INCLUSIÓN SOCIAL DE LA PERIFERIA – EL CASO DEL PROYECTO TRANSMICABLE

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Robert Bernasconi

In this essay I restore Hegel’s treatment of Indian philosophy to its context, specifically to what has been called “the Oriental Renaissance.” Already in the nineteenth century the phrase “Oriental Renaissance” was used to de- scribe the efforts of some European scholars to persuade a receptive public in Western Europe that India’s cultural achievements would prove as inspira- tional in their own time as Greek culture had been for the Italian Renais- sance three hundred years earlier.1 _{I use this context to challenge the idea} that by Hegel’s time the place, or rather the non-place, of Indian philosophy within the history of philosophy had already been decided. Although at the end of the eighteenth century we find the first extended histories of philoso- phy that begin with the Greeks, thereby omitting everything that preceded them, enthusiasm for Indian thought early in the nineteenth century re- opened the question of the beginning of the history of philosophy.2 _Hegel was a key figure in this debate and it is appropriate now, when the debate over the philosophical canon is finally being reopened, to reexamine the basis on which the canon as it has existed for some 170 to 200 years was established.

When Hegel consigned India to the margins of the history of philoso- phy, the place to which it is still consigned by mainstream academic philoso- phy, he was not following a decision that others had made earlier, but responding to Friedrich Schlegel’s attempt to give Indian philosophy an impor- tance it had not previously been granted. However, there is some suspicion

that Hegel in his polemic against Indian philosophy was responding as much to the place Schlegel gave to intuition within philosophy as to Indian thought as such. But after 1825 the context changed: Hegel, who now had at his disposal Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s essays on Hindu philosophy, for the first time fully engages the topic. The evidence is that Hegel at the end of his life seriously considered beginning the history of philosophy with India, but that he nevertheless rejected the idea.

I focus exclusively on Hegel’s treatment of Indian philosophy because it was the only “non-Western” philosophy that he ever took seriously as a philosophy. Hegel never gave the same attention, for example, to Chinese philosophy. He presented a brief account of the I Ching merely to show how superficial it was.3 _{Furthermore, Confucius, who was considered by Hegel to} be a moral thinker rather than a philosopher, was dismissed with the state- ment that it would have been better had his works never been translated (V6, 371).4 _{It is possible that Hegel did not devote as much attention to Chinese} philosophy as to Indian philosophy simply because at that time it was not at- tracting as much attention. Indian philosophy was championed by a number of Hegel’s contemporaries and it seems that his initial interest in Indian philosophy was with a view to criticizing his contemporaries and the way they looked to India to confirm their conceptions of philosophy. That is why it is particularly important to understand the context of Hegel’s discussion.

The foremost proponent of the Oriental Renaissance in Germany was Friedrich Schlegel. In 1808 in Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Schlegel presented a new synthesis of contemporary research on India, thereby raising its study to a higher level of importance.5 _{He argued that Indian literature} should be treated in the same way that Greek literature had been previously (SW, 111; IL, 427). One reason he offered was that the Indian language was philosophically clearer and more sharply defined even than Greek (SW, 173;

IL, 457). He also made significant claims on behalf of its historicity. Al-

though Sir William Jones believed that there was a common source behind Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin,6 _{Schlegel claimed that Sanskrit itself was the} common root of Greek, Latin, Persian, and German (SW, 115 and 139; IL, 429 and 439). However, the decisive claim was that the wisdom of India derived from an original revelation that could still be recognized in spite of the errors and distortions that had subsequently been introduced: “The In- dian system of emanation is totally inexplicable so long as it is considered as the natural development of reason; as a misunderstood revelation it is com- pletely intelligible” (SW, 207; IL, 472–473; my translation). Only panthe- ism, the most recent Indian philosophy considered by Schlegel and the one for which he had least sympathy, was not based on divine revelation. As a system of pure reason, Indian pantheism marked the transition to European philosophy (SW, 243; IL, 490). For Schlegel, India represented both proxim-

ity to the truth in the form of original revelation and at the same time departure from the truth insofar as it introduced error and obfuscation. That is to say, India was both the closest point of contact to the truth and yet the source of error.

