<au>Bradley L. Herling</>
<at>“Either a Hermeneutical Consciousness or a Critical Consciousness”</>
<ast>Renegotiating Theories of the Germany-India Encounter</>
<@@@>
In his 1973 essay “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” Paul Ricoeur articulates the
demands of the human sciences by recalling what he referred to as “the fundamental gesture of
philosophy”:
<ext>Is this gesture an avowal of the historical conditions to which all human
understanding is subsumed under the reign of finitude? Or rather is it, in the last analysis,
an act of defiance, a critical gesture, relentlessly and indefinitely turned against “false
consciousness,” against the distortions of human communication which conceal the
permanent exercise of domination and violence?... What is at stake can be expressed in
terms of an alternative: either a hermeneutical consciousness or a critical consciousness.
(63)</ext>
Ricoeur identifies the first attitude, “hermeneutical consciousness,” with Gadamer, who
conceived tradition, context, and “prejudices” (qua “pre-judgments,” or Vorurteilen) as the basic
coordinates of human understanding. Instead of trying to escape these conditions, hermeneutical
theory offers an “avowal” of “the reign of finitude.” Understanding the Other (a text, a culture,
the past, etc.) only occurs because we interpret from within a historical moment, from the
standpoint of a particular tradition with its own construction of authority and meaning, and the
practice of interpretation unfolds in dialogical fashion, allowing a gradual accumulation of everadjustable truths. Misapprehensions, it should be said, are affirmed as part of this dialogical
process as the interpreter “reintegrate[s] misunderstanding into understanding by the very
movement of question and answer” (83).
In his essay Ricoeur associates the opposing view, the approach of “critical
consciousness,” with Habermas, though it surely evokes past modern masters of suspicions
(Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and, by extension, more recent theorists such as Gramsci,
Benjamin, and Foucault. According to Ricoeur, “critical consciousness” lodges a protest against
the “reign of finitude,” often in the cause of lifting the veil on “the permanent exercise of
domination and violence.”1 The “tradition” that dictates the expanse of our hermeneutical circle
is in fact the product of underlying forces, like economic interest, sexual drive, or the will to
power; criticism has the power to unmask these “ideologically frozen” dependencies (82), which
is a crucial step in freeing ourselves from the repression, injustice, and exploitation that they
often enforce. As a consequence, “critical consciousness” insists—in contrast with the
hermeneutical model—that distortions in communication and understanding are “always related
to the repressive action of an authority and therefore to violence” (83).
Ricoeur’s scheme illuminates dynamics that have been at work within the humanities and
social sciences for several decades. His formulations are particularly helpful, however, when we
consider recent work on the encounter between European intellectuals and the cultural artifacts
(texts and data) of non-Western, largely colonized lands. Within this broader frame, the postEnlightenment reception of South Asian culture, texts, and thought in German-speaking lands
has emerged as a challenging area of investigation. And here too Ricoeur’s observations identify
a significant theoretical rift in the scholarship, one that I plan to trace in this article.
But I also aim to chart out some new territory. Indeed, by drawing bright lines between
“hermeneutical consciousness” and “critical consciousness,” I wish neither to over-simplify nor
to call for an either/or decision in our historical investigation of India’s place in the German
imagination. In fact, Ricoeur himself questioned his categories almost as soon as he offered
them: “Is it not the alternative itself which must be challenged? Is it possible to formulate a
hermeneutics which would render justice to the critique of ideology, which would show the
necessity of the latter at the very heart of its own concerns?” (63). Building upon my work on the
early reception of the Bhagavadgītā among German intellectuals (figures like Herder, the
Schlegel brothers, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Hegel),2 I will offer suggestions regarding
potential fusions of “hermeneutical consciousness” and “critical consciousness”—and also
attempt to illuminate some new theory-driven pathways through the historical thicket of the
Germany/India encounter.
*<!>Please use an ornament rather than an asterisk<!>
To begin, let us turn to the scholarship to discern notable examples of the approaches that
Ricoeur has outlined. Where, first of all, do we find “hermeneutical consciousness”?
Here we need to look no further than the influential work of the late great Wilhelm
Halbfass. As a careful commentator on both Indian and Western thought, Halbfass devised an
intellectual framework for comparative, cross-cultural philosophy, and, to put it in a nutshell, it
was hermeneutical in orientation. Halbfass’s influential text India and Europe (1988) is in fact a
monument to “hermeneutical consciousness”: to get a handle on the meaning of comparative
philosophy in the present, one must first understand the tradition that forged it. India and Europe
is precisely that genealogical account.
