CHAPTER 5 ! Problems with the Critical Method And that is that spiritual source of life from which Christianity, and after the killing of it in Catholicism, true Christian Protestantism has come forth, and with Christianity and Protestantism, the scholarly spirit of the new European culture. W. M. L. de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik Alten und Neuen Testaments INTRODUCTION he birth of Indology takes place at the crossroads of two great intellectual currents in German history: Romanticism, which gave rise to the search for pristine civilizations and the interest in myth, and Protestant biblical criticism (and its attendant phenomenon, historicism), which shaped ideas of what texts are and how they were to be studied. But the story of the intellectual roots of Indology cannot be told without also exploring the roots of a third intellectual current of the time: the new Wissenschaftsideologie of the nineteenth century. his ideology was to be a potent factor in the development of Indology out of the early grammatical, philosophical, and literary interests of an earlier generation of Orientalists (among them, the Schlegel brothers and the scholar-statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt). he idea of science or scientiicity as embodying academic rigor, an attitude of skepticism (an ideal with strong moral overtones), and the development of a method tailored to the precise needs of the individual ield rapidly led to the professionalization and specialization of scholarship. Rather than undertaking broad inquiries into human existence, scholarship came to coalesce around the idea of disciplines or departments. Within Indology, there was consistent growth in the establishment of chairs and concurrent growth in eforts by scholars to distinguish their chairs from those of their colleagues.1 Yet, it was not Indology, but a related science, classical philology—“our sister 1. See McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism, 92–95 for the factors at work in this process. In spite of the fact that certain schools such as Berlin became centers of Indology and exported candidates to the chairs at other universities, McGetchin sees the creation or reinforcement of specializations as one of the main factors responsible for the rapid growth of Sanskrit philology in Germany. ( 356 ) PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD science,” as Oldenberg called it in an essay from 19062—that came to epitomize the new spirit of science in Germany. It was also the discipline on which the most expectations of making a contribution to humanistic education or Bildung were placed.3 It was no surprise, then, that when Indologists sought to legitimate the wissenschaftliche character of their discipline, they turned to philology as a prototype, claiming both parallels and descent from it. By underscoring the philological nature of their researches, Indologists hoped to capitalize on the reputation of German scholarship in classical studies (Altertumswissenschaft). Although an explicit theoretical justiication of Indology’s claim to being a science cannot be found in the writings of the period,4 we do ind a broad acceptance of positivist philology as being basically synonymous with science in general. In this chapter, we examine some of the strategies used by Indologists to make the case for their discipline as Wissenschaft and how those strategies relate to understandings of science, both historical and contemporary. he chapter is divided into eight sections. he irst two sections take a look at how, in the work of Hermann Oldenberg, the leading theoretician of Indology of the day, a new ideal of scientiic scholarship on India emerged, and at how this ideal was then grounded in a positivist philology. he next three sections present a brief overview of three scientiic currents of the time—positivism, historicism, and empiricism—and show how Indologists were responding to broader movements in philosophy of science, especially the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the intellectual father of positivism and historicism. In the sixth section, we look at criticisms that the positivistic notion of truth has been subject to in the twentieth century; the next section returns the discussion to Kant’s critical project and its historical inluence, already broached in the introduction. he eighth and concluding section then presents an overview of Gadamer’s criticisms of the attempt to construe the scientiic character of the human sciences along the lines of the natural sciences. Because of the inluence of his seminal Truth and Method on the contemporary self-understanding of the human sciences, we delve especially deeply into his views. Gadamer’s criticisms of the valorization of method over truth in the humanities and of the Enlightenment’s suspicion of all traditional 2. Hermann Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 3 and 6. 3. In contrast, Indology was hampered both by its origins in Romanticism and by its association with the cultures of the Orient. Even after Indologists distanced themselves from their Romantic heritage (jettisoning scholars such as the two Holtzmanns—though not their ideas—in the process), they were constantly under pressure to justify their discipline, whose associations with the Orient somehow rendered it suspect. In an address to a congress of German philologists, Oldenberg explicitly acknowledged Indology’s limitations vis-à-vis classical philology. He conceded that “what we study does not enrich our life, or at least not directly and immediately. We cannot ofer the great ideals [necessary] for that; as the educator of our youth and our nation, India may never be mentioned in the same breath as Greece and Rome.” Ibid., 8. Yet, Oldenberg nonetheless asserted that Indology had a role to play. Even if the cultures of the East had nothing to teach, “we will nonetheless ind,” claimed Oldenberg, “that there is nonetheless a pedagogic element [ein erziehendes Element] in the acquisition of such knowledge.” Ibid., 9. He concludes with a fervent plea that “in view of this” “the educators of our people who draw out of the riches of antiquity [the classical philologists] will not deny us, too, the right to a place alongside them.” Ibid. 4. he one exception is the writings of Hermann Oldenberg, which we discuss below. 357 358 Chapter 05 forms of authority are the vantage points from which we evaluate Indology’s claims to being part of the human sciences. STEPS TOWARD A SCIENTIFIC INDOLOGY he development of a new ideal of science at German universities during the nineteenth century has been well documented.5 Scholars note that around the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, the term Wissenschaft took on grand idealist associations of a system of total and comprehensive knowledge. his system integrated both the transcendental principles of knowledge with the more specialized disciplines that developed from out of these principles and carried forward the work of enabling knowledge of the objective world. In the works of writers such as Fichte (Wissenschaftslehre, 1794), Schelling (Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, 1803), Schleiermacher (Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn, 1808), and Henrik Stefens (Vorlesungen über die Idee der Universitäten, 1809), we ind this ideal of science expressed not only in quasi-religious terms, but also closely associated with ideas of national renewal and Germanhood.6 hese claims, however, were not mere rhetoric. R. Steven Turner estimates that the professoriate expanded in Prussia by 147 percent between 1800 and 1834. Especially striking was the rise in the so-called lower (that is, philosophical) faculty. Berlin’s philosophical faculty grew from thirty-two in 1820 to ninety-one by 1848.7 Characterizing this rise, Turner writes: “After 1820 the philosophical faculty began to expand phenomenally, largely in response to its new role in the education of Prussia’s secondary teachers. It attracted new groups of students, and its teaching body swelled with specialists moving into more and more esoteric areas of philology, history, and the sciences.”8 here was also a stunning rise in the number of scholarly publications, learned societies, and journals dedicated to new specialized disciplines. It was not 5. See R. Steven Turner, “he Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818–1848,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 137–82 and “he Prussian Universities and the Concept of Research,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der Deutschen Literatur 5 (1980): 68–93. Turner has argued that nineteenth-century German attitudes to science should be seen less in terms of their concrete scientiic contributions than in terms of the role of what he calls a “Wissenschaftsideologie,” which played a role in “encouraging intensive professorial research throughout the university.” his ideology, again according to Turner, “promoted a lofty, idealistic concept of the universities and also that absolute devotion to learning stereotypical of the German scholar ever since.” “he Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia,” 153. More recently, Mike Higton (A heology of Higher Education [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012]) has sought to understand the growth in German learning in explicitly theological terms. 6. For a typical example, see F. A. Wolf, “Darstellung der Alterthums-Wisssenschaft,” in F. A. Wolf ’s Darstellung der Alterthumswisssenschaft nebst einer Auswahl seiner kleinen Schriften; und litterarischen Zugaben zu dessen Vorlesungen über die Alterthumswissenschaft, ed. S. W. F. Hofmann (Leipzig: August Lehnhold, 1834). 7. R. Steven Turner, “he Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1973), 442f. 8. Turner, “he Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia,” 143. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD just that there was a sudden burst of intellectual efort, but a change occurred in the very meaning of knowledge, that is, in the notion of what could be studied, what was worth studying, and what counted as knowledge. Turner describes the change in attitudes as follows: “he professor of the eighteenth century had considered his main duty the transmission of established learning to certain professional groups; in addition to maintaining that goal, his nineteenth-century counterparts tried actively to expand learning in many esoteric ields. . . . Research emerged within university ideology as a fundamental duty of the scholar, and a reputation within one’s specialist community beyond the university became more and more a sine qua non for even minor university appointments.”9 his ideology of the scholar as engaged in original research was given explicit sanction in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. In his essay “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin,” which was to be a major inluence on university reform, Humboldt argued that what was unique about the higher educational faculties was that they regarded Wissenchaft as a “never completely solved problem.” hey therefore “remain ever at research, whereas the school is only concerned with inished and settled insights.”10 If knowledge was no longer a unity, a single science approximating an eternal model as it had been in the time of the ancients, if knowledge had fractured into multiple ields of inquiry, then original research became a duty of the scholar. here were potentially as many forms of knowledge as methods for discovering them. As Paulsen commented in 1901, “he 19th century irst introduced the requirement of independent research in science: only he is capable of being a teacher in science, who is himself actively productive in it. And correspondingly, the task of university education is not [the handing down of] mere tradition, but rather, instruction in how to independently bring forth knowledge.”11 Among the disciplines (and objects) to be discovered in the nineteenth century, were psychology (man as the intersection and functioning of his psychological capacities), sociology (man as social being), philology (text as document), and biology (life as an organic structure embedded in a speciic environment).12 Indology, the new science of the study of India, too, emerged in the nineteenth century as part of this general expansion of research into all ields of human activity. It is thus no surprise that it conformed to general ideas of science in the air. Although we do not ind an explicit relection on its status as science (which perhaps would not be undertaken until the early twentieth century), in the writings of the Indologists of the period we do ind frequent (and repeated) appeals to the wissenshaftliche character of Indology. Certainly, the threshold of positivity (to use Foucault’s terminology) was crossed quite early in its history, with the thresholds of epistemologization 9. Ibid., 138. 10. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin,” in Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10: Politische Denkschriften, ed. Bruno Gebhardt (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1903), 251. 11. Friedrich Paulsen, Die deutschen Universitäten und das Universitätsstudium (Berlin: Verlag von A. Asher, 1902), 204–5. 12. See Michel Foucault, he Order of hings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 359 360 Chapter 05 and scientiicity being crossed a little later. Key in this process of evolution was the idea of Indology as a philological and historical preoccupation with the documents of Indian antiquity, just as the science of classical philology (Altertumswissenschaft) was preoccupied with the documents of classical antiquity. Before the establishment of the irst chair for Indology (at Bonn in 1818; the irst professor to hold the chair was August Wilhelm Schlegel), German intellectuals had carried out studies into Indian literature from a number of perspectives. Johann Gottfried Herder had produced literary translations of verses of the Bhagavadgītā. Humboldt himself had written an essay on the Gītā, praising it for its philosophical as well as for its poetic qualities.13 Schlegel hoped that the discovery of Indian antiquity would provide a similar impetus for the sciences in the nineteenth century as the (re)discovery of classical antiquity had provided in the ifteenth century.14 He was to be disappointed, however. Initial excitement over Indian thought gave way to a more philological preoccupation with Indian texts. In many ways, this transformation parallels wider currents relating to German philosophy. As Howard remarks, “as the nineteenth-century wore on and under the inluence of positivism, the growth of the natural sciences, disciplinary specialization, and the exigencies of industrialization and technology, Wissenschaft gradually lost its grand, idealist associations and took on a more limited deinition with reference to particular academic ields, empirical rigour, and the putative ideological neutrality of the scholar.”15 Above all, it was the new disciplines of history and classical philology that were to meet this idea of Wissenschaft. Turner notes: “he philological and historical disciplines irst displayed the intense concern with research and research training. Only later—during the 1830s—were these commitments widely adopted by science professors, often in direct imitation of learned values and institutional models of the humanistic disciplines.”16 Indology’s need to establish itself as a science meant that it quickly imbibed these ideas of disciplinary rigour. In fact, its evolution traced that of philology, which always remained the science against which it measured itself. hus, just as the “critical, analytic tendencies of the new philology clashed sharply with the philosophic program of a grand synthesis of learning [and] [a]fter 1830 . . . largely replaced the philosophical tradition,”17 so, too, did Indology see itself in a conlict with philosophical interpretation. he 13. See “Ueber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gîtâ bekannte Episode des Mahâ-Bhârata I,” 190, n. 1 (the Gītā is “a work rich in philosophical ideas”) and “Ueber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gîtâ bekannte Episode des Mahâ-Bhârata II,” 334 (the Gītā, “more than any other work of this kind, come down to us from any other nation, lives up to the true and genuine concept of a philosophical poem”) and 340 (“philosophical language is already far more developed in this Indian work [the Gītā] than the Greek [language] at least at the time of Parmenides was” and “in every epoch, philosophy had penetrated poetry more deeply in India than [this was the case] in Greece”). (Both works are cited earlier; all citations refer to the 1906 reprint.) 14. Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 111 and see also ibid., 316. 15. Howard, Protestant heology, 29. 16. Turner, “he Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia,” 138. 17. Ibid., 172. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD eforts of an earlier generation of scholars such as Herder and Humboldt were dismissed as Schwärmgeisterei.18 By the early twentieth century, we ind a widespread consensus in the writings of many Indologists that Indology had to be reestablished along philological principles. Hermann Oldenberg, in an essay written in 1906, argued that Indology was concerned with the documents of Indian antiquity, a task that necessitated a historical and philological approach. With this and other publications on Indologie or, as he preferred to call it in explicit contrast to classical philology, on indische Philologie (Indian philology), Oldenberg rapidly became the foremost spokesperson for the new science. Between 1875 (the year he published his dissertation, “De sacris fratrum arvalium quaestiones”) and 1920 (the year of his death), he published six articles or speeches devoted to a theoretical clariication of Indology. he earliest of these, “Über Sanskritforschung,” was written in 188619; the next to follow was “Die Erforschung der altindischen Religionen im Gesamtzusammenhang der Religionswissenschaft: Ein Vortrag” (1904),20 while the two years 1906–7 saw the publication of three of his most important contributions: “Göttergnade und Menschenkraft in den altindischen Religionen” (1906), Oldenberg’s inaugural lecture on his accession to the rectorship of the University of Kiel21; “Indische und klassische Philologie” (1906),22 his most extensive relection on the relation of Indian philology to classical philology; and “Indologie” (1907),23 a recapitulation of modern Indology’s tasks that explicitly closed the door on Indology’s Romantic and humanist heritage.24 18. For the politics of this term, see the informative and lively account by Anthony J. La Vopa, “he Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (1997): 85–115. 19. Hermann Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” Deutsche Rundschau 47 (1886): 386–409. 20. Hermann Oldenberg, “Die Erforschung der altindischen Religionen im Gesamtzusammenhang der Religionswissenschaft: Ein Vortrag,” Deutsche Rundschau 121 (1904): 248–61, reprinted in Hermann Oldenberg, Indien und die Religionswissenschaft: Zwei Vorträge von Hermann Oldenberg (Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1906), 1–30. All citations refer to the reprint. 21. Hermann Oldenberg, “Göttergnade und Menschenkraft in den altindischen Religionen, Rede gehalten beim Antritt des Rektorats der Königlichen Christian-Albrechts-Universität, 5. März 1906,” in Indien und die Religionswissenschaft: Zwei Vorträge von Hermann Oldenberg (Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1906), 31–57. 22. Hermann Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik 17 (1906): 1–9. 23. Hermann Oldenberg, “Indologie,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 1 (1907): 635–44. 24. Interspersed between these were two Jahresberichte (annual reports) on Indian philosophy (1888 and 1890) written for the journal Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie (Archive for the History of Philosophy) and a similar review of research on Indian religion titled “Indische Religion” published in 1903. Oldenberg’s last such review was the article “Neue indologische Entdeckungen” published in 1918 two years before his death. No other German Indologist, before or since, has published more statements on the theoretical self-understanding of Indology. (See bibliography for complete references.) 361 362 Chapter 05 What were Oldenberg’s main points? In his 1886 text, he was at pains to contrast the more haphazard eforts of British scholars (mainly colonial oicers such as William Jones) with the systematic eforts of German scholars. Oldenberg saw the establishment of the Asiatic Society (Calcutta, 1784) as the birth hour of Indology. He credited Wilson, Henry homas Colebrooke, and others with establishing this “new branch of historical research.” Yet ideas of historical research—however popular—did not sufice to deine the scientiic character of Indology; rather, what was required was a concerted efort at systematic research. Here, German scholars excelled: “Englishmen began the work; soon it was taken up by men of other nations and in the course of time it transformed itself ever more decisively, to a far greater extent than this could, for example, be said of research into hieroglyphic or cuneiform [writing], into an afair of German science [deutschen Wissenschaft].”25 “While Colebrooke still stood at the height of his [creative] powers, participation in researches on India began to awaken in that land which had done more than any other to bring these [researches] closer to a strict, irmly grounded science [Wissenschaft]: Germany.”26 Oldenberg assigned Germany pride of place in this transition from an amateur preoccupation to a formal discipline, the word being used with all its connotations of rigor, dedication, and a structured program of inquiry. Using the two great Sanskrit dictionaries of the time (Monier-Williams and Roth-Böhtlingk) as an example, he typiied the contrast between British and German scholarship as follows: “he contrast between the two great periods [of Sanskrit scholarship] could not be more clearly embodied than in these two dictionaries, in which the development of researches on India is displayed: here, the beginnings, which the English science standing directly on the shoulders of Indian pandithood had made; there, the further development, with the methods of strict philology, in terms of breadth and depth pressing incomparably ahead of these beginnings, at their head German researchers.”27 Paralleling the distinction Howard traces between the irst and second phases of Wissenschaftsideologie, Oldenberg also identiied two distinct phases of the reception of Indian thought in Germany. In the irst phase, German literature, poetry, and philosophy laid the ground for Indian studies in Germany. As Oldenberg notes, “here could be no more receptive ground for Jones’ and Colebrooke’s discoveries than the Germany of that period, full of enthusiastic interest for the ancient, folk [volksthümliche] poetry of all nations, illed with great movements in its own literature and philosophy; out of the distance, India’s [literature and poetry] now encountered these as though related: so to speak, an Oriental Romanticism and a poetic thought that, in its sweep, sought no less daringly than the absolute philosophy of the Germans to press forward to the formless primordial source of all forms [gestaltlosen Urquell aller Gestaltungen].”28 Yet, this Romantic heritage could, at times, also be a source of embarrassment, as Oldenberg lets out in his criticisms of Schlegel. Schlegel, he argued, had created a “highly inluential fantasy image of India.” Yet, this image 25. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 386. 26. Ibid., 390 (emphasis in original). 27. Ibid., 402. 28. Ibid., 390. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD was neither “sober” nor “faithful” to the truth.29 In contrast, it was “Bopp, with his researches into the grammatical structure of Sanskrit, who undertook to base the science [Wissenschaft] on the long recognized fact of the relationship of this language to Persian and to mainly European languages.”30 Bopp’s approach was more “modest”; yet, it had “penetrated incomparably deeper” into Indian language and literature.31 Oldenberg was full of fulsome praise for Bopp’s 1816 work, Conjugationsystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprahe, which he considered to have laid the foundation for scientiic study of India. He wrote: “We can here only mention with one word the researches that have been carried out since the appearance of this work . . . and for which Bopp laid the foundation at the time. Seldom has more remarkable work been accomplished for science [Wissenschaft] than here.”32 Bopp’s comparative linguistic approach, however, was only part of the story. he other part, which Oldenberg considered to have divided the evolution of the “science [Wissenschaft] of India” into “two halves,” was the development of historical research, aided above all by a renewed interest in the Veda.33 Here he identiies three great names: Max Müller, Rudolf von Roth, and Albrecht Weber. Roth, above all, appears to have been a paradigm of this new historical consciousness for Oldenberg. He cites the scholar’s view that it would be a “mockery” if the “criticism and acumen” of a century that had successfully deciphered the rock inscriptions of the Perisan kings and Zarathustra’s books, did not also succeed in reading “the history of ideas [Geistesgeschichte] of this people [that is, the Indians] in this mass of writings with certitude.”34 How far did the renewed interest in researching the Veda go toward fulilling Roth’s expectations? Although Oldenberg conceded that much of what Roth had hoped for could not be attained, he argued that “what has been attained has given a completely new look to the picture, which science [Wissenschaft] had of India.” “his picture appeared to lose itself without a horizon in the misty depths of an unmeasured past; now we ind the boundaries; an external starting point for history that can be the subject of our research is within sight. Authentic sources, originating in the oldest period of India, out of which and concerning which historical sources in the customary sense of the term can be attained, opened themselves up and, instead of the twilight traversed by uncertain, shadowy titanic igures, in which the epic poems caused this period to appear, the Veda showed forth a reality that one could hope to understand. . . .” Even where the Veda did not succeed in enabling historical knowledge, this was nonetheless “a gain” because “one then at least knew that the information one sought had vanished and what presented itself as this [information] was now exposed as a fantasy image, one that had emerged from the arbitrariness of later creators of legend.” Scholarship into the Veda, Oldenberg concluded, had succeeded in “outlin[ing] the horizon of historical knowledge with signiicant forms.”35 29. Ibid., 391. 30. Ibid. (Oldenberg’s emphasis). 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 393. 34. Ibid., 394; Oldenberg does not cite the source and we have been unable to discover it. 35. Ibid., 394. 363 364 Chapter 05 In contrast to the irst phase, the second phase of Indian studies in Germany (for which we properly reserve the name Indology) was also marked by increasing technicization. Whereas the Romantics had been inspired by pedagogic and philosophical considerations, such considerations were regarded as increasingly redundant by career Indologists. As we have seen, following Hegel’s review of von Humboldt’s Gītā, German scholars increasingly came to see Indian texts as raw matter for their own historical and critical researches. Hence Oldenberg could now declare, “it is the task of the philological researcher to determine these fates [which the Indian texts have undergone], so to speak, the life history [Lebensgeschichte] of the texts.” He also compared Indian texts, “as they have been handed down to us,” with “the paintings of old masters, across which destruction and attempts at restoration, both by legitimate and illegitimate persons, have alternately been at work.” Our aim, Oldenberg declared, was to “know, as far as can be recognized, what the painting originally was like.”36 Here was where German scholarship came into its own. Oldenberg writes: We may state [with justiication] that the most ambitious eforts [and] the most important successes in this ield are associated with the names of German researchers. If we [now] add that it could not easily have been otherwise, then this is not hubris; rather, we thereby merely give expression to a state of afairs that is grounded in the evolution of the science [Wissenschaft] itself. It was natural that the earliest impulses for the nascent research on India, the irst attempts to grasp the material that was imposing itself en masse on us and to ind preliminary forms for it, are owed to Englishmen—men who had spent a good portion of their lives in India and stood in constant contact with the local scholars of Sanskrit there. But it is no less natural that the honors of further advances [and] deeper insights have fallen to the lot of the Germans. he two areas of science [Wissenschaft], out of which life and strength primarily lowed to researches on India, were and remain essentially German: comparative linguistics [Sprachwissenschaft], which, one can say, was founded by Bopp, and that deepened, powerful science [Wissenschaft] or, just as rightly, art of philology, as it had been practiced by Gottfried Hermann and, alongside him, permeated by the proud spirit of Lessing, Karl Lachmann, full of astute, goal-oriented skill, precise and true [genau und wahrhaftig] in small matters just as much as in big ones.37 Systematicity, rigor, intensiication of research, development of autonomous methods, historical reconstruction, and comparative and philological methods—these, then, were the hallmarks of German scholarship on India according to Oldenberg. hey were responsible for endowing the study of Sanskrit with its properly scientiic character. hese traits, however, were not unique to Indology. hey were the deining characteristic of German scholarship tout court and in particular of classical philology, which remained the science against which Indology measured itself. As Oldenberg clariied, “even if representatives of this philology [that is, of classical philology] . . . should encounter the youthful science [Wissenschaft] of India 36. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 395. 37. Ibid., 400–1. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD with reserve or with more than reserve, this changes nothing about the fact that work on Indian texts, investigation into the literary monuments of India, cannot be learnt from any better teacher than those masters, who knew how to improve and to explain the classical texts with an accuracy of method as this world has never seen before.”38 Yet Oldenberg was not simply being ingenious. By the nineteenth century, it was the “new” philology that, above all, had established the reputation of German scholarship. Howard notes that classical philology and its sister discipline, Altertumswissenschaft, became “the German sciences par excellence, and [the] ones with far-reaching ramiications for scholarship and the university system as a whole.”39 Under the stewardship of Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761) and Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), philological studies came to take pride of pace within the neohumanist canon of the university. It thus comes as no surprise that Oldenberg sought to construe the wissenschaftliche character of Indology along the lines of classical philology. By underscoring the connection between Indology and philology, he hoped to establish the scientiic character of Indology. He argued a direct ancestry for Indology in classical philology in that he traced its genealogy via Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) to Moriz Haupt (1808–74) and Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848), the latter two classical philologists at Leipzig. Indology was scientiic, wissenschaftlich, because it had imbibed ideas of methodological rigor and technical precision from philology, from “that . . . great teacher” as Oldenberg called it in his 1909 article.40 Paralleling the development of the study of ancient languages at German universities, which had gone from being ancillary to theological concerns to becoming independent disciplines in their own right,41 Indian studies in the nineteenth century also underwent a similar process of Verselbständigung, rendering themselves independent or autonomous of philosophical, literary, or theological concerns. Well might Oldenberg underscore the wissenschaftliche character of Indology, if all that was thereby implied was that it had traced the evolution of philology. And yet that is only half the story, for we must still ask wherein the scientiic character of Indology as philology lies. he answer will take us in the direction of a general critique of positivist methodology. STEPS TOWARD A POSITIVIST PHILOLOGY Oldenberg further deepened the comparison between Indology and classical philology in later writings. As he expressed it in a 1909 address to a congress of German philologists, it was not just the “existence of material relationships” between the cultures of Greek, Roman, or Christian antiquity on the one hand, and Indian antiquity on the other, that legitimated the comparison between the two. Rather, it was the fact that “from a purely formal perspective, methodologically, the tasks that the 38. Ibid., 401. 