Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany

Front matter

“Owen Ware’s instructive and at times even entertaining study of the reception of Yoga philosophy in nineteenth century Germany is a valuable contribution to current attempts to look beyond overly narrow constructions of the philosophical canon. And the final chapter, which addresses the early twentieth century Calcutta philosophers, is an important addition to the study of world philosophies.”

Robert Bernasconi, Penn State University, USA

“The monolithic civilizational narrative of “Western philosophy” is undergoing serious critical reflection, and Owen Ware builds on existing scholarship and offers further revision in this study. Following ‘yoga’ down its pathways in post-Enlightenment German philosophy, Ware offers an accessible account of the cross-cultural anxiety of influence that lingers in modern philosophy, and — even more importantly — an account of the South Asian intellectuals who came to know this narrative and answered in no uncertain terms.”

Contents

Preface xiii Acknowledgements xix Introduction 1 PART 1 Indian Pantheism and the Threat of Nihilism 11 1 The Perils of Pantheism: Schlegel and Karoline von Günderrode 13 2 The Song of God: Humboldt’s Philosophical Poem 35 3 “Abstract Devotion”: Yoga in Hegel and Schelling 35 PART 2 God, Morality, and Freedom 85

4 Yogain the Late Nineteenth Century: Pal, Mitra, Vivekananda, and Müller 87

5 The Bengali Philosophers: Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharyya 112 x Contents

Preface

This study seeks to explain how systems of classical Yoga philosophy were received by German thinkers during the post-Kantian era. As one may gather from the table of contents, I have calibrated my historical scope to the nineteenth century, using Friedrich Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry (1800) and Max Müller’s The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899) as bookends. But I have not restricted myself entirely to this period, and in the final chapter I begin to explore how Bengali academics worked to defend classical Yoga in the twentieth century. During the early stages of research I conceived the idea of a wide-ranging project that would track the reception of Yoga philosophies across Europe, and vestiges of that grander vision survive in the present study. Over time, however, I came to see that foregrounding the German reception was more effective, because Yoga philosophies ended up becoming more intertwined with the legacy of post-Kantian thought than with any other intellectual movement across Britain or Continental Europe. At the centre of this reception was a fear that both post-Kantian thought and Indian systems of Yoga are unavoidably nihilistic: that they destroy our understanding of the world, of morality, and of ourselves.

As I tried to understand the root of this fear, it became clear to me why classical Yoga philosophies stirred so much discussion and debate in Germany. By the final decade of the eighteenth century, writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1804) and Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), along with the group of men and women we know today as the “early Romantics” (Frühromantiker), had begun to embrace the heterodox ideas of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who taught the identity of God and nature known as “pantheism.” Many of these writers, from an initial burst of enthusiasm, detected an affinity between their own pro-pantheistic thinking and the doctrines of Yoga which had recently become available to Western readers in translations of Sanskrit texts. As the fortunes of pantheism turned in Germany from celebration to fear, xiv Preface so too did the fortunes of Yoga, and all the same worries that had been directed at the doctrine of Spinoza — above all its perceived nihilism — soon shifted onto these ancient Indian systems. This is what made the German context unique, I realized, since no version of the pantheism controversy arose in other European countries at the time. My task then became to tell the story of this reception and its aftermath.

Once I began writing, my intention was not to produce a work of comparative philosophy, as I felt that my topic demanded more historical awareness and sensitivity to context. At the same time, I was not comfortable describing my project as a work of intellectual history either, since I often found myself delving into the texts in ways more typical of a philosopher, focusing on ideas, claims, and arguments. From the start it was important for me to frame the context of reception so that readers could see the often unstated ways in which systems of classical Yoga were misunderstood by German writers. But it was equally important for me to present the original Sanskrit texts in ways that would allow them to have their own voice outside of their European reception. This is why I chose to organize my study into two parts, starting with German authors in Part 1 and turning increasingly to Indian authors in Part 2, as my aim is to work toward a perspective at once critical and cross-cultural. In the final chapter I propose that these Indian authors can serve as models of emulation for us today as we attempt to make philosophy a global discipline.