In spite of their strong disagreements over the character of Indian philosophy, Schlegel and Hegel shared the common assumption that the philosophical tradition took the form of a continuous historical narrative. Schlegel’s argument for giving Indian philosophy a similar status to that which, since the Italian Renaissance, had been accorded to Greek philoso- phy relied on understanding India as the origin of the West. The idea of a unified tradition was, therefore, as integral to Schlegel’s account as it was to Hegel’s, even though Schlegel construed that unity differently from Hegel. Schlegel’s view was that because Asians and Europeans belong to one large family in the history of peoples, their literature should be conceived as part of a continuous development forming one large whole: “the mass of one- sided and limited ideas will disappear of their own accord, much will first become intelligible in its connections, and everything will appear in a new light” (SW, 315; IL, 526; my translation). Although Hegel saw similar ad- vantages to construing the history of philosophy as a whole and pursued this aim more rigorously than Schlegel, he drew its lines rather more narrowly, so that philosophy was in effect restricted to Greece and its Germanic de- velopment. This was because Hegel rejected Schlegel’s presentation of the people of Asia and of Europe as members of one vast family.7 _{For that reason} Hegel insisted, against Schlegel and Creuzer, that the study of Indian my- thology should be kept distinct from the study of Greek mythology (SW, 311;

IL, 522).8 _{In addition, whereas Schlegel maintained that philosophy had} declined since India’s highest point, in Hegel’s view both world history as the history of freedom and the history of philosophy, for which freedom was a precondition, had progressed. Early in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World

History, Hegel explicitly contested Schlegel’s conception of an original people

in possession of knowledge, art, and religion.9 _{The idea of an original revela-} tion ran counter to Hegel’s appeal to the principle of development, but it is worth noting that Schlegel had already explicitly contested the model of the mind’s gradual development from a state of animal stupidity that had begun to take hold in the philosophy of history of his contemporaries (SW, 207; IL, 472).

Hegel had his own way of negotiating the question of whether India should be conceived as a distant, autonomous culture or as the source of European culture. Although he acknowledged that Sanskrit lay behind Greek, Latin, and German, and that India was the point of departure for the West- ern world, he dismissed both these claims as “prehistorical” in the specific sense that they did not belong to the historical development of spirit.10 _In

1822 he denied Schlegel’s claim that Sanskrit was the ultimate source, and, reviving Sir William Jones’s position, he proposed that there must have been a further source behind both Sanskrit and Old Persian (V12, 221). This was an essential component of his denial that India could be identified as the original land, the Urland (V12, 221). Because the evidence for there having been an emigration to Europe from India was restricted to what could be gleaned from the study of certain languages, without there being any documen- tary support for it, Hegel dismissed it as prehistorical. So far as he was con- cerned, the genuinely historical connection between India and Europe was found neither in migration nor in language, but in British colonialism. Hegel declared, “it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Euro- peans.”11 _{And he added for emphasis that China would one day be obliged to} submit to this same fate. Colonialism lay behind Hegel’s account in another respect insofar as he relied heavily in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History on colonial sources, and especially on James Mill, for his knowledge of India.12 However, some time in 1824 or 1825 a new source fell into Hegel’s hands, Thomas Colebrooke’s essay “On the Philosophy of the Hindus,” which had been published in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great

Britain and Ireland.13 _{Jaeschke’s excellent edition of Hegel’s lectures on the} history of philosophy shows clearly that in the semester of 1825–26 Hegel followed Colebrooke’s essay quite closely. Hegel expressed his enthusiasm for the text in dramatic terms:

We first obtained specific knowledge of Indian philosophy a short time ago; on the whole one used to understand thereby religious ideas; but in modern times one has learned to recognize the Indians’ own philosophical works; in particular, Colebrooke, the President of the Asian Society in London, has in the Transactions of the Asiatic

Society I, provided abstracts from two Indian philosophical works,

and that is properly the first that we have of Indian philosophy (V6, 375–376).14

There is little doubt that Hegel’s enthusiasm for Colebrooke’s work was in part occasioned by his recognition that he could use it to establish himself as more knowledgeable about India than Schlegel. This is apparent from the fact that he used the occasion to renew his polemic against his old adversary. Hegel declared:

What Friedrich Schlegel said of the wisdom of the Indians is drawn more from religious ideas; he was one of the first Germans to occupy themselves with Indian philosophy; this did not bear much fruit; it

emerged that he had merely read a part of the table of contents of the Ramayana (V6, 375).