39. Howard, Protestant heology, 117. 40. Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 4. 41. Howard, Protestant heology, 117–20. 365 366 Chapter 05 Indologist has to solve are in every way comparable to those of the classical philologists, albeit, in other respects, not identical at all.”42 Here he distinguished between two aspects: (1) the object and aims of the science; and (2) the method of treating the ield. As regards the irst, he argued that “for both sciences the task is to summon up the existence of past civilizations [Volkstums] from their grave, to reinvigorate their manifestation, to understand the causal processes at work in them. he doorway here, as there [in classical philology], is language, grammar, and the lexicon. . . . hen the same holds for the Indologist as for the classical philologist, to hew a trail through monstrous masses of literature, to cleanse the texts, to put the old and the new, as much as possible, in their place.” Indology speciically was faced with the task of a “reconstruction” of “the history of India.”43 Oldenberg, however, conceded that expectations had to be set “especially low” concerning the possibility of a comprehensive and coherent account of the history of India.44 In its place, he advocated specialized investigations focusing on “the religious essence of India in its evolution, law, [and] the plastic arts.” Political, economic, or social history remained beyond the ambit of Indology. Instead, Oldenberg argued a narrower claim. Indology was to research “all areas of spiritual activity out of the texts and monuments, just as the classical study of antiquity [klassische Altertumswissenschaft] does it in its own ield with such great success.”45 his narrowing of focus to what might be called the spiritual history of India (as compared to its material history) was conditioned partly by what Oldenberg called the “existential conditions” under which German scholars operated.46 As he noted, “On the one side stood those who work in India locally and on site [an Ort und Stelle], obviously mostly Englishmen, alongside them anglicized Indians: there are administrators, jurists, military oicers, practical school-teachers, as a whole not Indologists according to the German mould [nach deutschem Zuschnitt].”47 hese workers came in for high praise: Oldenberg noted that they had collected manuscripts, inscriptions, works of art, and ethnological and folkloric material. Yet, this work was only preparatory to truly critical scholarship and the latter was done (or was to be done) by German academics. Oldenberg comments: “here are fruits in Indology that only the purposeful [zielbewußt] philological and historical method is capable of picking. To these fruits the hands of the workers, of whom I have spoken, do not always reach.” He continues: “Now the others: we philologists, in particular, the German philologists. Many of us have not seen India at all; for obvious reasons we cannot come so easily to Benares as one comes to Rome or Athens. hus, we are all too exposed to the danger that something of the ultimate vitality of life is missing from the pictures that appear to us, that what we take to be the cloud trails of the 42. Oldenberg,“Indische und klassische Philologie,” 1. 43. Ibid., 2. 44. Ibid.; his exact words are: “Und dann gilt es die Geschichte Indiens zu rekonstruieren: eine Aufgabe, bei der wir freilich unsere Ansprüche besonders tief herabstimmen müssen.” 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 3. 47. Ibid., 3–4. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD Indian sky are ultimately only the vapors of our own study-rooms.”48 Nonetheless, Oldenberg argued that there was “rich compensation” for these shortcomings: If we may not feel ourselves immediately certain of [possessing] a feeling for the Indian present, we nonetheless see with greater acuity in the distance of Indian antiquity, that is, in the period that is important, above all, to us. . . . We know the Hindu less well than our [British] colleagues, who live in his land and breathe his air. But to us, I declare, the opportunity has been given to know the Aryan of ancient India better than these [our colleagues].49 It is with respect to this task that Oldenberg considered classical philology to be the science par excellence upon which Indology had to model itself. He concluded: Here I have reached the point at which I was aiming. My task is to speak of the relationship of our science [Wissenschaft] to classical philology. Now if we trust ourselves to be able to look back into those ancient horizons, without constantly going astray in their murky depths, then we owe this above all to that philology, the great teacher, from whom we learn to work as philologists!50 What made classical philology the paradigmatic science for Oldenberg? Although German successes in classical philology might have partly fuelled these—admittedly somewhat hyperbolic—claims, there is good reason to look more closely at his reasons. Partly hyperbolic as they were, his claims nonetheless expose deep shared commitments (with philology) to certain principles of scholarship. First and foremost, there were the technical aspects of the discipline. Here Oldenberg argued that there can be “absolutely nothing humiliating for us [i.e., for the Indologists] [to learn from philology] for this is simply a self-evident state of afairs.”51 As he clariied, Our science [Wissenschaft] is still too young, still too little established for us to be able to learn and to teach the techniques of the philological art in our own ield of work in their complete conformity to law [Gesetzmäßigkeit] and detail. All the experiences, through whose conscious mastery tentative relection is transformed into a skilled technique of research—we could not possibly have had them ourselves in the necessary richness and determinacy; hence, we must take them over from those who have had these experiences before us. We must observe the possessors of such experiences at work: where can this occur better than in the workshops of Lachmann or Mommsen?52 48. Ibid., 4. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 51. Ibid., 4–5. 52. Ibid., 5. 367 368 Chapter 05 Second, there were the concrete methodological steps to be learned from the philologists. Oldenberg argued that the art of inquiry that also applies to the Indologist is practiced here [that is, in the workshops of Lachmann and Mommsen]; it is here that he [the Indologist] learns to recognize the seams in the form of what has evolved historically [Gestalt des Gewordenen], through which research penetrates to the processes of becoming [Vorgängen des Werdens] lying behind it [i.e., behind the outward form]; he learns with a conident hand to collect all the irm points and to forget none of them for each and every problem, setting out from which [points] the state of the unknown points, which we are in search of, can be determined. Are there Indologists in training among those whom I address? I do not know of any more suitable advice to give them than to take classes with the teachers of classical philology. hey should not slavishly imitate them, but they should learn to apply in other ields and to other conditions what manifests in terms of universal norms in the works of these [teachers] in the most vivid form.53 hird, there were the aims of scholarship, which once again were explicitly borrowed from philology. As Oldenberg exempliied vis-à-vis the Ṛ!gveda, Indologists had adapted and further developed the tools of philology for their own needs. he kinds of questions they had raised concerning the text, too, echoed the speciic origin of their concepts and methods in philology. he textual transmission of the Ṛ!gveda, already quite irmly established in very ancient times; seemingly in many of the most minute details of an admirable faithfulness: does it nonetheless permit, and if so to what extent, free reign to the conjecture that strives beyond the old state back to the original state [of the text]? [And, further,] the explanation of the Ṛ!gvedic text that is laid down in imposing works handed down by the old Indian scholars; does our exegesis have to demonstrate respect before this Indian knowledge [Inderwissen] or must it on its own responsibility hew open its own paths?54 Oldenberg also emphasized the critical potential of philology, in both correcting the transmission and in ofering an alternative access to the text than the commentarial tradition: Whoever stands closer to my subject knows how diametrically opposed the views are. What I consider to be correct, I will indicate. . . . It can only appear correct to me to examine the text without all the literal faith in words [Buchstabenglauben] in the traditional text with the methods of classical philology, as precisely as we are able to examine this: then we learn, I declare, to recognize that the exemplary transmission is nonetheless not infallible and in some places we learn to improve it. And similarly, 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 5–6. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD I can only consider it correct to once again examine the traditional explanation of the Ṛ!gveda with the methods of classical philology: we then learn to see through it as completely untenable and in many, I hope in the most places, we learn to ind better [explanations].55 Although the parallels between Oldenberg’s views and Roth’s views (discussed earlier in chapter 4) of tradition are striking, we ought not overlook the fact that the new philology, especially as it developed in the hands of scholars such as Heyne and Wolf, was equally skeptical of tradition.56 Oldenberg could therefore claim to be well in the mainstream of philological ideas. he new philology, with its critical methods, emphasis on a return to the sources of tradition, disdain for commentarial glosses or interpolations, and preference for literal and historical readings, held out the promise of revolutionizing the understanding of the Veda. It not only ofered to build incrementally on existing readings; it was a completely new approach, rooted in completely diferent expectations and in a completely diferent understanding of texts. Further, its aims were antithetical to those of the tradition: whereas tradition considered the Veda to be a revelation and a source of infallible knowledge concerning supersensible reality, philology would regard it as a human and historical testament. As Barbara Holdredge notes in her comparison of the Veda and the Torah, the very purpose of studying scripture underwent a sea change.57 If the Indologist could not see the antimetaphysical biases of his approach, it was because the new philology implicitly underwrote his antitraditional, antiauthoritarian relex. Indeed, Oldenberg did not think there was a signiicant diference between the critical stance espoused by philology and the criticisms of tradition advanced by Indology. As he expressed it, “the technique of interpretation” was “in both ields [i.e., Indology and philology]” 55. Ibid., 6. 56. How far apart the two are to be kept is, of course, a matter of debate, since there are scholars who see the critical relex of philology as itself partly arising from and partly contributing to theological developments in Germany. According to Howard, the application of “innovative philological techniques to biblical texts” by philologists such as J. D. Michaelis and J. G. Eichhorn laid the foundations for the development of “ ‘myth criticism’, the exegetical efort to separate the historical from the mythical in the Bible.” Howard therefore argues that one is “tempted” to “generalize that the shape of nineteenth-century German historical criticism of the Bible—and the concomittant critical theology that prioritized historical exegesis over dogma—bears witness to a revolution in philology. . . .” Howard, Protestant heology, 120. 57. “he study of scripture since the nineteenth century has been almost exclusively the domain of biblical and orientalist scholars, who have used the tools of critical analysis in order to determine the cultural, historical, and literary inluences that have given rise to individual texts. hese historical and literary studies have primarily focused on the content of particular religious texts and on questions of Entstehungsgeschichte, or the ‘history of origins’—the history of causes and conditions that have produced speciic texts.” Barbara A. Holdrege, Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (Albany: State University of New York, Press 1996), 3–4. But as Holdredge notes, the “very category of scripture” as it has been conceptualized by Western scholars may be insuicient to these texts. Rather, “the very notion of textuality implicit in the concept needs to be reexamined” since scripture, for the tradition, is “not simply a textual phenomenon, but . . . [represents] a cosmological principle . . . inherent in the very structure of reality.” Ibid., 4–5. 369 370 Chapter 05 “partly identical and partly closely related.” “For the scholar of the Veda, who is tempted to translate faithfully according to the Indian commentators, the contact with classical philology is like contact with fresh air. he future of Veda interpretation, this is my conviction, depends not insigniicantly upon whether we succeed in dispelling the airs of the commentators’ knowledge by such a fresh breath of air.”58 In a nutshell, then, the positivist philology advocated by Oldenberg as the foundation for Indology had the following features: 1. It drew on established methodological canons, made available to it by classical philology. 2. Under the inluence of what Sheehan has termed the “documentary impulse” it studied Indian texts as physical, historical, and cultural artifacts, but not, at any event, as literary works. 3. It focused on texts not as they functioned within the life of the community, but as reconstituted by the scholar. 4. It replaced commentary by criticism, where the salient feature of this criticism would be, as Schleiermacher has it, its suspicion.59 5. It privileged historical investigations, though, conditioned by the fact that German scholars lacked irsthand access to India, these investigations would not take the form of positive historical research, but of identifying the historical processes at work in the evolution of Indian texts. 6. Finally, there was the claim to being Wissenschaft, legitimated not only in terms of speciic methodological precepts, but also in terms of a powerful rhetoric of scientiicity. Although presented as making contributions to a positivist, historicist philology, there were signiicant problems with Oldenberg’s conception of Indology. Oldenberg might recall the names of Gottfried Hermann and Karl Lachmann, but the German Indologists’ knowledge of philology remained tenuous at best. hey neither had the secure grasp of language demanded by Hermann nor the secure grasp of critical edition demanded by Lachmann. heir reconstructions of various Ur-texts of the Mahābhārata and Bhagavadgītā (studied in the preceding chapters) were evidence that they had not grasped the basic principles of textual criticism. For the most part, their philology could be summed up as what Heyne once described as “the vanity of wanting to seem brilliant through emendations.”60 Further, their penchant for studying the Veda from a documentary perspective needs to be seen in its historical context. Although Indologists did introduce new modes of contemplation, those modes in the inal analysis are also not free from suspicion. It is perhaps true that the 58. Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 6. 59. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 255–56. 60. As reported by Hermann Sauppe in “Johann Matthias Gesner und Christian Gottlob Heyne,” in Göttinger Professoren. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Cultur und Literaturgeschichte in acht Vorträgen (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Porthes, 1872), 89. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD tradition did not develop historical modes of contemplation (or, at least, not to the same extent and in the same way as modern scholarship). As Oldenberg exclaimed, “historical development tends to be more weakly, more nebulously formed in India than in the West. And it lies in a transmission before us that does everything [possible] in order to obscure its image completely: this transmission without irm dates, which often confuses old and new to a seemingly hopeless extent, which continuously presents us with illusions with the pretentious [anspruchsvoll] wisdom of its masses of commentaries that only owe their existence to the sophistry of the scholastics in place of genuine thoughts and institutions.”61 Oldenberg also wrote that, “the more we . . . know of the history of India,” the more it appeared “as an incoherent rise and fall of accidental events.” “hese events lack a secure hold and the meaningful sense such as that the power of a national spirit [Volksgeistes] that wills and transforms its will into deeds lends history [Geschehen].” “Only in the history of ideas, above all of religious thought,” do we ind “irm ground.” “One may hardly speak of history in another sense here . . . [and] a people that has no history, naturally has even less of historiography.”62 hese claims of a deicient historical consciousness among Indians were, doubtless, at least partly rhetorical. By highlighting the historicist dimensions of their research, Western Orientalists could make a powerful case for their own profession. Yet, what emerged at the end of this process of divestment of the text of its traditional social contexts and meanings was not a text emptied of all religious authority, but one whose authority had, to use Sheehan’s terms, been reconstructed and recuperated elsewhere: in the academies of Western scholars. Sheehan demonstrates in painstaking detail how changes in attitudes to the Bible in the eighteenth century led to the development of “nonliterary techniques . . . for evaluating documents.”63 Once the Bible lost its source of legitimation in a single, uniied church, scholars began to undertake the “recuperation of a text whose authenticity and authority could no longer be guaranteed by . . . theology.”64 In this project, scholars turned to various domains and disciplines, especially philology. he Bible came to be seen as a document rather than as a carrier of theological truths. As Sheehan describes the process, the “idea of the textual unconscious was key to the documentary impulse. By divorcing the physical features of the manuscript from its literary content, and by using these physical features to historicize the manuscript, both Maubillon and Montfaucon successfully removed the question of literary content from the domain of serious scholarship.”65 Yet, while these methodological innovations were essential to the discovery of the academic Bible, they were also conditioned by this discovery, indeed, made possible and necessary by it. he cultural Bible became the legitimation for a positivist philology that was, in turn, tasked with the investigation of this very text qua cultural artifact. “As a tool for teaching, a subject of 61. Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 6. 62. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 406. 63. Jonathan Sheehan, he Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 102. 64. Ibid., 213. 65. Ibid., 103. 371 372 Chapter 05 scholarly research, and a disseminated document, the authority and authenticity of the Bible were guaranteed—in these domains—by the exercise of philological scholarship.”66 Hence, for Sheehan, the central problem for a study of the Enlightenment Bible (and its attendant methods) cannot, following a popular narrative, be that of an overcoming and an emancipation of religious authority, but its “reconstruction and recuperation.”67 Western scholarship on Indian scriptural literature would trace a similar trajectory, irst projecting and then deconstructing the category of scripture. he radically reconstituted texts that emerged at the end of this process were mere simulacra of their originals. Legaspi has elegantly deined “scripture” as a text that “functions in an authoritative and obligatory way within the context of a community shaped by a coherent economy of meaning.”68 If we accept his deinition, we can see why the Orientalists’ attempt at projecting an autonomous study of Indian texts was destined to fail. On the one hand, the Orientalists claimed justiication for their work in the fact that they were ofering a nonconfessional take on Indian texts. On the other, the texts studied by them had lost all reference to their originating communities. hey were no longer the texts they had originally been. he “knowledge” the Orientalists attained in this process was thus pertinent only for them, premised on objects that existed only for them. Yet, before we set aside the work of the Indologists, it is useful and illuminating to consider exactly what kind of knowledge it was that was attained in Indology and what the epistemic foundations of this knowledge were. hese questions will lead us ineluctably into a wider question concerning the understanding of scientiic method in the nineteenth century. CONSTRUING THE NATURAL SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF PHILOLOGY Oldenberg in his essay pursued two aims. he irst was to legitimate the claims of his discipline to being a form of knowledge, Wissenschaft, alongside and on par with classical philology. he second was to ground the claim to being scientiic, wissenschaftlich, in an ideal of method. We shall distinguish between these two as the claim to science (or Wissenschaftsanspruch) and the claim to scientiicity (or Wissenschaftlichkeitsanspruch). he former refers to the social and pragmatic aspects of the acceptance and integration of Indology into the university canon; the latter refers to the epistemic aspects of how the university canon in general was understood such that Indology could claim to belong to it. he former aspect has been studied in great detail elsewhere, among others by McGetchin, Sengupta, and Rabault-Feuerhahn, and we shall therefore not pursue it further here. Rather, we shall focus on the second aspect, attempting what might be called a Wissenschaftlichkeitsgeschichte rather 66. Ibid., 117. 67. Ibid., xii. 68. Michael C. Legaspi, he Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 14. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD than a Wissenschaftsgeschichte of Indology here. he question we shall pursue is: on what understanding of science can Indology claim to be Wissenschaft? he search for an answer to this question takes us back to the problem of method in what have been called the human sciences, the so-called Geisteswissenchaften.69 Although Oldenberg did not explicitly clarify wherein the scientiic character of philology lay, it is not hard to trace the roots of his understanding of science. he supposedly scientiic character of his philology was, in essence, undewritten by three implicit claims: (1) its positivism; (2) its historicism; and (3) its empiricism. he insistence on the positive character of philology was not surprising, given the history of efect of the positivism of Auguste Comte, which largely shaped nineteenth-century attitudes and ideas of science. Positivism was the reigning intellectual current of the nineteenth century. Emerging originally as a theory of experience, Comtean positivism inluenced the ields of economics, politics, and even engendered the ield of scientiic sociology. Besides J. S. Mill, many leading intellectuals at the time made common cause with positivism. “Alexander Bain, John Morley, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot and Harriet Martineau were partial adherents of Comte’s positivist system; others (e.g. Matthew Arnold, Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephan) read Comte— often surprisingly sympathetically—because, given their particular moral concerns, he was a force to be reckoned with. From the mid-1850s there was an oicial positivist movement, led by Richard Congreve, and including E. S. Beesly, J. H. Bridges and the proliic Frederic Harrison.”70 Beyond this list of luminaries, positivism was to have wideranging efects in the three major European powers of the nineteenth century: England, France, and Germany. Even though the form of positivism that inally established itself in these countries was diferent in each case, nineteenth-century Europe can rightly be regarded as the greatest lowering of positivism at any time in human history.71 Owen Chadwick nicely sums up the lasting inluence of Comte, 69. he term Geisteswissenschaften was popularized by the translator of J. S. Mill’s Logic, who used the term to render Mill’s “moral sciences.” More recently, it has been standard practice to translate Geisteswissenschaften (back) into English as “human sciences.” Schürmann follows Gadamer (and in this both diverge from contemporary academic practice ) in that he translates Geisteswissenschaften as “social sciences.” For reasons of idelity, we retain his “social sciences” wherever we quote from him, although, in our own text, we prefer “human sciences” (the one exception to this rule is the expression “social scientist”; the alternative “human scientist” sounds awkward and contrived, relecting our deep-seated unease with calling the student of the human sciences a “scientist”). 70. Cheryl B. Welch, “Social science from the French Revolution to positivism,” in he Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political hought, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 189. 71. As Rom Harré writes, citing an unnamed commentator, “the impressive ‘rise of science’ in the public regard in this period (one commentator remarked that the locomotive was all that was needed to convince the general public of the authority of physical science) ensured that the inluence of [positivist] authors like Comte, Darwin, Huxley, Mach, and Spencer was very widespread, iltering through to moral, political, and economic attitudes to life itself.” Rom Harré, “Positivist thought in the nineteenth century,” in he Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. homas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26. 373 374 Chapter 05 when he writes: “In the mind of every one of us, even the most devout of us, is tucked away some little secret piece of Comte.”72 Oldenberg’s (re)framing of the scientiic character of philology in terms of positivism can thus be understood in terms of a general but paradigmatic intellectual constellation of the time. Let us see what led him to this understanding of philology. he story of philology more or less follows the vicissitudes of the human sciences in their complex and problematic distinction from the natural sciences. hus, in order to understand the identiication of positivism with science tout court at this moment in European history, we should irst look at how the human sciences, headed by philosophy, split of from the natural sciences, and then at how the human sciences attempted to ground their methods in a torturous relationship with natural sciences: the human sciences were both distinct from the natural sciences and like them. To anticipate, the three ways in which the human sciences attempted to distinguish themselves are: (1) positivism, (2) historical and/or dialectical, and (3) phenomenological-hermeneutic. In antiquity, there existed no separation between philosophy and science.73 Take, for example, the earliest Greek philosophers, the so-called Presocratics. heir works, which the later doxographers uniformly titled Peri Phuseōs or “On Nature,” contained both cosmologies and ethical discussions. Plato’s Timaeus likewise contained serious discussions about mathematics, the universe, space, and physiology, alongside a theology that the entire Christian tradition of the Middle Ages found meaningful. Aristotle is even more explicitly an illustration of the uniied intellectual enterprise whereby philosophy works hand in hand with scientiic enquiry. Not only does he lecture on physics, politics, biology, the soul, God, and friendship but he also clariies the common metaphysical grounding of all these subjects, which he articulates in his study of the irst principles or the archai. In sharp contrast to this approach, modernity deines itself by rapidly setting apart philosophy (and its branches, anachronistically called the “human sciences”) and the natural sciences. Indeed, we could even make an argument for seeing the preliminary gesture for this division in the philosophy of St. homas Aquinas, who distinguished between lumen naturale and lumen revelans or “the light of natural reason” and “the light of revelation.” he four-faculty structure of the medieval university, encompassing, besides law and medicine, the theological faculty and the philosophical faculty (or what we today might call “arts and sciences”) can at least partly be 72. Chadwick, he Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, 233. 73. he following sections draw heavily on the unpublished lecture notes of Reiner Schürmann, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and the leading European intellectual to theorize the origins of totalitarianism after Arendt. Schürmann belonged to a tradition of European humanism that is the absolute opposite of the tradition of European exceptionalism, of which German Indology is a part, and his work provides the best vantage from which to interrogate Indology’s claims to being a European tradition of knowledge. We therefore draw extensively on the unpublished text of Schürmann’s “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” a lecture course ofered in 1982 at the New School for Social Research. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD traced back to the inluence of this division. he philosophical faculty (which taught subjects such as arithmetic, geometry, logic, grammar, and rhetoric) was explicitly considered a lower (i.e., preparatory) faculty. One could further speculate, with much convincing evidence, that this distinction itself is theological in its innermost nature: Christian belief begins by separating belief and reason, assigning theology to the former. his precarious relationship between the sciences and philosophy is clear in the case of Descartes in the seventeenth century. Descartes is both a scientist and philosopher; he is quite at home in theorizing about optics, geometry, and the circulatory system of blood. And yet, in his Meditations, God is introduced to guarantee the reality of the perceived world. his is also the case in Leibniz; his Monadology does double duty as both a sort of atomic theory and a theology. But this tenuous relationship between philosophy and science, already distinct, does not last. Schürmann notes: hen progressively a shift occurs which is more than a distribution of labor: the scientist doing research and the philosopher attempting to ground scientiic discourse in the structure of the knowing subject (Kant takes Newtonian physics for granted and places it on a critical basis). In the 19th century, the estrangement between science and philosophy is blatant: for the scientist, ‘true’ is what is empirically veriiable; and Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophical systems now appear as frightfully unscientiic. Philosophers build their concepts around such terms as ‘spirit’, ‘absolute’ etc.— before which the scientist can only shrug. he divorce is complete. It still marks the cultural situation today. It is responsible for the sometimes desperate attempts at ‘bridging the gap’. In fact, there exist two cultures: the scientiic one and the ‘meta’–culture.74 To complicate the picture, there is a further distinction between philosophy and the human sciences. Whereas the rift between philosophy and natural sciences has been a continuous process, beginning already at the end of antiquity, the social sciences have a much more complicated relationship to the natural sciences. It is very important to understand this distinction, because we now see philologists, with no training in philosophy, who feel quite competent to assess diicult philosophical texts of antiquity. Wherefrom their conviction of competence? In a certain sense, the subjectivity of the social scientist, founded in his method, provides an “all-encompassing method” that becomes the bedrock of human sciences. But matters are not so simple, because in the human sciences “the researcher himself is always implied in what he studies.”75 According to Schürmann, the “divorce between science and philosophy” 74. Reiner Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” typewritten lecture notes, Reiner Schürmann Papers, he New School Archives and Special Collections, Fogelman Social Sciences & Humanities Library, 1–2. (Hereafter cited as Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences”; page numbers refer to the pagination of the original typescript in the collection of the New School Archives.) 