The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  In Hegel’s representation, one need only consider the prevalence and gravity of the notion of brahman in ancient “Hindu” thought and religion to understand that South Asian philosophers were inseparably wedded to notions of the absolute as “pure being without concrete determination,” and “indeterminate substance.”11 But, in accordance with the rest of his thought, Hegel believes that this absence of determination in the absolute, despite whatever overtly positive descriptions may be given of it, amounts to sheer negation and vacuity. This is so because there is in this fixation on pure substance no “mediation” (Vermittlung) whereby the subject that contemplates such substance may become aware of its own reflective acts and, in a process of evermore dialectically comprehensive movements, integrates its subjectivity with its understanding of nature and history so that the idea of the absolute may develop into one that accounts for both the possibilities of complete freedom and concrete personhood. Despite its only seeming difference, the Buddhist concept of nirvāṇa should also be understood as resulting in a negative concept of the absolute, for practice dedicated to its pursuit led to an identification with “abstract nothingness.”12 This thoroughgoing “negativity” that lies at the heart of both South Asian religious traditions and major philosophical systems explains for Hegel why, in his view as well as in the opinions of many other Romantic thinkers, South Asian civilization finds itself in such a “static” and “degenerate” condition, for the mediation that spirit requires to arrive at the “whole” of truth is itself what propels human historical development.13

  An even better place for discerning Hegel’s estimation of the meaning and value of South Asian philosophical and religious thought than the continuously edited and reconstructed lectures is his extensive review of Humboldt’s essays on the Bhagavad Gītā. This two-part, 100-plus page pair of essays published in the 1827 Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik enables Hegel to integrate his characterizations of classical Indian metaphysics with the meditative technique, namely yoga, that is supposed to facilitate ultimate knowledge in the discourse of the Gītā. Siding with Humboldt, Hegel understands the meaning of the word yoga to be “Vertiefung” (immersion), which specifically is absorption into the absolute unitary substance that is Kṛṣṇa. Once again, because the conception of the absolute in the Gītā remains, in Hegel’s assessment, one of abstract, unitary, and eternal substance, the mind that contemplates and identifies with that absolute in meditative praxis is voided of all concepts, all thought, and reduced to a state of negativity.14 The implications of this are dire for the maturation of philosophical thinking, since a practice which aims to identify consciousness with a “contentless” absolute requires that human existence itself becomes just as abstract as the pure substance that the supporting metaphysics elevates, and this consequently renders the mind “devoid of consciousness” and yields a sense of selfhood whose purity is precisely its emptiness.15 In addition to the stifling of thought and real philosophy, such a form of what Hegel considers less meditation than a kind of devotionalism entirely prevents the human being from being “posited,” that is, from even becoming an ideal of knowing and action unto itself.16

  Unfortunately, in Hegel’s depiction, despite the fact that the ancient Chinese religious and philosophical traditions make more concrete commitments to naturalistic and political thought, they get us no closer to actual spirit. His understanding of the Dao De Jing inspires him only to group the text with other philosophical traditions that conceive the basic substance or logical principle of nature as a unitary abstraction that resists any concrete determination or definition.17 He judges that the text’s trope of tracing cosmic emergence back to the notion of “the one” has some similarity with the ancient thought of Pythagoras. As a result, Hegel groups Daoism with those philosophical traditions that render the contentless notion of substance into nothingness, and this fixates the movement of spirit at the early stages of philosophical history.18 There were, Hegel concedes, moments when ancient Chinese thought did feign to progress beyond mere unitary substance ontology into conceptual thought, specifically in the text and commentaries of the Yijing (Classic of Change). But the project did not go very far, in Hegel’s judgment, due to the text’s attempt to combine the concept of oneness in the unbroken yang lines to its representation of the four elements in the trigrams to the concrete natural symbols constructed by the building of the hexagrams, which all result in an incoherent association of elements and a “pictographic” and “concrete” thinking that does not ensue in mathematics, logic, and language.19 But Hegel’s most virulent criticisms are reserved for Confucianism and the “cult of the state” to which Confucian teachings ultimately led. The Analects, Hegel claims, gives us nothing but moral platitudes which, while demonstrating understanding of human affairs, never rise to the level of moral reflection.20 He finds the Analects so devoid of interest or speculative sophistication that he remarks at one point that it should never have been translated.21 Furthermore, in his view, the Confucian tradition does far-reaching damage to the political order in China to the extent that it reduces the individual to nothing more than a compliant servant who is not charged with moral expectations. The Confucian admonishments about family loyalty combined with their conception of the emperor as the “son of heaven” deprive the individual of any opportunity to develop a sense of “inwardness,” moral judgment, or autonomy, and thus leave individual subjects at the whims of the despotic state. In sum, elementary cosmology and an ethics of conformity prevent Chinese thought from ever attaining to the philosophical sophistication of spirit.