It is remarkable that Hegel judged himself to be in a position to criticize the extent of Schlegel’s knowledge, but Hegel’s main point was that Schlegel had discussed Indian religion, not Indian philosophy.

In the 1825–26 lecture course on the history of philosophy, which remains Hegel’s best known treatment of Indian philosophy (insofar as it served as the main basis of Michelet’s version in the Werke and all subse- quent editions, including Jaeschke’s new edition of the Vorlesungen), Hegel largely contented himself with a paraphrase of Colebrooke’s first two papers. Hegel did not give particular attention to the Yoga-sutras attributed to Patanjali that would subsequently solicit Hegel’s most generous remarks about Indian philosophy. For his knowledge of it, Hegel relied on Colebrooke, who sum- marized its contents as follows:

The collection of Yóga-sútras, bearing the common title of Sánc’hya

pravachana, is distributed into four chapters or quarters (páda): the

first on contemplation (samád’hi); the second on the means of its attainment; the third on the exercise of transcendent power (vibhúti); the fourth on abstraction or spiritual insulation (caiwalya) (PH I, 25). However, there is little or no trace of this description in Hegel’s 1825 lec- tures. He recognized two main systems, the Sankhya and the Nyaya, and in his treatment of the Sankhya followed Colebrooke’s division unto the atheist and the theistic versions (PH I, 25 and 38. V6, 381). Patanjali’s Yoga-sutras is Colebrooke’s example of the latter and, through contemplation of nature and abstraction from it, it sets a path to the unity of the soul with nature. Hegel calls this a great thought in which the negation of the object is a negative moment that is already speculative (V6, 382). However, he seems more impressed by the atheistical school represented by a treatise known as Càricà, which was attributed to Iwara-Crishna, a follower of Capila (PH I, 23). With reference to it, Hegel explained that beatitude (Seligkeit), as ex- emption from every kind of evil, is attained through what he called “genuine science” (V6, 379). Colebrooke called it “perfect knowledge”: “True and perfect knowledge, by which deliverance from evil of every kind is attain- able, consists in nightly discriminating the principles; perceptible and imper- ceptible, of the material world, from the sensitive and cognitive principle which is the immaterial soul” (PH I, 27). Hegel commented that the Sankhya is thereby distinguished from religion only in that it has a full doctrine of thought that is not an abstraction to something empty, but elevates it to the meaning of a determinate thought (V6, 379).

Hegel’s conclusion earlier in the same lecture course that the high- est level individuality can achieve in the Orient is eternal beatitude as an absorption in substance and a passing away of consciousness, and thus a passing away of the distinction between substance and individuality (V6, 266), is now given a more positive interpretation. Hegel described it as “intellectual substantiality,” but what was the goal for the Indians was only the beginning of philosophy (V6, 396). There is no dramatic acknowledgment of Indian philosophy in Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy from 1825–26, as there would be later. Instead, Hegel ex- plained that Indian philosophy is contained within Indian religion, just as the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages is said to be inside Christian dogmatics (V6, 375). “The first philosophy is oriental philoso- phy. It does not enter into the body of the whole presentation. Rather it is preliminary and we speak about it only in order to justify why we do not deal with it more extensively and in what relation it stands to thought, to true philosophy” (V6, 365). So there is Indian philosophy, but it is not true philosophy. One year later, in 1827, at the end of his first article reviewing Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay on the Bhagavad-Gita, Hegel wrote that whereas the ultimate goal of Indian philosophy is the same as that of Indian religion, its formation is sufficiently distinct from the form of religion, so that “it very definitely deserves the name philosophy.”15 This recalls Hegel’s formula whereby religion and philosophy are said to be the same in content, but different in form. It would seem to open up the possibility of recognizing Indian philosophy as true philosophy. How- ever, closer examination of Hegel’s article on Humboldt’s essay “On the Episode of Mahâ-Bhârata known by the name Bhagavad-Gita” reveals that Hegel maintained some reservations.

