{"id":13448,"date":"2024-11-12T10:22:59","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T15:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=13448"},"modified":"2024-11-12T10:23:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T15:23:25","slug":"owen-ware-indian-philosophy-and-yoga-in-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2024\/11\/12\/owen-ware-indian-philosophy-and-yoga-in-germany","title":{"rendered":"Owen Ware, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany."},"content":{"rendered":"

Owen Ware, <\/span>Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany<\/span><\/i>. New York: Routledge, 2024; xx + 178 pp. ISBN: 9781032452333.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviewed by J. M. Fritzman, Lewis & Clark College<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In this outstanding and highly recommended book, which engages both the history of philosophy and comparative philosophy, Owen Ware chronicles the reception of Indian philosophy and Yoga in Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following the \u201cIntroduction\u201d that discusses the book\u2019s scope and aims, Ware divides his work into two parts. The first, \u201cIndian Pantheism and the Threat of Nihilism,\u201d has three chapters: \u201cThe Perils of Pantheism: Schlegel and Karoline von G\u00fcnderrode,\u201d \u201cThe Song of God: Humboldt\u2019s Philosophical Poem,\u201d and \u201c\u2018Abstract Devotion\u2019: Yoga in Hegel and Schelling.\u201d European philosophers were not initially aware of the different schools (<\/span>dar\u015banas<\/span><\/i>) of Indian philosophy and so they did not recognize that Yoga is only one such school.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Ware\u2019s reading, the early reception of Indian philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Karoline von G\u00fcnderrode (1780-1806), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) was positive. They were receptive to the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who maintained that nature and God are identical, and they believed there are affinities between pantheism and Yoga. This initial positive reception was followed by a more critical response. Rejecting his previous assessment, Friedrich Schlegel charged that Indian philosophy leads to nihilism, and Georg Hegel (1770-1831) rejected Humboldt\u2019s interpretation of the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i>. However, Schelling can be seen as defending Humboldt\u2019s interpretation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1800, Friedrich Schlegel called on readers to find the highest Romantic in the Orient. G\u00fcnderrode\u2019s philosophical fictions were inspired by Indian doctrines. However, there were questions concerning the very definition of yoga. In 1826, Friedrich Schlegel\u2019s brother, August Schlegel (1767-1845), maintained that yoga is a true Proteus, as the meaning of \u201cyoga\u201d seemed to continually shift. Specifying the meaning of \u201cyoga\u201d was difficult because European scholars did not have access to the relevant Indian texts. As a result, the ancient Indian <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> of Pata\u00f1jali were interpreted through the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> and \u201cyoga\u201d was understood as meaning \u201cunion with God.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As noted above, the initial positive reception of Indian philosophy in Germany was followed by a more critical response. In his influential essay, \u201cOn the Philosophy of the Hindus,\u201d the English orientalist Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) provided an account of the different schools of Indian philosophy. Colebrooke did not fully discuss Pata\u00f1jali\u2019s <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i>, however, allowing readers to conclude that Yoga is pantheistic and nihilistic. Reversing his earlier positive assessment, for example, Friedrich Schlegel charged that Yoga entails a metaphysical nihilism that eliminates all distinctions between things, a moral nihilism that eliminates all distinctions between actions, and a practical nihilism which preaches the destruction of the self.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ware explains why Humboldt\u2019s interpretation of the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> challenged the one-sided understandings caused by Colebrooke\u2019s partial treatment. Humboldt maintained that the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> does not deny morality, individuality, and freedom. Citing K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a\u2019s claim in the<\/span> Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> that \u201cAll things abide in me \/ I do not abide in them,\u201d Humboldt rebutted Friedrich Schlegel\u2019s charge that it is pantheistic and nihilistic. Humboldt distinguished between an identity pantheism, which maintains that the world is ontologically identical to God, and a dependence pantheism, which more modestly claims only that the world ontologically depends on God. In later terminology, it seems that the concept of dependence pantheism allowed Humboldt to interpret the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> as a form of panentheism. Friedrich Schelling further argued that the way in which everything ontologically depends on Brahman is absolutely