The German Gītā: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the Early German Reception of Indian Thought
Bradley L. Herling
Language: English
Pages: 371
ISBN: 2:00248193
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publish Year note: First published April 1st 2009
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How did the Bhagavadgata first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today?
This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgata around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgata and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation.
Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews."
words of various kinds, into which most of the languages of more recent European peoples are forced to draw themselves because of a lack of endings, by which the gender, number, and case of nouns and person, tense, and mood of verbs are precisely and to a certain extent pleasantly distinguished by sound. (xxii)58 As I mentioned above, Schlegel had repeated this argument for about eight years before finally finding application for it in the translation of the GUo, but after merely glancing at the
poetics is correct: an idea of the beautiful inspires the poet. But the poet is also attuned to the sensuous, expressive power of language, and as a consequence he or she specializes in individuation of concepts and the mastery of energy and force. Herder claims that this function of the poetic is particularly evident in relation to religion and mythology. Homer's gods and heroes, for example, "are not abstract concepts: they are subjects that act out full-voiced individua"; the gods are
culture) is essentially oriented towards "wisdom." But in the end, this is not to say that Herder discounts the synthetic potential of the Gitii's teachings. While it cannot provide a full rationale for the combination of theory and practice that satisfies his moral concerns, it does at least recognize that there is a problem in dividing the two, which is more than can be said for many in the local intellectual context that surrounded Herder. This is evident in the selection "Wissen und Thun"
divinity as the singular goal of all of one's actions and strivings" (KA VIII, 213). Nevertheless, the teaching is fraught with dangers. The divine essence is surely in continuity with creation, but the distance is so great for most that a variation on the emanationist theme begins to take over in order to filJ the gap: "Everything is ... a consequence of the effiuence of divinity; each being itself is only a limited, bound up, and obscured god" (KA VIII, 209). All of creation takes on a glow
pervasive in the East. In India, a shining and active subjectivity is constantly invoked, a trend that manages to stand up to rampant materialist imagination and polytheistic worship (KA VIII, 229; tr. 482). The avatars of Vi~t:lu provide dear evidence of the "doctrine of the Two Principles" in its pure form, for Vi~t:lu "frequently appeared upon earth, under the various forms of a king, a sage, a wonder-making warrior and hero, but always with the intention of checking the progress of crime" (KA