In this work, Halbfass rarely hesitates to highlight moments when Europeans—and
Germans in particular—misconstrued and misrepresented South Asian worldviews, but in his
hands these misapprehensions consistently become Gadamerian “prejudices.” By carefully
identifying the intellectual context from which limited judgments and faulty representations
sprung, Halbfass constructs a historical narrative within which there was always some
interpretive progress being made, however sporadic. India and Europe consistently reflects this
hermeneutical sensibility, in discussions of Herder (72–73), Friedrich Schlegel (79–80), Hegel
(96–99), Schelling (102–03), Schopenhauer (116–17), and many others. As Halbfass puts it, in a
decidedly Gadamerian formulation:
<ext>There is certainly no coherent history of [the] European search for India. Yet, there
is an identifiable historical path leading to the situation of modern Indological research
and of intercultural communication. It is a process which accompanies and reflects the
development of European thought in general—a process in which Europe has defined and
questioned itself, and in which misunderstandings and prejudices may be as significant as
the accumulation of factual truth and correct information. (434–35)</ext>
In a limited sense, this “process” of understanding led to a more faithful picture of Indian culture
and thought, but Halbfass articulates another theoretical proposition that is central to the
hermeneutical approach: gaining better knowledge about the Indian Other in Germany depended
on the Indian Other becoming a genuine challenge to the self-understanding of German
intellectuals; they were prompted to become Other to themselves. In no other way could
idiosyncratic distortions and obviated prejudices have become dislodged. And according to
Halbfass, they often did in early nineteenth century Germany, allowing Indian thought to come
into focus slowly but surely.
It must be noted that Halbfass’s account contains its own share of “critical
consciousness.” The last part of India and Europe, for example, registers a deep concern about
the “Europeanization of the earth,” a cultural/philosophical force that accompanies the
ascendancy of European power (166–70, 439–42). Within this frame, Halbfass’s reading has
both a nostalgic aura and a polemical edge; he charts the gradual expulsion of Indian thought
from the canon of philosophy during the course of the nineteenth century and then discerns the
impact of that legacy among his contemporary philosophical colleagues. By highlighting the
relative openness and evident vigor with which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
German intellectuals investigated Indian worldviews, a provocative argument emerges: if these
figures (even someone like Hegel!) could take the intellectual content of Indian culture seriously,
despite the limited information available to them, then why can’t today’s philosophers? And
shouldn’t we be concerned about this parochialism, when it seems to mirror the globalizing
hegemony of “the West”?
Despite this critical edge, Halbfass’s Gadamerian apologetics might strike some readers
as a bit quaint—and, indeed, perhaps dangerously naïve. After Said, we are urged to see the
entirety of German intellectual discourse on India as part of a “Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over” other cultures (Said 3), a style that was linked to the
actual deployment of European colonialism. To this extent, Said’s Orientalism is a quintessential
expression of “critical consciousness,” and it laid out the contours of a new and distinctive
approach to the Germany/India case.
One of the earliest and still most notable attempts to apply Said’s argument to the
European study of South Asia appears in Ronald Inden’s work Imagining India. Drawing upon
Freud, Gramsci, and Foucault (as well as Said), Inden argues that a master discourse
circumscribed the interpretation of Indian culture and society in the modern West, transforming
Orientalist knowledge into cover for European power. This scheme drew on a broad assumption
in the post-Enlightenment episteme, namely that human beings, their cultural forms, and their
social institutions could be reduced to stable, essential elements that undergird shifting “surface
phenomena”—including “the actions of transient, historical agents” (Inden 263). Capturing and
then dogmatically reasserting these tropes enabled the Western interpreter to get a fix on the
imagined essence of the Indian Other, at the expense of reality; a world constituted by the
dynamic overlapping of cultural and social institutions, and by the complex activities of actual
living, breathing, thinking agents.
According to Inden, two essentialized conceptions came to dominate the European study
of India during the nineteenth century: caste and the imagination. German scholars and
intellectuals played a major role in constructing and reinforcing these ideas, despite taking up
divergent perspectives on them. Friedrich Schlegel’s Romanticist “positive Orientalism,” for
example, led him to a relatively favorable view of caste; it was perhaps but “a primitive example
of civil society” (69). Yet caste was a necessary touchstone in his discussion of India,
contributing to Hegel’s powerful final word on the matter, as summarized by Inden:
<ext>[Caste] has become, in Hegel’s pages, the necessary and distinctive nucleus of
India, logically integral to the whole of Indian civilization. It has ... become the
substantialized agent of Indian history, from the time of its appearance down to the
present. To be sure, it gave India a brief glint of sunshine, but then petrified, causing
India itself to spend the rest of time as the passive recipient of acts by other, more
assertive essences from the West. (71) </ext>
Schlegel also wrangled with Hegel over the nature and value of the imagination. For
Schlegel, the Romantic, the imagination had a powerful synthesizing function, and thus its
expressions, at least in theory, deserved to be honored. But Hegel subordinated imagination to
reason because it intermingles with the sensual—and then detaches itself from reality in
impassioned flights of fantasy (94). Allowing the imagination free play could lead to
submergence in a dreamy, undifferentiated cloud (“illusionary pantheism”), or it could result in
seeing more in the natural world than one should—maybe even gods (“nature religion”). In
Hegel’s reading, both of these eventualities unfolded within the Indian worldview, and its center
could not hold. The crucial point, according to Inden, is that both the Romantic and the Hegelian
agreed that “the Indian mind” was essentially constituted by the irrational imagination. For the
former, this could be seen as positive; perhaps India was a source of a primordial aesthetic
revelation that would bring renewal to tired old Europe. For Hegel, this essence was decisively
negative. Despite these differences, however, Inden suggests that both thinkers reinforced the
same vision, the same essential interpretive touchstones, reinforcing a broader European
intellectual discourse on India.