75. Ibid., 2. 375 376 Chapter 05 that occurs in the nineteenth century can be traced back to this fact.76 he scientist now “turns away” from what is “immediately given” and “constitutes a ‘world’ of research.”77 his world, obviously, does not replicate the world the scientist inhabits, even though it comprises the tools (for example, hypotheses and models) he uses to understand and interpret his world. his solution, of course, is not available to philosophy or the human sciences, for they cannot claim to constitute a “pure” world of research, as the natural sciences can. heir models must have a relation to reality; that is, they must themselves contain some element of the real. We can now understand the naïveté and futility implicit in Oldenberg’s (and other Indologists’) claim that their hypothetical and reconstituted texts are the real ones. Having attempted to construe the scientiic character of their discipline on the model of the natural sciences, they were caught on the horns of a dilemma: they can neither acknowledge the texts of the tradition as the authentic ones (in which case the Indologists’ task is reduced to exegesis, that is, carrying forward the commentarial tradition) nor can they acknowledge the constructed character of their own texts (in which case they are talking about literally nothing). As much as they would like to think of themselves as (natural) scientists, the notion of purely theoretical (i.e., unapplied) research available in the natural sciences was unavailable to them. Hence, they had only one way out: to maintain the model-character of their reconstructions but insist that their models contain more of reality than the originals.78 Ontologically, the tradition now appears deicient in comparison to its image, while ethically-epistemologically the popular reception appears naïve (“uncritical”) in comparison with the critics’ understanding. he point is worth underscoring. Whereas the natural sciences speak of a world that is epistemologically and theoretically separated from the world the scientist inhabits, the social scientist is “both embedded in a social context” and has to “reconstitute it [i.e., his society] theoretically.” “More than the natural sciences, the human sciences aim at practice—at practical ‘application.’ ”79 his practical part is essential to their constitution, but it provokes a question: in what sense can the human sciences be considered sciences when this term primarily refers to the disinterested theoretical contemplation characteristic of the natural sciences? As Schürmann notes, “here is no problem with a seminar of ‘methodology in natural sciences’: that would be the inquiry into ways of producing that world of models. But there is a problem with regard to ‘social’ sciences because the ‘ways’ are directed less towards abstract knowledge than back towards social reality, towards intervention . . . ‘critique,’ irst of all. Eventually, a transformation of the society in which we live.”80 Here arises the 76. Ibid.; Schürmann is using the term “philosophy” in a wide sense that includes the social sciences. 77. Ibid. 78. his is not an empty statement. As we saw, this claim was explicitly made by Adolf Holtzmann Sr., at the very inception of German Mahābhārata studies. As he put it, “he Kuruinge are thus not a translation [of the Indian characters]; I may say: they are my work. But nonetheless they are Indian through and through and do not contain anything, even in the slightest detail, for which I could not demonstrate [the existence of] an Indian prototype.” Holtzmann Sr. Indische Sagen, x. 79. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 2. 80. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD deinitive aspect of the social scientist’s work. It is now critical not only in the weak sense that compared with the tradition the scientist appears to undertake a relection (mediated via his theoretical model) on his object but also in the stronger sense that it has an ethical-social dimension. he scientist must not only create the models that relect reality but also clarify reality back to the layperson. Practically, this took the form of Indologists trying to teach Indians how to read their own texts “critically.” Hence the twin protestations of the Indologists: “we are scientiic” and “we are useful.” A true scientist need assert neither. One does not read a journal of physics where one reads, “We are scientiic!” his obsessive cry of the Indologists we have so far seen is symptomatic of the intense anxiety of the social scientist. he anxiety stems from the unavailability of the hypothetical-deductive, experimentally veriiable method in the human sciences. hus, having adopted natural scientiic method as the prototype of true knowledge, the human sciences are caught in the bind of having to continuously justify themselves vis-à-vis (natural) science. By claiming that philology is a rigorous science, philology ultimately places itself on a dangerous and doomed ground, for it will be unable to live up to the criterion of scientiicity implicit in the natural sciences. To trace the history of attempts to legitimate the scientiic character of philology is simultaneously to trace the history of the travails of the idea of “method” in the human sciences. Let us see how the human sciences have attempted to create their own alternative method. What is it that makes the transference of the (natural) scientiic ideal into the domain of human sciences questionable? he natural scientist, when speaking of theoretical objects, makes use of concepts or terms (e.g., mass, energy) derived from the world he inhabits. However, he is able to draw a strict line between the natural scientiic usage of such terms (e.g., in formulae or experiments) from their everyday meanings. In the human sciences, no such division is available. As Schürmann notes, the admixture of what is scientiic and not scientiic is “essentially constitutive of the domain of any discourse about society.”81 In spite of attempts by social scientists to produce formal systems analogous to those of the scientists (e.g., the search for metalanguages in analytic philosophy, Russell’s theory of types), these attempts remain illusory. hese systems cannot be used to predict or evaluate the outcome of experiments as in the natural sciences (e.g., the formula E = mc2, which, provided one of the two variables is known, will always yield the second). Further, the discovery of the idea of universal history in Kant (more speciically, the discovery of the historicity of all existence that occurs in Droysen and is raised to a methodological principle in Dilthey) makes it impossible henceforth for the social sciences to construe their objects naïvely on the model of the natural sciences. Schürmann attributes the break between the “two cultures . . . the scientiic and the ‘meta’-culture”82 directly to this discovery. Whereas the “scientiic modern mind” renounces the claim that “theory corresponds to invariable objective structures in the world [and] constitutes . . . a discursive world, [one] made of models,” the 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 377 378 Chapter 05 “critical mind” cannot renounce “the relatedness to a given world altogether.” “here is no ‘pure’ object of social sciences, but only an ‘historical’ one.”83 hus we now turn to “historical grounding” of method. To understand the crisis brought about by the discovery of history for the human sciences, we need to take a closer look at Comte. he tension between the natural and human sciences is already present in Comte’s early work, his famous Cours de philosophie positive (six volumes, 1834–42). Volumes one through three of this work analyze the natural sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. In his inal three volumes, Comte then deals with the social sciences, self-consciously laying the grounds for a new science. his work presupposes the “Law of the hree Stages of Humanity,” which can be summarized as follows: humanity develops via three successive stages, namely, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. In the irst, the human mind seeks to understand phenomena in terms of supernatural causes or reasons; in the second, it moves on to seeking abstract causes or reasons. Comte emphasizes that the metaphysical stage is but a transition in the development of science from a theological to a positivist inquiry. hus, only in the third, properly scientiic phase does the mind turn away from seeking irst causes or origins and toward identifying the law underlying phenomena. Paralleling this theory of the genesis of the natural sciences, Comte also ofers an account of the material development of society: irst militaristic, then legalistic, and inally culminating in industrialism. his law, as can be plainly seen when stated bluntly, is hardly a law in the scientiic sense. It gains its validity not by being either logically true or through empirical veriication, but through its application. he social scientists, especially the philologists, rest their claims regarding the scientiicity of their method on the ambiguity of this law. A reading of Mahābhārata studies, as the German Indologists have undertaken them, reveals that Comte has been thoroughly absorbed into this discipline, to the point where most Indologists do not even realize that they are Comteans! Note the correspondence of Comte’s Law and the textual history ofered by Indology for the Mahābhārata: the epic’s textual history is divided up into three phases: an initial militaristic phase; followed by a second phase in which scheming, power-hungry Brahmans (Comte’s lawyers and jurists?) interpolated “abstract” ideas into the text, corrupting it; and inally, a positive phase, marked by a critical approach, which German philology must fulill. he critical approach “stops looking for causes of phenomena, and limits itself strictly to laws governing them; likewise, absolute notions are replaced by relative ones.”84 Comte’s hypothetical law has become the absolute law that grants scientiicity to Indology. It proceeds through an analysis of layers and identiication of interpolations and a tireless capacity for detheologization and excision of metaphysics. Let us now return to the third, positive stage. Comte’s sole legacy here appears to be skepticism. If this were scientiic skepticism, Indologists would be open to 83. Ibid., 3. 84. Michel Bourdeau, “Auguste Comte,” in he Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta; http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ comte/. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD questioning the validity of their method; they would be able to adopt new approaches and engage in dialogue with other forms of inquiry. But this is not so. Comte’s inheritance is complex. he law brooks no suspicions; Comte endows the inal positive stage with its own form of dogmatism. he only diference between an earlier theological dogmatism and the new dogmatism is the law of human development. Indologists are no skeptics, for they believe in the scientiic status of Comte’s hypothesis, which allows them to continue in their positivistic praxis. Comte clariies the necessary dogmatism in his second major work. As Bourdeau writes: he Considerations on Spiritual Power that followed some months later presents dogmatism as the normal state of the human mind. It is not diicult to ind behind that statement, which may seem outrageous to us, the anti-Cartesianism that Comte shares with Peirce and that brings their philosophies closer to one another. As the mind spontaneously stays with what seems true to it, the irritation of doubt ceases when belief is ixed;85 what is in need of justiication, one might say, is not the belief but the doubt. hus the concept of positive faith is brought out, that is to say, the necessity of a social theory of belief and its correlate, the logical theory of authority.86 If Comte’s silencing of the critical impulse in the third, positive stage does not surprise us, it is because we have so thoroughly internalized the narrative of the apotheosis of criticism in the Enlightenment that we no longer consider it necessary to query whence comes the authority of the modern scholar. At the same time as German scholars railed against the machinations of a corrupt elite (the Brahmans), they entrenched themselves as beneiciaries of an arcane method. As oicial purveyors of Indian culture to the European public, they managed to insert themselves between the text and the reader. he university ofered them a powerful bully pulpit from which to harangue theologians and philosophers, the previous occupants of the power echelon the philologists in the third and positive stage of human development wished to occupy. And yet, there is more to the story of positivism. For, as Bourdeau notes, Comte himself underwent a kind of turn after 1846: After Clotilde’s death in 1846, positivism was transformed into “complete positivism,” which is “continuous dominance of the heart” (la prépondérance continue du coeur). “We tire of thinking and even of acting; we never tire of loving,” as the dedication to the System put it. Positivism transformed science into philosophy; complete positivism now transforms philosophy into religion. . . . he transformation of philosophy into religion does not yield a religion of science because, having 85. his “ixed belief” dogmatism of positivism coincides with Luther’s distinction between the sozomenoi and apollumenoi, or the saved and the damned. For details on the link between textual deconstruction and Lutheranism, see Vishwa Adluri, “A heological Deconstruction of Metaphysics: Heidegger, Luther, and Aristotle,” Epoché 18, no. 1 (2013): 129–60. hat a criticism of the previous stages, that is, metaphysics and theology, also works hand in glove with Luther’s project hardly needs to be proved. 86. Bourdeau, “Auguste Comte.” 379 380 Chapter 05 overcome modern prejudices, Comte now unhesitatingly ranks art above science. . .. the break-up with the academic world was complete . . . . !87 German Indology did not follow Comte down this path. It accepted a popular (and clichéd) view of positivism (even making it the basis of its “scientiic” praxis88 ), but it did not think through positivism to its end, as Comte had. As was remarked earlier in the introduction, the positivism it subscribed to was an incomplete positivism: it took the turn neither to a positivism dominated by social, emancipatory, and aesthetic concerns, as in Comte, nor to a critical positivism dominated by the rejection of a reality independent of the model-character of science, as in Mach, nor to logical positivism dominated by the veriication principle, as in Carnap. Yet, the attempt at holding out in the third, positive stage was no solution, for Indology thereby rendered itself irrelevant to and out-of-step with wider currents in European philosophy. 87. Ibid. 88. Positivism remains the basis of the Indologists’ scientiic praxis, even when—as is the case in Bronkhorst’s recent article—they argue against it. Indeed, the explicit target of Bronkhorst’s criticism is not so much “methodological positivism,” but rather the reliance upon positive data in the form of texts. In his assessment, this reliance skews the results of the Indologists, because they are now—allegedly—forced to accept the dominant perspective of the Brahmans (in his opinion, the “winners” who were able to ensure that only their version of events or their ideas survived). he following passage is typical of his concerns: “he winner takes all. he texts that have survived are the ones that belong, or were acceptable, to the currents of thought that have been victorious in the long run, for whatever reason. If, as philologists, we decide to limit our attention to the texts that have survived, we take the side of the victors, perhaps unwittingly. Worse, by doing so we run the risk of taking the side of the victorious tradition, which includes projecting back its vision of the past.” Johannes Bronkhorst, “Against Methodological Positivism in Textual Studies,” Asiatische Studien LXIV, no. 2 (2010): 267 (italics in original). Bronkhorst further argues that Indologists ought to, in the name of “a more critical spirit,” move beyond the surviving texts and seek the outlines of those traditions whose texts have not survived (speciically of the Buddhists, the Ājīvikas, and the Cārvākas, the “losers” in his idiom). Ibid., 269. hus, even though the article is titled “Against Methodological Positivism in Textual Studies,” what Bronkhorst is really opposed to is not methodological positivism as such but scholars’ practice of deferring to the extant texts instead of positing their own texts. hus, his approach is still methodological positivism, albeit a positivism where the positum, the text, must irst be posited rather than being accepted in the form in which it is given. (A more appropriate title for the article would thus have been: “Against Textual Studies in Methodological Positivism.”) Bronkhorst’s argument fails because he does not grasp the distinction between positivism as an approach and as a reliance on positive data. Indeed, his prescription is no more than the formalization of something Indologists had been doing any way for over a century: they had progressively been freeing themselves from the text since at least Roth’s time (and for similar sorts of reasons, namely to recover an alternative history of India in which Brahmanic ideas do not become normative for Indian tradition). Once again, the root anxiety behind this explicit call to Indologists to distance themselves from the texts (and to seek the hidden texts of other sects) is the fear that, if they rely upon the texts that have become normative for the Indian tradition, they will “fall in [sic] the trap to become, in Indian studies, second rate imitation pandits. . . .” Hence Bronkhorst’s conclusion that Indologists “have to think twice before [they] decide to limit [their] attention to texts that have survived.” Ibid., 268. Exactly how the Buddhists, Ājīvikas, or Cārvākas are helped by conjuring up texts Bronkhorst does not explain. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD Indeed, it led to an irreparable crack in the very foundation of the human sciences in particular and the Enlightenment in general. On the one hand, we have a critical science coeval with “outrageous” dogmatism; a purportedly universal humanism surrendering to the narrow hegemonic claim that European self-understanding represents the fulillment of planetary human development; and a science that brooks no criticism. On the other hand, we have the universality of the natural sciences and its powerful integration of all humans across the world through technology. It is easy to see which element of this contradiction—German Indology as a human science or natural science as the feature of all humanity—won out in the end. he attempt to construe the scientiic character of philology on analogy with that of the natural sciences thus fails. Positivism is no guarantee of the scientiicity of Indology. But what of the second of Oldenberg’s three candidates, historicism? Can it ground the scientiic character of Indology? HISTORICISM AND THE SEDUCTIONS OF POSITIVE SOCIOLOGY Indology appears to be on more stable ground with the second of the three aspects we noted earlier as underwriting the scientiic character of philology: historicism. Here it seems we can at last point to real contributions made by Indologists to the study of Indian texts. Even though the absence of historical consciousness was never as pronounced a feature of ancient cultures as is sometimes made out to be by proponents of the theory, it is undeniable that a proliferation of historical knowledge took place after the nineteenth century. To cite but the best known examples of this expansion, there was Lassen’s four-volume Indische Alterthumskunde completed between 1843 and 1862 and Weber’s three-volume Indische Streifen (a collection of smaller articles that had appeared elsewhere and were, as he wrote in his preface to the irst volume, “wanderings over the wide, almost unsurveyable ields of Indian cultural history [Cultur-Geschichte]”) published between 1868 and 1879.89 Some of the most signiicant contributions to this proliferation took the form of canonical histories of Indian literature and philosophy. Besides Winternitz’ three-volume Geschichte der indischen Literatur, other representatives of this genre include Windisch’s Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und Indischen Altertumskunde (both cited in the introduction), Glasenapp’s Die Literaturen Indiens. Von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, and Frauwallner’s Geschichte der indischen Philosophie.90 Doubtless some of this added to our knowledge of Indian history, although, equally doubtless, most of it, such as Lassen’s pseudo-ethnographic researches or Frauwallner’s periodization of Indian history into an “Āryan” and an “Indian” intellectual phase, made no contribution outside the respective author’s head. 89. Albrecht Weber, Indische Streifen, vols. 1–3 (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1868–79). 90. Helmuth von Glasenapp, Die Literaturen Indiens. Von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1929). For the Frauwallner citation, see chapter 1. 381 382 Chapter 05 Yet at stake here is not history as such, but the historicism of the Indologists, speciically, vis-à-vis its claim to embodying greater scientiicity. And this means, once again, that we need to trace this phenomenon back to its historical origins. Although many candidates have been proposed for the title of “father of historicism” (among them Vico, Leopold von Ranke, J. G. Droysen, and Wilhelm Dilthey), historicism as a philosophical theory, like positivism, originates in the work of Comte. In contrast to Ranke and Droysen, who emphasized the historically unique character of events and therefore rejected grand philosophical narratives of history in favor of an objective and descriptive science of history (Geschichtswissenschaft), Comte speciically sought a law of historical development that would explain all of human history. (Ranke and Droysen, for this reason, are more properly considered the founders of the historiographical movement known as “historism”; the tendency among English speakers to use “historicism” and “historism” interchangeably is responsible for much of the confusion.91) Comte therefore is the true father of historicism, understood as “the belief that objective laws can either be derived from history or imposed upon history.”92 Comte’s inluence on Dilthey is well attested.93 But although Dilthey developed his project of grounding the human sciences in dialogue with Comte’s thought, he explicitly rejected the latter’s metaphysics. In a letter from 1882, he stated that his project was undertaken via a rejection of Comte’s positivism: “he irst book of the irst volume seeks, in contrast to the presently popular approach of the Comte and Mill school, to grasp the truly inner structure of the human sciences as they have developed historically. From this I hope to show the necessity of a general grounding [of the human sciences].”94 Bambach comments: “Dilthey shared with the positivists a desire to restructure the system of sciences according to a new methodological ideal: the commitment to empirical research in place of abstract systematizing. In the end, however, he wholly repudiated any attachment to Comte’s positive sociology or 91. In his excellent overview of the term (“Historicism: he History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 1 [1995]: 129–52), George G. Iggers traces the term Historismus back to Schlegel, who used it to characterize Windelband’s awareness of the “immeasurable distinctness” and “the totally unique nature of Antiquity.” But Iggers argues that the distinction between Historismus and Historizismus, the latter referring to “the attempts by Hegel and Marx to formulate laws of historical development which were used by the Marxists to legitimize their authoritarian control for eschatological ends” (ibid., 136 and infra), is irst attested to in Popper’s he Poverty of Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1957). 92. Graeme Donald Snooks, he Laws of History: Exploding the Myth of Social Evolution (New York: Routledge, 1998), 90. 93. Hodges considers the “empirical philosophy of the British school and the positivism of Comte” to be one of the three “determinative inluences in Dilthey’s thinking” (the other two being Kant and Romanticism). H. A. Hodges, he Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 2. Also see Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, 137, n. 29 for a list of treatments of the topic, though Bambach does not cite Hodges’ work. 94. Cited and translated in Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, 135; Bambach notes that the citation is from Dilthey’s unpublished letter, the so-called Schoene Brief of 1882; Bambach cites Ulrich Lessing, Die Idee der Kritik der historischen Vernunft (Freiburg: Alber, 1984), 111 as his source. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD Mill’s logic of the moral sciences.”95 For that reason, Dilthey’s grounding, although it was to have a long and signiicant history of efects, falls out of consideration as a source of inluence upon the Indologists. Indeed, there is much the Indologists could have learned from his antimetaphysical, empirical but not empiricist approach, had they chosen to do so. Written in the shadows of what he called the “orgies of empiricism,”96 Dilthey’s philosophy was well aware of the ideological potential of even the seemingly innocuous commitment to empirical research. How does historicism manifest itself in the work of Indologists? To answer this question, we must irst understand the salient features of historicism as opposed to historism. Inseparable from positivism, historicism makes its crucial appearance in Comte. Schürmann writes that “in Comte, historicization appears in one of its radical—and also simplest—forms. He declares: ‘In order to know yourself, know your history’ (Traité de l’esprit du positivisme).”97 As with positivism, so also in historicism, Comte’s thesis of the development of the human mind is essential. Comte proposes three stages of development: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. Each of these stages is characterized by a search for irst and inal causes (and hence all are part of the theological stage, broadly speaking). However, the degree of sophistication with which they do so is diferent in each case. Fetishism represents a primitive stage, where man clariies natural phenomena by attributing supernatural agents to objects. However, as he matures and observes that phenomena follow certain patterns, fetishism gives way to polytheism. he supernatural agents inherent in objects give way to a limited number of supersensuous, supernatural, and divine agents, who control all phenomena according to laws. he inal stage is monotheism, characterized by its faith in one God. hese three stages are all subsumed within the theological stage of Comte’s Law, but their development parallels the development from the theological to the metaphysical and, inally, positivist stage. In fetishism, animism or anthropomorphism reigns. Polytheism, in contrast, is more critical, as it operates with abstract powers. In this respect, it recalls the metaphysical stage. However, only in the third stage, monotheism, does reason come into its own. Even though man ultimately attributes everything to a supreme Being, the ield of operation of his metaphysical imagination is restricted to this one, ultimate instance. Instead of identifying supernatural agents or abstract powers, as in the irst two stages, man now conines himself to the objects of sense experience, both inner and outer. As Schürmann notes, “Only that is called reality [now], as opposed to fantasy.”98 Before we proceed, let us note the irony here: the move beyond metaphysics, now seen as fantasy, into history, now seen as real, is itself metaphysical. Comte is making an ontological claim here: the empirical is the real. Schürmann says: “here is something very metaphysical about his positivism, since it is meant to present a total view 95. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, 137. 96. Cited in Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, 138; Bambach cites Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p. 135 and vol. 4, p. 434 as the source of the phrase. 97. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 4. 98. Ibid. 383 384 Chapter 05 of history. here is even an ontological thesis underlying it—despite Comte himself—namely that being = appearance.”99 From Comte’s clariication of the historical development of man toward positivism, we can now say what is supposed to be scientiic about this new science. he task of science as understood by Comte is twofold: on the one hand, the scientiic mind tries to grasp what remains the same throughout appearances. On the other, if the mind can understand this selfsame (i.e., identify the law that pertains to its appearance), it can also intervene in these appearances. Primitive man is surrendered to the natural phenomena in which he worships supernatural agents. Modern man is the master of the natural phenomena whose laws he speculatively discloses. his has monumental consequences for the human sciences conceived on analogy with the natural sciences. Schürmann writes: “If the rules of history can be shown, then it is possible to intervene in it. hus theory and practice are closely intertwined at this third stage. As he [Comte] puts it: both the scholar and the industrialist work with the premise: ‘Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prévenir.’ ”100 he pragmatic aspect of human sciences is very important as Comte establishes them. According to Schürmann, it is “this idea of mastery that makes Comte’s three-stage theory understandable.” he theory may not be read “as if history were something unfolding by itself.” Rather, history now becomes “the arena where man progressively makes himself master of his own destiny and of nature.” hrough the three stages, man progressively emerges as the “subject of history,” not only in the sense of that which history studies but also in the sense that he is now properly the subject. According to Comte’s historicist view, earlier ages lacked such a notion of man’s relexive subjectivity, but it is precisely this view that instates the subject (modern, self-conscious, self-relexive) as the goal of history. In Schürmann’s words, “hrough the three stages, he [man] progressively constitutes his freedom.”101 his freedom expresses itself in man’s capacity for science, more precisely in the tendency to replace absolute notions with relative, which Comte considers the hallmark of science. As Comte puts it in the second volume of his Cours: If we contemplate the positive spirit in its relation to scientiic conception, rather than the mode of procedure, we shall ind that this philosophy is distinguished from the theologico-metaphysical by its tendency to render relative the ideas that were at irst absolute. his inevitable passage from the absolute to the relative is one of the most important philosophical results of each of the intellectual revolutions that has carried on every kind of speculation from the theological or metaphysical to the scientiic stage.102 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 5. 