  In view of his conclusions, it is all-to-easy to simply dismiss Hegel’s encounter with Indian and Chinese thought as a biased assertion of Western intellectual and cultural superiority inspired by his systematic commitments and relatively uninformed investigations, due to imperfect resources, of classical Asian traditions. But, as Halbfass some time ago noted, Hegel’s attempts to learn about classical Asian thought from the extant Orientalist scholarship in the 1820s was active and ongoing, and his system was deliberately designed to reject the notion of hermeneutic neutrality and provocatively formulate an historically progressive conception of philosophical “education.”22 These qualifications duly accepted, Hegel believed in the end that classical Indian and Chinese philosophy left us with elementary ontologies of substance, badly attenuated conceptions of self-consciousness, “static” and underdeveloped political societies, and grounds to believe that the West had far superseded Asia in philosophical reflection.

  36.4 SCHOPENHAUER

  Despite his later denials that his exposure to early Hindu and Buddhist thought had any influence on the shaping of his system, there is abundant evidence from his Nachlass of the years 1811–18 that the epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical contours of Schopenhauer’s thought were impacted by ancient India.23 Schopenhauer’s early sources on ancient Indian thought were an 1801 Latin translation of the Upaniṣads by the Kantian philologist Anquetil Duperron, essays in the magazine Asiatic Researches, missionary reports, and early works on Hindu law and South Asian Buddhism. But, from the 1830s onward, Schopenhauer built a massive collection of sources on Chinese philosophy and various forms of Mahāyāna Buddhism, believing that the former resonated with his developing philosophy of nature and that the latter offered a “wondrous” confirmation of his depiction of the highest human holiness as “will-renunciation.” Schopenhauer is not just a philosophical antipode of Hegel, but also adopts an opposite position to Hegel’s with respect to his reading of Asian thought. Not only does the latter exert discernable influences on Schopenhauer’s own system, but Schopenhauer believes the study of Asian thought will lead to a new European philosophical “Renaissance.”24 For Schopenhauer, Asian thought served the functions at once of being a personal spiritual inspiration, a confirmation of his own philosophical thinking, and an example of what he conceived, in the spirit of medieval thinkers, as the philosophia perennis, even though all of these idealizations t
ake the form of alternatively sophisticated reflection and superficial conceptual and historiographical parallelization.

  Schopenhauer was an adherent of a simplified Kantian idealist epistemology, according to which our experience is framed by the a priori forms of sensibility, time, and space, as well as mediated by concepts that together delimit individual things from one another, determine the causal laws of their interrelation, and make the fundamental distinction between self and object. Taking his cue from Duperron but going farther, Schopenhauer would label these forms of sensibility and concepts, following medieval thinkers as well as Spinoza, the principium individuationis, but also with the Vedāntic appellation “the veil of māyā,” or “illusion.”25 In light of his arguments that the real essence of the world is an undifferentiated power, “will,” that grounds all beings and supports their existence, our apprehension of things as distinct individuals, with our own presumed distinctness being foremost among them all, is a product of the “principles of individuation.” And these principles thus create an epistemic falsification of the nature of the world, and this is precisely the justification Schopenhauer draws for calling the Kantian forms of intuition māyā. This equation of māyā with the a priori forms of time and space is discernable in Schopenhauer’s notes of 1814–16 during the period when he formulates his system.26 He is subsequently sometimes given to equating his conception of the metaphysical “will” as ground of being with the Upaniṣadic notion of brahman in light of Max Müller’s later translation of the term as “force, will or wish,” although he at other times qualifies this by asserting that the identification is put in merely “mythical” and “symbolic” terms.27 This equation of “individuation” with māyā or “illusion” also has great ethical and soteriological consequences for Schopenhauer’s thought. If his “falsification thesis” of the forms of intuition is true, then the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads are also, in Schopenhauer’s view, fundamentally correct that there is no ultimate distinction between “the slayer and the slain,” between self and other, and this gives warrant for seeing compassion (Mitleid) as the moral virtue most attuned to the correct metaphysical understanding of the world.28 Furthermore, in what Schopenhauer viewed as the strongest resonance between his own and early Buddhist thought, which would prompt him in late correspondence to even identify himself as a “Buddhist,” the realization that the will, when reflected through prevalent human egoism and malice, could only cause interminable suffering in the world is what prompts truly holy people to a “denial of the will to live” through quietude and asceticism. Even if we concede in the end that Buddhist terms like nirvāṇa are merely “symbolic” in character, the abrogation of epistemic individuality and moral egoism results in a negation of the world which should not be castigated but welcomed as the culmination of mystical life.29

  In the 1820s and 30s, leading up to a collection of essays intended to demonstrate the coherence of his metaphysics of will with contemporary scientific findings, Schopenhauer expanded his horizons beyond South Asia to classical Chinese thought. Two of his most cited resources for classical Confucian thought are Robert Morrison’s Chinese Dictionary and an 1826 entry in Asiatic Researches entitled “Chinese Creation Theory” which includes translated selections from the twelfth-century seminal Confucian thinker Zhu Xi. Both resources are employed by Schopenhauer to elucidate various features and implications of the classical concept of tian or “heaven.” Schopenhauer relies on Morrison’s dictionary in order to debunk the by then commonplace missionary assumption that the term can be justifiably translated as “God,” when the word actually should be understood as denoting the visible “sky” and connoting the “metaphysical principle of nature.”30 He is most intrigued, however, by his mediated reading of Zhu Xi, wherein he finds a few sentences claiming that the principle of nature, tian, can be deduced from the human will, and speculates that a confirmation of the organic unity of the human will and the ground of nature proclaimed by his own philosophy may be found here.31 These speculations are, Schopenhauer freely admits, sketchy and uncertain, and they are certainly only adjudicated in the light of his own thought, but they further exemplify the degree of his openness to regarding classical Asian thought as offering genuinely true philosophical insights.