Inden’s form of “critical consciousness” is most provocative when he attempts to
dramatize the impact of this discourse. For example, to insist that India is a) essentially a caste
society, whose parts are radically and inherently disparate and scattered, and b) that it is a also
land of the dreamy imagination, where rationality and pragmatism have not matured, is
equivalent to saying, in no uncertain terms: India needs a firm, guiding hand from outside to
make sense of things—a European hand. As Inden writes, “[Indology] actually fashioned the
ontological space that a British Indian empire occupied. Its leaders would ... inject the rational
intellect and world-ordering will that the Indians themselves could not provide” (128). At the
same time, this discourse was not just about foisting reductive essences on the Indian Other;
rather, “India was (and to some extent still is) the object of thoughts and acts with which this
[Western] ‘we’ has constituted itself” (3). In other words, positioning India as a realm of caste
allowed European observers to define and bolster their own vision of individualism and
community. And reducing the “Indian mind” to irrationality and imagination was a mode of
ejecting these foibles from the rational, pragmatic Western Self, while also keeping them on
hand as a projected part that has been lost, a potential object (particularly for the Romantic) of a
nostalgic quest. On both fronts, the central dictate of Inden’s “critical consciousness” comes
through loud and clear: Western scholarly discourse on India played an important role in the
construction of cultural identities and political structures that effaced the lived reality of the
colonial subject, while simultaneously narrowing the capacity for self-understanding in the socalled West.
How are we to measure these different approaches, hermeneutics and criticism, in
relation to each other? How should we decide whether one theory is right, and the other is
wrong? Certainly the body of scholarship on this material has advanced well beyond these two
venerable texts, India and Europe and Imagining India, so perhaps the answer lies in the
concreteness of the analysis—in the devilish details of careful intellectual history.3 But as I
illustrate in the next section, historical specificity does not necessarily resolve the tension
between these two approaches. In fact, it may only exacerbate the problem.
*<!>Please use an ornament rather than an asterisk<!>
One of the most impressive intellectual achievements of the early part of the nineteenth century
was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s two-part analysis of the Bhagavadgītā from 1825 and 1826.4 Here
Humboldt puts on a remarkable display of erudition: he immersed himself in the language of the
text, learned as much as he could about its philosophical backdrop (from Colebrooke’s newly
published treatises on the schools of Indian philosophy), and allowed his subjectivity to be
engaged in the interpretive process, going so far as to engage his empathetic imagination, trying
ideas from the Gītā on for size.5 All of this was premised, one might argue, on a high degree of
open-mindedness that allowed Humboldt to take the text seriously as an object of both
philosophy and philology.
But a proponent of “hermeneutical consciousness” might remind us that Humboldt’s
investigations were themselves conditioned by a prejudicial structure, one that had been
authorized by his intellectual tradition and carried forth by the learned community to which he
belonged. So Humboldt’s analysis of the Gītā was the culmination of a gradual process begun by
Johann Gottfried Herder some 35 years earlier. When Herder read Charles Wilkins’ English
translation of the Gītā in the late 1780s, he had a place ready for it, an interpretive position that
imagined it as a product of the “cradle of humanity,” an archaic expression of the “mind” of
India that combined poetry, philosophy, and religion in a direct synthetic whole. It was the kind
of text that suggested the possibility of cultural rebirth in modern Germany, one that asserted the
validity of holistic philosophical doctrine, a vitalist pantheism that could unify the forces that
modernity had split asunder.
This interpretive structure, which circumscribed the level of hermeneutical engagement
Herder could have with the text, along with his exclusive reliance on Wilkins’s English
translation, led to a distorted reading. Yet these prejudices also promoted a relatively
sophisticated textual encounter. For example, in light of his own philosophical experimentations
in the wake of the Pantheismusstreit,6 which are most vividly expressed in the pages of Gott
Einige Gespräche (1787), Herder’s “translations” of excerpts from the Wilkins rendering tend to
isolate the seeming contradiction between a pantheist or monistic metaphysics and the
significance of action. This was one of the main objections to pantheism in Herder’s
philosophical context, and it guided his reading of the Gītā. So, while he was attracted to the
possibility of synthesizing knowledge and action, Herder implicitly raised questions about why
any given action has moral significance, if one had attained realization of the oneness of all
things. This point, the proponent of “hermeneutical consciousness” would likely assert, is an
entirely viable line of inquiry in dealing with the text.