102. Auguste Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism: he Essential Writings, edited and with an Introduction by Gertrude Lenzer (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 220. (All citations hereafter refer to this edition, but see the next but one note.) PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD his is very diferent from science as understood thus far in European intellectual history. his is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, as in Aristotle, this is not seeing temporal things in the lumen naturale of Aquinas, and it is not Newton’s “morsels of wisdom into the workings of God.” It is most deinitely not the “objectivity” one inds in the natural sciences. he social scientist is an activist, an interventionist, a history transformer, as Schürmann notes. To obtain so-called objective knowledge is not what matters. Rather the world is— as I said—no longer understood as an objectivity out there, to which our propositions have to conform themselves; the world is to be made. Comte calls the unity of theory and practice “the most enjoyable privilege of the spirit of positivism.” his is so, because with the triumph of sciences we have unlearned to ask, What are things? And learned to ask instead, What can we make of them? he connection between science and technology in its modern form is thus a direct result of the discovery of history. “Technique will no longer be exclusively geometrical, mechanical, chemical, etc., but also and primarily political and moral”. . . even religious: Comte was the founder of a short-lived religion, worshipping ‘Humanity’.103 Finally, the social scientist also provides his own form of modest, relative, and suitably positivistic kind of salvation in the guise of self-relexivity. Since the question of method in the human sciences is indissolubly linked to their capacity to transform society, the human sciences do not just relect society as it is. Rather, the relection they undertake is a self-relection of a peculiar kind: it is a self-relexive self-relection, that is, one that recoils on the subject, transforming it. he social scientist ofers not just transformation of history or society (these are his interventionist aspects) but also holds out the promise of a transformation of the self (the soteriologicaleschatological aspect). here is thus an essential connection between positivism and historicism. Comte himself called the “historical method” the “indispensable complement of the positive logic.”104 In contrast to historical inquiry, which treats phenomena in their speciicity and tries, as far as this is possible, to understand their evolution out of a set of determinate historical circumstances, historicism may be understood as the attempt to construe the being of historical phenomena as analogous to the being of natural phenomena. he salient point for both is that phenomena must be subject to universal laws and the scientist’s task is to identify these universal laws. he idea of law, furthermore, plays a foundational role in the constitution of the discipline. It was necessary for us to outline the essential features of historicism in contradistinction to historism and to trace its intrinsic connection to positivism, because we now see that the approach of the Indologists was not just historical, but historicist. 103. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 5. 104. he complete sentence reads: “Cet indispensable complément de la logique positive consiste dans le mode historique proprement dit, constituant l’investigation, non par simple comparaison, mais par iliation graduelle.” Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 6 (Paris: J. Ballière, 1869), 671 (the passage is not included in the Lenzer edition). 385 386 Chapter 05 Although they claimed merely to be applying historical methods to the study of India, the “historical method” they applied was not the descriptive approach of Ranke, but the inductive approach of Comte. Comte had called his approach “historical method” because its domain was historical phenomena, just as the domain of experimental method was natural scientiic phenomena. But his historical method did not aim at a description of historical events in their speciicity and its locus was not (the discipline of) history, but what he called “sociology.”105 Comte’s historical method was, properly speaking, a method for making observations in keeping with an a priori conception of human nature. As he wrote, “every law of social succession disclosed by the historical method must be unquestionably connected, directly or indirectly, with the positive theory of human nature, and all inductions that cannot stand this test will prove to be illusory, through some sort of insuiciency in the observations on which they are grounded. . . . And thus we ind, look where we will, a conirmation of that chief intellectual character of the new science, the philosophical preponderance of the spirit of the whole over the spirit of detail.”106 Like Comte, Indologists set out in search of such universal laws capable of explaining all of Indian history. In Comte’s case, this had been an a priori law of “the development of human intelligence,” which Comte called “a great fundamental law.”107 In the case of the Indologists, it would be an a priori law of the decline of Indian civilization from heroic Āryan beginnings to a state of corruption and lassitude, partly under the inluence of priests and partly under the inluence of the climate.108 And again, like Comte, they would ind observation of historical phenomena to be meaningful 105. Scholars have since labeled it “positive sociology,” because to call Comte’s project “sociology” is no less misleading than to call his method “historical method.” 106. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 251. 107. Ibid., 71. 108. Although we have seen references to this earlier, it is worth collecting all the references as attempts have recently been made to deny the continuity of this thesis in German Indology. he earliest scholar to hypothesize the existence of a pure northern Āryan race was Christian Lassen, who in his Indische Alterthumskunde of 1847, claimed that the Āryans “came from the Northwest.” Christian Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, vol. 1, 513; and also see his “Beiträge zur Kunde des Indischen Altertum aus dem Mahâbhârata I,” 75 and Indische Alterthumskunde, vol. 1, 2nd ed., 791 for references pertaining to the Mahābhārata; both passages are quoted in chapter 1. Lassen also presented a comprehensive epidemiology of how the Āryans declined owing to a mixture of racial contamination and the efects of climate (Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, vol. 1, 410–12), besides explicitly contrasting the Indo-German race to the Semitic (ibid., 414–17). hereafter, Holtzmann Jr., also made use of this interpretive scheme (see his Zur Geschichte und Kritik, 45–46 and 33, both passages are quoted in chapter 1). Hermann Oldenberg also attributed northern origins to the Āryan race (see especially his Buddha: sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde [Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1881], 9 and 11–12, reprising many of Lassen’s comments about the spiritual and physical decline of the Āryans under the inluence of the Indian climate). Still later, the leading Indologist of the day, Richard Garbe, invoked the thesis of racial degeneracy to explain ancient India’s cultural achievements (which he attributed entirely to the Āryan race), whereas the customs of the mixed Hindu race were presumed to have originated not from the Āryans but from “the darker side [von der schwarzen Seite].” According to him, “in the present day, the blood of the Hindus is without a doubt only Aryan to the smallest degree, and even the Brahman families have been starkly contaminated PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD only insofar as these phenomena conformed to, that is to say, could be integrated into a general law of the evolution of history. What counted as genuinely “scientiic” about the new discipline was not the discovery of events per se (indeed, Oldenberg conceded that colonial adminstrators “working locally and on site” were better placed to carry out historical inquiries of an empirical and material nature), but the realization of their conformity to law. Here was where German scholars excelled. As Oldenberg noted, Englishmen, French, Russian, and Japanese had played a more signiicant role in bringing historical phenomena—be it events, social circumstances, or documents—to light. But when it came to bringing order to those discoveries by integrating them into an a priori conception of history, German scholars took the lead. In an article published in Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik (he International Weekly for Science, Art, and Technology), Oldenberg clariied the roles of the diferent nations as follows: “Englishmen bring the material to light. hey collect the manuscripts, inscriptions, coins. hey organize the excavations. . . . he activity of the French, too, has, in recent years, approximated a similar character.”109 Russian and Japanese scholars, too, were assigned merely a preparatory role: “Multiple relationships to the central Asian and Tibetan regions endow the activity of the Russian Indologists with [its speciic] character. he origin of one of their main religions out of India [endows] the eforts of the Japanese, which have in recent years begun promisingly, [with its speciic character].”110 In contrast, Oldenberg argued of the “German Indologists” that they could not “proit from relationships of this tangible kind. Many of them have never been to the country their work concerns. Out of this and, in certain respects, from the unique nature of German philological-historical research in general we can understand why for at least a section of German Indologists the focus on making new material accessible had to take a backseat to that of the critical analysis [Durcharbeitung] of texts, to that of the solution of historical problems; [while] the striving for immediate, lively concrete contemplation of the Indian essence [had to take a backseat to] the efort to arrange the Indian formations [Gebilde] in further contexts [and] via a comparative observation make them serviceable to the solution of broader problems.”111 he idea of reciprocity between what the discipline studied (and brought to light as the law of historical progression) and the discipline itself plays a major role in Comte’s conception of a science of positive history. Comte had argued of the new with barbarian blood.” Richard Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1889), 86. In this new “scientiically” legitimated form, the thesis would later be a cornerstone of Erich Frauwallner’s racial construal of the history of Indian philosophy (see his “Der arische Anteil an der indischen Philosophie” and Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, vols. 1–2, but the relevant passages, along with other source materials are superbly presented in Jakob Stuchlik, Der arische Ansatz: Erich Frauwallner und der Nationalsozialismus [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009]), as well as of Hauer’s stern warning to the German nation to learn its lesson from the weakening of the Āryan race in India (see his Eine indo-arische Metaphysik, 63, the passage is cited in chapter 3 earlier). 109. Oldenberg, “Indologie,” 641. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 641–42 (italics added). 387 388 Chapter 05 sociology that, “it asks from history something more than counsel and instruction to perfect conceptions that are derived from another source: it seeks its own general direction, through the whole system of historical conclusions.”112 We ind a similar reciprocity in the case of Indology: there was a consonance between the laws whose discovery was necessary to explain Indian history and the laws that guaranteed scientiicity to Indology. Indeed, they were one and the same. Just as “positive sociology” revealed itself to be “both the fulilment and the science of history,”113 Indology turned out to be “both the fulilment and the science of (Indian) history.” Even though Oldenberg had cited Mommsen approvingly, most Indologists were not interested in a descriptive general history. Rather, as works with titles such as Deutsch-indische Geistesbeziehungen (Ludwig Alsdorf), India and the Germans: 500 Years of Indo-German Contacts (Walter Leifer), and Impact of Indian hought on German Poets and Philosophers (Wilfried Nölle) attest,114 they saw themselves as participants in the narrative of Indian history itself. he Indologist is, as we noted earlier of the social scientist in general, an activist, an interventionist, a history transformer. his aspect of their science was important for German Indologists as they understood their work. Indology devoid of its interventionist, aufklärerische, and simultaneously restorative and reformatory concerns would be dissolved into the discipline of history. Hence, they insisted that there was a unique domain of objects that called for the development of autonomous (Indological) methods. It was important for them to dismiss not only the claims of their British and Continental colleagues to participation in the narrative of Indian history but also the claims of their colleagues in history departments at German universities, who were their rivals and challengers in ofering an account of Indian history. hus began the project of discovering a diferent set of laws alongside the principles invoked by the historian: laws that speciically governed the Indian context and hence could also be used to explain it. hese laws would constitute an annex or supplement to the laws of history; without them, Indian history could not be suiciently explained. Here was where the theory of the absence of history among Indian peoples came into its own. First, there was the thesis that “historical development tends to be more weakly, more nebulously formed in India than in the west.”115 Lest the historian nonetheless attempt to study Indian history, there was the need for the further addendum that this history could not be relied upon without further ado. hus Oldenberg now argued, “it [i.e., historical development] lies in a transmission before us that does everything [possible] in order to obscure its image completely: this transmission without irm dates, which often confuses old and new to a seemingly hopeless extent. . . .”116 here was thus need for extreme suspicion when approaching Indian history, which suspicion could not get a purchase until one knew, irst of all, how to decipher Indian history to identify the guilty party. One had to know of the material in front of one that it “continuously presents us with illusions with the pretentious [anspruchsvoll] wisdom of its masses of commentaries that only owe their existence to the sophistry of the scholastics in place 112. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 252. 113. Snooks, he Laws of History, 93. 114. See bibliography for complete citations. 115. Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 6. 116. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD of genuine thoughts and institutions.”117 he Indologist, as opposed to the historian, possessed the necessary suspicion (indeed, hostility) toward the tradition. But there was also a further quality he brought along with him: an a priori scheme for reconstructing Indian history. As Oldenberg put it, “the more we . . . know of the history of India,” the more it appeared “as an incoherent rise and fall of accidental events.”118 “hese events lack a secure hold and the meaningful sense such as that the power of a national spirit [Volksgeistes] that wills and transforms its will into deeds lends history [Geschehen].”119 hus, one could not simply reconstruct Indian history without irst having some idea of the laws that governed it. Whence were these laws to be obtained? Here Oldenberg is quite unambiguous: it is “only in the history of ideas, above all of religious thought,” that we ind “irm ground.” “We can hardly speak of a history in any other sense here [i.e., as pertains to India].”120 And so, the Indologists, who since the time of Rudolf von Roth had been deeply concerned (we might even say, obsessed) with Indian religions, were naturally positioned to take over the task of studying Indian antiquity from the historian. Finally, there were the narrowly historicist aspects of the German Indologists’ praxis, understood as the belief that the past has nothing to teach us and hence can only be studied from a historical perspective. Although this appears at irst to be the most prominent feature of historicism, it is in many ways but a consequence of Comte’s understanding of science. As F. A. Hayek insightfully grasped, “he idea of recognisable laws, not only of the growth of individual minds, but of the development of the knowledge of the human race as a whole, pre-supposes that the human mind could, so to speak, look down on itself from a higher plane and be able not merely to understand its operations from the inside, but also to observe it, as it were, from the outside. . . . What this belief really amounts to is that the products of the process of mind can be comprehended as a whole by a simpler process than the laborious one of understanding them, and that the individual mind, looking at these results from the outside, can then directly connect these wholes by laws applying to them as entities, and inally, by extrapolating the observed development, achieve a kind of shortcut to future development.”121 Calling this “empirical theory of the development of the collective mind” “the most naive and [at the same time] the most inluential result of the application of the procedure of the natural sciences to social phenomena,” Hayek argues that it is here that the belief in our ability to “recognize the ‘mutability’ of our mind and of its laws” and the belief in our ability to “control [our] future development” arises.122 But a corollary of this view of science, more precisely, of self-relexive understanding as the hallmark of science, is that the past, which has not been able to grasp itself in this way (ex hypothesi, the past is never able to grasp itself in this way; it is only the individual mind at present that can, as 117. Ibid. 118. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 406. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. F. A. Hayek, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 269–70. 122. Ibid., 270. 389 390 Chapter 05 Hayek says, “lift itself up by its own bootstraps”123), no longer appears relevant to us. Its function is reduced to that of serving as a mere iteration of the human mind in its progression toward the self-relexive contemplation of the individual mind at this present moment. he past, on this view, has no intrinsic value; its value is entirely a function of the position it is assigned in a continuum and only in this way does it become, for the irst time, truly past. By integrating the Indian past into a teleological narrative of history, Indologists historicized Indian culture. hey were not just proposing that one could study Indian history, which historians had in any case done to varying extents for centuries. Rather, they were proposing that Indian texts could only be studied as dead letters, within a metanarrative of history that accounted for their being dead in terms of the movement of historical reason. (he same metanarrative did double duty, since it also justiied why the Western Indologist had to be taken seriously: he was the embodiment of that selfsame reason in its latest, and perhaps inal, incarnation.) he speciics of the narrative discovered or projected were less important in each case than the fact that such a narrative was needed in order for the Indologists to be able to make sense of Indian texts at all. Indeed, the narrative could even have been true in one or the other respects (although we found that it was not). But the discovery of “laws” governing Indian history was crucial, because it irst allowed Indologists to identify events as conforming to such-and-such a type, to integrate them into their histories, to make sense of them as making sense of their own position as the inheritors of Indian antiquity. hus, although they claimed to be merely proceeding empirically, in actual practice their work was weighed down by a heavy burden of metaphysical, historicist, empiricist and scientistic presuppositions. he faith in the mind’s ability to hover above itself and its history and thus to achieve a kind of “shortcut to future developments” (to use Hayek’s expression) also explains the Indologists’ conidence in being able to advise Indians on what was to be done by them. he Indologist, as we have seen earlier, understands his role not just as that of providing a commentary on Indian history but also as that of, through critique, transforming it. his aspect of their praxis remained, for the most part, latent (although it could occasionally also come to the fore in the writings of more religiously or politically motivated Indologists such as Hacker and Stietencron).124 To be sure, this understanding of the social scientists’ role has its explicit role-model in Comte, who remarked, “Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prévenir.” But Indologists, by tying the Comtean program of positive sociology to the encounter with a 123. Ibid. 124. A few of the more important of Hacker’s writings on Hinduism are listed in the bibliography. he best summary of Hacker’s works is in Joydeep Bagchee, “he Invention of Diference and the Assault on Ecumenism: Paul Hacker Becomes a Catholic,” paper presented at the 3rd Rethinking Religion in India conference, Pardubice, Czech Republic, 11–14 October, 2011. he paper includes a comprehensive bibliography of Hacker’s writings, including polemical pieces Hacker wished suppressed from his collected essays (Kleine Schriften). Bagchee demonstrates how, behind the facade of a scholar and university professor, hid a religious fundamentalist, who in Christian pamphlets and newsletters denounced Hinduism as an unethical religion and argued for an aggressive program of religious conversion. Although motivated by political rather than religious concerns, PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD non-European culture, gave it a new, racially-tinged edge. German Indology perpetually airmed Comte’s axiom. As a discipline, it heartily agrees with Comte that, as Schürmann puts it, “the ‘method,’ in positivism, clearly is not merely a method for the formation of concepts. It is at the same time a method of intervention. his is an entirely new notion of science.”125 his intervention meant diferent things to diferent generations of Indologists. To some, it meant displacing Semitism from the center of European history with a nobler, purer Āryan origin, and this entailed mastery of Sanskrit and sustained dedication to linguistics. To others, it meant supplying Germany with an identity, particularly that of the modern, enlightened scientist. A more banal intervention of a personal sort also played a big role: positions of power within the ranks of academic institutions. German Indology thus sees itself not merely as learning and collecting objective knowledge as in the case of natural sciences. It is more: the German Indologist directly intervenes in history and changes it. On the one hand, Indians are to be shown to be at the mercy of the tyranny of their misshapen, lecherous, and fantastical gods.126 Even more urgently, they are to be shown as being subject to the tyranny of priestly authority. Texts need to be puriied of Brahmanical interpolations and metaphysical speculations. Freedom on a political and cultural level, in this idiom, can only be secured when the task of securing texts coincides with purifying them. hus, we have seen in the third chapter the profuse enthusiasm with which German Indologists vied with each other to ind excuses to dissect the Gītā. If only Brahmanical and bhakti aspects were removed, Indians, as brethren in the world humanitarian project, could stand up as good, free Kṣ!atriyas, interpreted here to mean as good Prussian soldiers. Or very nearly so. More importantly, the Indologist must keep the Enlightenment torch burning at home in Germany, as Slaje, Hanneder, and Bronkhorst argue. hus the Indologists allied themselves with whoever was in power to do their best to be philologist-kings or at least philologist-advisors. It is important to keep this aspect in mind when considering German Mahābhārata studies. What could be more invigorating than a Blut und Eisen model of the great Stietencron’s writings share Hacker’s concern with inluencing contemporary Hinduism through deconstructing (the concept of) Hindu identity; a good place to begin is Heinrich von Stietencron, “Hinduism,” in Secularization and the World’s Religions, ed. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 122–40. His secularist zealotry is also in evidence in: “Religious Conigurations in Pre-Muslim India and the Modern Concept of Hinduism,” 51–81 and in “Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term,” in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 11–27. 125. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 4. 126. See Oldenberg, “Indologie,” 641, commenting that “its gods [i.e., the gods of Hinduism] are the misshapen, wild, cruel, [and] lascivious Hindu gods, at their head Shiva and Vishnu” and see also Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen, 85: “there is no bridge from the radiant forms [Lichtgestalten] of the Veda to the forms of the modern gods [modernen Göttergestalten] [of Hinduism], whose monstrous representations with their tastelessly multiplied animal limbs and so on, should be familiar to all, at least as a type. . . . In spite of their Aryan names, I consider the modern Hindu gods—Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Hanuman, and whatever else they may be called—not to be Aryan conceptions, but to be conceptions of the aborigines. . . .” (Garbe’s emphasis). 391 392 Chapter 05 epic of India?127 hus begins the complex seduction of the experiment of forging a Kṣ!atriya Urepos from the Mahābhārata. But the transformation was not just directed outward at Indian history or society, but inward at the researcher’s historical situation itself. he former two were to be remade in the mold of the German scholar’s interpretation, even if the most dubious evidence had to be brought forth to convince Indians that they had once been blood brothers in the Āryan rationalist project. he history recounted was always an eschatological history embodying a concrete vision of what India could be if it but followed the German scholar’s missives. But at the same time as the Germans intervened in the subject of their researches, they were placing themselves at the head of this narrative of history: if the scholar-scientist can put in place a historical narrative that culminates in Western, enlightened self-consciousness, then the scholar-priest who is the epitome of that consciousness becomes the very meaning of history itself. hus behind the German scientists’ mournful glances backward at Indian history was also a rather self-serving look forward at their own historical present. Who would pay them to tell tales of ancient Indian history unless those tales simultaneously relected Germany (and German scholarship) in a good light? Lest we think that this transformative, ideological aspect was secondary to the conduct of a pure science, we should recall that the relation of knowledge to its results difers in the case of the human sciences as compared to the natural sciences. Natural sciences, for the most part, exist for the sake of knowing, although technology arises out of them as a welcome but not essential consequence. Not so with the human sciences, where the “link between theory and practice is true of all schools that have arisen from Auguste Comte’s project, viz. Empirico-criticism (Richard Avenarius), Logical Positivism (Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Ayer), and today so-called Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy (except Ludwig Wittgenstein).”128 In the natural sciences, the step from the realm of fact to that of pure logic and mathematics must be undone in a step back to the realm of fact if the science is to turn into technology. Since the human sciences never leave the realm of fact in spite of the Indologists’ protestations that they are operating with pure models of the epic or the Gītā, that step back has always already become redundant. Finally, there is the ethical aspect. As Schürmann notes, “A society gets the philosophy that it deserves. It should not come as a surprise that a technological society recognizes itself best in positivist thinking. But this only illustrates the practical orientation of this entire school of thinking.”129 Schürmann, speaking after the horriic genocides of the twentieth century, teaches us a valuable lesson: a society gets the philosophy it deserves. If the social scientists who interpreted the Bhagavadgītā and the epic had, instead, interpreted it as a call for understanding the limits of history and martial gloriication, one wonders 127. he words are a reference to a famous speech made by Bismarck (the “Iron Chancellor”) before the Budget Committee of the Prussian Assembly on September 30, 1862, in a plea for supporting his proposed reforms of the Prussian army. he full sentence runs: “he great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions . . . but by iron and blood.” 128. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 6. 129. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD if they could they have made a diference. Gandhi’s Indian experiment with the Gītā (see the conclusion of this book) seems to suggest that perhaps they could have. But by taking the turn toward historicism, Indology closed of the avenue to a social philosophy informed by emancipatory concerns no less than to a historical science informed by humanistic concerns. he point bears repeating. Whereas Indologists would like to see themselves as either in the tradition of Ranke and Droysen (when it comes to Geschichtsschreibung) or in the tradition of Dilthey (when it comes to the Geisteswissenschaften), their true intellectual pedigree is neither of these. Indeed, there lourished a strong German tradition of historiography on India in history departments—quite independent of Indology and its fundamentalist, interventionist concerns. Dilthey’s emphasis upon Verstehen (understanding) as the speciic characteristic of the human sciences (as opposed to Erklären in the natural sciences, which explain things) was to inluence Heidegger and to become a model for the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer. Dilthey would have been much more sympathetic to the ideal of Indian studies we have been (implicitly) proposing than to Indology. He would recognize in the former an attempt to understand what is unique and special about the human sciences, whereas he would see the latter as embodying precisely the tendency he sought to combat: to construe the scientiic character of the human sciences as identical with that of the natural sciences. If the irst of the three aspects we identiied as underwriting the scientiic character of Indology—positivism—led to a dead end, and the second—historicism—led to a wrong turn, what of the third? Does empiricism constitute a more viable alternative for grounding the scientiic character of Indology? EMPIRICISM AND THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL PROPOSITIONS A good place to begin our inquiry into the empiricism of Indology is to ask how precisely empiricism was understood in the writings of nineteenth-century Orientalists. Speciically, we should ask whether they understood empiricism merely in the sense of a moment in research practice or as a philosophical doctrine and epistemological position.130 he latter is more correctly described as an empiricist stance and, like historicism (which was not itself historical but referred to an a priori metaphysical understanding of history), is not itself empirical but describes a metaphysical theory of concept formation in the social (and natural) sciences. Oldenberg, in his statements on the scientiic character of Indology, had opposed its positivist and historicist aspects to the tradition, which he explicitly accused of engaging in metaphysical speculation, that is, speculation exceeding the sphere of empirical reality. “Instead of history,” he charged, “religion, poetry, relection and 130. his is how the distinction is encapsulated in the Collins Dictionary of Sociology, for example; see D. Jary and J. Jary, eds., Collins Dictionary: Sociology, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2009). 393 394 Chapter 05 dreaming [Sinnen und Träumen] of world forgetful [weltvergessender] philosophers plays the dominant role in the literary products of India.”131 “During the period when, in a healthy nation, the interest in its own past and its relationship to the wars and suferings of the present awoke, where Herodotus and Fabius, the narrators of what had occurred would normally appear, the literary activity of India was sunk in theological and philosophical speculation.”132 Oldenberg speciically critiqued the tendency to “pantheism” he found to be widespread in later (that is, post-Vedic) Indian thought. hus, whereas the earlier phases of Indian history more or less replicated the evolution of Western culture (that is, as Oldenberg understood it), moving from primitive nature speculation (Comte’s fetishism) to identifying abstract powers as gods (Comte’s polytheism), this process was interrupted at a certain stage in Indian thought. “It has been fatal,” he says, “for all thought and poetry in India that, early on, a second world, illed with strangely fantastic shapes, was established there alongside the real world. his was the place of sacriice with its three sacred ires and the schools in which the virtuosos of the sacriicial art were educated— a sphere of strangest activity and the playground of a subtle, empty esotericism [Geheimniskrämerei], whose enervating power over the spirit of an entire nation we can scarcely comprehend in its full extent.”133 In place of the monotheism leading inally to positivism, which should have been the successor to fetishism and polytheism, Indian thought goes astray down the path of speculation. Oldenberg sees one brief shining moment when Indian tradition might have taken the turn to an empiricism motivated by positivistic concerns: “Earlier and stronger than among any other people of antiquity, interest and joy in analyzing language scientiically [die Sprache wissenschaftlich zu zergliedern] developed in India. One developed with dazzling perspicuity and precision the observation of the individual consonants and of the changes to which they are subject to a system, from which, as it became known in Europe, the science [Wissenschaft] of our century found reason to learn with [due] admiration.”134 But it was not to be. “Naturally, the brilliance and profundity of these Vedic linguists was shadowed, as though by a curse, by a genuinely Indian tendency toward sophism; the joy, out of which at times something like a bizarre schadenfreude seems to emerge, of cloaking the things [Dinge] in an artiicial robe and forcing it upon them, of building labyrinths of subtleties, in whose twisting passageways the well-versed and cunning expert knew how to pretentiously ind his way.”135 In contrast to this penchant for developing metaphysical systems of thought rather than turning to the things, Dinge, themselves, Oldenberg understands his task as being one of rigorously introducing empiricism into the pantheism of the Indians, subverting its speculative, anti-empirical character. He does so, of course, less by exposing the problems with speculative thought than assuming speculative thought to be a priori inadmissible. We do not ind an explicit engagement with (much less an analysis of) Indian philosophy. Rather, Oldenberg seeks to explain phenomena such 131. Oldenberg, “Indologie,” 638. 132. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 406. 133. Ibid., 396. 134. Ibid., 399. 135. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD as myths, magical incantations, sacriicial rituals, and philosophical doctrines (especially concerning the identity of the cosmos with Being) in positivist, historicist, and empiricist terms. From a positivist perspective, he seeks to convert the beliefs of ancient authors (concerning the immortality of soul, the connection between the personal and the suprapersonal spheres, etc.) into expressions of the universal mind, albeit one that is still at a primitive stage in its development. hus, theories are explained psychologistically in terms of the desire of the ancient man to control his environment, to address his fears of death, and to ind comfort in the thought of a cosmic justice. From a historicist perspective, the thesis of the progressive development of Indian thought from primitive beginnings in nature worship to its mature, pantheistic stage comes to his aid. hus, magic and ritual are explained as developing from the core of the nature worship of Āryan tribes. In his book on the philosophy of the Upaniṣ!ads,136 Oldenberg describes how Vedic gods such as Indra gradually lost ground to the interest in sacriice, leading, inally, to the emergence of a specialized class of ritual technicians, the Brahmans.137 hey, being more interested in “magic than in the worship of Gods,” “now took up the next task, of explaining all this [i.e., the sacriicial ritual, gods, being and existence] in their own way so as to secure all power in the hands of the knower.”138 “Here we have reached the point where we encounter the Brahmanic science of sacriice, which requires our attention as the foundation and breeding ground of the great pantheistic speculation.”139 Likewise, the belief in the eicacy of magic is explained in terms of primitive man’s belief that if there exists an identity or resemblance between two things, then the one can be used to control the other. So much is easy to understand, that one eats the heart of a bear or of a bird of prey in order to become courageous, that one smears the brains of a wise man onto one’s forehead in order to gain wisdom: in that very heart or brain dwells the essence of courage, of wisdom; in this way, one takes it up into oneself. Other equivalences can also be understood such as the mystic identity that is imagined [to exist] between the shadow of a being or even its footsteps or its name and, on the other hand, he himself such that the one who takes hold of the one also has the other [in his control]. Or efects such as that, when produced by a magician in the right way, the illusion of rain brings about rain. he one signiies the other, it is the other.140 From an empirical perspective as well, Oldenberg believes he has found the key to the metaphysical speculation of the Indians. It is rooted, he argues, in a distrust and distate for empirical reality, which was to be subordinated to a higher, eternal principle. “In all occurrences, one saw only this, that it was transient: and one recognized everything transient, we may not even say, as a simulacrum [Gleichnis], but 136. Hermann Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1915). 137. Ibid., 12–14. 138. Ibid., 15. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 11 (Oldenberg’s emphasis). 395 396 Chapter 05 as absolutely worthless, an unhappy nothing [ein unglückliches Nichts] from which the knowing one had to free his thoughts.”141 What Oldenberg speciically criticizes about Indian thought is not that it did not accept perception as a source of knowledge. Indeed, he would likely have known (although he does not mention it) that Indian tradition, too, under the heading of pratyakṣ!a, considered the senses one source of knowledge, albeit one that operates under speciic limitations.142 Rather, his criticism of tradition takes the form of an a priori claim that empirical experience is the sole means of knowledge such that all statements must be reducible to their empirical content. According to Oldenberg, there is no statement of Indian thought that cannot, through some combination of positivistic, historicist, or empiricist explanation, be reduced to a positive datum, that is, to a positum. his holds all the more so for the conception of knowledge of the time. At that time, the relation of man to knowledge appeared in a diferent light; the acquisition of knowledge, therefore, took place in a very diferent form than in our time, which is glutted with knowledge and operates with it in objective and businesslike fashion. Ancient concepts step in here. Just as the name of a being, its image or shadow stands in the closest mystical connection to it, so also knowledge of it. he saying ‘knowledge is power’ is true here in another sense than that familiar to us: not, as we understand it, in the sense that it enables us to act rightly, but directly, in the sense that it produces a mysterious connection between the knower and the thing known; for example, the way it might contain an immediate magical power over the object of knowledge within itself, whereas the same object might take revenge upon the knower for his insuicient or false knowledge.143 he basis for Oldenberg’s comparison of Indian and Western philosophy, then, was a thoroughgoing empiricism. Oldenberg not only defended sense experience as the main (and perhaps, sole) source of human knowledge, but also rejected the claim to knowledge implicit in other means of knowledge. When the Indian tradition spoke of supersensuous reality, hidden connections, or nonmaterial forces, it was not just invoking alternative sources of knowledge, ones that could exist alongside empirical knowledge and perhaps extend it; it was “subtle, empty esotericism,”144 “a tendency toward sophism,”145 and a “diferent form” of knowledge altogether, which could scarcely be compared to our own.146 he gulf between the two conceptions was 141. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 406. 142. Pratyakṣ!a, for example, is incapable of giving us mediate or supersensuous knowledge. At least in some schools, when we see smoke, we require an additional step beyond perception to attain the knowledge “there is ire.” his knowledge is gained through anumāna or inference. Likewise, when it comes to supersensuous reality, Indian philosophy holds that pratyakṣ!a cannot be of aid. Rather, what is required is a diferent pramāṇ !a, or valid means of knowledge, namely, śabda or authoritative testimony, especially as contained in the revealed texts, the Vedas. 143. Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden, 6–7. 144. Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 396. 145. Ibid., 399. 146. Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden, 6. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD absolute and yet not unbridgeable, for Oldenberg proposed that Western scholarship could nonetheless make sense of traditional ideas of knowledge by explaining them historically and empirically. He notes that the Brahmans’ “representations of things and events was fundamentally diferent from what appears real to modern man, indeed, as representable.” he diiculty, for him, is resolved through the category of “ ‘prelogical’ intellectual constitutions.” “Naturally, that is not to say that the theology or metaphysics of the Brahmans has remained at this prelogical level. But it is as yet on the path of separating out from it and has not, as yet, covered great distances in all respects on this path.”147 “Only later—for the period of which we shall speak, this lies for the most part in the future—one learns, instead of the imaginary occurrences, to see the real.”148 When looking back at a past that had not as yet learned to see “the real,” the challenge was to ind categories to translate and explain these experiences into ideas and categories familiar to nineteenth-century audiences. Herein lay the justiication for Indology as a public and publicly funded discipline. When it comes to grounding the scientiic character of Indology, however, empiricism too proves to be no solution. First, there is the problem, already alluded to above, that empiricism itself is not empirical, but rather, a metaphysical theory of experience. here is the further problem that, as understood by Oldenberg, the empiricism of Indology did not simply refer to the use of sense data as a moment in research, but the much more problematic claim that all knowledge claims could be reduced to their empirical conditions. he latter clearly breaches the domain of possible sense experience; it makes a totalizing claim about how all experience (even that of others) is to be understood. Finally, rigorous empiricism runs into problems when it comes to identifying the kind of general propositions Indologists were seeking. Here, a look at Mill’s radical empiricism is instructive. Empiricism, understood as the view that sense experience is a source of knowledge (of reality), was not new. Before Comte and Mill, the British empiricists (Locke, Berkely, Hume) knew of the view and had defended it. But what is new about the empiricism of Comte and Mill is the emphasis on induction as the method of empirical science. In his System of Logic (1843), which appeared the year following the publication of Comte’s sixth and last volume of the Cours de philosophie positive, J. S. Mill proposed two theses: irst, all knowledge is based on the data of sense experience; second, there is nothing beyond the realm of experience (i.e., no rational intuitable nature of things in itself). he latter was especially contentious. Following Hume’s skeptical attacks on empiricism, leading to the extreme skeptical conclusion that no knowledge of causality was possible setting out from an empiricist framework, philosophers had struggled in a number of ways to resuscitate knowledge of external reality. Kant famously remarked that Hume “awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers.” Hume had argued that we may associate two events with each other based on the observation that they always occur in succession, but we cannot assert a causal 147. Ibid., 10. 148. Ibid., 12. 397 398 Chapter 05 connection on this basis. Kant’s solution had been to propose that we do not infer or intuit causality from the manifold of sense experience, but that it constitutes one of the a priori categories of the understanding through which we institute order in the manifold (in this case, introducing the idea of cause and efect). For Mill, however, the task was to reconcile a radical empiricism with mathematics and logic. His solution was to propose induction as the method of science. Whereas Hume had stopped with association, Mill proposed that the mind moved from observations to inductive generalizations. Although these could not have the apodictic certainty of deduction, by combining the notion of inductive logic with that of psychologically necessary connections in the mind, Mill ofered a robust defense of science. Indologists wishing to ground the scientiic character of Indology in empiricism might have taken a closer look at Mill, especially at his ive laws of induction, through which he sought to defend empirical observation as leading to more than particular knowledge: 1. Method of agreement. If two cases or more, in which one fact occurs, share only one feature, this is the cause or the efect of both cases. 2. Method of diference. If two occurrences both contain a phenomenon W in a given circumstance A—but not, when A is absent—then W depends on A. 3. Joined method of agreement and diference. If certain cases contain a phenomenon W when A is given, and if other cases, when A is not given, also do not contain W, then A is the condition of W. 4. Method rests. When W depends on A = A1, A2, A3, then to discover the dependence of A1 and A2 is to establish that A3 depends on W. 5. Method of parallel transformation. If an appearance W changes as soon as another, U, changes, whereby an increase or decrease of W occurs with an increase or decrease of U, then U depends on W.149 Mill’s work, which presents an epistemological defense of empiricism, would have permitted the Indologists to go beyond mere association to actually asserting scientiic claims about the text (more precisely, to actually asserting the scientiicity of their claims about the text). hus, it seems as though, if these laws hold, the project of converting philosophical, literary, mythic claims in the Indian texts into rigorously empirical facts could, in fact, get underway. We could then really undertake the task posed by Oldenberg of presenting a scientiic (and this means, exclusively empirical) account of the texts. Rather than being an ad hoc method of interpretation, Mill’s laws would be the principle that grants scientiicity to Indology. Yet, when we look more closely at the way German scholars tackled the Gītā, we ind no such consistency. Even though the scholars studied here all valorized their approach as scientiic and empirical, they did not adhere to basic principles for developing general propositions from empirical data. To be sure, they cannot be faulted for not having an education in Mill’s System of Logic. But when one borrows general ideas of science from the intellectual climate of the time and, moreover, makes those 149. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 7. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD ideas into a rhetorical weapon, one should also know something of the intellectual history of those ideas. In the case of Indology, empiricism was a basic tenet of scholarship, yet most Indologists did not even understand the problems with empiricism. hey were using some combination of Mill’s laws (although, of course, without being explicitly aware of them as such) in the most random fashion. A few examples may suice here. First, the method comes in too late: from the beginning, German Gītā scholars were hamstrung by the war narrative hypothesis. All of these scholars shared the opinion formalized by Jacobi but imagined by others before him, that the entire epic, like Homer’s Iliad, is essentially a historical record, restricted to a depiction of war. his prejudice prevented an objective evaluation of the text in question: it presents itself, among other things, as a Veda for all members of society.150 We have shown that various subjective prejudices necessarily relating to German identity are at work here. hese scholars neither questioned their premises nor subjected their criteria to scrutiny. Whatever the methodological rigor of inductive argumentation, it arrives too late and presents itself dogmatically. Second, the text in question is a philosophical work, necessarily populated by various perspectives. he adding of a layer for each perspective creates multiple texts, as demonstrated. he inductive method in this context shatters rather than explains the basic text. hird, the text in question is a poetic, literary work. his necessarily means that the text uses the same terms with several meanings, and several termswith the same meaning, in order to achieve proper rhetorical efect. he application of inductive laws must be ine-tuned to accommodate for such variance. In all of the scholars studied here, we ind no such adjustment. Fourth, in addition to its poetic, literary qualities, the text in question is also a pedagogical work. his means that arguments occur in a speciic order. hus, although the discussion of the Gītā does begin with Arjuna’s dilemma concerning his proximate duty, this is by no means the ultimate concern of either being human or of the text, which purports to teach Arjuna the courage to be, not merely the courage to ight. Rules of induction must therefore also be ine-tuned to allow for this pedagogical crescendo of meaning; otherwise, the application of rules has the unintended consequence of creating data for a text that does not exist: a monotone. hen there is the problem of circularity in the Kṣ!atriya hypothesis and the method of inding “interpolations” that challenge that hypothesis. Last but not least, the scholar must be trained not only in method but also in grammar, logic, philosophy, and poetics, as well as being skilled in the delicate task of hermeneutics.151 Since such scholars are rare, we ought to depend, to some extent, on a plurality of 150. See Mahābhārata 12.314.45 and Bhagavadgītā 9.32. he appellation strī-śūdra-veda or a “Veda for women and śūdras” for the Mahābhārata, in contrast, is late. 151. In all these cases, notice that it is the text that demands a better method rather than an intrinsic law in this method. Positivistic research may or may not be a satisfactorily scientiic method in itself, but a naïve trust in the universal applicability of this method to all texts, whatever their genre, self-presentation, form, and philosophical signiication, turns out to be misplaced. Still, it is one thing to supplement positivistic methods with others such as hermeneutics and traditional commentaries. To label this inadequately reined and shabbily applied positivism to texts with the dogmatic, authoritative, and uncritically normative claim that this is the most rigorous, scientiic, and objective of all approaches betrays the very spirit of the Enlightenment. 399 400 Chapter 05 perspectives, interpretations, and approaches. Obsessed by nationalism, however, German Indologists rejected pluralism. he German Gītā project was most concerned always to exclude all of these options. In search of securing a method that could rival the natural sciences in objectivity, this subbranch of philology arrived not at certain knowledge, but at a discipline in which scientiic knowledge basically meant any interpretation authored by a German. To these criticisms, we may add one more, setting out from Schürmann’s observation: “he basic goal in these laws is the transition from the particular datum to general propositions. hat is, in a word, induction.”152 he existence of a plurality of German Gītās shows that no such general propositions concerning the poem were discovered, and the particular data remain idiosyncratic, depending upon the views of the respective scholar. Mill, who argued with Comte against the inclusion of phrenology among the sciences, would be astonished at the claim that the philology practiced by the Indologists could lay claim to any science, much less an objective, rigorous one. If Mill’s views on induction proved too restrictive to ground the work of the majority of Indologists, they might have considered the work of the nineteenth-century British empiricist Herbert Spencer. Philologists fascinated by the history and fate of texts could have found some theoretical grounding in Spencer’s work, since he subscribed to positivism but combined it with a theory of social evolution. Although inluenced by Comte and therefore in agreement with positivism about the empirical character of scientiic knowledge, Spencer rejected Comte’s metanarrative of history. Because the subject of the social sciences (human life) is itself in a process of change, knowledge regarding it must also change. In his A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862–92), Spencer rejected the dichotomy between religion and science. here must be between them a “fundamental harmony,” for “it is impossible that there should be two orders of truth in absolute and everlasting opposition.”153 Even though he was a critic of religious doctrine, Spencer advocated a methodological agnosticism. While there is progress and change in both religion (the domain of society’s values) and science (the domain of society’s knowledge of itself and inventions that serve it), the idea of a universal end is speculative. In Spencer’s organicist conception of society, there is growth and development, as well as decline and decay. hus there is no narrative of the movement from theology-religion to positivism, as in Comte, and religion survives alongside science.154 In contrast to Spencer, it was very important to the German task of isolating an Āryan identity to deny any theory of progress and evolution. In fact, the political and 152. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 7 (Schürmann is speaking of Mill’s laws). 153. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London: Williams and Norgate, 1862), 21. 154. “Assuming, then, that since these two great realities are constituents of the same mind, and respond to diferent aspects of the same Universe, there must be a fundamental harmony between them, we see good reason to conclude that the most abstract truth contained in Religion and the most abstract truth contained in Science must be the one in which the two coalesce. he largest fact to be found within our mental range must be the one of which we are in search. Uniting these positive and negative poles of human thought, it must be the ultimate fact in our intelligence.” Ibid., 24. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD intellectual climate suggested ends (Catholicism, theology, religious authority, etc.) and bold new beginnings (Protestantism, study of religions, the cult of the expert, etc.). But these beginnings required a digniied past: Āryan heroes here and also Greek heroes. hus texts were understood as corrupted rather than enriched, and the philologist here is like a plastic surgeon who carefully performs rhinoplasties on these texts. We have shown how these re-created texts resonate with the political and cultural aspirations of the scholars themselves. In any event, Spencer’s evolutionary theme is not only inconvenient but also too metaphysical for the philologist’s taste. his leaves the Indologists increasingly little room for maneuver. Indologists looking to ground the scientiic character of their discipline in empiricism might have considered one more option: the scientiic empiricism of Ernst Mach. Mach combined elements of French (Comtean) and British (Humean and Millean) positivism. From Comte, he inherited the former’s pragmatic and antimetaphysical stance, but he rejected his absolutism. Further, he difered from Comte in assigning psychological facts as much value as physical ones. hese two explain Mach’s reluctance to view science independent of human reality. Science provides us models to understand reality but can view its picture neither as inal nor as corresponding to a reality that is “out there.” he former is at the core of Mach’s view of science as a Weltanschauung or “worldview,” the latter at the core of his debate with Max Planck about the reality of atoms. Mach claimed that contemporary science “does not claim to be a inished view of the world; rather, it is aware of working towards a future view of the world (a future Weltanschauung). he highest philosophy of the scientist consists, in fact, in tolerating an incomplete view of the world and to prefer it to a seemingly complete but actually insuicient theory.”155 hus, Mach struggled to retain his agnostic view of science, where science was characterized by its radically open, revisable, and syntactic character. Against Planck, who insisted that the atoms the physicist worked with were real, Mach argued that they were but a “convenient iction.” Scientiic theories are not true or false; rather, they are workable or unworkable. Grounded in empirical experience, they help us organize data, but while the data remain, theories come and go. Regarding this view of science as a means of rendering reality comprehensible, Schürmann remarks: “his is a ‘hodos’ of sense data; a hodos to which the ‘meta-’ discourse has become rather modest.156 hat is, ‘methodology,’ the discourse about the proper triad to follow, no longer claims to say anything about reality.”157 But in contrast to Mach’s modest, agnostic, and self-negating notion of method as a hodos or “path,” Indologists viewed method as the meaning of scholarship itself. As the writings of Oldenberg demonstrated, German Indologists did not just see themselves as collecting empirical data nor was their goal to simply provide 155. Cited in Richard von Mises, “Ernst Mach and the Empiricist Conception of Science,” in Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Raymond J. Seeger (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 2010), 267. Mises does not give the source. 156. Schürmann is playing with the etymology of the word method. he Greek hodos means “road” or “path”; method implies a certain path. his etymology is not merely for efect; Heidegger places great emphasis on thinking as being “on the way” and prefaces his collected works with a Spartan utterance: “Wege nicht Werke.” 157. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 8. 401 402 Chapter 05 hypothetical models (which were to be tested against the data and discarded if found to be unworkable). Indeed, in contrast to Mach’s emphasis on the role of data in any scientiic theory, Oldenberg had explicitly assigned the task of data gathering (which he regarded as inferior) to English and French scholars. German Indologists, meanwhile, were assigned the task of making sense of this information. Unfortunately, Indologists chose not to take a page out of their compatriot Ernst Mach’s book: instead of the theory being revised to it with the available data, it was always the data that was shaped to it the theory. Instead of reading texts in a spirit of humility and hermeneutic openness, they went to work with chisels and axes.158 “With crude powerful tools, with the axe, we hew our way through the forests of as yet untouched problems and, ever and ever again, we are rewarded by the opening up of new horizons,” exulted Oldenberg.159 he German Indologist is not only committed to Realpolitik but also vociferously insistent on the superiority and sovereignty of his method. He has many facts to expose and some myths to present as facts (see Holtzmann’s “Buddhist hypothesis” in the second chapter for a good example). hus while Mach’s “militant anti-dogmatism” found acceptance in the United States with Dewey, who “at the same time, wished to obtain ‘scientiic knowing of society’ and dismissed all deinite formulae about society,”160 within his homeland, his modest proposals found no takers among the Indologists. Even though they equated scientiicity, Wissenschaftlichkeit, with the bracketing of subjectivity and the reliance upon empirical observation, in practice they were never able to live up these ideals. “I have thereby already touched upon a peculiarity of these investigations concerning which I may not keep silent,” wrote Oldenberg. “hat precisely in them the subjectivity of the observer, his scientii c temperament, tends to play an especially dangerous role. We see, on the one side, researchers who with hasty conidence throw themselves upon every similarity between distant manifestations and constantly scent the track of historical relationships. he phlegmatic types, who stand opposed to these sanguine ones, are also not lacking. hey let a timid mistrust rule everywhere where they are asked to take a gamble, to make a leap or even just to take a step from the one cultural sphere in the direction of the other.”161 he irst of the three aspects we identiied as underwriting the scientiic character of Indology—positivism—led to a dead end. he second—historicism—led to a wrong turn. he third has now led us to a missed opportunity. Empiricism is only viable as a fundament for Indology if it turns to milder forms of empiricism such as Spencer’s or Mach’s empiricism. 158. For the reference to the Indologist, who with his “chisel’ gives “form” to the “block . . . of uncut stone,” see Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 386. 159. Oldenberg, “Indische und klassische Philologie,” 3. 160. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 8. 161. Oldenberg, “Die Erforschung der altindischen Religionen,” 18. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD CRITICISMS OF THE POSITIVISTIC NOTION OF TRUTH We have already seen that the notion of science implicit in the three great scientiic movements of the nineteenth century—positivism, historicism, and empiricism—is insuicient to ground the scientiic character of Indology. his makes the Indologists’ claims to being scientiic, wissenschaftlich, increasingly problematic. In spite of their attempts to claim a place within a “world of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] [i.e., a world] that is . . . a purposeless [zweckfreie] world of human sciences,”162 they were not able to convincingly demonstrate wherein their scientiicity lay. Crucially, while upholding a positivist conception of science, they seemed unaware of the criticisms the positivist notion of truth had been subject to in twentieth-century Continental philosophy. We shall now look speciically at three criticisms of positivism raised by Schürmann. hese three criticisms may be summarized as: (1) veriication, (2) prediction, and (3) a hidden metaphysics. he problems with veriication are stated succinctly by Schürmann as follows: It is not so simple to say what veriication is. Traditionally, the answer is: “sense experience.” hat does not solve much. Indeed, whose experience are we talking about? Scientiic language would be reduced ultimately to observational statements (see Carnap’s article). But neither the “who” nor the “fact” are clear: what is the fact that an observation statement reports? Is it a subjective experience about a physical object? Is it a pure picture of that object? Subjectivity, it appears, cannot be entirely disentangled from veriication. his is already the case in the natural sciences but even more so in the social and human sciences. here it is quite clear that the observer contributes a lot to what he observes.163 Schürmann’s point is glaringly obvious in the case of the text-historical approach to Indian texts, especially the Mahābhārata and, even more so, the Gītā. here is absolutely no conclusive evidence that there was such a war, and there are no texts outside the epic to corroborate that there was such a war. Even if there was such a war, there is no agreement about who the participants of the war actually were: they range from the text’s own suggestion (a titanomachy) to the German Indologist’s fantasy (a religious war, involving Buddha himself!). External veriication being impossible, the interpreters we have been discussing resort to internal veriication. But thesis and evidence appear in a vicious circle: the proof of Brahmanic mischief is precisely what the Indologist asserts, based on this text, as an alleged Brahmanic redaction! he text becomes both the thesis and evidence. hese very basic logical errors go unnoticed because, like ish to water, these scholars have fully taken for granted their thesis of corrupt, mendacious Brahmans as a self-evident truism. Surely there is mischief on the part of any faction of society claiming to have the absolutely correct interpretations of texts and claiming power in the name of truth. But this accusation is as true of German Indology as of any other elite group. Further, the enormous 162. Slaje, “Was ist und welchem Zwecke dient die Indologie,” 311 (italics in original). 163. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 15. 