Hegel's India

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A relentless engagement with India is integral to G. W. F. Hegel's thought in ways unexplored in Hegelian (or Indological) scholarship. In his writings on India, Hegel characterized Indian thought as "fantastic," "subjective," "wild," "dreamy," "frenzied," "absurd," and "repetitive." He also presented a scathing social critique of the caste order, a theme reiterated in many of his works. The central provocative issue thus is: if Indian art, religion, and philosophy were so inadequate, what explains his lifelong fascination with India?

Hegel and India

Hegel's major works include his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the larger Science of Logic (1812–16/1831), along with the briefer Logic (which constitutes the first part of his three-volume Encyclopedia) (1817), the Philosophy of Right (1821), the Philosophy of History (1820s), the Lectures on Aesthetics or the Philosophy of Fine Art (1820s), the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821–31), and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1820s). In each of them, except the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel explicitly discusses relevant aspects of Indian thought (Indian art, or religion, or philosophy, for example), ranging from a few hundred words (as in the Philosophy of Right) to over 20,000 words (as in the Philosophy of History). Indeed, even in the Phenomenology, there are numerous implicit references to the "oriental" world generally, though not necessarily Indian thought, in sections such as "Lordship and Bondage," "The Unhappy Consciousness," "Self-estranged Spirit," and "Natural Religion." It is instructive to glance briefly at Hegel's major texts, taking note of his project within them, with the aim of understanding how Hegel's rendition of Indian thought features within his wider project or system.

In catalyzing such explorations, the book Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts by Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents, collected together in one volume for the first time, all of Hegel's writings on and about India, an astonishing 80,000 words, including translations of his lesser-known essays on the Bhagavad-Gita and the Oriental Spirit, along with a substantive reinterpretation and a bibliography. The book brings together Hegel's reflections and argues that Indian thought haunted him, representing a nemesis to his own philosophy. Further, it indicates that the longstanding critical appraisals of Hegel are incommensurate with his detailed explorations of Indian thought.

The Standard Interpretation

The standard interpretation is that Hegel merely sought to show that he was wiser and more learned than his many rivals, especially the German Romantics and their Indophilic forays, and this may explain his negative and critical comments on India that are often perceived as racist, prejudiced and Eurocentric. That may be true as far as it goes, but it is not sufficient to explain the consistency of Hegel's interest, or, for example, the appearance of Hegel's reflections on Indian thought even in the final sections of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817). Hegel could have forwarded his anti-Romanticist agenda through numerous other means than India. And even if Indian art, religion, and philosophy were the best domains for Hegel to outshine and outwit his rivals, it still hardly accounts for the obsession visible in his voluminous and, importantly, evolving approaches to the Indian spirit. It is much more adequately explanatory to assume rather that Indian thought intrigued Hegel on its own merits, and not just for proxy war. Indeed, an attentive reading of his India writings tends to suggest that Indian thought really haunted Hegel somehow. The reinterpretation in Hegel's India argues that it represented a sort of nagging twin that he badly needed to shake off throughout the development of his own philosophy.

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Bhagavad-Gita

In terms of the sheer number of words, Hegel devotes as much attention in his capacious writings to India as he does to the Greek world—indeed, he writes more on what he calls the "oriental" world than he does about the Greeks. While much has been written about Hegel concluding his comprehensive Encyclopedia (Part III) with an extended passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics, critics have passed over in silence the much longer passage from Jelaleddin Rumi that just precedes it, and which Hegel says he cannot refrain from quoting. Indeed, they have passed over in silence the astonishing fact that the culmination of Hegel's system—that is, Philosophy as the highest expression of Absolute Spirit, as articulated in the final paragraphs of the Encyclopedia, Part III—consists of about 12 pages of text, a full 10 of which are devoted to Indian art, religion, and philosophy. Why would these appear right there at the end, the culmination of it all?

The first time Hegel dealt with India specifically was in the 1817 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In the revised edition of 1827, Hegel added a great deal of detail, illustrating not only how much he had learned in the intervening decade, but also indicating the spread of Indological studies in Germany and elsewhere.