For the present purposes, however, the more important result of Herder’s analysis of the
Gītā—and of the Indian worldview in general—was that it conditioned the next phase of the
discussion. Friedrich Schlegel inherited many of the hermeneutical presuppositions that Herder
had clarified and championed. When Schlegel turned to actual Indian texts in the early years of
the nineteenth century, he was hoping to see a “new mythology” arise in their pages, one that
would provide the rationale for a powerful Romantic synthesis.7 Once again, pantheism was a
central concern guiding Schlegel’s line of hermeneutical questioning. However, the historical
framework laid out in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808) also led him to a
differentiate philosophical layers within the text, which was a significant advance—even if his
intent was ultimately to devalue the Gītā.
The uneasy interpretive legacy that Schlegel left when it comes to the interpretation of
South Asian language, culture, and philosophy is now well documented. His Frühromantik
rhapsodies placed India solidly within the realm of “reverse teleology” that for Gadamer
characterized Romanticism, a backwards teleology that located its prized objects (in this case the
“wisdom” of India) in some irreal, primordial past (Gadamer 201). The present of these cultural
objects, in contrast, could only be read as a dim, degenerated outgrowth of the “Golden Age.”
This scheme persisted in Über die Sprache, but the narrative of degeneration became all the
more pronounced. The Gītā, for example, was in the end a bearer of “pure pantheism” (F.
Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe 8: 249), but pantheism was no longer a good thing; instead, it was
where the degeneration of Indian wisdom had terminated. Surprisingly, it was also where
contemporary Europe found itself, in the thrall of idealism.8 Thus Schlegel’s contentious
relationship with his own cultural and intellectual context ultimately distorted his hermeneutical
frame for interpreting South Asian texts, and after 1808, he largely left them behind.
But once again, it could be argued that Schlegel’s contributions allowed for a further
expansion of the interpretive capacity of his intellectual community. We must take note of the
lengthy excerpts from the Gītā (and other texts) that are appended to Über die Sprache, for
example. These are powerfully wrought, German verse translations of the original texts, the
product of several years of intensive study in Paris. As these excerpts show, the prejudicial
assumption that Indian texts should be studied like those of Greece and Rome had proved
remarkably productive—as had Romantic “Indomania,” based on a misguided “reverse
teleology.” Classicist philological sensibilities and Romantic enthusiasm, which persisted
beyond Schlegel’s own disillusionment, were in fact crucial elements in the construction of a
viable hermeneutical location for the new discipline of Indology.
This frame of reference began to emerge most decisively in the work of Franz Bopp and
August Wilhelm Schlegel. In the present context, Schlegel’s full Latin translation of the
Bhagavadgītā from 1823 draws our attention. Here the translator refrains from non-philological
commentary; he resists the temptation to impose some cultural or philosophical agenda on his
rendering. This move reveals that a new interpretive structure is at work in the examination of
Indian sources: that of philological science.9 The hermeneutical issues, the interpretive questions
that prompted response and further inquiry within this discursive community, were concentrated
within the language itself; they resided within the translator’s choices, and these become the
more technical sites of inquiry that anchored the practice of interpretation in the era of Indology.
This is not to say that A.W. Schlegel’s Gītā was merely a transparent, technical product
of German philology. His choice of Latin was designed to say something, for example, namely
that the translation, a shining example of German intellectual preeminence, was designed for the
consumption of learned Europe as a whole. This target language also positions the text as
archaic—and worthy (through the translator’s artifice) of a place next to the authoritative works
of the Classical world. I should also note that the individual choices within the translation were
at times enigmatic, a fact that was not lost on the European audience that Schlegel had hoped to
dazzle.10
And so, at this moment, after following the German career of the text that he devoted so
much attention to in the mid-1820s, Humboldt becomes the inheritor of an accretion of
hermeneutical prejudices that allow him to achieve some remarkable exegetical work. Did he
retain some of the early Romantic assumptions carried forth by figures like Herder and F.
Schlegel? Yes: he suggested that the Gītā did in fact present a kind of synthetic, imaginative
whole, a vision that combined the philosophical and the aesthetic. But it is also clear that
philological prejudices, which led to many fruitful avenues of reception, tempered the excesses
of bygone enthusiasms and led ultimately to a measured account that is noteworthy even to this
day.
The analysis I have just presented provides a breezy but not implausible case for the
approach of “hermeneutical consciousness.” I have based it on a relatively specific historical
testing ground: the early reception of the Gītā in Germany. While it is tempting to evaluate it on
its own terms, let us turn instead to a rejoinder from “critical consciousness” and, following
Ricoeur’s schema, highlight the distinctiveness of these two theoretical approaches.