403 404 Chapter 05 generalization of “Brahmans” is a shoddy one: it does not make room for the ierce debates that must necessarily occur in any intellectual milieu. Let us imagine that a faction of Brahmans attempts tampering with a canonical text: would the Indologist have us imagine that the Brahmans, already characterized by him as greedy and hungry for power at any cost, allowed it? Were there councils of Brahmans agreeing on synoptic views to interpolate? Were those who disagreed murdered? Such questions do not bother the Indologist, in whose view all Brahmans are alike. here is the further point of the distinction between the natural and the human sciences: Namely, that in the latter we are somehow involved. It is to say that as observers in the human sciences we introduce what one may call our own “horizon” of understanding. he hermeneuticians speak therefore of a “fusion of horizons” between observer and observed. his certainly makes the quest for elementary statements that are like the facts, impossible.164 Schürmann, of course, is referring here to the Horizontsverschmelzung elaborated by Gadamer in his seminal work Truth and Method. Gadamer’s interpretation necessarily leads to a dialogical situation, where the exclusionary gestures and self-important postures of German Indologists become no longer tenable. But failing such a development, German Indology remains trapped by its positivist inheritance. Once again, Schürmann is instructive as to what happens once one rejects opening oneself up in the direction of a philosophical hermeneutics: In the language of the positivists themselves: is it ever possible to translate a person’s internal experience into a statement about physical objects, or vice versa? Does the subject not “contribute” something that makes the fact forever elusive? his is more than merely the problem of solipsism, of private language, of the necessarily non-public character of experience. It has to do with the very process of obtaining knowledge: whether private or public, statements always involve the speaker, hence interpretation.165 he German scholars whose work we examined in the preceding chapter, however, could not agree even on a basic text of the Gītā. Each proposed his own text based on his reaction to the Gītā. What is this but the most extreme and utter solipsism? To be sure, they were prepared to open themselves up a little to each other, as one can see from the Garbe-Jacobi debate. But this debate ended without leading to any conclusion because the two participants in it were not capable of a genuine dialogue. As Garbe curtly noted in his inal response: “It is naturally not possible to continue the discussion in DLZ in the current manner; furthermore, a continuation of it would also not have the success that one of us would convince the other of the incorrectness 164. Ibid. (Schürmann’s emphasis). 165. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD of his stand-point.”166 Schürmann’s comments regarding how extreme veriicationism leads to the problem of solipsism, of private language, and of the necessarily nonpublic character of experience are thus pertinent here. Far from the scientists they so wish to emulate, German Indologists begin to look like the fabled blind men of India, each touching a diferent part of the Gītā elephant. What is the solution? Schürmann ofers the following answer: Each person’s experience, each age’s presuppositions are interpretation. Each person’s experience, each age’s presuppositions are diferent from the allegedly objectively real world. But to say that veriication statements mean one thing to one person and another to others, amounts to eliminating the very possibility of the veriication principle. Hence my irst thesis: no veriication without interpretation.167 Either dilute the veriication principle by acknowledging its interpretive dimension (and then attempt to reinstate the intersubjective dimension of truth via a theory of communication) or watch the veriication principle erode away anyway. But since the former meant opening oneself up in the direction of a truly dialogical, international situation, where the truth of a statement is open to question and is not simply accepted because it is made by a German, German Indology was unable accept this solution. German Indology fails veriication as a test of its scientiic character, but it is no more successful when it comes to the second test of a positivist methodology: prediction. Previewing or prediction is the area where positivism is supposed to have the greatest impact. As Mary Pickering notes in her biography, one of Comte’s cherished aphorisms was “from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action.”168 “he aim of each science was therefore prediction. Prediction to Comte meant going not only from the present to the future but also from the known to the unknown.”169 In fact, in the second volume of his Cours, Comte goes so far as to say: “All sciences aim at prevision [toute science a pour but la prévoyance].”170 German Indologists wishing to defend the scientiic value of their work might have argued that their work nonetheless has value in terms of being able to foresee (and perhaps forestall) future developments in India. But what is it exactly that the positivist methodology in Indology is supposed to predict? Future Āryan incursions? he gradual darkening of the Northern races under the inluence of India’s clime? Or are they supposed to predict the loss and degradation Indian texts would allegedly sufer if no German Indologists were around to preserve and safeguard them? Even if the Indologists were to accept a weak form of the prediction hypothesis, where the law is useful and retained as long as it produces predictions accepted by 166. Garbe, “Mein Schlusswort zum Bhagavadgītā-Problem,” 604. 167. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 15–16. 168. Cited and translated in Mary Pickering, Comte: An Intellectual Biography, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 566 (Pickering’s italics); the Lenzer edition has it as: “From science comes prevision; from prevision comes action.” Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 88. 169. Pickering, Comte, 566. 170. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 56. 405 406 Chapter 05 German Indologists alone rather than by general consensus (as the strict deinition of “successful prediction” requires), there is still a problem. We might imagine a situation in which German Indologists sat around in circles and narrated stories of Brahmanic corruption and mendacity; these could even take the form of predictions to which everyone assembled gave their assent, hence ensuring the “predicative success” criterion was met. But even then, they would at best be verifying empirical statements but precisely not the law from which their discipline draws its character of a science. Schürmann writes: Prediction is based on laws. How is a statement like the following to be veriied: “When a moving body is not acted upon by external forces, its direction will remain constant”? It is one thing to verify a statement like: “here is a parade on 5th Avenue.” It is another thing to verify these laws on which prediction is based. Scientiic statements imply an indeinite number of cases. If the positivist is consistent, then any single case in the future can falsify such a statement. What would be needed is a fact that can verify now the future truth of that general scientiic statement—obviously an impossibility. hus the problem that the positivist faces is whether to consider any scientiic statement meaningful. It would be so—according to the veriication principle—if it could be veriied. But can an experiment, or my experience, tell me anything about the future? By rigorous application of the veriication principle, a statement of prediction has to be meaningless.171 What can be done? If the law is to govern an indeinite and ininite number of cases in the future, then how can a statement such as “Brahmans always corrupt texts” be veriied here and now? Clearly, when posed in this way, the statement loses its appearance of a positivist, empirically veriiable claim and becomes the expression of a religious point of view. But even religious points of view must be capable of being subject to criteria for validity, if they are not to be dogmatic claims. Here is where the notion of falsiiability or defeasibility comes in. In Schürmann’s view, the only person to draw the correct conclusion from the impossibility of prediction as a criterion for a scientiic theory was Popper: More hardcore positivists stick to the axiom: if a statement is not conclusively veriiable in principle, then it is not a proposition, i.e. meaningful. Positivists who did not want to abandon the veriication principle have therefore proposed a compromise: there are strong and weak forms of the veriication principle. he weak form says that statements must be veriiable “in principle”; they must be ‘capable’ of veriication. hey must be conirmed in some degree by the observation of something physical. With this concession, the most important point of the theory, the strict adherence to data of experience, sufers a defeat. It is Popper who has drawn the appropriate consequence, namely the trial-character of statements. As far as the 171. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 16. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD instrumentation is concerned, it cannot rest on positive statements alone. It makes the principle of veriication impossible.172 Following Popper’s move from a veriication principle to a falsiication principle, it becomes a simple matter to test a theory for its scientiicity. Scientiic statements, according to Popper, are capable of falsiication: it suices to demonstrate just one instance of ~p, to set aside the theory that p. Likewise, it suices to demonstrate one instance where Brahmans have not corrupted a text to defeat the German view that Brahmans always corrupt texts. But once one does this, two hundred years of German Mahābhārata scholarship collapses like a house of cards, for it is based on the premise that there was a militaristic Āryan epic that was later corrupted by Brahmans. What can be done to salvage this legacy? Schürmann writes: In predictions we are in fact always working with a deinite picture of society, which positivism must pretend to set aside. here is always a pre-understanding of social realities at work when predictions are attempted. But the back-and-forth between an anticipated totality and a single present case is precisely one way of describing dialectics. Here, then, it is only dialectics that can solve the problem. Dialectical thinking cannot oppose present and future. he future is a possibility, [and,] as such[,] ‘real’ in the form of an anticipated totality.173 hus, there is always the option that the German Indologist will acknowledge his historical conditioning, that he is working with a deinite picture of society, as Schürman puts it. he back-and-forth between the anticipated totality (his assumptions regarding Indian tradition) and the single present case proves to be such that it is susceptible to correction and this precisely in the course of such a back-and-forth. In this case, there can be no opposition between present and future, because the present (the text currently being researched) and the future (the anticipated conclusion) are both open to each other. But this would mean precisely abandoning the artiicial walls German Indologists erect between the Indian past and the present, between the pure text and its reception in Indian history, and between themselves and the Indian tradition. One can see the problems this positivistic demand for predictability places on the philologist, especially if he rejects the Wirkungsgeschichte of ideas in the culture that produces the texts. he German Indologist does himself no favor by claiming that he has neither expertise nor interest in the evolution of ideas in the commentarial or textual traditions. Challenged in this way, the Indologist may fall back on the old defense “but the Indians are metaphysical!” Hanneder, for example, compares the pandit to a theologian for whom his subject “will always be more than ‘just’ a topic for research” and points out that his proiciency in a subject “is often coupled . . . with a certain way of life.”174 But against Hanneder, it is important to note that positivism itself entails a 172. Ibid., 17. 173. Ibid. (Schürmann’s emphasis). 174. Hanneder, Review of he Pandit, 672. 407 408 Chapter 05 metaphysics. he criticism of positivism at this level is twofold. One is subtle and yet essential, the other obvious and more empirical. First, the subtle criticism: Something non-empirical has to be assumed in any form of positivism. Usually, this is the formal realm of logic and math. his already falls outside the veriication principle. But the equation “real = empirically veriiable” is itself metaphysical: a claim about the nature of things. he veriication principle is itself unveriiable, it is a metaphysical assumption.175 he second criticism is especially relevant to the study of Indology: he metaphysical option—since that is what is at stake—can perhaps best be described in reference to language. In so-called observation statements, language supposedly accurately relects the facts. his is . . . old hat for philosophers, called the correspondence theory of truth. Except that no previous philosopher had been so uncritical of this theory as the positivists: philosophers had always felt the necessity to go into some pains to establish how such correspondence is at all possible. Prior to modernity, it was made possible by the “divine bridge” between the mind and the outside fact; after Descartes and Kant, by the simultaneous formal constitution of subject and object. But in positivism these considerations are explicitly rejected as non-scientiic—depriving therefore positivism itself of one of its most solemnly invoked bases. How can we at all circumscribe (demarcate) the realm in which positive knowledge obtains? Only by an act other than such knowledge— “thinking” or rational belief.176 What are we to make of the claims of the German Sanskritist who places extreme faith in lexica rather than in experiences that have deined and shaped the reception of the text? he epic itself, through a series of literary tricks, overcomes this criticism in its narrative and didactics. he most important motif is the erasure of boundaries between reality and textuality: Vyāsa, the author, is also the progenitor of its main characters. hus reality is irst raised to a narrative level, and it is this narrative that is narrated by the epic.177 In so doing, the entire metaphysics of the relationship between spatiotemporal events and language is sublated: the world itself is now a literary creation. Spatiotemporal reality is not the original of which the narrative is a copy, a fact that German Indology misses in order to keep itself relevant. hus, one may extrapolate an external world from the narrative, but in doing so, a scholar 175. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 17. 176. Ibid., 18 (Schürmann’s emphasis). 177. One could object that the outer frames are a late invention. his ignores the contribution of the Sukthankar edition, which demonstrates convincingly, on the basis of the manuscript evidence, the basic contours of the oldest possible archetype. One need not follow the Indologist into his dream world of a Kṣ!atriya Urepos; it suices to point out that even in the innermost narrative, the Vaiśampāyana narrative, a dialogic, retelling substructure, endures throughout the epic. Hiltebeitel has proitably read the epic by paying attention to such literary tropes. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD ceases to be a scholar and becomes a dreamer. He, too, inds the boundaries between reality and textuality fuzzy, but both reality and textuality are now lost in an extrapolated, imaginary realm. he concrete text at hand is no longer the locus of operation for such a scholar. Other literary tropes abound in a textual approach to the reality of Becoming, and this is seen in the way certain set themes (sacriice, genealogy, war, and cosmology) are wrested from their straightforward functions as descriptions of events and become leitmotifs for certain ideas. hus the war is not just a war but a sacriice, a inal apocalyptic event in cosmology, and a crisis in genealogy. he epic, through working out the possibilities of various genera of Becoming, thus re-creates a textual universe, and it is this textually created universe that is then subjected to analysis. When one reads the epic as a textbook of ancient history, one inds such perplexities as Aśoka as Duryodhana or Buddha as Aśvatthāman (Holtzmann), a monstrous chaos (Oldenberg), Brahmanical tampering (any one of the Indologists cited), and so on. his is not to say that there is no historical information contained in the text. here are descriptions of landscapes, lora, and fauna, as well as references to other texts, but these are present as simulacra, not as testimonies. Philosophers in the twentieth century have become suspicious of the grand claims of positivism to being an objective science. As Schürmann notes, “he extreme shortcoming of positivism can be summarized by the observation that general scientiic statements are impossible to verify; and mere falsiication does not produce knowledge. he metaphysical option for the positivist can only be balanced by a theory of how universals are always involved in any process of observation. Such a theory is precisely transcendental criticism. hus whereas the tenet of veriication made hermeneutics necessary and that of prediction, dialectics, the option for the positive makes something like transcendental philosophy necessary—Kant.”178 Schürmann thus lists three objections to positivism: it is subjectless, it is ahistorical, and it is literally a thoughtless view of the world.179 178. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 18. 179. Ibid., 18. hese criticisms were already anticipated in the work of Kierkegaard, who, against the philosophy of Hegel drew attention to the problems with Hegel’s notion of objective truth. In his Concluding Unscientiic Postscript, Kierkegaard insisted upon the subjective nature of truth against both Hegel and Kant, a criticism that was to be extremely inluential for existentialist and twentieth-century Continental philosophies. Against the idea that truth is possessed in the form of propositions, Kierkegaard emphasizes the notions of subjectivity, of interiority, of conscience, and of the situatedness of the existent individual. He argues that speculative thought (principally Hegel’s but Kierkegaard’s critique is also applicable to historical speculation) forgets the existent individual from whom all thought proceeds. Instead of taking this subjective situatedness into consideration, in speculative thought the subject attempts to rise above his subjective condition and set himself above all history. What holds for Christianity also holds for all theologies, including the theology that has become successful under the name of “German Indology.” In the history of thought, Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian speculative metaphysics was enormously inluential. It not only inluenced philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre but also theologians such as Tillich. Kierkegaard’s criticism is relevant here because it illustrates the absurdity of a science that attempts to construct objective histories of Indian literature, while leaving out the subjective relationship to this literature. As a irst step, 409 410 Chapter 05 It is partly in response to these criticisms of the positivistic notion of truth that German philosophy in the early twentieth century began to turn away from the natural sciences as a model for the Geisteswissenschaften. Knowledge in the humanities could not approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences. More important, this ideal was shown to be a false ideal and a misunderstanding of the task of the humanities. But before we study this turn in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, it is important to return one last time to Kant, from whom the “critical project” of Western philosophy—and, by extension, philology—took its inspiration. KANT’S CRITICAL TURN AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF APRIORISM Since we began this engagement with the scientiic character of Indology in the introduction with a discussion of its “critical” potential, it is only appropriate that, at the end of this engagement, we return to that question. We had begun with the observation that most Indologists seek to justify their work in terms of its critical character. We examined three notions of critique or criticism: critique in the sense of an inquiry that takes a critical stance toward its objects, critique in the strict Kantian sense of a self-relexive turn to the a priori categories of the understanding through which we organize the contents of experience, and critique in the sense of textual criticism. We found that the last two of these did not apply to Indology and that when Indologists used the terms “critical” or “critique” what they basically meant was any generalized suspicion toward authority. In the meanwhile, it has become clear that this suspicion was not scientiically grounded. Indeed, the texts of the Indologists we studied shows Kierkegaard distinguishes “historical truth” from “philosophical truth” and “eternal truth.” Since German Indologists explicitly and repeatedly pooh-pooh the notions of philosophical truth and eternal truth, only the irst enters consideration here. However, as we have seen the irst is not available to the Indologists, who were not interested in historical investigations per se, but in a metanarrative of history. Indeed, even if we accept that Indology was interested in the historical truth, according to Kierkegaard, the subjective individual’s relationship to historical truth cannot be one of noting some datum; it must be one of “inwardness” and “possession.” Further, as Kierkegaard points out, the “existing subjective thinker” is “just as negative as positive, has just as much of the comic as he essentially has of pathos, and is continually in a process of becoming, that is, striving.” In other words, he is as much a part of the process of becoming he seeks to grasp. Finally, there is the problem that of the three sources of knowledge possible from a positivistic perspective—sensation, historical record, and speculation—the irst two are ruled out. (Sensation requires that the Indologist be cotemporal with the events he wishes to study, which is impossible in the case of ancient events, and the criterion for historical record is also not met in the case of German Indologists, who possessed no actual archaeological or historical records. heir information was largely derived from texts and hence properly falls in the domain of philosophical knowledge). Further, even where historical knowledge was available, it is, as Kierkegaard notes, at best “approximation-knowledge.” hat is to say, we can assume that this inscription can be dated to this period or that such-and-such a king was responsible for it, but our knowledge is at best only an approximation. his leaves us the category of speculation, to which, properly speaking, all Indological knowledge belongs. Such knowledge, of course, is a “phantom,” as Kierkegaard notes. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD that their work was justiied more often in terms of an ideology of critique rather than anything concretely critical about it. Since this ideology of critique ultimately, if implicitly, derives from Kant (more precisely, from the enormous historical inluence of his idea of critical philosophy),180 we should look at how the critical project of Indology relates to that of Kant. Speciically, we should look to see whether the Indologists may ind some epistemological grounding in Kant’s idea of a science built up out of a priori propositions. Even though positivism itself failed to account suiciently for the allegedly scientiic character of the discipline, Indologists may maintain that, unlike the commentarial tradition, their science is presuppositionless. It begins neither from revealed truths nor from precepts handed down by the tradition. Yet, if the Indologist gathers his data neither from sense experience nor from an exegetical tradition, his science must consist of a priori propositions. It would have to be a strictly logical, deductive enterprise. Indologists could then claim that what guarantees scientiicity to Indology is the rational, self-evident character of its truths. hese truths can then be used as as criteria to discriminate or critically distinguish between the propositions of the tradition, thus fulilling Indology’s promise of ofering a critical canon. But although apriorism initially appears to ofer a solution to Indology’s problem of self-justiication, this solution also runs quickly into problems. To begin with, the notion of the a priori has undergone a signiicant change since Kant, who, as Schürmann notes, “ixes deinitively on the notion of the a priori:”181 A posteriori knowledge is that which has its origin in experience, sense experience. “A priori modes of knowledge are entitled pure when there is no admixture of anything empirical” (KrV Intro, B 3). hus there are things that we do know a priori, for Kant, i.e. that we know “independently from experience and with clarity and certainty.” his is opposed to inductive knowledge in which one can only reach “assumed and comparative universality” (ibid.). In a priori knowledge, on the contrary, we possess modes of knowledge that are universal and necessary.182 Kant’s genius consists, on the one hand, of his rejection of metaphysics and all dogmatic claims to authority of uncritical knowledge, while on the other hand rationally grounding philosophy. He is able to do this by undertaking a critical rather than an empirical turn. In doing so, he turns to the subject, not the object, of all sense experience. According to Kant, the mind can only know itself, it can discover only what it projects, and all knowledge outside the domain of the subject’s a priori logical constitution is a mere Herumtappen.183 180. For a good overview of the historical inluence of Kant’s conception of Kritik, see Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, s.v. “Kritik”; see especially pp. 1267–82 (“Der Begrif der K. von Kant bis zur Gegenwart”). 181. Schürmann, “Methodology of the Social Sciences,” 12. 182. Ibid. 183. hat is, a groping or blundering about (especially in the dark). he expression is from the Preface to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where he writes that if the local knowledge provided by the specialized sciences is not ordered and directed 411 412 Chapter 05 his is where German philology, especially Indology, and German philosophy begin to part ways. For Kant, what is a priori is precisely not what is intuited through sense experience about the external world. Rather, the critical turn, as understood by Kant, implies a turn from the objects of experience to the subjective conditions under which those objects are known. Kant’s famous “Copernican turn” marks precisely a turn away from the kind of naïve faith in appearances German Indologists manifest when they argue, as Slaje does in a recent article, that Indology as “the disciplinary efort at knowledge, description, and analysis of the autonomous Indian Logos” must seek “with the help of” “textbook-ready factual knowledge” to “project a general overview” that “views the great and continuous lines of the spiritual world of this culture . . . as they manifest themselves to us.”184 Slaje would receive no sympathy from Kant: the reliance upon mere appearance is precisely what Kant considers uncritical about ancient philosophy.185 Kant would argue that the method of separating “original” from “later” layers of texts is a criticism in the phenomenon, and thus a Herumtappen. It is hardly a “critical enterprise,” a term he reserves for the study of the a priori structure of the subject of experience. Further, if we bear in mind that the texts in question are characterized by the fact that they relate to the experience of distant cultures, the philologist’s use of the term critical loses the force of Kant’s scientiic project. As for the myths of original Germans in India, a Protestant Enlightenment in India called Buddhism, what would Kant call these but the “Dreams of a Ghost Seer”? In any event, contemporary philologists such as Slaje and Bronkhorst are anxious to bring the textual project out of India and closer to home, and their claims for Enlightenment are based on a confused understanding of European “critical consciousness” on which they wish to base Indology as a rigorous science of their own self, namely, Europe.186 he parting of ways between philosophy and philology becomes increasingly glaring in Germany. Philosophers in Germany develop from Kant’s critical philosophy to phenomenology. his coincides with German Idealism: Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Indologists, on the other hand, still call their work “critical.” We raise this point to underscore how German Indology became an isolated, outdated niche in the richer and larger arena of German intellectual life. After Hegel’s lectures on history, philologists no longer developed newer intellectual perspectives and approaches. hey afected embarrassment with Schopenhauer’s Romantic encounter with Indian philosophy, and they ignored the criticisms leveled against philology by Nietzsche. Twentieth-century philosophies, which take a rich textual turn (Arendt: narrative, through philosophy, it can yield nothing more than “fragmentary groping around and no science [fragmentarisches Herumtappen und keine Wissenschaft]” (7: 120). 184. Walter Slaje, “Was ist und welchem Zwecke dient die Indologie?,” 324 (italics added). 185. Whether correctly or incorrectly is a separate matter and is not to be debated here. 186. here is one place where Kant would provide room for an encounter with the other in a scientiic way, and that is contained in the Critique of Judgment. Since no Indologist seems to have availed himself of the aesthetic categories contained within it, we leave it out of the discussion. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD Gadamer: hermeneutics), are completely ignored. German Indology appears stunted not from an Indian perspective (indeed, it is our claim here that Indology had suprisingly little to do with India187); rather, German Indology is woefully out of step with intellectual currents within Germany and, by geographical extension, Europe. hat the Enlightenment itself, from which Indology feigns to draw its theoretical ideals, has come under severe criticism either does not bother the Indologist, or he is unaware of it. “We philologists are keepers of the torch of Enlightenment, and guardians against dogmatism,” one hears.188 In any event, the practical aspect of teaching Indians how to read their own texts takes on a tragic note when German Indologists refuse to read contemporary German texts in philosophy and philosophy of science. hese texts have, unbeknownst to them, completely eroded their theoretical foundations. In the next section, we shall look at how Continental philosophers, especially German philosophers, begin to turn away from the ideal of method as the guarantor and embodiment of scientiicity in the humanities, and to turn toward truth. In this turn, an engagement with Gadamer is unavoidable.189 RETHINKING THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES hroughout most of this book, we have inquired into the praxis of text-historical research. Praxis, unlike theory, is circumscribed: thus in place of general claims, we have focused on just one text, the Mahābhārata, and, even more speciically, on the Bhagavadgītā. he temporal focus of research (Gītā interpretations between the two world wars) provided further deinition to this study, although the story of this research required us to reach back into its own history to clarify important issues. he central question guiding this study is this: in what sense is text-historical research a science? Our research showed that none of the criteria germane to natural 187. his claim has of course been made before, above all by Inden. See his lucid and persuasive account in Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 188. Bronkhorst’s recent essay “Indology, What Is It Good For?” provides a paradigmatic example of such wishful thinking. He writes: “However, not only do disciplines like Indology need Enlightenment values, Enlightenment values also need disciplines like Indology. he two need each other, their dependence is reciprocal. In other words, if we wish to maintain and strengthen a society in which the values enumerated above have a place, we need to maintain and strengthen disciplines like Indology.” Johannes Bronkhorst, “Indology, What Is It Good For?” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161, no. 1 (2011): 122. 189. he signiicance of Gadamer’s work for Indian studies has been evaluated earlier by Richard King, though from another perspective (see his Orientalism and Religion cited earlier, esp. chapter 3). King is more interested in using Gadamer to show how every interpretation remains embedded in its historical context; his work is thus a contribution to (the formation of) an anti-essentialist, anti-Orientalist discourse on Indian texts or cultural practices. However, we are more interested here in using Gadamer to critical illumine Indology’s claim to being part of the human sciences, especially insofar as that claim invokes an understanding of scientiic method that the human sciences themselves found problematic and turned away from. he problem for us is not of the colonial or noncolonial nature of Indology, but of its nonscientiic nature. 