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay returned Hegel to Colebrooke’s brief paraphrase of the Yoga-sutras and from there to his paragraph on the third chapter. The context of Hegel’s return to Colebrooke was a discussion of translation. Humboldt had raised certain questions of translation in his essay, and in particular he had focused on the word “yoga.” Humboldt wrote:

Yoga, in the philosophical sense, is the persistent directing of the

mind toward the godhead. This directing, withdrawn from all ob- jects, even from inner thoughts, inhibits every possible movement and bodily function, sinks itself alone and exclusively in the essence of the godhead and strives to bind with it. I will express this con- cept as “absorption” (Vertiefung).16

Before challenging Humboldt’s rendering of Yoga as Vertiefung or “absorp- tion,” Hegel took up the question of cross-cultural translation in general:

It certainly runs contrary to the nature of the matter to demand that a linguistic expression of a people that has its own characteristic disposition and culture, different from ours, should be rendered by an expression in our language which corresponds to it with full determinacy, when such an expression is concerned not with imme- diately sensible objects, like the sun, the sea, a tree, a rose, etc., but with a spiritual content. A word of our language gives us our deter- minate representation of such an object and thereby not that of another people, that not only has another language but also other representations (J I, 1444–45).

Unfortunately, Hegel did not apply these considerations to the question of how the term “philosophy” might be translated into Sanskrit, which might have led him to question the form as well as the boundaries of his history of philosophy, but he did use it as a basis for reviewing Humboldt’s rendering of yoga as Vertiefung.17

Hegel judged Humboldt’s translation to be weighty and suitable for expressing the word’s general meaning without conveying its characteristic religious sense. Hegel cited Wilkins, who in his English translation of the

Bhagavad-Gita explained that yoga was there “generally used as a theological

term, to express the application of the mind in spiritual things, and the performance of religious ceremonies” (J I, 1446).18 _{Hegel commented: “Our} language cannot possess a word which corresponds to such a determination because the thing cannot be found in our culture and religion” (J I, 1446). “Absorption” does not go far enough because yoga is

an absorption without any content, a dissolving of all attention to external objects, of the occupation of the senses just as much a silencing of every inner sensation, the stirring of a wish, a hope or fear, the stillness of all inclinations and passions, as the absence of all images, representations, and all specific thoughts (J I, 1446).

Hegel granted that the term “devotion” (Andacht) would be suitable insofar as elevation is only a momentary condition, but he immediately acknowledged that “our devotion” arises from a concrete spirit and is directed to a substantive (inhaltsvoll) God (J I, 1446). Hegel came to favor “abstract devotion” as a translation of yoga because yoga rises to a complete loss of content in both the subject and the object, thereby advancing into loss of consciousness.

Hegel next turned his attention to Schlegel’s use of the phrase assiduitatis

devotio in his translation. Humboldt had called this “a very dark expres-

sion.”19 _{Even though Hegel was anything but an expert, he apparently had} sufficient confidence in his understanding of Indian thought to offer his own

gloss on the phrase.20 _{He explicated the exercise of this assiduity as “the} familiar Indian exercise of forceful withdrawal and perseverance in the monotony of an actless and thoughtless condition” (J I, 1452). He then recognized that the assiduitatis devotio corresponds to the indications that Colebrooke gave of the third chapter of the Yoga-sutras, where this devotion precedes the highest level, the attainment of beatitude. After briefly recall- ing the contents of this chapter, Hegel took up Humboldt’s rejection of Colebrooke’s use of the phrase “meditation on special topics,” a rejection all the more striking because Humboldt had begun his essay by praising Colebrooke’s essays as the first specific and detailed information on the dif-