There are, in fact, so many openings for an interpretation in light of “critical
consciousness” that it is difficult to know where to start. From the Saidian perspective, for
example, all of these efforts to understand the Gītā are relentlessly self-obsessed: these readings
only refer to each other and themselves; they compose a body of enunciations that are designed
to uphold the European sense of superiority. In each phase, we find a brand of intellectual
imperialism: in the Romantic “reverse teleology” (the “positive Orientalism,” to use Inden’s
phrase), which proposes that India’s greatness is only in its bygone past, and now the artifacts of
that past can only be recovered by the ingenuity of the German/European; in the emphasis on
Indian pantheism, which is ultimately obtuse and amoral, requiring the tutelage of a more
discriminating European intelligence; in philological science itself, which represents the
ascendancy of the Orientalist’s ability to organize, control, and categorize another culture’s texts.
Instead of working through all the details of this critique, however, allow me to choose an
example that supports a more direct case for “critical consciousness.”
In an 1849 publication by the Wesleyan Mission Press in Bangalore, we find Wilkins’s
original English translation of the Bhagavadgītā, A.W. Schlegel’s Latin rendering, and a number
of essays—including an English translation of Humboldt’s 1825–26 Berlin lectures on the text.
In his introduction, the Reverend G.H. Weigle glosses the Humboldt treatise as follows:
<ext>Should these pages find any readers among young Hindoos, it is hoped that they
will acknowledge the perfect fairness and deep research, with which the learned author
conducts his disquisition; and that they will learn from him an art in which their own
ancestors were certainly not backward, that of thinking. And if they think aright, and
examine the holy books of the Christians, with a fairness similar to that with which one
of their own is here investigated, they cannot remain in doubt concerning the value of
either. (123)</ext>
Weigle executes some classic colonialist strategies in this passage, strategies that “critical
consciousness” is designed to detect and unmask. He promotes the value of India’s past, for
example, but only in order to chide contemporary “Hindoo” youth with a subtle and patronizing
rebuke. The “young Hindoos” themselves are not able to return to their own venerable,
thoughtful past: that will take the enlightened mediation of great European scholars like
Humboldt. At the same time, Weigle uses Humboldt’s methodological openness as a tool for
proselytizing, for if Humboldt in his far-flung land could take the Gītā seriously and study it with
care, then why can the natives not do the same with the Christian Bible? Thus even
hermeneutical openness is an expression of power; it can easily be brandished before the colonial
subject as a marker of European cultural superiority. This is perhaps the very nature of a
hegemonic, imperialist discourse: it manages to convert both empathetic engagement and
vigorous protest into fuel for its own persistence. In instances like this, it must be admitted that
the ghosts of Foucault and Said put a real scare into the Gadamerian model of hermeneutical
consciousness.
*<!>Please use an ornament rather than an asterisk<!>
What are we ultimately to conclude regarding the two theoretical approaches outlined in our
investigation? A very big question is actually at issue here: how should history, and specifically
this history, be done, and assuming that it can be done faithfully, what conclusions should we
draw from it? In this particular instance, we are asking: what is it, exactly, that Humboldt did
when he wrote his remarkable treatise on the Gītā? Perhaps this is merely a question of
emphasis: maybe Humboldt’s text is both a success of the hermeneutical process, a momentary
“fusion of horizons” (to use Gadamer’s phrase) that contributed to later interpretive efforts, and a
product and object of Orientalist, colonialist discourse, destined to bolster an imbalance of power
between colonizer and colonized. Yet we cannot so quickly discount the genuine tensions
between these two perspectives, tensions that seem to render them mutually exclusive.
While “hermeneutical consciousness” takes the individual encounter with a text (or with
another person, a conversation partner) as its model for the act of understanding that which is
foreign, and thus affords Humboldt a high degree of interpretive freedom, it also tells us that his
tradition guided his questioning. Humboldt’s hermeneutical engagement with the Gītā was only
meaningful to the extent that it was authorized by his context, and if his context was
surreptitiously twisted by deeper forces, this flash of understanding was in the ultimate service of
something larger and perhaps more nefarious. The ease with which Reverend Weigle
appropriated the text is the tip-off on this account. Even Humboldt’s openness, which is the
premise of successful acts of interpretation in Gadamer’s scheme, emerges as part of a larger
discourse of European power.
Yet the advocate of hermeneutics has a response: the individual German interpreters like
Humboldt had no way out of a monolithic discourse that was anonymously designed to control
and patrol India with its intellectual practices. To this point, we recall one of Said’s most famous
(or infamous) declarations from the pages of Orientalism:
<ext>It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient,
was consequently a racist, and imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the
immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human
societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything
but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures. So
Orientalism aided and was aided by general cultural pressures that tended to make more
rigid the sense of difference between the European and Asiatic part of the world.