free and he emphasized God\u2019s creative glory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ware then shows how Hegel directly responded to Humboldt\u2019s interpretation of the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i>. Hegel denied that philosophy existed in ancient India. He charged that Yoga promotes metaphysical and moral nihilism, and that it advocates pantheism and self-annihilation by wholly emptying the mind of thoughts and experiences. The <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> is nihilistic because it reduces God to an emptiness that lacks all determinate content, according to Hegel, not because it ontologically identifies God and nature. Whereas Humboldt had translated \u201cyoga\u201d as \u201cabsorption\u201d (<\/span>Vertiefung<\/span><\/i>), Hegel preferred \u201cabstract devotion\u201d (<\/span>abstrakte Andacht<\/span><\/i>) to underscore his understanding that Yoga amounts to annihilation. He further responded to Humboldt by urging that the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> oscillates between contracting everything into the empty void of Brahman and a chaotic polytheism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ware may not be fully aware of how obsessed Hegel was by India. He wrote 80,000 words about India, as much as he wrote about ancient Greece. He discerned parallels between his own philosophical system (to simplify: thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and the Hindu trinity (Brahm\u0101, Vi\u1e63\u1e47u, \u015aiva). Nevertheless, Hegel failed to recognize the affinity between what he regarded as the annihilation of Yoga and his own notion of mechanical memory in the <\/span>Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit<\/span><\/i>. In mechanical memory, spirit divests words of their meanings. This occurs, for example, when children memorize a poem by rote learning without comprehending it. By reducing words to sounds, meaning to noise, spirit becomes self-externalized within itself. Its activity becomes a mechanism. Spirit then regards both itself and its content as nothing, as absolute negativity. Spirit thereby becomes immediate and external to itself. This allows spirit to sublate everything, even itself. Had Hegel discerned the affinity between mechanical memory and annihilation, he could have incorporated Yoga as a moment in his system. Still, immediately prior to the culmination of his system, Hegel engaged the <\/span>Bhagavad Gita<\/span><\/i>. While he did not regard the <\/span>Bhagavad Gita<\/span><\/i> as philosophy, it is his system\u2019s penultimate moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although Humboldt never responded to Hegel, Schelling can be interpreted as subsequently doing so. He maintained that the grounding relation between God and humans is creative. He further claimed that human freedom and dependence pantheism are compatible. As Owen helps us to see, Schelling attempted to incorporate Indian philosophy into the history of philosophy as an aspect of his project of reconciling human freedom and dependence on God.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second part of Ware\u2019s book, \u201cGod, Morality, and Freedom,\u201d has two chapters: \u201cYoga in the Late Nineteenth Century: Pal, Mitra, Vivekananda, and M\u00fcller\u201d and \u201cThe Bengali Philosophers: Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharyya.\u201d Those Indian philosophers mastered and critically engaged European thought, and defended their intellectual heritage. They demonstrated that those who had charged that Pata\u00f1jali\u2019s Yoga is nihilistic had missed its moral principles.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the nineteenth century, R\u00e1jendral\u00e1la Mitra (1822-1891) and Max M\u00fcller (1823-1900) recognized that there are two distinct versions of classical Yoga. There is a religious version, which defines the essence of Yoga as union with God and a nonreligious version, which defines Yoga\u2019s essence as soul liberation. Mitra and M\u00fcller further perceived that Pata\u00f1jali\u2019s <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> are more concerned with disunion than with union. That is, the <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> seek to separate the essential self (<\/span>puru\u1e63a<\/span><\/i>) from its entanglement with nature (<\/span>prak\u1e5bti<\/span><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Mitra presented the first complete edition of the <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> in English. He distinguished Pata\u00f1jali\u2019s emphasis on soul liberation, which Pata\u00f1jali regarded as the highest end for humans, from the religious emphasis of Ved\u0101nta and Bhakti. According to Ware,<\/span> M\u00fcller used the distinction between religious and nonreligious versions of Yoga to rebut the charge that Yoga is nihilistic. Other nineteenth-century scholars subsequently suggested that Pata\u00f1jali incorporated religious aspects into Yoga, including devotion to God (<\/span>\u012a\u015bvara<\/span><\/i>), only to attract religiously inclined followers.