One of my reasons for pursuing what the Germans call *reception history" (Rezeptionsgeschichte) is that I was guided by the conviction that the first step toward a genuine cross-cultural dialogue between the systems of post-Kantian thought and classical Yoga is a reckoning of historical accounts. I held this conviction for a long time, at least since my first study of Edward W. Said's book Orientalism in the year 2000. But it was not until twenty years later, when I taught Said's work in a graduate seminar devoted to the reception of Indian systems in Europe, that this conviction acquired new weight for me. I recall being struck by Said's comment about *the most important task" facing post-colonialist scholarship: that it must learn *how one can study other cultures and peoples" from a *nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective" — a task, Said added, left “embarrassingly incomplete" in his book.! Rereading those words in 2020 led me to wonder what progress scholarship had made on this front, and the students in my seminar — coming from all different disciplines in the humanities — assured me that the task is as pressing now as ever before.

Teaching this seminar also afforded me the opportunity to experience some of the ways in which the ripple effects of this Indo-German encounter have become part of our present-day academic reality. This came to my attention even before classes started, as graduate students were petitioning for ways to make the MA and PhD programmes more

Preface xv inclusive of non-Western fields of study. I had titled my seminar “Yoga Philosophies in the West,” not thinking what havoc this would cause administrators who have the task of assigning pre-existing course codes to each class. My seminar ended up being listed as a credit in “Medieval Philosophy,” which was strange by any standard, but highlighted the fact that even one of the largest philosophy departments in the world was still bound to a narrow, Western-focused conception of what it was teaching. Even when the students’ concerns were addressed and concrete action was taken to diversify the curriculum, I couldn’t help but feel that the task Said had identified was only just beginning. The hard work now lay in engaging the texts and contexts of this encounter, one that introduced manifold challenges for everyone, myself included.

One challenge is that many of the German figures we studied enjoy a certain dignity in the history of philosophy. Encountering their hostile or dismissive attitudes to the Yoga systems of India then lent itself to different reactions, either rejecting their work wholesale, or apologizing (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) on their behalf. By far the most controversial figure is G.W.F. Hegel. I came to see that the degree to which a student was inclined toward apologetics could often be gauged by their prior commitment to his system; those without any background in Hegel, on the other hand, were quite happy to dismiss his philosophy on the grounds of its link to Eurocentrism. Yet what struck me over time was that a similar polarization has come to divide much of the discipline of philosophy today, where many stand either on the side of rejecting a major historical figure or on the side of defending them, even if that defence takes the form of refusing to engage with the problematic issues at hand, perhaps by spotlighting their work on metaphysics while looking past their theories of race.

A more specific challenge 1 faced had to do with issues of translation — not only of texts, but also of ideas from their original homes in nineteenth-century Germany and pre-modern India to North America in the twenty-first century. I kept telling my students that the more time they spent studying these traditions, the deeper the understanding and appreciation they would gain of their ideas. Almost as an afterthought, I said that the work of acquiring perfect fluency in a foreign language is like one's understanding of a foreign system, a regulative ideal in the Kantian sense: a goal to which one can only ever approximate. I have since found this to be a useful way of framing any problem of translation, whether of texts or ideas: the emphasis should be on striving toward the goal rather than attaining the goal itself. These were thoughts I carried with me as I worked to unpack the reception of Yoga philosophies in Germany, all the while trying to make those philosophies intelligible. It is a never-ending process of interpretation, but I would like to think that progress in our understanding is still possible.

xvi Preface

One translation problem anyone working on this topic must sooner or later confront is the meaning of the word “yoga” itself, along with the equally elusive concept of “Yoga philosophy.” The difficulty is not etymological — “yoga” derives from yuj in Sanskrit, meaning yoke, union, or junction — but has rather to do with the signifiers at play: a yoking of what, by whom, and to what end? To complicate matters, different schools of classical Indian thought provide different answers, depending on their metaphysical and theological commitments, so that the meaning of “yoga” shifts according to the framework in which it is employed. And that is just the beginning of the difficulty, since many schools of classical Indian thought uphold their own doctrine of Yoga (where the capitalization refers to a philosophical system). The meaning can then encompass both the goal of a spiritual practice — such as union with the supreme Godhead, or liberation from one's mistaken self-identity - and the means of attaining this goal — such as forsaking the fruits of one's actions, or cultivating awareness of the distinction between soul and nature. A Yoga philosophy is what spells out those methods and their aim within an overall theory.