(204)</ext>
As this passage illustrates, the approach of “critical consciousness” has the tendency to leave
aside differences between disparate national, local, and individual efforts at cross-cultural
understanding. It also denies flatly that actual advances and progress occurred, despite
considerable evidence to the contrary. Not everything can be reduced to the political and/or the
economic; it seems sensible to remain open to the possibility that some Orientalist efforts
escaped such interests and contributed to cross-cultural understanding. We might add that the
approach of “critical consciousness” tends to see the Indian Other as silent and passive in the
face of an overwhelming, all-powerful European discourse. “Hermeneutical consciousness,” in
contrast, always reminds us that otherness, even if it is only embodied in a foreign text, always
speaks, always resists, and always insists that the interpreter adjust his understanding—if he is
brave enough to listen. Even denial and stubbornness in the face of cultural otherness is
symptomatic of its disruptive potential.
Despite these serious disjunctions between the two approaches, I am drawn to the
prospect of a synthesis, and Richard King has proposed a succinct way to think about this
possibility:
<ext>it is necessary to combine Gadamer’s insights into the “historical situatedness” of
the interpreter with an awareness of the ideological elements at play in both text and
interpreter. Gadamer’s redemption of prejudice suggests that the interpreter, rather than
suppressing his or her biases and agenda in the pursuit of scholarly neutrality, should, on
the contrary, bring such prejudices to the fore. Such an approach involves an attitude of
critical reflexivity towards one’s work. (King 80) </ext>
In other words, hermeneutics and “critical consciousness” come together when we identify the
genealogical critique of our categories, including the anti-Orientalist critique, with a
foregrounding of the prejudices that have come down to us from within our tradition.11 This
echoes Ricoeur’s suggestion that we “formulate a hermeneutics which would render justice to
the critique of ideology, which would show the necessity of the latter at the very heart of its own
concerns” (63). When we transform these suggestions for the present into a historical model, we
derive an instructive corollary: we must be able to account for both interpretive progress and
ideological retrenchment, sometimes in the very same object of historical inquiry, an object like
Humboldt’s Gītā text.
This is no mean task. I would argue that it requires a highly nuanced sociology of
knowledge, one that reaches across the boundaries of intellectual history, comparative literature,
and comparative philosophy and adds richness and texture to our theoretical vocabulary. For
example, following the work of Bruce Lincoln, Dorothy Figueira, and George Williamson (and
of course the venerable A. Leslie Willson),12 I have proposed that we begin by revivifying the
old dialectic of “myth” vs. “logos” to distinguish and describe the prejudicial structures that we
find in the work of intellectuals and their communities. “Myth,” according to Lincoln, is
“ideology in narrative form” (147), and when framing their work, scholars have been utterly
prone to constructing such mythic imaginaries when encountering the foreign and unknown (the
Voltairean vision of India as the “cradle of humanity” is one such myth). Much of what is
described by “critical consciousness” as the European discourse of intellectual imperialism,
including the vast body of distorted representations and stereotypes, falls under this
conceptualization of myth.
But there also must be some room made for the possibility of refinements in
understanding and logos is the name for the application of technique and method to the project of
cross-cultural understanding (here the application of philological, exegetical tools to a text like
the Gītā is an example). Can logos be overwhelmed by myth, distorted out of recognition by
unsettling agendas and narratives? Certainly. Do esoteric and inaccessible logoi need myths to
justify and popularize themselves to a learned (or not so learned) public? Yes. Can logos be
taken up by mythic discourse and brandished before the real or imagined colonial subject? Of
course. But is there something ultimately independent about scholarly technique and method that
has at times yielded moments of cross-cultural understanding, even if there were great challenges
to it? Without a doubt.
I would also argue that we increase our attention to the way intellectual communities
mediate myth and logos. Invoking Ludwik Fleck’s pioneering text Genesis and Development of a
Scientific Fact (first published in 1935), I have proposed that we trace the “proto-ideas,”
“conceptions,” “structures,” and “styles” of scholarly communities and their discourse. In the
early construction of knowledge about the Indian Other by the German intellectual tradition, for
example, we find that hazy “pre-ideas” and “conceptions,” often tied to broader scholarly myths
of Indian culture, initiated the circle of interpretation. Through the process of more technically
oriented inquiry (logos), these conceptions gained a level of firmness. Certain structures and
styles became reliable modes of knowing. And some of these structures and styles were allowed
to calcify, solidifying into slogans and clichés. The nature of these prejudices—and the basic
tendencies of a scholarly community encountering something challenging and new, and
foreign—inhibited the hermeneutical openness that should have allowed faulty assumptions to be
corrected and refined. That the pantheism concept remained in play for so long in the
interpretation of the Gītā, for example, supports the suggestion that it was one of these
“structures” described by Fleck: it was a repeated scholarly touchstone, virtually a fetish, that
took on a life of its own as a frame through which to view the foreign text. Here we address one
consistent quandary for the “hermeneutical consciousness” proponent. Why do certain
unproductive prejudices persist, even when intellectuals have the opportunity to put themselves
into interpretive play with sources that are supposed to make them adjust and recalibrate their
views? The answer is not always “power”: it sometimes has to do with the nature of intellectual
communities themselves, which have their own distinct set of sociological dynamics and
discursive practices.
