culture of Bildung (“Berlin Salon,” 60).

  43 Schleiermacher links this with (rationalist) philosophy and claims that the philosophical reception of religion has led to “barren uniformity” and “dead letters.” See Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 108.

  44 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  45 For a study of Schleiermacher’s philosophy of Bildung and culture, see Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). This study also contains a comparison of Hegel and Schleiermacher’s views on education and the university (Ethik und Hermeneutik, 147–70).

  46 See Christian Berner, La philosophie de Schleiermacher: Herméneutique, Dialectique, Ethique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995), 179–267.

  47 See Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher, 70–98.

  48 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn” (1808), in Pädagogische Schriften, vol. II, ed. Erich Weniger and Theodor Schulze (Düsseldorf: Georg Bondi, 1957), 110–24.

  49 This, however, is not to say that Hegel does not also have a philosophy of education. For a discussion of this point, see Allen W. Wood, “Hegel on Education,” in Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (London: Routledge, 1998), 300–18.

  50 For an overview of how Hegel draws on the philosophical development from Kant to Schelling, see Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16–91.

  51 In this context, it is worth noting that Schelling had lectured on Bildung already in 1802. Schelling had been suggesting that “a methodology of university study must be rooted in actual and true knowledge of the living unity of all the sciences, and (…) without such knowledge any guidance can only be lifeless, spiritless, one-sided, limited.” F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, ed. Norbert Guterman, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), 7.

  52 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 16–17. Further references to this work will be abbreviated PS, followed by page number.

  53 For a study of Hegel and the French Revolution, see Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right, trans. Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982).

  54 Hegel’s perspective at this point is, no doubt, Eurocentric. Nevertheless, his work has played an important role in the shaping of philosophy of race and post-colonial studies. For an early testimony to this, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 191–7.

  55 As such, Hegel’s system contains more specific advice for the educational goals of the family and state than the Phenomenology does. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§174–81.

  56 See in particular the Second Volume of The World as Will and Representation. Here Schopenhauer writes admiringly about how Kant lives “by and for philosophy.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge, 1948), 362.

  57 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. II, §372. Further references to this work will be abbreviated PP, followed by volume and section.

  58 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, book III, 219–346.

  59 In Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125–95. Later on, Nietzsche will claim that the views discussed in this piece are not so much those of Schopenhauer, as those of “Nietzsche as Educator.” See Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), §3.

  60 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. J. M. Kennedy (Lexington, KY: Maestro, 2011). Further references to this text are abbreviated FE, followed by page number.

  61 Nietzsche discusses this under the rubrics of “Socraticism,” “scientism,” and “aestheticism.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76.

  62 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 30–3.

  63 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 101–4. This hope is later retracted in “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” (1886), The Birth of Tragedy, 3–12.

  64 See Nietzsche, “What do Ascetic Ideals Mean?” in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).

  65 Nietsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1–9.

  66 For a discussion of Nietzsche’s understanding of history, see Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” in Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–29.

  67 Se
e, for example, the discussion of the higher man in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 24.

  68 For Nietzsche’s reflections on the last human being, see Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9–10, 171.

  69 For the literary aspects of Nietzsche’s style (as it reflects, at a deeper level, his view of life itself), see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

  70 This perspective is left out of Martha Nussbaum’s recent study of the humanities. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). According to Nussbaum, it is imagination and creativity that makes humanities graduates attractive on an ever more rapidly changing job market.

  71 While Gadamer has been mentioned throughout, McDowell’s discussion of Bildung is found in Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 123–6.

  CHAPTER 36

  RECEPTIONS OF EASTERN THOUGHT

  DOUGLAS L. BERGER

  36.1 INTRODUCTION

  IN retrospect, the increased engagement of nineteenth-century Western philosophers with various representative texts and movements of ancient and medieval Asian thought was bound to take place. The fascinating philological work of such figures as A. H. Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805), William Jones (1746–94), Charles Wilkens (1749–1836), Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was not only making texts like the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and certain scholastic works from the Indian tradition available for Western readers, but often suggested ways that these same texts and systems could be understood in more contemporary “pantheistic” and “idealist” terms. As for the ancient Chinese world, the writings of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries which led Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) to conclude that ancient Confucianism represented an incredibly morally exemplary instance of “natural theology” received transformed but enthusiastic receptions in the writings of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Voltaire (1694–1778). During the nineteenth century, the seminal translations of significant texts in the classical Chinese philosophical corpus by James Legge (1815–97), though initially largely undertaken for missionaries, laid the foundations for the professionalization of Western Sinology and made classical Chinese thought widely accessible to Western readers. In addition, the nineteenth century saw the culmination of British colonial expansion along with the economic and missionary ventures of a number of other Western countries in India and China, which prompted complex debates among many European thinkers regarding the value of these events and what sorts of intercultural and “civilizational” implications they portended. The influence of classical Indian and Chinese thought on the contours of nineteenth century Western philosophical reflection did indeed become indelible, even when it was mitigated by limitations of access and understanding as well as preoccupied with thematizing Asian traditions in such a way as to bring their own cultures and history into preferred reliefs vis-à-vis Europe.

  Classical Indian and Chinese texts and systems of thought had the most lasting impact on the way a number of nineteenth-century Western thinkers conceptualized the constitution of the self, the workings and significance of nature and the philosophical relationship of “West” to “East” in the unfolding history of intellectual and spiritual development. We will highlight these themes in the writings of some of the nineteenth century’s most important German Orientalists, namely Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), and Eduard Röth (1807–58), and then primarily the philosophical writings of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The tensions that can be found in the thought of these philosophers between recognition that classical Asia had produced traditions of reflection of far-reaching significance and preoccupations with assessing the ongoing legacies of Western thought that were playing themselves out in their own systems are palpable and diverse, exhibiting various degrees of influence and disavowal among each of them. But their respective receptions of what they learned about Asian thought continue to have impact and important hermeneutical lessons.