Once it became clear to me that the questions driving my project had received little attention from previous scholars, I felt that much more grateful for the few studies that have made headway in exploring the European reception of Indian Yoga systems. Bradley L. Herling's The German Gita and David Gordon White's The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali became regular companions on my writing desk, and much of the direction of the present book is indebted to these two studies. What I came to see, however, was that even their work left an important lacuna when it came to the topic of how systems of Yoga were first encountered by German writers in the nineteenth century, at a time when knowledge of orthodox Indian “schools” (darsanas) was not yet a centrepiece of European scholarship. While Bradley’s book charts the reception of the Gita, and White's that of the Yoga Sütras, many key figures of the post-Kantian tradition read these works without any awareness of a doctrinal or practical difference between, say, Bhakti, Vedänta, and the kind of classical Yoga espoused by Patañjali. Telling this neglected story, then, is one of the contributions my study offers.?

Those conversant with classical Indian thought will know that when one speaks of “Yoga” as a single system, one is usually referring to the work of Patañjali and the ideas contained in his Yoga Sútras, composed sometime between 200 and 400 cE. Recorded instances of Yoga doctrine are much older, of course, found in texts like the Katha Upanisad (ca. 500 BCE) and the Bhagavad Gită (ca. 200 BCE); and efforts to define and defend a theory of Yoga continue to the present day, making this network of Indian systems both very ancient and very alive. My choice to speak of Yoga philosophies in the plural stems from the fact that there is no

Preface xvii single tradition of Yoga; rather, there is a family of traditions, with each family itself admitting of internal variation and even discord. From the beginning, it was important for me to keep these traditions distinct, as I began to see that part of the complexity in the reception of Yoga philosophies is due to the fact that early nineteenth-century German readers often lacked knowledge of their original frameworks. These readers were not aware of the underlying metaphysical and theological commitments of these systems, without which the import of any given “yoga” or “Yoga” becomes unclear.*

I have wanted to share some of my teaching experiences in this Preface because it was in that setting that much of the material for this book took shape. Prior to the graduate seminar I taught, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to design an introductory course on South Asian philosophy for undergraduate students at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, and teaching that course on a regular basis was another setting in which I worked through some of the fundamental questions addressed in this study. For me, these were rewarding experiences, and my initial motivation for venturing into this terrain was that I was drawn to teach material that I had been studying for over two decades. At the time I did not foresee a project that would bring together my work on post-Kantian thought with my much earlier interest in the systems of Indian Yoga. As with any introductory course, mine merely touches the surface of an incredibly vast history that would require many years to unfold. But even a peek into this other world is often enough to stir my students” curiosity, and many of them then want to learn more. In the end, that is all I hope to achieve in my classes.

As for what I hope to achieve in this book, my aim is to show why it is urgent to undertake reception histories of this sort, both as a way of learning to work critically with the legacies we have inherited from our philosophical predecessors, and as a way of making room for new conversations across both historical, cultural, and geographical boarders. When I teach this material to my students, I like to remind them - especially when we examine the more disturbing moments of the Indo-German encounter — that learning this history is of the utmost importance, lest we risk repeating history through ignorance. To be sure, this is a message I often have to remind myself of, since it is uncomfortable to study thinkers who try to exclude the philosophical traditions of ancient India. Yet I also want to show in the coming chapters that there is room for optimism too, and that we can find attempts to engage in global dialogue even in the depths of the nineteenth century.* We have much to learn from these past attempts, I believe, as we reflect on the history of philosophy, and as we ask ourselves where we want the discipline of philosophy to go in the future.

xvii Preface

Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1978), 25.