As a final point, I would also argue that this history needs to move much closer to the
event of contact between European intellectuals and India. This means moving closer to the
material conditions of possibility for cross-cultural encounter, and paying more careful attention
to the scholarly practices that constructed India as an object of European knowledge. Halbfass,
the purveyor of “hermeneutical consciousness,” admitted that his inquiry was intellectualist: “It
seems to neglect the ‘real world’ of social, anthropological, economic, political, and military
events and conditions” (xi). But we might ask whether “critical consciousness” has made much
more progress drawing connections with the “real world.” Stemming from Said, it is assumed
that critique of Orientalist discourse (or German intellectual discourse) always somehow speaks
to these realities because of the assumption that all such discourse must be linked to the actual
deployment of European colonialism. As I have already suggested, this is a faulty assumption;
or, at the very least, it must be borne out by the historical research itself, in individual sites of
inquiry. As a general rule, we might attempt to get beyond one of the most misleading, but
largely neglected limitations of the Saidian brand of inquiry: it fixates on representations of India
that were embodied primarily in statements about it. This methodological focus led Said to
suggest that the “enunciations” (to use Foucault’s term) that made up the discursive formation
called Orientalism only referred to themselves and never to a real, empirical Orient. There was
inevitably a form of encounter, however, in the practices through which foreign texts were
constituted, such that it was possible to make statements about their culture in the first place.
Attention to the details of these textual practices, I would argue, disrupts the problematic
assumption that Indian otherness offered no resistance to a supposedly insular, monolithic
intellectual discourse that was invented to control it in Germany.
Given the Foucauldian impulse behind the Said’s deployment of the “critical
consciousness,” it is surprising that the “micro-physics” of Orientalism’s textual practices have
rarely been explored.13 There are some notable exceptions of course. For example, in his essay
on the 1820s debate about the Gītā between Humboldt and Hegel, Saverio Marchignoli claims
that a basic matter of textual practice framed the discussion: whether the Indian work should be
part of the “cultural canon” or not. Such debates had an immediate impact on the way German
learned culture received and handled a text; it determined what texts would be produced and
read, and how they would proliferate and become known as representative objects of the past, or
of the other land.
A thorough discussion of the practices of textual reception would go on to account for the
full chain of transmission: the relationship between the native informant (e.g., the pandit) and the
European intellectuals who learned native languages and then translated and published Indian
texts; the process by which Indian texts were procured and transported to European centers of
learning; and the method by which libraries identified, catalogued, and made these texts
available such that they became recognizable to the German exegete. In my own work, by
focusing on translation practices, I have admittedly remained relatively close to the surface of the
European archive, but I would argue that when we look at translation carefully, against the
specific backdrop of a German culture of scholarship, we take an important step forward in
reconstructing the dynamics of the transmission of South Asian sources into the European
episteme.
To invoke Ricoeur’s dichotomy one last time, we can take up “hermeneutical
consciousness” and think of a translation as an interpretive act that interrogates the original text
with its approximations. We can also see it, in accordance with “critical consciousness,” as an act
of intellectual/cultural mastery. My tendency has been to identify the degree to which German
translations of Indian texts (on which so much depended) foreclosed and fixed cross-cultural
understandings, rather than opening them to scrutiny. And yet, vigorous contemporary analysis
of these renderings (analysis I am tempted to call deconstructive) also reveals how they confound
themselves: how the supposed mastery of the European intellectual was disrupted by South
Asian textual otherness before the Orientalist discourse could ever have imagined itself to be in
control.
I cannot claim to have thoroughly outlined a “third way” for scholarship on German
Orientalism in this brief essay. Instead, we can only wait for this path to emerge as contemporary
scholars continue to revisit this challenging layer of European intellectual history—but it is
beginning to emerge. The last few years have seen complex institutional histories instead of
diatribes driven by grand generalizations, careful estimations of the link between scholarship and
colonialism, and an ever-expanding recognition of the sheer diversity of motives and aims
among German intellectuals who took India as their object of study. In addition, we observe a
persistent urge to move beyond statements about and representations of India, and into the
specific contexts, intellectual practices, and material conditions that subtended them. In light of
these developments, perhaps the “third way” is but a reassertion of careful intellectual history
and incisive textual analysis. But it also must be grounded in a simple but powerful recognition:
the German Orientalist understanding of India was never purely a function of power, nor did it
always make progress; the truth resides somewhere between.