  36.2 THE EARLY GERMAN ORIENTALISTS

  The professional German Indologists of the nineteenth century who had strong influences on the philosophers of the period had frequently shifting relationships with both Romanticism and the ancient Indian traditions that were the subjects of their study. The seminal work Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) by Friedrich Schlegel is an outstanding example of the ambivalence of a group of men whose enthusiasm for the cultural riches of South Asia and their potential to “renew” the European cultures that were supposedly its descendants morphed into great reservation and caution. Schlegel’s devotion to Sanskrit studies culminated in this work. While highly complimentary of early Indian civilization and religion, Schlegel not only continues to maintain that the consummation of spiritual truth can only be found in Christianity, but Schlegel’s own focus shifts after this work to Mesopotamia.1 Schlegel singled out for special criticism in this influential work the philosophical unintelligibility of such pervasive fixtures of classical Indian thought as the doctrine of rebirth and what he referred to as “pantheism,” an original wonder at the infinity of existence that degenerated in the hands of Vedāntic and especially Buddhist systems into first empty abstraction and then downright nihilism respectively.2 Schlegel’s critical stance would be reflected, as we shall see, in Hegel’s assessment of Indian thought, but was also read with great interest by Schopenhauer in his early philosophical career. Later in the century, Eduard Röth’s scholarship exhibited a similar shift. He maintained initially that understanding ancient Indian philosophy was indispensable for a comprehension of the development of Greek and later Western thought.3 But his later work tended to idealize ancient Egypt far more than India.4 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich’s younger brother, however, managed to maintain his enthusiasm for the potential of ancient Indian thought to facilitate a “restoration” of European culture and save it from its merely “utilitarian” and “civic” commitments.5

  The voluminous and pivotal linguistic studies of Wilhelm von Humboldt included investigations of early Sanskrit literature. His enthusiasm for the Bhagavad Gitā, after reading A. W. Schlegel’s 1823 rendition of it, was palpable. In addition to delivering lectures on the work, he published a detailed study on it, informed by his own Sanskrit learning, in the Proceedings of the Academy of Berlin that inspired Hegel in turn to write a review of it that exceeded a hundred pages in length.6 We will return to Hegel’s review in section 36.3. But for his own part, von Humboldt devoted much energy to both defending Schlegel’s translation of the term yoga from criticisms brought forward by other Orientalists, but also experimenting with the multiple meanings of the term as these were articulated in classical Sanskrit texts. His attempts to provide a consistent philosophical reading of the term that bridges the views of two classical Indian schools of Sāṃkhya and Yoga and with the poetic genre in which the Gitā resides enables him to distinguish between the “pantheist” and “emanationist” readings of early Indian thought in Schlegel and articulate the term’s sense of “absorption” into the divine that the Gitā appears to be calling for. Humboldt’s scholarship, though still firmly rooted in the arguments taking place among his Orientalist colleagues in the early nineteenth century, did nonetheless set a kind of philological precedent in the sense that it turns to the source materials and experiments with different possibilities of meaning.7 Hegel, though accepting some of Humboldt’s important conclusions about yoga, persistently contrasted its philosophical value with what he deemed the more developed metaphysical sense of “spirit” in the West.

 
36.3 HEGEL

  The signature feature of Hegel’s thought, namely its insistence that spirit (Geist) achieves a progressively comprehensive notion of the Absolute through the course of its dialectical development in history, culminating in the realization of social spirit in his own system, led him to stark conclusions about classical Indian and Chinese thought. In contrast to the widespread Romantic idea that the earliest stages of civilization produced the most direct and unitary visions of reality and its spiritual significance, Hegel regarded ancient philosophical ideas as the most undeveloped and “superficial” conceptions of existence. Philosophical ideas thematized at the beginning of history for him were but various attempts to identify the unitary “substance” of the world, the fixed essence of all of nature, which never formed ideas of the “subject” or “person,” the reflective and social agent that grows and comes to fuller knowledge in time. While these convictions would surely come to over-determine Hegel’s assessment of Asian thought, they hardly prevented him from keeping himself highly informed about ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy through the developing literature of European Orientalist scholarship. But his intensive reading of these materials came only in the last decade of his career with his Berlin lectures on the history of philosophy and religion. He singles out Colebrooke’s 1824 essays on the Indian systems of Sāṃkhya and Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika for special admiration, relies largely on missionary literature for his acquaintance with South and East Asian Buddhism, and ends up writing a lengthy review of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essays on the Bhagavad Gītā in 1827.8 Though his familiarity with classical Chinese schools of thought is much less detailed, he did consult, among a wide variety of extant translations, an 1811 English rendition of Confucius’ Analects by Joshua Marshman as well as Johann Gottlieb Buhle’s 1796 Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, which had a chapter on Chinese thought and an accompanying bibliography.9 Though Hegel was sufficiently impressed with some early Indian schools to refer to them as “actual philosophy,” his interpretations of the earliest texts of both the South and East Asian traditions align these with fundamentally religious modes of thought that, in the strict sense, are merely “preliminary” to and “presuppositions” of philosophy and thus do not undergo the conceptual development that is inaugurated in Greece.10