My focus on Yoga doctrines and yoga practices explains why Schopenhauer plays no role in this study: for despite his well-known interactions with classical Indian thought, Schopenhauer did not contribute to the debates surrounding Yoga at the time. Those interested in the Schopenhauer-Indian connection may wish to consult Stephen Cross, Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy: A Dialogue between India and Germany (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2013); and Urs App, Schopenhauer’s Compass: An Introduction to Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and Its Origins (Wil: University Media, 2014).

For a clear overview of this history, with a focus on Patañjali, see Philipp A. Maas, “A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy," in Periodization and Historiograpby of Indian Philosophy, ed. Eli Franco, 54-90 (Vienna: Sammlung De Nobili, 2013).

I share Francis X. Clooney's conviction on this point: *We have much to learn from the scholarship of early nineteenth-century Germans and, truth be told, at times we may not measure up to their standards of making maximum use of all available knowledge" (52). See his “Much Ado about Nothing? Some Reflections on Hegel's Encounter with Bhagavad Gitä 6.25,” The Owl of Minerva 52, no. 1-2 (2021): 51-71.

Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making, and I have accrued many debts. First, I thank the students at the University of Toronto who have taken my classes on Indian philosophy over the years. I suspect they don’t know what their eagerness for these courses meant to me, and their excitement to learn about non-Western systems of thought gave me renewed encouragement. I am grateful to Diana Raffman for greeting my idea of a new course on South Asian Philosophy with enthusiasm, and to Amy Mullin who supported my idea for a seminar on the European reception of Yoga philosophies. I am also fortunate to work in a department where global philosophy now flourishes. Among my colleagues in Toronto, I am grateful to Elisa Freschi for helping me think critically about the idea of six orthodox *schools" of Indian thought, as well as to Jonardon Ganeri, whose studies on Bhattacharyya refined my understanding of his *immersive" methodology. Thanks also to Shyam Ranganathan at York University for many illuminating conversations on Patañjali.

I had the opportunity to present material from Chapter 3 at the 2022 YDYS conference (“Yoga darsana, yoga sädhana: Methods, migrations, mediations"). Thanks to Matylda Ciolkosz for organizing my panel, and to the two institutions of the YDYS, the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the Jagiellonian Institute for the Study of Religions. I am immensely grateful to the works of scholars who have written on Patanjali's Yoga or the Indo-German encounter in general. In addition to the work of Bradley L. Herling and David Gordon White, I am indebted to the studies of Robert Bernasconi, Edwin F. Bryant, Mikel Burley, James Mallinson, Suzanne L. Marchand, Stephen Phillips, Mark Singleton, and Jon Stewart, among many others. For supporting my project, I thank Emma Parry, my literary agent, Sarah Ratzlaff, my research assistant, and Ian Drummond, my copy editor, who were all outstanding midwives for my manuscript at various stages of its birth (and rebirth). The two anonymous reviewers for Routledge offered me perceptive input; and both Andrew Weckenmann, xx Acknowledgements my commissioning editor, and Rosaleah Stammler, my editorial assistant, did a superb job of guiding my book to the finish line.

Research on this book was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Thanks to SSHRC funding, readers have free access to the electronic copy of this book through Routledge's Gold Open Access programme.

Many friends served as pillars of support during the period in which I worked on this project, among them Brittany Kraus, Gregmar Newman, Erica Podlowski, Angelica Rao, Massimo Terreri, and Shawna Turner. Ionly hope I can repay my debt of gratitude to them. While my journey with Yoga began in 1997, it was not until many years later that I encountered its classical doctrines in the Yoga Sütras. This was thanks to J-P Tamblyn, who helped me understand the centrality of ahimsä (non-violence) for Patañjali's Yoga, and who helped me to appreciate the enduring value of the Yoga Sütras. For sparking my interest in Yoga early on, I thank my mother; and words cannot describe my appreciation for the way she taught me to value different cultures and religions. I feel the same depth of gratitude to my wife, Leah, whose real wisdom never ceases to humble me; and to her I owe an understanding of what matters in life beyond the world of philosophy. This book is dedicated to her.