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Vivekananda (1863-1902) and such philosophers as Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) emphasized the unity of Pata\u00f1jali\u2019s <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> and interpreted them within the larger context of Indian philosophy. Vivekananda emphasized Yoga\u2019s synthesis of action (<\/span>karma yoga<\/span><\/i>), meditation, (<\/span>dhyana yoga<\/span><\/i>), knowledge (<\/span>j\u00f1\u0101na yoga<\/span><\/i>), and devotion (<\/span>bhakti yoga<\/span><\/i>). Bhattacharyya presented Yoga as a unified metaphysical and ethical system. He distinguished absolute freedom (<\/span>kaivalya<\/span><\/i>) from the freedom of persons to disentangle themselves from <\/span>prak\u1e5bti<\/span><\/i>. Bhattacharyya maintained that yoga is a system of freedom that aims at both goals through the progressive realization of freedom. Dasgupta interpreted the <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> as a unified system of metaphysics and ethics. He influenced Radhakrishnan, who emphasized the moral principles in the <\/span>Yoga Sutras<\/span><\/i> and characterized Yoga as a practice of self-perfection and self-realization.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conclusion, \u201cYoga, the \u2018True Proteus\u2019,\u201d summarizes the book. The appendix, \u201cImages of India\u2013Voltaire and Herder,\u201d effectively serves as a prequel. While the writings of Voltaire (1694-1778) set the context for the subsequent positive reception of Indian philosophy, those of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) prepared the way for Hegel\u2019s more critical engagement. As Ware outlines, Voltaire was committed to writing a world history that began in India. He interpreted Indian religion in terms of his own Deism. He maintained that Indian religion was historically earlier than the Abrahamic tradition, and he claimed that Indian religion is a pre-Mosaic source of monotheism. However, Voltaire\u2019s understanding of Indian religion was based on the <\/span>Ezour Vedam<\/span><\/i>. He believed that the <\/span>Ezour Vedam<\/span><\/i> was an ancient Indian text, but it was written by French Jesuits. Even in interpreting the <\/span>Ezour Vedam<\/span><\/i>, Voltaire selectively attended only to passages that complemented his Deism. Although Herder was the first German writer to make available translated sections of the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i>, he accepted a biblical chronology and the primacy of the Abrahamic tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n

One might quibble that Ware refers to Radhakrishnan as a Bengali philosopher. Although Radhakrishnan taught at the University of Calcutta during 1921-1932, he was born in what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On a more substantive note, while Ware shows that Schelling and Vivekananda maintained that the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> espouses a doctrine of freedom, and that they emphasized God\u2019s playful manifestation in and as the world, this does not necessarily establish that the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> allows for human freedom, libertarian free will, or agent causation. The <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> proclaims that everything is a manifestation of K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a, who is Brahman, the supreme Godhood. It initially seems that K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a is attempting to convince Arjuna to fight, which seems to presuppose that Arjuna has the freedom to decide whether to fight. Nevertheless, K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a also maintains that he is the sole agent, such that each event happens solely as an act of K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a. K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a further claims that Arjuna cannot himself act and that he will use Arjuna as his instrument. He announces that Arjuna will fight. This seems to be a theological determinism. Schelling and Vivekananda are correct that the <\/span>Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101<\/span><\/i> teaches that K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a acts freely. Yet, it is unclear whether persons, who are manifestations of K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a, can themselves act freely. Hence, worries remain that moral nihilism is a consequence. Nonetheless, <\/span>Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany<\/span><\/i> is highly recommended text for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. It provides sufficient context, clarity, and explanation to make it both generally accessible and an important scholarly contribution.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Owen Ware, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany. New York: Routledge, 2024; xx + 178 pp. ISBN: 9781032452333. Reviewed by J. M. Fritzman, Lewis & Clark College In this outstanding and highly recommended book, which engages both the history of philosophy and comparative philosophy, Owen Ware chronicles the reception of Indian philosophy and Yoga in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[315,31,27,314],"class_list":["post-13448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-comparative-philosophy","tag-german-idealism","tag-history-of-philosophy","tag-indian-philosophy","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 17:11:22","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13450,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13448\/revisions\/13450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}