The Place of India in Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of History
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THE PLACE OF INDIA IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND POST-ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Tarandeep Singh Kang August 2012 © 2012 Tarandeep Singh Kang THE PLACE OF INDIA IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND POST-ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY Tarandeep Singh Kang, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 Within Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies of history, the Orient was represented not only as occupying a different geographical space from the Occident, but as participating in a different historical moment. Even as the Orient functioned as a site of curiosities, a subject of fantasy, and an object of domination, it was also a source of comparison that played a defining role in Europe’s own self-definition and sense of history, including what was often a sense of world-historical mission. This dissertation explores the ways in which an intensifying interest in India, particularly ancient India, shaped European thinkers’ historical understanding and their theories of world history. The notion that India was a nation of great antiquity was not an invention of either the Enlightenment or Romanticism; however, the age of India and its supposed role as a land of origins acquired new significance during the Enlightenment with the advent of elaborate attempts to reconstruct the trajectory and logic of world history. Through a focus on the place of India in the writings of Voltaire, J.G. Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer, this study shows how some of the defining characteristics of modern historical thought were integrally related to Europe’s encounter with the Orient. The debate over Indian origins also reveals how the status of the Orient was bound to the problem of defining history itself. In deciding where and when history began, and in determining which cultures belonged inside and outside of it, philosophers of history were determining both the contours of the concept and the proper method of historical interpretation. The result was instrumental for the rise of modern historical thought. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Taran Kang was born in Miami, Florida in March, 1979. He received his B.A. (Honours) in 2001 and his M.A. in 2003 from the University of Alberta. His doctoral research was generously supported with fellowships from Cornell University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He will take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale-NUS College in July, 2012. iii For My Parents iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank the members of my committee for their engagement with this project. First and foremost, I thank Dominick LaCapra, who has been an ideal committee chair in every respect; I have benefitted immensely from his insight and his generosity. Isabel Hull was supportive of this project from the beginning; I could not ask for a more perceptive or incisive reader. Robert Travers encouraged me to consider the broader implications of the dissertation; he helped me very much in thinking though its unifying themes. I also owe a tremendous debt to Diana Reese, Michael Steinberg, and Dennis Sweeney – three excellent teachers who helped me along the way. The generosity of Cornell University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program provided me with the resources and the time to pursue my studies and research. My time in graduate school has been greatly enriched by friends and colleagues, and I express my sincere thanks to Peter Staudenmaier, Arina Rotura, Emma Kuby, Emma Willoughby, Kate Horning, Madeleine Casad, Anna Parkinson, Chris Jones, Ryan Plumley, Marie Muschalek, Guillaume Ratel, Ada Kuskowski, Abigail Fisher, Rebecca Tally, Minhwa Ahn, Sean Franzel, Katrina Nousek, Melanie Steiner, Duane Corpis, Barb Donnell, and Angeles Espinaco-Virseda. v I cannot imagine life in Ithaca without Franz Hofer and Pedro Erber; it is my good fortune to know them both. I am also exceedingly fortunate to have such a loving family, and I express my heartfelt gratitude to my mother, my father, and my sister Veenu. Finally, I give thanks to my wife Claudine for all her love and support. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vii Introduction. The Orient and the Emergence of Modern Philosophies of History 1 Chapter 1. Voltaire and the Expansion of History 16 1. The Uses of the Foreign 21 2. Situating India and Europe 31 3. Voltaire and Vico 42 Chapter 2. Poetic Beginnings: J.G. Herder and the Childhood of Humankind 48 1. India and the Search for Paradise 55 2. The Poetic Spirit of the Indians 68 3. In Defense of Humanity 76 Chapter 3. Friedrich Schlegel: Indian Origins and the Future of Europe 86 1. Universal History: In Search of the Whole 94 2. History as Philology: On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians 103 3. “A Prophet Facing Backwards”: Schlegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy 116 of History Chapter 4. Hegel’s Vision of India: A Prelude to History 125 1. The History of “so-called” Oriental Philosophy 134 2. History in Translation: Rival Readings of the Bhagavad Gītā 143 3. Spirit Awakens: Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History 153 Chapter 5. Schopenhauer’s Reversal: From History to Nirvana 166 1. “There is no System of History” 171 2. Indian Philosophy and the Overcoming of History 177 3. In the Wake of Pessimism 188 Conclusion 194 Works Cited 199 vii Introduction The Orient and the Emergence of Modern Philosophies of History In the Discourse on Method, René Descartes suggests that to read the writings of the ancients is comparable to traveling to a foreign land and conversing with its inhabitants. Such an exercise not only teaches an acquaintance with the customs and ideas of other peoples; it also subverts our complacency and the naive assumption of the rightness of our own opinions, a subversion crucial to the beginning of the Cartesian philosophical enterprise. But notwithstanding the advantages of such intellectual excursions into the past, Descartes quickly admonishes his readers that an excessive concern with history may so blunt a concern with the present that “one eventually becomes a stranger in one’s own country”.1 According to Descartes, the danger of historical research is further exacerbated by the fallibility of all historical accounts and the consequent inability of history to provide us with true certitude, which is the desired object of his own philosophical quest. This prejudicial judgement largely repeats a longstanding devaluation of history within philosophy; however, it would also call forth a revolt and, ultimately, a radical reappraisal of history’s philosophical status. By the end of the eighteenth century, not only was history treated as a matter worthy of philosophical inquiry, but the notion of a philosophy of history, foreign to Descartes, was already part of common intellectual parlance. Moreover, Descartes’ casual characterization of the past as a strange land found its own strange corresponding reversal in the portrayal of contemporary foreign peoples as themselves representing or participating in past stages of mankind’s historical development. This notion of the uneven development of different peoples and cultures decisively shaped modern European 1 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 8. 1 philosophies of history and narratives pertaining to the historical position of Europe and the Orient. Within Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies of history, the Orient was represented not only as occupying a different geographical space from the Occident, but as participating in a different historical moment. Even as the Orient functioned as a site of curiosities, a subject of fantasy, and an object of domination, it was also a source of comparison that played a defining role in Europe’s own self-definition and sense of history, including what was often a sense of world-historical mission. With the expansion of European trade and conquest came an increase in travel literature and accounts of foreign cultures, which often fed into sentiments of European cultural superiority, but also generated critical self-reflection. The result in either case contributed to the formation of a new historical consciousness in the eighteenth century. Narratives of both progress and decline were integrally related to what European thinkers’ thought about other parts of the world and how they conceived Europe’s historical connection, or lack thereof, to foreign lands. In particular, an intensifying interest in Oriental origins proved to be decisive in shaping emergent theorizations of the movement, the structure, and even the meaning of world history. Problems of origins were paramount in Enlightenment debates about the validity of scripture and the historical position of the Orient in relation to modern Europe. At the beginning of the century, Egypt was the country most often associated with ancient origins, particularly among those who remained sympathetic to the hermetic tradition. But as information poured into Europe from other parts of the world, more distant lands become sources of fascination, sometimes with unsettling and disruptive philosophical consequences. In this context, India came to occupy an increasingly important position in the course of the eighteenth century. Voltaire 2 was at the forefront of those thinkers who sought to mobilize the East for religiously and politically subversive ends. He thus held up China as an exemplar of good governance to better excoriate absolute monarchy in Europe, and he argued for the great age of India so as to cast doubt on the authority and historical accuracy of the biblical narrative about the formation of the first nations. In placing the land of the most ancient origins outside the parameters of the biblical Orient, Voltaire sought to demonstrate that the biblical narrative was geographically and temporally parochial.