Owen Ware

Introduction

The past two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of interest in Yoga movements, doctrines, and philosophies, both in their classical and post-classical developments. Since the early 2000s this growth has increased in a variety of disciplines, from scholarship devoted to South Asian cultures, to comparative religion and literature, and to the emerging field of global philosophy, which seeks to bring Western and non-Western classics into conversation.! With the wealth of information we now possess, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of “Yoga” in the singular. There were and are many yoga traditions, from rája or astänga to tantra or hatha, and even more Yoga philosophies, from Vedänta and Vaishnavi Bhakti yoga to Buddhist Yogäcära. Indeed, one need only look at the Bhagavad Gitä (part of the great Hindu epic, the Mahäbhärata) to see how many forms of yoga practice are in circulation: the yoga of action (karma yoga), the yoga of meditation (dhyana yoga), the yoga of knowledge (¡ñána yoga), and the yoga of devotion (bhakti yoga). Add to this the many forms of postural yoga popular around the world today, and the list of possible Yogas and yogas quickly grows.

The aim of the present book is not to write a history of these doctrines or practices, from their birthplace in northern India to their later migrations around the world. My point of departure concerns a more specific set of questions: how were Yoga philosophies first received in the Western world? How were they understood and misunderstood? And lastly, how were they bound up with the course of modern European - especially post-Kantian — philosophy? These questions invite us to retrace a largely neglected story of reception that begins around the turn of the nineteenth century and ends around the turn of the twentieth century, a span of one hundred years marked by many tumultuous shifts within the field of European thought. At the centre of these shifts was a recurring question over the nature of God: not the question of whether God exists, but of how God exists. As we shall see, it was when this question reached a boiling point that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003376088-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Sanskrit texts first became available to European readers, and questions about India’s ancient systems of philosophy acquired sudden urgency.

These tensions reached their peak during one of great intellectual controversies of the late eighteenth century. The controversy was sparked by the revival of interest in Spinoza and what critics derided as the “monstrous hypothesis” of his pantheism, the idea that God and nature are one, standing in a relation of identity.” When this debate grew in intensity, the first English translation of the Gita was published, and its pantheistic overtones were greeted with either celebration or fear. All the accusations that surrounded Spinoza's doctrine of pantheism - that it denies the transcendence of God, the reality of freedom, and the grounds of morality — soon shifted onto the idea of Yoga, and much of Indian thought would bear the burden of these charges for decades to come. This anxiety about Yoga as a system and way of life was best captured by Friedrich Schlegel, who once spoke of the *spirit-crushing martyrdom of the Yogis" and their highest end of *self-annihilation."?

Once we embark upon this history of reception, it is surprising to learn how many German thinkers of the period engaged with Indian thought in general or Yoga philosophies in particular. This includes Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), among others. Yet it is odd that despite the attention these figures have received for over two centuries, studies devoted to their engagement with Sanskrit texts remain relatively few. It was with a feeling of excitement, for example, that I first read Humboldt’s 1825-1826 lectures on the Gita, but I was puzzled by the fact that the intellectual history of the period leading up to these lectures and their aftermath had found its way into only a few specialized articles and monographs. Reading these original sources, I came to hear the pieces ofa conversation between modern Europe and ancient India, a conversation about the most fundamental questions of God, religion, faith, rationality, the self, freedom, and morality. The challenge posed by Yoga philosophies, I discovered, brings these questions into new and unfamiliar light.*

Unfortunately, with few exceptions these listed thinkers failed in their encounters with Indian systems of thought.’ And their failures took a variety of forms: some idealized the traditions of India, and many criticized them, but few took the time and effort to learn from them. Now if it is true, as I believe, that there is no better way to guard against repeating the failures of history than by studying them, the prospect of understanding this Indo-German encounter promises to open up new perspectives on the field of global philosophy that is growing in momentum. We shall take steps in this direction at the end of the book, where I will turn to examine how three Indian philosophers during the early twentieth century worked

= to reclaim the value of Yoga doctrines after so many years of misperception. I wish to show how their work gives us resources for countering many of the objections that German thinkers levelled against Indian systems, and we shall see why their methods of interpretation are of lasting importance and value.

