Introduction

Summary

IN MY FIRST BOOK I was primarily interested in what A. Leslie Willson called the “mythical image” of India in German Romantic thought. In the absence of material German interests in the region, how can we account for Romantic orientalist enthusiasm in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? In that study, I came to the conclusion that their construction of the “mythical image” was part of the process of the Romantics’ construction of a mythical image of Germany. As India had once been the fountainhead of religious, philosophical, and literary traditions that flowered throughout the ancient world, so too would Germany become “the Orient of Europe”—the birthplace of a spiritual revolution that would usher in a new Golden Age.

The most persistent adversary of the Romantic mythical images of both India and Germany was G. W. F. Hegel, and one chapter in that study focuses on the place of India in Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I was especially struck, as one cannot fail to be, by Hegel's description of the mysterious kind of beauty that “one” finds in the Orient. It is strange and otherworldly, and its seductive allure possesses the power to “dissolve” (auflösen) oppositional subjectivity into the flaccidity of a mere “state of emotion.” This beauty is a trap, and only a critical analytical consciousness can see beneath the lovely appearance of this “beauty of enervation” to recognize it for what it is—“the death of free self-reliant Spirit.”

What I could not quite account for at that time was the anxiety that is evident in this passage, as elsewhere in Hegel's writings on India. One possible source of Hegel's discomfort with Indian thought, which Bradley Herling has incisively shown, is its similarity to his own philosophical project. Hegel's narrative of the “Self” that comes to know itself in and through the absolute has striking similarities to Upanishadic Vedantism and Krishna's teaching regarding the relationship between Śankhya and Yoga and the nature of duty in the Bhagavad Gita. Hegel's antipathy toward these schools of Indian thought might very well have been due to the uncomfortable affinities he found between them—and the post- Kantian philosophical and literary projects of the Romantics—and his own efforts at systematic philosophy.