413 414 Chapter 05 sciences holds for text-historical scholarship: neither self-evident and indisputable hypotheses, nor bracketing of subjective feelings, nor universal methods that can be objectively formulated, nor consensus among experts, nor universal and binding indings, nor pragmatic application, nor even relevance to laypersons—none of these informs this praxis. For the sake of understanding the praxis, in the preceding sections we traced the theoretical background and the issues surrounding text-historical methods. At least in the case of the Bhagavadgītā, we found that some elements of positivism did inform text-historical method, but incompletely so. Beyond positivism, European thought made great advances in theoretical models for inquiry into research in the humanities. Hegel’s phenomenology, Marx’s dialectics, and Freud’s psychoanalytic method are the most dominant examples of useful models into research in social sciences. German Indology remains uninformed of these avenues of intellectual progress. We now propose to turn away from method, suggest that hermeneutics constitutes the best candidate for research into Indological research, and with that conclude this section on theoretical aspects in methodology. In our quest for a reformed, contextually sensitive, and historically appropriate (zeitgemäße) Indology, we bring nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indology into a dialogue with one of the major igures of twentieth-century Continental philosophy: Hans-Georg Gadamer. In the irst section of his Truth and Method, “he Problem of Method,” Gadamer turns his attention to the humanistic tradition in search of nonmethodological avenues to truth. As Weinsheimer describes the situation: “If Gadamer does not begin (or end) with a deinition of method but rather proceeds to the history of humanistic alternatives, that is in part because history is itself the alternative to method.”190 Gadamer does not engage with method but inds an alternative to it, because just as “methodical proof calls a halt to history and obviates any further need to consult tradition as a source of knowledge, so also art, philosophy, history—tradition generally—challenge the universality and exhaustiveness of method as the exclusive means whereby knowledge worthy of being called true is disclosed.”191 Gadamer is dissatisied with the sovereignty of method for several reasons. Method is an inappropriate tool for understanding truth in humanistic tradition. his implies “irst, that method lies outside the humanistic tradition. Second, it implies, albeit indirectly, that method, and speciically the method of the natural sciences, has no history: that it sprang full-blown from the heads of Bacon and Descartes and has not altered signiicantly since then.”192 Rorty works out Gadamer’s insight that the domination of method has epistemology as its goal, namely, securing stable foundations of knowledge. If this goal is translated into that subject in the humanities we call philology, it manifests itself in an obsessive, method-driven 190. Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–2. 191. Ibid., 2. 192. Ibid. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD production of “critical” editions.193 his has an unanticipated side efect: Fremdheit or alienation. As Gadamer notes, As the foreignness which the age of mechanics felt towards nature as the natural world has its epistemological expression in the concept of self-consciousness and in the methodologically developed rule of certainty, of “clear and distinct perception,” so also the human sciences of the nineteenth century felt a comparable foreignness to the historical world. he spiritual creations of the past, art and history, no longer belong to the self-evident domain of the present but rather are objects relinquished to research, data from which a past allows itself to be represented.194 German Indology, to be sure, inverts this relationship and views India’s own unfolding history as meaningless and favors instead an abstractly conceived fetish history: a history of untrustworthy historiography. From this fetish history, numerous constructs were made, such as the decline of the hypermasculine Āryan warrior and Brahmanical wrongdoing. hese two fantasies serve as more historically objective to German Indology than the painful and brutal colonizations by Islamic and European forces. Even on this fetish level, Gadamer is still correct: anxieties of Fremdheit remain, and the Āryan brotherhood theme, although now defunct and glossed over in silence, is present to assure the German scholar that he is indeed a participant in India’s history, albeit in some unthematized way. Clearly, the German Indologist will neither airm the Āryan hypothesis nor concede that he is no diferent from a scholar from France or the United States. But Gadamer is making a much bigger case: “Fremdheit consists in the schism between past and present, I and others, self and world. Method derives from this sense of living among objects to which one no longer belongs.”195 With the rise of a historical method, one becomes “stranded in the present.”196 We may summarize the problems with positivism from a Gadamerian perspective thus: 1. Method is engineered to avoid “stumbling.” his is not a banal point. As Weinsheimer notes, “Mistakes are precluded by method because the 193. A critical edition, when carried out correctly, can have considerable value. It can help clarify the transmission of the text or help attain the oldest state of the text, the so-called archetype. But as we have seen, in the case of German Mahābhārata and Bhagavadgītā scholarship, the Indologists’ editions were not critical editions in the technical sense of the term where it refers to an edition based on systematic recensio and genealogical analysis. On the contrary, they elevated prejudices about the tradition to irst principles and proceeded to reconstruct the texts on the basis of these subjective impressions. In general, the principles of critical editing are badly understood and the expression itself irresponsibly applied by the majority of German Indological authors, as we discuss in our forthcoming book, Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism. For other examples of inlation in the use of the term, see the recent “critical” edition of the Mokṣ!opāya, in reality nothing of the kind. 194. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 61. 195. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 4. 196. Peter Fritsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 79. 415 416 Chapter 05 methodologically controlled mind is aware of its position at all times, knows its origin and the rules that govern its progress; and therefore the end of method is clear and distinct, because the steps of derivation can be retraced, reconstructed and rechecked at will. Truths accidentally known, as irregular and unrepeatable, are therefore essentially unfounded; and what is not founded by method, what is not repeatable, is suspect. hus, as method becomes the criterion of truth, history (itself essentially unrepeatable) becomes increasingly unnecessary (WM 329, TM 311)”.197 2. he relationship of the method to its practitioners becomes one of Master Method/Slave Scholar. By claiming universality, method gathers under its dominion all that can truly be said to be. “In methodological universalism, there is a distinct exaggeration of sovereignty—of its claim to control what occurs to us and in our world, to control history, and especially to control truth. he ambition of method, in Bacon’s words, is to ‘extend the empire of man over things,’ to ‘exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs’ to the mind. he peculiar sycophancy of method as Bacon conceives it is that precisely by submitting the mind to the show of things, which Bacon calls the ‘humiliation of the human spirit,’ the mind achieves dominion.”198 Note that this collusion between knowledge and power goes beyond merely method and applies more generally to epistemology as well. his was worked out in great detail by Foucault199 and applied speciically to humanistic discourses of the other by Said.200 Pollock exposes these dynamics in the context of German Indology.201 Although there are protests against Pollock, a brief glance at the attunement of German Indologists toward Indian scholarly history is suicient to prove Pollock’s point. 3. Scientiicity begs the question. Gadamer writes that “even modern historical, and scientiic consciousness—is governed by efective-historical determinations, and that beyond any possible knowledge of being so governed. he historically efected consciousness is inite in so radical [a] sense that our being, efected by the whole of our history, essentially far surpasses the knowledge of itself.”202 he 197. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 7. For a counter to the irreversible universalist pretensions of method in ancient Greek philology, see Vishwa Adluri, Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy: Return from Transcendence (London: Continuum, 2011). In this book, the author has argued that every human life is singular and unsubsumable under linguistic categories. Likewise, in the Gītā, Arjuna raises the question of singulars, those mortals he can name, whom he loves, and whom he must kill (Bhagavadgītā 2.4). hus this work is aware of the limitations of history and is concerned not with “secure facts” but with ultimate concerns. By exploring phenomena such as erōs, salvation, initiation, and pedagogy, this work articulates an alternative approach in philology, one that truly takes history in terms of singulars. he alternative, as Gadamer shows, is not to have a history at all but simply generalizations and phantasms such as the “cunning Brahman” or the “shrewd Jew.” 198. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 8. 199. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1980). 200. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 201. Pollock, “Deep Orientalism?” 202. Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxx–xxxi. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD mind thus does not account for itself; our scientiic objectivity is far from indubitable. Overarching historical determinations manifest as self-evident truths, and this has been proven beyond doubt in the prejudices that handicapped the scholars whose philological work we discussed in the preceding chapters of this work. hese are some of the reasons for Gadamer’s dissatisfaction with method-based approaches to humanities. Let us now turn our attention to key sections within Truth and Method, where he retrieves an alternative approach to humanities—philosophical hermeneutics—by undertaking a critique of Enlightenment. German Indology closely follows the Enlightenment in forging an irrational suspicion of authority and an exaggerated optimism concerning method into a science. Already in Romanticism, according to Gadamer, there was an implicit and nuanced criticism of Enlightenment. In contrast to the latter’s emphasis on rationalism and science, Romanticism valorized the world of myth. his world was supposedly lost to the Enlightenment’s desire for scientiic progress. However, as Gadamer sees it, Romanticism, even though critical of the Enlightenment, ends up implicitly adopting the very scheme it criticizes, namely, the conquest of myth by logos. Romanticism shares “the presupposition of the Enlightenment and only reverses its values, seeking to establish the validity of what is old simply on the fact that it is old: the ‘gothic’ Middle Ages, the Christian European community of states, the permanent structure of society, but also the simplicity of peasant life and closeness to nature.” To this list, Gadamer could have added, had he been aware of German Indology, the “heroic” Āryan past, the knightly deeds of the Kṣ!atriya warriors, the noble simplicity of their ethical and philosophical outlook, and so on. As a discipline, German Indology is so much a child of its time that Gadamer’s philosophical analysis of European Geistesgeschichte can be applied one-to-one to understand Indology’s historical evolution. German Indologists, of course, are embarrassed by their Romantic inheritance, and some such as Garbe and Oldenberg made serious eforts to deny it.203 Even today, most historical accounts by Indologists invoke the scheme of Romantic enthusiasm for India being replaced by a critical, distanced, and self-relexive science. However, the critical aspects of this science are directed more against what it sees as rival sources of authority (e.g., Brahmans, or native traditions of interpretation) and less against a fundamental premise of Romanticism: this is the tendency toward restoration. his restorative tendency takes the forms of a “tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old, the conscious return to the unconscious, culminating in the recognition of the superior wisdom of the primeval age of myth.”204 hus, the German Indologists surveyed are 203. Garbe, without specifying his precise targets, wrote: “he period, in which the Bhag., because of its sublimity of its thoughts and its language, stimulated nothing but enthusiasm and delight in Europe, are long past. We have—apart from [a few] fantastic theosophists like Franz Hartmann and other such enthusiasts [Schwärmer]—become more sober and critical and do not close our eyes to the obvious failings and weaknesses of the poem.” Garbe, Die Bhagavadgîtâ, 11–12. For Oldenberg’s criticisms of Schlegel, see Oldenberg, “Ueber Sanskritforschung,” 391 (quoted earlier). 204. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275. 417 418 Chapter 05 not satisied with reading the epic as it exists or as it is available in any of its manuscripts, irrespective of whether these are nineteenth-century, eighteenth-century, or even fourteenth- or ifteenth-century manuscripts. In the case of the Gītā, the text is attested to at least since Śaṁ !kara’s eighth-century commentary, but even this does not satisfy the Indologist. In a relection of the Romantic longing for the origin, he seeks the Ur-Gītā. Meanwhile, the wisdom of later commentators is discarded as interpolation, while one seeks the superior wisdom of a heroic Āryan past, which the Indologist fails to realize is but a projection of his own longings.205 he Romantic reversal of the Enlightenment’s criteria, as Gadamer notes, ends up actually “perpetuat[ing] the abstract contrast between myth and reason.”206 But this is no objection to the Indologist, who, of course, needs this contrast to sustain his self-image. hus, whereas the Romanticists felt close to the pristine cultures and religions they sought and found in the texts of antiquity, the Indologist paradoxically both longs for the old and feels compelled to distance himself from it. Two examples: Holtzmann wanted to both reconstruct the ancient heroic epic with all its bloodlusts and raw passion and to fuse this with the enlightened Protestant outlook he found in Buddhism. Hauer likewise sought to ind the contours of the old Indo-Āryan race and their metaphysics of battle and action but cautioned that importing Indian ideas to Europe would be a problem. he solution, a wesensgerechte Erforschung, was supposed to mediate between these contradictory requirements of a past that is valorized both as near to the present and yet utterly unlike it. he German Indologist wanted to exist in two cultures at once: the ancient India of his fantasy and his modern present, where he could feel secure of himself as enlightened, progressive, secular, and scientiic. Romanticism critiques historicism by valorizing myth. he Indologist valorizes historicism by discovering myth, paradigmatically present to him in the writings of non-European cultures who were allegedly not critical enough to distinguish between history and myth. In Romanticism, there is a presupposition “of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought.” Gadamer inds this presupposition to be “as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfect enlightenment or of absolute knowledge. Primeval wisdom is only the counterimage of ‘primeval stupidity.’ ”207 205. he Indologists were able, after a fashion, to ind the more original or more ancient texts posited by them. his was only because—to cite Nietzsche’s famous metaphor—they had already hidden them behind the proverbial bush. heir scholarship thus had all the apodictic value of Nietzsche’s “ ‘Behold, a mammal’.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” trans. Ronald Speirs, in he Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147; the full passage runs: “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and then inds it there, his seeking and inding is nothing much to boast about; but this is exactly how things are as far as the seeking and inding of ‘truth’ within the territory of reason is concerned. If I create the deinition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, declare, ‘Behold, a mammal’, then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but it is of limited value, by which I mean that it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in itself’, really and in a generally valid sense, regardless of mankind.” 206. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275. 207. Ibid., 276. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD We have seen throughout this work how German Indologists opposed the “mysterious darkness” of Indian antiquity to the perfectly enlightened self-critical awareness of the German scholars. Weber, in his letter to Raumer, in fact, uses these precise words: “As soon as they [i.e., the Vedas] are unveiled from the mysterious darkness surrounding them till now . . . and made accessible to all, all the untruths shall be automatically revealed, and this shall, in time, put an end to the sorry plight of religious decadence . . . of India.”208 But what is remarkable is how this perceived contrast between the primitivism of India and Enlightenment modernity itself directly engenders the critical task, as voiced by Gadamer: hese romantic revaluations give rise to historical science in the nineteenth century. . . . he great achievements of romanticism—the revival of the past, the discovery of the voices of the peoples in their songs, the collecting of fairy tales and legends, the cultivation of ancient customs, the discovery of the worldviews implicit in languages, the study of the “religious wisdom of India”—all contributed to the rise of historical research, which was slowly, step by step, transformed from intuitive revival into detached historical knowledge. he fact that it was romanticism that gave birth to the historical school conirms that the romantic retrieval of origins is itself based on the Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century historiography is its inest fruit and sees itself precisely as the fulillment of the Enlightenment, as the last step in the liberation of the mind from the trammels of dogma, the step to objective knowledge of the historical world, which stands on a par with the knowledge of nature achieved by modern science.209 Here, then, is what Gadamer grants as scientiic about the human sciences: liberation of the mind from dogma. Rather than question whether this is a suicient criterion for science, Gadamer rejects the methodology of human sciences and questions the cognitive value of undoing tradition. he Romantic criticism of the Enlightenment is rejected by philologists, but Gadamer is more sophisticated: he shows that this critique itself is a continuation of the program Enlightenment sets up for itself. To overcome Enlightenment and restore tradition, Gadamer rejects the view that all tradition can be reduced to prejudice, and all prejudices ought to be overcome. As he notes, the “overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice.” hus, a philosophical hermeneutics, according to him, must begin with “removing it [i.e., this prejudice]” as this “opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the initude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.”210 Let us see how this distancing of oneself from the prejudice against all prejudices simultaneously implies a reinstatement of traditional authority. Gadamer rejects the notion that we can guard against error, especially by simply overworking our notion that traditional knowledge, inasmuch as it is unscientiic, is merely prejudice. He traces the Enlightenment’s prejudice against tradition to the “mutually exclusive antithesis between authority and reason.” Enlightenment 208. See his Letter to Karl Otto von Raumer, 12.10.1855, cited earlier. 209. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276–77. 210. Ibid., 277. 419 420 Chapter 05 consciousness, the “false prepossession in favor of what is old, in favor of authorities, is what has to be fought.” Explicitly linking itself with to the Reformation, the Enlightenment sees itself historically as a continuance of Luther’s task: the struggle against authority. “Neither the doctrinal authority of the pope nor the appeal to tradition can obviate the work of hermeneutics, which can safeguard the reasonable meaning of a text against all imposition.”211 But exactly what is entailed in the hermeneutic task that is engendered by this break? And in what way does German Indology correctly inherit and interpret this critical inheritance? A hermeneutic approach to Indian texts such as Gadamer advocates crucially requires the condition of being open for these texts. his is not a trivial point, for it means not only that one must be open to the traditional self-understanding of these texts as providing a hermeneutic entrée to them but also that one’s own interpretation must be informed by philosophical and critical relections on the Enlightenment and its methodological shortcomings. In the case of the Indologists, we see that neither of these conditions was met: not only were the German scholars we have discussed not open to the Indian tradition but they also were not self-conscious of their own tradition. Only in this way could a notion of science, whose origins lay in nineteenth-century Comtean positivism, come to be identiied with science tout court, while an entire discipline could come to be constituted on the pretext of ofering a postconfessional, postmetaphysical and posttheological access to texts. But as with any other endeavor constituted on the basis of a repression, this was to exact a price from German Indology. Freud has shown how repression of a trauma exacts a price in the form of a neurotic symptom. In the case of German Indology, the repressed trauma (forgetfulness of its origins in the Neo-Protestantism of the eighteenth century) returned in the form of an exaggerated and overwrought afectation against all forms of religion. hus scholars such as Hanneder would argue that whereas Indian scholarship was “religious and confessionally bound,” German scholars were the inheritors of the secular Enlightenment, charged with a “defense of the achievements of the Enlightenment against religiously determined views that disguise themselves as science.”212 hus emerged the picture of Indians as beatiic yogis on lying carpets,213 whereas the German Indologist constituted himself as a scientist, critic, rationalist, secularist, and defender of the Enlightenment.214 What can be done to help these repressed theologians? Once again, Gadamer ofers a way out: his kind of hermeneutics need not lead to the radical critique of religion that we found, for example, in Spinoza. Rather, the possibility of supernatural truth can 211. Ibid., 279. 212. Hanneder, Marburger Indologie im Umbruch, 87. 213. For the metaphor and other stereotypes, see ibid., 86. 214. Ibid., 87, and 81–82. Also see the position paper published by Islamwissenschaftler (scholars of Islam) in Germany, defending their Islamwissenschaften as “scientiic” vis-à-vis plans for a program in Islamic Studies at the universities of Osnbrück and Münster. he signatories allege that the latter is a form of “Islamic theology” and is “confessionally bound,” whereas “Islamwissenschaften is a . . . confessionally neutral discipline.” Hanneder is one of ive Indologists to sign the document (the others are Heidrun Brückner, Andreas Pohlus, Axel Michaels, and Walter Slaje). “Stellungnahme von Fachvertreterinnen und -vertretern PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD remain entirely open. hus especially in the ield of German popular philosophy, the Enlightenment limited the claims of reason and acknowledged the authority of Bible and church. We read in Walch, for example, that he distinguishes between the two classes of prejudice—authority and overhastiness—but considers them two extremes, between which it is necessary to ind the right middle path, namely a mediation between reason and biblical authority.215 hus the hermeneutic approach as applied to the epic seeks to liberate itself from the faith-reason dichotomy that is misapplied to Indian texts.216 his is because, following Gadamer, we can reject the applicability of this scheme—typical of the Enlightenment but nevertheless deeply rooted in Luther217—to the texts of those traditions where rational soteriology was a real possibility, and where the texts explicitly claim to undertake the necessary pedagogy through rational means. Lessing’s parable of God ofering a choice between the whole truth in one hand and eternal striving in the other is unthinkable in relation to any reasonable god, and the value of rejecting truth for strife sets up an untenable opposition between reason and faith—an opposition that is at the root of all fundamentalism. Yet, it is this choice that is enshrined in Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegel’s Phenomenology and, as we documented, in the case of Holtzmann. Unable to sustain this either-or of faith and reason, where reason itself is driven by an irrational methodological strife, we ind in Gadamer’s overcoming of error and fear of prejudice a theoretically robust approach. hus we reject the text-historical method in full agreement with Gadamer’s rejection of Schleiermacher’s approach. In taking over the Enlightenment’s prejudice against reason, the critic fails to see “that among the prejudices in favor of authorities there might be some that are true—yet this was implied in the concept of authority in the irst place.” “His [i.e., Schleiermacher’s] alteration of the traditional division of prejudices documents the victory of the Enlightenment. Partiality now means only an individual limitation of understanding: ‘he one-sided preference for what is close to one’s own sphere of ideas.’ ” his, however, is not the proper meaning of partiality, which can also mean a preference for something based on its merits or on a consideration of it. It is this narrowing down of the concept of partiality that we see at work in German scholars rejecting traditional commentators because they are traditional. However, that der Islamwissenschaft und benachbarter akademischer Disziplinen zur Einrichtung des Faches ‘Islamische Studien’ an deutschen Universitäten,” October 25, 2010 http://www. dmg-web.de/pdf/Stellungnahme_Islamstudien.pdf. 215. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 279. 216. See, for example, Vishwa Adluri, “Frame Narratives and Forked Beginnings: Or, How to Read the Ādiparvan,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 19, no. 2 (2011): 143–210; and Vishwa Adluri, “Hermeneutics and Narrative Architecture in the Mahābhārata,” in Ways and Reasons for hinking about the Mahābhārata as a Whole, ed. Vishwa Adluri (Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 2013), 1–27. 217. See Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner, 1963) for a superb and concise elaboration of how reason and faith coexisted in a sophisticated and nuanced relationship to each other throughout the Middle Ages. Anselm’s credo ut intelligam and ides quaerens intellectum and St. Augustine’s crede, ut intelligas emblematically accuse the faith-reason dichotomy both of historical and religious parochialism, even within Christianity. 421 422 Chapter 05 the prejudices determining what we think are due to our own partiality is a judgment based on the standpoint of their having been “dissolved and enlightened, and it holds only for unjustiied prejudices.” If, however, there are “justiied prejudices productive of knowledge,” then the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice is unjustiied and itself antithetical to knowledge.218 his is why Gadamer rejects the radical consequences of the Enlightenment as expressed in Schleiermacher’s faith in method as “not tenable.”219 In a sense, it is this blind faith in reason that ultimately undoes the Enlightenment in that the Enlightenment succumbs to its own followers. Gadamer notes the pathos of this situation: the Enlightenment means well,220 but it is misguided in its knee-jerk and extremist iconoclasm.221 he Gadamer reference is relevant because the same iconoclastic rejection of authority guided early German Orientalists. Ever since Hegel, Orientalist scholars had considered Indians to be incapable of history. To these writers, the reception of the Mahābhārata as a theological text ofered conirmation of Hegel’s suspicions. India’s lack of historical consciousness, they reasoned, was a direct consequence of spiritual excesses. Indeed, the absence of historical consciousness could be directly attributed to the priestly caste’s need to control and to impose their religion on their naïve followers. his suspicion was at the back of Indologists’ claim that “critical” scholarship into antiquity was both a scientiic and social desideratum. he primary value of their discipline, as they understood it, was that it provided a check upon authoritarian excesses, protecting Indians, for example, against the depredations of a corrupt and power-hungry clergy. Historical-critical research into Indian texts thus, from the very beginning, carried an ethical imperative along with it. It was charged not only with the task of enabling a Klärung (clariication) of Indian texts 218. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 280. 219. Ibid. 220. “he Enlightenment’s distinction between faith in authority and using one’s own reason is, in itself, legitimate. If the prestige of authority displaces one’s own judgment, then authority is in fact a source of prejudices. But this does not preclude its being a source of truth, and that is what the Enlightenment failed to see when it denigrated all authority. . . . In fact the denigration of authority is not the only prejudice established by the Enlightenment. It also distorted the very concept of authority. Based on the Enlightenment conception of reason and freedom, the concept of authority could be viewed as diametrically opposed to reason and freedom: to be, in fact, obedience.” Ibid. 221. “But this is not the essence of authority. Admittedly, it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is ultimately based not on the subjection and abdication of reason but on an act of acknowledgment and knowledge—the knowledge, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence—i.e., it has priority over one’s own. his is connected with the fact that authority cannot actually be bestowed but is earned, and must be earned if someone is to lay claim to it. It rests on acknowledgment and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, trusts to the better insight of others. Authority in this sense, properly understood, has nothing to do with blind obedience to commands. Indeed, authority has to do not with obedience but rather with knowledge. It is true that authority implies the capacity to command and be obeyed. But this proceeds only from the authority that a person has.” Ibid., 281. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD but also that of an Aufklärung (Enlightenment) of the Indian mind.222 But as laudable as the Orientalists’ attempts to induce a second Reformation in India were, they overlooked a crucial point: Even the anonymous and impersonal authority of a superior which derives from his oice is not ultimately based on this hierarchy, but is what makes it possible. Here also its true basis is an act of freedom and reason that grants the authority of a superior fundamentally because he has a wider view of things or is better informed— i.e., once again, because he knows more. hus, acknowledging authority is always connected with the idea that what the authority says is not irrational and arbitrary but can, in principle, be discovered to be true. his is the essence of the authority claimed by the teacher, the superior, the expert.223 In their overly hasty post-Luther, post-Reformation, and post-Enlightenment rejection of authority, the German Orientalists clearly forgot this legitimate aspect of tradition. A resurrection of bloodthirsty Āryanism seemed preferable to them than to countenance legitimate authority. Even if we accept the equation of all priestly authority with mendacity, one would still have to ask: is Āryan primitivism preferable to clerical authority? Is it therefore not worthwhile, illuminating, and intelligent to look at the Indian tradition when interpreting Indian texts rather than launch a campaign of general viliication in the name of a global method and an indefensible conception of science? Merely attacking Brahmans with the same intensity, for the same reasons, in the same language, and for the same religious motivations as attacking Catholics in Germany is not science; it is simply self-righteous self-enrichment at the price of cultural genocide. But what part of tradition ought we preserve? In the case of Indian epic, the pedagogical function stands out. hese texts are less a record of power than of philosophy, and no matter how incestuous that may seem to our cynical ears, we must begin our journey into a text on its own terms. Much would seem to us foreign, bizarre, or irrational. he text is aware of the contingencies of time and worldview and endeavors to use a sophisticated set of tools to overcome and compensate for “truth leakage” across history. It does so by selecting its subject matter carefully, by alternating narrative with didactics, through riddle and humor and enigmatic symbols, and by opposing 222. See the statements by Goldstücker, already cited throughout this book. And see also Oldenberg’s remark in his “Ueber Sanskritforschung” that “it was not easy [for European scholars] to defeat the opposing Brahmanic prejudices [and gain a knowledge of Sanskrit texts]; to master the hindrances that arose from the unnature [Unnatur] of the indescribably sophistic and twisted grammatical system of the Indians entailed great diiculties, which, however, could be overcome with some patience.” Oldenberg footnoted the words “indescribably sophistic and twisted grammatical system” with the passage: “he original lament of the missionary Paulinus S. Bartholomaeo is well known: the Devil, in his wondrous cunning, has spurred on the Brahman philosophers to invent a language that is simultaneously so rich and so convoluted that their secrets are hidden not only from the people [at large], but also from their own students.” Ibid., 388, n. 3. 223. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281. 423 424 Chapter 05 various ideas, worldviews, and philosophies in a literary construction. his literary construction itself has an architectonic that is both stylistic and thematic: composed of circular and repetitive patterns, returning motifs always slightly modiied and juxtaposed with each other in thoughtful ways, and interspersed with hermeneutic clues ranging from key experiences (initiation, sacriice) to large narrative constructs (genealogy, cosmology, war). he most profound intellectual experiences are the result of such “stumbling” through the epic, rather than of clinical methodology. To appreciate these avenues, one can glance at the tradition that created and continues to use these texts proitably.224 Traditionalism should not be misunderstood as a bond of naïveté. It is true, as Gadamer remarks, that the concept of tradition has “become no less ambiguous than that of authority, and for the same reason—namely that what determines the romantic understanding of tradition is its abstract opposition to the principle of enlightenment.”225 But, as we have argued throughout this work, there is a way of looking at tradition that does not play on this abstract opposition. hat tradition is some kind of monolithic, unchanging entity is a false idea, one that is engendered by Romanticism. Gadamer notes: “Romanticism conceives of tradition as an antithesis to the freedom of reason and regards it as something historically given, like nature. And whether one wants to be revolutionary and oppose it or preserve it, tradition is still viewed as the abstract opposite of free self-determination, since its validity does not require any reasons but conditions us without our questioning it. . . . 226 he majority of German Indologists, however, accepted this understanding of tradition. Some, like Oldenberg, went so far as to criticize those (like the British Orientalists Jones and Wilkins) who did not share this iconoclastic attitude toward tradition. Instead of looking at what in tradition was valid and could be reused and made the basis for further researches, German Indologists cast away all tradition. Not only tradition, but also traditionally trained scholars were reviled as uncritical and untrustworthy.227 Nowhere does the German scholars’ rootedness in speciic historical circumstances become more evident than in this diference from their British and Continental colleagues. German scholars, however, did not stop to ask themselves why tradition appeared so inimical to them. In their headlong rush to take their place 224. Gadamer thematizes these insights clearly: “Here we can ind support in the romantic criticism of the Enlightenment; for there is one form of authority particularly defended by romanticism, namely tradition. hat which has been sanctioned by tradition and custom has an authority that is nameless, and our inite historical being is marked by the fact that the authority of what has been handed down to us—and not just what is clearly grounded—always has power over our attitudes and behavior. . . . And in fact it is to romanticism that we owe this correction of the Enlightenment: that tradition has a justiication that lies beyond rational grounding and in large measure determines our institutions and attitudes. What makes classical ethics superior to modern moral philosophy is that it grounds the transition from ethics to ‘politics,’ the art of right legislation, on the indispensability of tradition. By comparison, the modern Enlightenment is abstract and revolutionary.” Ibid., 281–82. 225. Ibid., 282. 226. Ibid. 227. For examples, see the articles and essays by Hanneder, already cited in this work. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD as scientists alongside their philologist colleagues, they simply accepted the abstract opposition of tradition and reason as set up by Romanticism. Indeed, it became one of the foundational gestures of the discipline. hus, from Roth to Oldenberg and from Slaje to Hanneder, when asked what Indology was, they responded with a clariication of what it was not: it was not the tradition. But merely not being traditional is no argument for a discipline; it is only an argument for the value of something where tradition has been equated with the nonrational or the antirational. Gadamer too rejects the idea of an “unconditional antithesis” between tradition and reason. “However problematical the conscious restoration of old or the creation of new traditions may be, the romantic faith in the ‘growth of tradition,’ before which all reason must remain silent, is fundamentally like the Enlightenment, and just as prejudiced.” Indeed, he points to an element of “freedom and history” within tradition itself: “Even the most genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be airmed, embraced, cultivated.” But lest Indologists such as Hanneder and Slaje oppose that this is precisely to surrender to the forces of irrationalism and conservatism against the scientiic spirit of Europe, Gadamer points out that “preservation . . . is active in all historical change.” Indeed, he challenges the dichotomy between conservatism and reason: for him, “preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one.” Precisely because the reason inherent in preservation is inconspicuous, well bred, and moderate and does not engage in the kind of book burning Slaje and Hanneder advocate, “only innovation and planning appear to be the result of reason.” But, as Gadamer notes, “this is an illusion.”228 “Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and it combines with the new to create a new value.” For this reason preservation represents “as much a freely chosen action as . . . revolution and renewal. . . . Both the Enlightenment’s critique of tradition and the romantic rehabilitation of it lag behind their true historical being.”229 Gadamer wishes to apply these insights—the use of enabling prejudice, the pedagogical function of authority, and the intellectual horizon of tradition—to critique method in humanities and to recommend the sophisticated art of hermeneutics. He notes: hese thoughts raise the question of whether in the hermeneutics of the human sciences the element of tradition should not be given its full value. Research in the human sciences cannot regard itself as in an absolute antithesis to the way in which we, as historical beings, relate to the past. At any rate, our usual relationship to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from tradition. Rather, we are always situated within traditions, and this is no objectifying process—i.e., we do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a kind of cognizance that our later historical 228. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 282. 229. Ibid., 282–83. 425 426 Chapter 05 judgment would hardly regard as a kind of knowledge but as the most ingenuous ainity with tradition.230 Gadamer’s critique of the equation of historicism and historical method with objectivity tout court is especially germane to our context. With him, we might ask: “has the rise of historical consciousness really divorced our scholarship from this natural relation to the past? Does understanding in the human sciences understand itself correctly when it relegates the whole of its own historicality to the position of prejudices from which we must free ourselves? Or does ‘unprejudiced scholarship’ share more than it realizes with that naïve openness and relection in which traditions live and the past is present?” Obviously, these are questions Indology is not well placed to ask or answer, since it constitutes itself via a repression of its history. But even if we grant it diplomatic immunity from history, the question still remains: how can Indology claim to carry out historical research when it evades the elementary conditions of historical being? As Gadamer pertinently notes, “understanding in the human sciences,” too, shares “one fundamental condition with the life of tradition,” that is, “it lets itself be addressed by tradition.”231 “Is it not true of the objects that the human sciences investigate, just as for the contents of tradition, that what they are really about can be experienced only when one is addressed by them?” Gadamer’s pregnant formulation makes the crisis of German Indology especially acute and places it before a fundamental decision: either it must acknowledge an inheritance, a debt to German history, or it must accept some connection to the Indian tradition, but there is no such thing as access to the past unmediated by history. From all we have read, we know that the second option is anathema to Indology; to do so would be to accept the validity and binding authority of the Inderwissen that Oldenberg so decries. Given that Indology has only been able to think of Indians in terms of stereotypes such as lying carpets and yogis, it is unthinkable that it would seriously strive to ind some link or access to the Indian tradition. But the irst option is no less problematic: since Indology’s claim to superiority over the classical Indian tradition has rested on its claim that it alone is not indebted to history—that it alone has transcended the elementary conditions of historical being to attain pure objectivity—it cannot now acknowledge that its perspective, too, is historically conditioned, unless it is willing to accept the problems with past scholarship. But as we know, Indology is far from taking up such a critical relation to its own past. Indeed, even at the price of sheltering Nazis, German Indologists are unwilling or unable to accept a critical relection on the history of German Indology.232 230. Ibid., 283. 231. Ibid., 283. 232. In a recent review, Slaje attacks Jakob Stuchlik’s detailed and pertinent study of the Austrian Indologist Erich Frauwallner’s involvement in Nazism; see Walter Slaje, Review of Der arische Ansatz: Erich Frauwallner und der Nationalsozialismus, by Jakob Stuchlik, Études Asiatique 64, no. 2 (2010): 447–62. Slaje’s criticisms are polemical, unfounded, and illogical, and provoked the only possible response from the author: in a response to the review published in a subsequent issue of the same journal, Stuchlik accused Slaje of being “motivated by an obvious desire to discredit a critical book about the relationship of a scholar to PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD hus, the relevance of Gadamer to Indology is ultimately that he dispels the Enlightenment illusion of an unmediated access to history and, in fact, establishes this elementary historicity as the basic condition of all knowing, even of historical knowledge. Once one grants this historicity, however, the “real fulillment of the historical task” can no longer be to provide, as Slaje describes it, “manual-ready factual knowledge . . . that brings into view the great and continuous lines of the intellectual world of this culture, exactly as it articulated itself primarily”233 but, rather, as Gadamer describes it, “to determine anew the signiicance of what is examined.”234 But here, the basic reciprocity inherent in all human cognitive endeavors comes to the fore. But the signiicance exists at the beginning of any such research as well as at the end: in choosing the theme to be investigated, awakening the desire to investigate, gaining a new problem. At the beginning of all historical hermeneutics, then, the abstract antithesis between tradition and historical research, between history and the knowledge of it must be discarded.235 his makes the dogmatic separation of “the efect (Wirkung) of a living tradition” and the “efect of historical study” characteristic of historicism impossible. Indeed, in Gadamer’s words, the two come together to constitute “a unity of efect,” the analysis of which reveals “only a texture of reciprocal efects.”236 Equally sobering are his conclusions for historicism: Hence we would do well not to regard historical consciousness as something radically new—as it seems at irst—but as a new element in what has always constituted the human relation to the past. In other words, we have to recognize the element of tradition in historical research and inquire into its hermeneutic productivity.237 A recognition of the “hermeneutic productivity” of historical research, however, applies not only to the books and ideas through which the West sought to determine itself but also to those through which Western authors sought to determine National Socialism” and of attempting “over and above the attempt at discrediting the book and its author, to wash the [accused] scholar clean [of Nazism].” Jakob Stuchlik, “Replik auf Walter Slajes Rezension meines Buches,” Études Asiatique 65, no. 1 (2011): 287. See also Stuchlik’s concluding remarks: “However, Slaje does no favors for the Frauwallner school to which he belongs and which he believes he must defend in this manner: his engagement places him in the tradition of the questionable and only apparently de-Naziied [scheinentnaziizierter] Frauwallner and thus conirms the book’s conclusion which pointed out the remarkable contemporary relevance of the problem.” Ibid., 307–8. We discuss yet another member of the Frauwallner school in the next chapter: Frauwallner’s student and direct successor, Ernst Steinkellner. 233. Slaje, “Was ist Indologie?” 324. 234. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 283. 235. Ibid., 283–84 (italics in original). 236. Ibid., 284. 237. Ibid. 427 428 Chapter 05 Indian culture. A critical Indology, then, would recognize, as Gadamer says, “that an element of tradition afects the human sciences despite the methodological purity of their procedures,” and it would not consider this element of tradition a problem that must be eliminated but its “real nature and distinguishing mark.” hus, for Gadamer, the “hermeneutic turn” in philosophy ultimately marks a renewed turn to man’s initude after the hubris of the Enlightenment and the easy technological progress of early modernity, for which tradition, faith, and respect for authority— in other words, everything that is, for Gadamer, summed up in the word phronesis—appeared to be unnecessary at best and an active hindrance at worst. Precisely because “none of man’s inite historical endeavors can completely erase the traces of this initude,” it is hubristic to call for an Indology that neither owes anything to humanity nor believes it owes allegiance to tradition.238 Indology “does not provide therapy, it does not heal, and it does not prognosticate,”239 but it wants to be well paid nonetheless. But lest Slaje rejoin that Indology belongs to a “European tradition of knowledge [Wissenstradition]” that, according to its “original claim [ursprünglichem Anspruch],” aims at the creation of the “purposeless [zweckfreie]world of the human sciences,”240 it is helpful to recall the fundamental distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften as this was developed by us in the preceding sections. Gadamer, too, notes: It is clear that the human sciences cannot be adequately described in terms of this conception of research and progress. Of course it is possible to write a history of the solution of a problem—e.g., the deciphering of barely legible inscriptions—in which the only interest is in ultimately reaching the inal result. Were this not so, it would have been impossible for the human sciences to have borrowed the methodology of the natural ones, as happened in the last century. But what the human sciences share with the natural is only a subordinate element of the work done in the human sciences. . . . 241 Why is this so? As we demonstrated in the central sections of this chapter, the attempt to construe the scientiic character of the human sciences on the model of the natural sciences (as was done in positivism, for example) is to misunderstand their basic character. First and foremost, there is no pure object of research that can be investigated for itself, independent of history and independent of human subjectivity, as in the natural sciences. Further, the attempt to determine the being of historical phenomena in this abstract a priori manner (as was done, for example, in historicism) leads not only to the elision of what is historically speciic about them, but also to the veiling of the historical particularity of the researcher. But this historical particularity is merely veiled and not put out of commission. Even as he imagines he has transcended his historical and social context, these continue to inluence him in the choice of research object he makes, in the particular questions he raises, and in 238. Ibid. 239. Slaje, “Was ist Indologie?” 321. 240. Ibid., 311 (italics in original). 241. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 284. PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD the kinds of answers that seem germane to him. Finally, although empirical methods have their place, empiricism, and its attendant phenomenon, psychologism, do not get us very far when what is at stake is understanding why people in the past thought as they did. Gadamer is not unaware of these issues, of course. He notes: Obviously, in the human sciences we cannot speak of an object of research in the same sense as in the natural sciences. . . . [Rather,] historical research is carried along by the historical movement of life itself and cannot be understood teleologically in terms of the object into which it is inquiring. . . . Whereas the object of the natural sciences can be described idealiter as what would be known in the perfect knowledge of nature, it is senseless to speak of a perfect knowledge of history, and for this reason it is not possible to speak of an “object in itself” toward which its research is directed.242 hus, with Gadamer, we come full circle. We began with the Wissenschaftsideologie of the nineteenth century and its resonances in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indology, especially in the work of Hermann Oldenberg. Via an analysis of Comte’s positivism and historicism and of the empiricism of Mill, Spencer, and Mach, we developed an understanding of the problems with the methodological self-understanding of Indology. We demonstrated how, although German Indologists continue to valorize the wissenschaftliche character of their work, they are unable to give an account of wherein this scientiicity should lie. And inally, we showed how the abstract contrast between tradition and reason is a false contrast—not only because there is an element of tradition that is rational and worth preserving, but also because we are always already claimed by tradition even where we, as the German Indologists did, think to stand entirely on the side of an abstract and ahistorical reason. But one inal point may be made here allied to the criticism of the Enlightenment in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. his is the question of theology. Here, Gadamer allies himself with the Romantic critique of method. Hermeneutics allows us to deal with those aspects of human existence that theology addresses, without thereby signaling a loss of truth or reason. As he notes, the “crisis of historicism” ushered in by the publication of Dilthey’s collected works243 led to a “revival of mythology.”244 Gadamer cites the work of Walter F. Otto and Karl Kerényi as examples of this new interest in myth in scholarship. But “the example of mythology is only one among many.”245 Gadamer argues that, “in the concrete work of the human sciences,” 242. Ibid., 285. 243. he expression is usually attributed to Ernst Troeltsch, especially his “Die Krisis des Historismus,” Die neue Rundschau 33 (1922): 572–90 (see also Der Historismus und seine Probleme [Tübingen: Mohr, 1922] and Der Historismus und seine Überwindung [Berlin: Heise, 1924]), even though notions of a crisis were prevalent in the work of European writers long before Troeltsch. Charles Bambach provides a useful bibliography of the concept and the expression; see his he Crisis of Historicism, 4, n. 5, and see also the dissertation by Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begrifs und des Problems (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1992). 244. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 509–10. 245. Ibid., 510. 429 430 Chapter 05 it is possible to show “many places where there is the same turning away from a naïve methodologism, the equivalent of which in philosophical relection is the explicit criticism of historical objectivism or positivism. his development became particularly important where originally normative aspects are combined with science.” Among the many examples we might adduce, two are especially important for Gadamer: theology and jurisprudence. He notes that “theological discussion in recent decades has placed the problem of hermeneutics in the foreground precisely because it has had to combine the heritage of historical theology with new theological and dogmatic departures.”246 he signiicance of this remark is topical. heology is gradually overcoming the dichotomy of historical research and philosophical inquiry to once again address pragmatic, social, and existential concerns. Within European philosophy itself, a theological turn has been underway since at least the mid-1950s. Heidegger himself takes a theological turn in his later works, above all in his Beiträge zur Philosophie. To him, we also owe the dramatic phrase, “only a God can save us now.”247 his God, however, is no longer the Lutheran Deus absconditus for Heidegger, whose insuficiency as a theological conception became all too apparent in the horrors of World War II and in Heidegger’s own brush with Nazism. Heidegger’s statement owes more to Hölderlin and to the Greek gods whose departure Hölderlin was the irst to diagnose. Since then, the school of French phenomenology—above all, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Courtine, and Dominique Janicaud—has been at the forefront of debate over what Heidegger characterizes as the “light of the gods.” Likewise—again inluenced by Heidegger—a fundamental shift in the notion of truth has been underway in Continental thought of the past half century.248 In his lecture course Parmenides, Heidegger explicitly sets apart two notions of truth: alētheia/pseudos and verum/falsum and undertakes a deconstruction of the reigning notion of truth as “correctness.”249 He discusses how the modern notion of truth derives from the Latin notions of verum and falsum and how both terms originate in a political, legalistic context. In 246. Ibid. 247. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans. Maria Alter and John D. Caputo, Philosophy Today 20, no. 4 (1976): 267–84. 248. Even before Heidegger, Nietzsche had problematized the notion of truth as correctness. Refusing to succumb to the pretensions of the philologists, Nietzsche subjected their work to merciless critique. He struggles to include aestheticism, perspectivism, and intoxication as ways of addressing truth in his work. Aphorism 57 of he Gay Science (titled “To the Realists”) is typical of this interest: “hat mountain over there! hat cloud over there! What is “real” about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution, from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school—all of your humanity and animality! here is no “reality” for us—and not for you either, you sober ones—we are not nearly as strange to one another as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.” Friedrich Nietzsche, he Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Joseine Nauckhof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69. 249. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), see esp. §3. Interestingly, the question of the deconstruction of the notion of truth as “correctness” is posed in the context of a wider question concerning the correct translation of the Greek !λ !θεια. hus, Heidegger is well PROBLEMS WI TH THE CRI TIC AL METHOD place of these notions of truth (veritas, certitudo, rectitudo, iustitia), Heidegger seeks to retrieve a notion of truth as alētheia: truth as the presencing or self-disclosure of Being. his is the sense of truth Heidegger inds was originally present in the Greek alētheia, which he translates as “un-concealment” or “dis-closure.” he notion of truth as an un-concealment leads Heidegger to the notion of truth as a happening, an occurrence (Ereignis), and it is this eventlike character of truth he is ultimately concerned with recovering. Truth becomes the event of the free self-manifestation of Being, an event that is always ambiguous, for Being can withhold itself or stay away and cannot be reduced to or mastered with our technical means. In his writings from the mid-1930s onward, he becomes increasingly critical of the traditional deinition of truth, as well as concepts such as subjectivity, objectivity, Being, the relation of Being to beings, and the history of this relation. Heidegger inds that Western thought has lost its original relationship to the truth: thinking becomes merely technical and, everywhere, man only encounters himself. Over against this literally thoughtless thinking (since the 1969 essay, “he End of Philosophy and the Task of hinking,” summed up in the concept of “cybernetics”),250 Heidegger is interested in recovering an original experience of the truth, an interest that necessitates a return to the Greeks. Here, he will ultimately ind the resources to think of truth more primordially: as the “granting” or “giving” of Being expressed in the German “es gibt.” In contrast, in his Parmenides lecture notes, Heidegger rejects the notion of “true” (in the sense of verum) as “un-German” in its essence.251 hus, at the end of a two-century-long period, when Europe gave way to the seductions of positive sociology, there is once again a concern with fundamental human questions, which include the question of what it means to be a mortal on this earth. Here is where a fruitful engagement with Indian texts might begin. Since we began this inquiry into the scientiic character of German Indology with a review of German Gītā scholarship, it is only itting to conclude by taking a look at the Gītā once again. How might the Gītā, beyond the so-called text-historical interpretations of German scholars, enter into dialogue with Western philosophy? What might the text have to say about a notion of truth as the free self-manifestation of Being? In the eleventh chapter of the poem, there occurs an unusual exchange between God and mortal. Arjuna, the great warrior hero of the epic, asks to see Kṛ!ṣ!ṇ!a’s divine, plenipotent form (rūpam aiśvaraṁ !, 11.3) and Kṛ!ṣ!ṇ!a responds by revealing his universal form. In van Buitenen’s translation, the verses read: Pārtha, behold my hundreds and thousands of shapes, of many kinds, divine, in manifold colors and igures. Behold the Ādityas, Vasus, Rudras, Maruts; behold, Bhārata, many marvels that have never been witnessed before. Behold the entire aware of the problems with merely lexical deinitions and would have no sympathy for the German Indologists who think they merely look up Sanskrit words in their lexica, when in fact the greater task is for us to translate ourselves into the world of the speakers of the language. 250. Martin Heidegger, “he End of Philosophy and the Task of hinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 58. 251. Heidegger, Parmenides, 47. 431 432 Chapter 05 universe with standing and moving creatures centered here in this body of mine. (Bhagavadgītā 11.5–6) hat this theophanic vision is not simply a supernatural occurrence but one that signiies Being’s self-granting or giving is seen from the use of guhyam (secret or mystery) and related words and from the fact that Kṛ!ṣ!ṇ!a has to endow Arjuna with a divya cakṣ!uḥ!, or “divine eye,” before he can behold the god’s self-disclosure. Kṛ!ṣ!ṇ!a’s theophany transposes Arjuna into an ecstasy of vision. He uses the word paśyāmi (I see) ive times in his description of the god’s universal form (in verses 11.15, 16 [twice], 17, 19) and the entire encounter between the two is framed in the language of vision (dṛ !ṣ!- and paś-related words). A comprehensive interpretation of the Gītā’s philosophy would take us far aield of the present chapter’s concerns, which were simply to point to the inadequacy of German Indology from Western perspectives. But this brief excursus into the poem was necessary to show how the poem’s philosophical richness cannot be exhausted in terms of a theory of an original epic situation riddled with later Brahmanic interpolations. It requires philosophical perspectives developed from Plato to Kant and Hegel and from Nietzsche to Heidegger to be able to interpret the poem. Compared with the rich interpretation possible from the perspective of a Heideggerian understanding of truth as alētheia, the interpretations of Garbe and Jacobi illustrate the poverty of the text-historical method. By failing either to recognize Nietzsche’s criticisms or to keep up with philosophy in Germany, these philological treatises became obsolete. hus, it is not a matter of opposing the Indian commentarial tradition to Western scholarship but of evaluating the Indologists’ work strictly in terms of the standards they themselves appeal to. Here then, at the beginning of the twenty-irst century, is a good point to look back at this history and ask in what way German Indology can be said to contribute to the task of either the sciences or the humanities. he diremption of the text-historical method and the power structures built up on it simultaneously ofers an opportunity for the humanities to reclaim and rehabilitate Indian philosophy and literature after Indology.252 he work of scholars such as Sukthankar, Biardeau, Charles Malamoud, and others is testament to the fact that philological rigor can and ought to be combined with philosophical concerns. As attention begins to focus on non-Western philosophies as an essential part of the global humanistic canon,253 the question is not “whither the humanities?” but “whither humanities after Indology?” 252. See Nicholson, arguing presciently that the near-total disappearance of Indian philosophy from the Western and global philosophical canon is due to an uncritical acceptance of the work of nineteenth-century Orientalists. “We have,” writes Nicholson, “for too long been content to repeat these same lists of doctrines, devoid of serious philosophical analysis or historical examination of their claims (such as the time-worn belief that the true Sāṃ !khya is atheistic). Such presentations have led readers to conclude that the beliefs of Indian philosophers were derived from private mystical experiences, operating entirely outside the realm of warrant and rational argument. Hence the widespread idea that Indian religions are mystical rather than rational.” Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism, 11. 253. See Peter K. J. Park’s recent book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Modern Canon of Philosophy, 1780–1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).