  The last two decades of Schopenhauer’s life witness a steady growth of his interest in classical South and East Asian thought and a growing library collection of Orientalist literature in these areas. But his attention turns during this period from searching in these sources for confirmations of his own thought to making large-scale cultural characterizations of the place and value of Asian religious and philosophical traditions in comparison with the originary traditions of the Middle-East and ongoing religions and philosophies of Europe. These characterizations are surely contorted ones, particularly as they elevate Asian traditions of “pessimism,” those that supposedly, like his, recommend will and word-denial, over religious of “optimism,” those that affirm the goodness of the world and God’s various designs of salvation. Like many other Romantic thinkers, Schopenhauer believed that the ancient pedigree of Indian civilization placed its representative religious traditions in a much more favorable position to garner authentic insights into nature, and that Christian missionary forays into Asia were not only pernicious but would lead to native rejection.32 He ends up inferring that the pronouncement of God at the culmination of each day of creation in the Torah that “all is very good” represents a fundamental “optimism” about the world that does not accord with the recognition that the ground of nature is a blind and rapacious will. But this “optimism” has enabled Judaism to imbue Christianity and Islam with its supposed falsity in ways that are strongly rebutted by Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which he believes teach that the world is ultimately illusion and should be resigned from in the pursuit of sagehood and holiness.33 He does suggest, however, that in the cases of Islam and Christianity, this “realism” about the world’s existence and “optimism” about its value is qualified in Islam by Sufi mysticism and in Christianity with its recognition of the doctrine of original sin, even going so far as to speculate at one point that Christianity has “Indian blood in its veins.”34 Ultimately, however, Hindu and Buddhist thought represent for Schopenhauer insights into a “perennial philosophy” that is in various terms mediated through Plato, Eckhart, Böhme, and Kant to a final apotheosis in his own system. The only thing that makes his system in the final analysis superior to Hindu and Buddhist thought is that the latter are clothed in “mythical” language whereas his own philosophy communicates the same truths through conceptual analysis in the “strict and proper sense.”35

  Schopenhauer’s representation of the Indian religious and philosophical heritage in particular was to have far-reaching impact in the decades immediately following his death. The founder of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft and first editor of his collected works, Paul Deussen, was to become one of the nineteenth century’s preeminent Indologists, and his six-volume Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie included three volumes on Indian thought, with characterizations of Vedānta that were distinctly Schopenhauerian. As we shall see in section 36.6, Nietzsche also took Schopenhauer’s and Deussen’s readings of Hindu and Buddhist thought to be authoritative and based his own hermeneutic of these traditions upon them. On the one hand, Schopenhauer’s openness to Asian traditions, his willingness to permit his own understandings of classical Hindu and Buddhist ideas to help shape the contours of his own system and his valuations of Indian and Chinese thought as genuinely philosophical are exemplary for his time. But on the other hand, the particular ways in which he weaves Asian thought into a historiographic tapestry that pits its representative traditions as starkly opposed to other traditions like Judaism and Islam betrays a cultural appropriation of Asian traditions that is profoundly problematic.

  36.5 EMERSON

  This central figure of the American Transcendentalist movement, like other nineteenth-century Western philosophers, ap
proached Asian traditions through books, but in his specific case, also entirely consistently with what he thought the true scholar should use books for, to help him attain “his own sight of principles” and the inspiration of “the active soul.”36 Though his journals and correspondence only make sparse and dismissive references to Asian thought in the 1820s and early 1830s, 1830 by the time his first book, Nature, appeared in 1836, he had become familiar with William Jones’ writings on Vedānta and the Laws of Manu, selections from the Mahābhārata and Confucius’ Analects.37 He began to draw major themes from Wilkins’ early translation of the Bhagavad Gītā and the Bhagavata Purāna in the 1830s and 1840s which he believed resonated with his conceptions of the religious “paths” of works and gnosis, with moral “compensation” and “fate.”38 It appears that mostly South Asian and some East Asian texts became the primary focus of his reading on religion from the mid 1850s until the end of his life, and the results of this immersion provoke him to draw significant parallels between his notions of life as a “train of moods” and the illusory nature of the finite self in comparison with the “Over-Soul” and the Upaniṣadic and Vedāntic conception of māyā that was such an inspiration to Schopenhauer.39 The strongest connections Emerson felt to Confucian thought were both the moral demands that Confucius made on the individual as well as how the figure of Confucius served as a model for the solitary Emersonian scholar.40 Of course, Emerson’s steady and increasing fascination with Asian thought was integrated into an all-embracing universalism which almost unfailingly led in his published works to citations of Indian and Chinese texts and philosophers alongside those of the neo-Platonic and Christian traditions.