A conspicuous example is the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita. While Hegel was revising his Encyclopedia, he came to know of Wilhelm von Humboldt's work on the Gita (1826) and dropped what he was doing to work instead on India. Although the 1817 edition of the Encyclopedia contained only a small section on India, since 1822 Hegel had been speaking extensively on India in his lectures on the philosophy of history. Upon hearing of Humboldt's work, Hegel decided to add numerous passages, including on the Gita, to the revised edition of the Encyclopedia. Hegel's review of Humboldt's Gita was longer than Humboldt's own text, and thus had to be published in two separate parts!

The standard interpretation of Hegel's India writings is true up to a point: India did serve as the theatre for a proxy war against the Romantics. But it is counter-intuitive to permit that explanation to account for the depth and breadth of Hegel's involvement with Indian thought across many decades. It is not simply the indefensible bias of Hegel that led to his dismissive conclusions about the profundity of Indian thought. Indeed, after a careful study of all of Hegel's India writings vis-à-vis his own system of philosophy, the reader may begin to sense that it might be precisely the other way round. Hegel's conclusions—after a deep and wide-ranging enquiry, as well as a great deal of writing—regarding the beauty of Indian art, the sublimity of Indian religion, and the complexity and significance of Indian philosophy may be a sizeable part of what led to this prejudice.

This twin clearly possessed him in some respect. Hegel himself indicates the similarity of Indian philosophy to his own thought, such as the conception of the absolute (Brahman). He did, however, achieve two points of clarity in distinguishing his own thought from Indian philosophy: The first was to focus on his pivotal motif of freedom, thus railing perpetually against the caste system in Indian society, and attempting to read traces or resonances of casteism into the entire breadth and depth of Indian history, politics, art, religion, and philosophy. The second was to indicate the necessity for dialectical, progressive mediation, and thus frequently to contrast the apparent stasis of Indian thought. But did Hegel really ever manage to exorcise this twin haunting his work? After working through Hegel's huge corpus of India writings, the reader may find reason to doubt it. But it was surely not from a lack of vehemently trying.

A Guide to Contents

REINTERPRETATION

1. India in Hegel's System: The Ladder to the Circle 2. Hegel's Indological Sources and the Standard Interpretation 3. Hegel's India Writings: The Gita and World History 4. Hegel's India Writings: Art, Religion, and Philosophy 5. Fragments: Oriental Spirit, Logic, and Right 6. Conclusion References

TEXTS

1. On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gita by Wilhelm von Humboldt 2. Philosophy of World History 3. Lectures on the Philosophy of Fine Art 4. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 5. The Philosophy of Mind (Encyclopedia, Part III) 6. Lectures on the History of Philosophy 7. Fragments: Oriental Spirit, Logic, and Right Bibliography Index

Critical Reviews

Slavoj Žižek, International Director, The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, UK

'In our postcolonial times, Hegel's thoughts on India seem to allow only one reaction: an outright rejection of Hegel's racist Eurocentrism. Hegel's India takes the challenge of a detailed reading of Hegel's texts with a surprising result: behind Hegel's dismissal of India, there lies not only his profound fascination with India but also an uncanny proximity between India's ancient wisdom and Hegel's speculative thought. Beneath Hegel's India, we can discern the traces of what would have been India's Hegel. [This book] provides a model of how a dialogue between different cultures should be practiced, beyond the confines of Eurocentrism and historicist relativism.'

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA

'From the very beginning the depth of Hegel's engagement with India and with Indian philosophy has been consistently underestimated. This volume makes a compelling case for a reassessment and it does so at a time when Western philosophy faces renewed challenges for its Eurocentrism. Hegel's India belongs front and center within that debate for the new perspective it offers.'

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Indian Express

"It is wonderful to have access to these writings in one volume. The introduction gives a tour d'horizon of the sources Hegel consulted and the interpretive controversies surrounding his work on India. Reading Hegel is always challenging. But an anthology of his work on India highlights how, even in his most prejudiced criticism, he could shine a light on unusual questions."

The Caravan

'This new book includes all of Hegel's essays on India, as well as explanatory essays about his writings, to reassess the significance of India in the philosopher's larger body of work.'