Chapter Overview

This book unfolds over the course of five chapters.

If it was exuberance that led the early Romantics of Jena to associate Indian systems with pantheism, this would soon become a shadow haunting the legacy of these systems well into the nineteenth century. In Chapter 1, I introduce the background of this association in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, who in 1800 issued a call to seek the “highest Romantic” in the Orient.° Among those who answered the call, we find a striking example in the work of Karoline von Günderrode, who wrote a series of philosophical fictions inspired by Indian doctrines of reality, the self, and the existence of the soul after death. As will become clear, both Schlegel and Günderrode were influenced by a form of pantheism defended by Johann Gottlieb Herder (1744-1803), who was the first German writer to make portions of the Gita available in translation. However, these early zealous responses soon gave way to a period of skepticism, and Schlegel himself went on to identify the whole of Indian philosophy with nihilism in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808).

When Schlegel's text first appeared, available source material on Indian thought was far from abundant, and European readers had to rely largely on secondary expositions to obtain information about these non- Western systems. For many decades, one of the most influential of these expositions was *On the Philosophy of the Hindus," which Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1865-1837) delivered at the Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland on June 21, 1823, and February 21, 1824. As Chapter 2 will show, Colebrooke's lectures were of significance for providing readers with an account of the different “schools” (darsanas) making up Indian philosophy, including the doctrine expounded by Patañjali in his Yoga Sütras. 1 will show the extent to which Humboldt’s 1826 account of the Gita was motivated by a desire to challenge Colebrooke's presentation of Yoga, which in turn incited a rejoinder from Hegel in 1827. While Humboldt’ view was that the Gita is a poem of the highest philosophical worth, Hegel felt obliged to overturn this claim, given his commitment to denying ancient India a place in the history of philosophy."

On one level Humboldt and Hegel were struggling over the linguistic point that yoga means “yoke,” “union,” or “junction,” deriving from the Sanskrit yuj. Following this etymology, the question of what “yoga” means elicited a number of proposals at the time, such as “devotion” or “equanimity.” Criticizing Humboldt’s choice of “absorption” (Vertiefung), Hegel coined the expression “abstract devotion” (abstrakte Andacht) in an effort to show that the spiritual exercises making up Yoga systems amount to “annihilation.”® My first task in Chapter 3 is to unpack the details surrounding Hegel’s line of argument, before considering a late (and largely overlooked) rejoinder by Schelling in his Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Mythologie (Lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology, 1842). Schelling, like Humboldt, was not committed to excluding non- Western systems from his account of the history of philosophy, and his late lectures show him attempting to defend a sympathetic reading of Indian metaphysics. Schelling would even draw connections to the pantheistic ideas expressed in the Gitd and his own philosophy as a system that seeks to reconcile our personal freedom and our dependence on God.

Questions about the translation of the term “yoga” were complicated by the fact that, even in the mid-nineteenth century, there was little consensus on how Yoga systems fit within the larger family of schools making up classical Indian thought. While Colebrooke’s lectures introduced readers to the division of six orthodox darsanas (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimämsä, and Vedänta) and two heterodox ones (Jainism and Buddhism), the referent of Yoga philosophy was not always clear. On this division, Yoga was identified with the work of Patañjali, which is thought to have been compiled between 200 and 400 cE. But this ordering was unhelpful for understanding the references to “yoga” in the Upanisads and the Gita, not to mention the “yogas” of later tantra and hatha traditions. As a religious text that contains elements of theism and pantheism, the Gita expounds different spiritual exercises, all identified as a kind of “yoga,” whose shared aim is to bring about union with Brahman, the supreme Godhead. But as scholars became more familiar with the ideas of Patafijali, they were surprised to learn that his system makes no such appeal to the divine.