Ranabir Samaddar, Director, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India

'Hegel's India opens up a new line of enquiry, namely how much of the dialectic between two philosophies helps us to understand the inner dialectic within one philosophy?'

Ajay Gudavarthy, The Book Review

'This is an important book at a significant time. It makes some incisive points on how the Anglophone world has refused to, and continues to ignore, the contributions of 'far-reaching philosophical systems' that arose outside the so-called western traditions.'

Dilip M. Menon, Mellon Chair of Indian Studies and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

'Intriguing and original'

Makarand R. Paranjape, Professor of English, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

'Promises to be the most thorough and incisive treatment of the topic since Tibebu's Hegel and the Third World.'

References

Further Readings

Bernasconi, Robert, "With What Must the History of Philosophy Begin? Hegel's Role in the Debate on the Place of India within the History of Philosophy," in David A. Duquette (ed.), Hegel's History of Philosophy: New Interpretations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 35–49.

———, "With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin? On the Racial Basis of Hegel's Eurocentrism," Nineteenth Century Contexts 22 (2000), 171–201.

Brooks, Thom, "Review of Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2007), 28 March, available at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-german-gita-hermeneutics-and-discipline-in-the-german-reception-of-indian-thought/ (accessed 8 June 2016).

Crawford, Oliver, "Hegel and the Orient," available at https://www.academia.edu/4985405/Hegel_and_the_Orient (accessed 8 June 2016).

Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994).

Desmond, William, Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003).

Ferrarin, Alfredo, Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

———, "Hegel's Aristotle: Philosophy and Its Time," in Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (eds), A Companion to Hegel (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011), 433–51.

Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Halbfass, Wilhelm, "Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer und Indien," Zeitschrift fur Kulturaustausch 37(3) (1987), 424–33.

———, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

Hastings, Warren, "Foreword," in Charles Wilkins, The Bhagavat-Geeta or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon: In Eighteen Lectures. With Notes. Translated from the Original, in the Sanskreet or Ancient Language of the Brahmans (London: C. Nourse, 1785).

Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

———, "Geist der Orientalen," in Frühe Schriften, Werke 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 428–32.

———, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892).

———, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind: Translated from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894).

———, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1895).

———, On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gita, by Wilhelm Von Humboldt, ed. and trans. Herbert Herring (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995).

———, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, vol. 1 (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1910).

———, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998).

———, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston, 4 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920).

———, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Colonial Press, 1900 [1857]).

———, "Preface to Phenomenology," in Hegel: Reinterpretation, Text and Commentary—Hegel's Preface to His System in a New Translation with Commentary on Facing Pages, and "Who Thinks Abstractly?," ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965).

———, Science of Logic, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, vol. 1 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929).

———, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Herling, Bradley L. The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Herring, Herbert, "Introduction," in G.W.F. Hegel, On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gita, by Wilhelm Von Humboldt (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995), ix–xxix.

Hoffmeister, J. (ed.), Briefe Von Und an Hegel: 3 ['Letters to and from Hegel'] (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970).

Hulin, Michel, Hegel et l'Orient (Paris: J. Vrin, 1979).

Kaufmann, Walter, "The Hegel Myth and Its Method," in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 82–103.

——— (ed. and trans.), Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary—Hegel's Preface to His System in a New Translation with Commentary on Facing Pages, and "Who Thinks Abstractly?" (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, comp. Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

Leifer, Walter, India and the Germans: 500 Years of Indo-German Contacts (Bombay: Shakuntala Press, 1971).

McCarney, Joseph, "Hegel's Racism? A Response to Bernasconi," Radical Philosophy 119, May–June (2003), available at https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/extras/exchange-on-hegel%E2%80%99s-racism (accessed 8 June 2016).

———, Hegel on History (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).

Palshikar, Sanjay, Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014).

Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950).

Radhakrishnan, S., The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992).

Rathore, Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra, Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Sri Aurobindo, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 19: Essays on the Gita (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997).

Varma, V. P., The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1960).

Viyagappa, Ignatius, G. W. F. Hegel's Concept of Indian Philosophy (Roma: Università Gregoriana, 1980).

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