<#><aff>Marymount Manhattan College</>
<bmh>Works Cited</>
<bib>Benes, Tuska. In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in NineteenthCentury Germany. Detriot: Wayne State University Press, 2008. </bib>
<bib>Figueira, Dorothy M. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of
Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. </bib>
<bib>______. The Exotic: A Decadent Quest. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994. </bib>
<bib>Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Trans. Fred Bradley and
Thaddeus J. Trenn. Eds. Thaddeus Trenn and Robert K. Merton. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979. </bib>
<bib>Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Routledge,
1979. </bib>
<bib>Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald
G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1989. </bib>
<bib>Germana, Nicholas. The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing
Images of German National Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. </bib>
<bib>Halbfass, Wihelm. India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1990. </bib>
<bib>Herder, Johann Gottfried. God: Some Conversations. Trans. Frederick H. Burkhardt. New
York: Veritas Press, 1940. </bib>
<bib>Herling, Bradley L. “Epilinguistic Hypophecy: August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Latin
Bhagavadgītā.” Epilanguages: Beyond Idioms and Languages. Ed. Pascale Catharine Hummel.
Paris: Philologicum, 2009. 95–122. </bib>
<bib>_____. The German Gītā: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian
Thought, 1778–1831. London: Routledge, 2006. </bib>
<bib>_____. “The Problem of Action in the Early German Interpretation of the Bhagavadgītā.”
Mapping Channels between the Ganges and the Rhein. Eds. Joerg Esleben, Christina Kraenzle,
and Sukanya Kulkarni. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 82–106.
</bib>
<bib>Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Ueber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gîtâ bekannte Episode
des Mahâ-Bhârata [I and II].” Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. 1906; reprint, Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 1968. 190–232, 325–44. </bib>
<bib>Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
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<bib>King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic
East.’ London: Routledge, 1999. </bib>
<bib>Kontje, Todd. German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
</bib>
<bib>Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999. </bib>
<bib>Marchand, Suzanne L. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and
Scholarship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. </bib>
<bib>Marchignoli, Saverio. “Canonizing an Indian Text? A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt,
Hegel, and the Bhagavadgītā.” Sanskrit and ‘Orientalism’: Indology and Comparative
Linguistics in Germany, 1750–1958. Eds. Douglas T. McGetchin, Peter K.J. Park, and Damodar
SarDesai. Delhi: Manohar, 2004. 245–70. </bib>
<bib>Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970. </bib>
<bib>______. “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology.” Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 63–
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<bib>Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. </bib>
<bib>Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, trans. Bhagavad-Gītā, id est Thespesion Melos sive Almi
Krishnae et Arjunae Colloquium de Rebus Divinis, Bharatae Episodium. Bonn: Edward Weber,
1823. </bib>
<bib>Schlegel, Friedrich. “Gespräch über Poesie.” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol.
2. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1967. 284–98. </bib>
<bib>_____. Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe.
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<bib>_____. “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians.” The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous
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526.</bib>
<bib>Weigle, G.H. Preface to “Essay on the Episode of the Mahabharat, Known by the Name of
Bhagvat-Geeta; by Baron William de Humboldt.” The Bhagvat-Geeta, Dialogues of Krishna and
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<bib>Wilkins, Charles, trans. The Bhagvat-Geeta. 1785. Reprint, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’
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<bmh>Notes</>
<en>1 Ricoeur’s 1973 distinction can perhaps be traced back to its more famous precedent in
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970). There Ricoeur described the
“hermeneutics of recollection” versus the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (28–36).
2
See The German Gītā: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian
Thought, 1778–1831.
3
Indeed, the last few years have seen the appearance of a remarkable body of scholarship that
uncovers the historical complexity of German Orientalism, raising important questions about the
applicability of both Gadamerian and Saidian approaches. See, for example, Todd Kontje,
German Orientalisms; Douglas McGetchin, Peter K.J. Park, and Damodar SarDesai, eds.,
Sanskrit and ‘Orientalism’: Indology and Comparative Linguistics in Germany, 1750–1958;
Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century
Germany; Jörg Esleben, Christina Kraenzle, and Sukanya Kularni, eds., Mapping Channels
between Ganges and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations; Nicholas Germana, The
Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National
Identity; and Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race,
and Scholarship.
4 “Ueber die under dem Namen Bhagavad-Gîtâ bekannte Episode des Mahâ-Bhârata [I and II].”
5
For a full account of Humboldt’s reading of the Bhagavadgītā, see my essay, “The Problem of
Action in the Early German Interpretation of the Bhagavadgītā” in Mapping Channels between
the Ganges and the Rhein.
6
The “Pantheism Controversy” broke out in 1783 when philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
revealed a supposed death-bed confession by Lessing: he (Lessing) had secretly been a long-time
devotee of Spinoza’s philosophy. This caused a scandal. Lessing was a standard-bearer of the
Enlightenment, and if he had taken his guidance from Spinoza, something vital (and dangerous)
was revealed about the Enlightenment: it was essentially pantheistic. In late eighteenth century
intellectual life, that necessarily meant that the Enlightenment project was also atheistic and
morally bankrupt.
7
The call for the “new mythology” inspired by India appears in Ludoviko’s famous exhortation
in Gespräch über die Poesie (1800).
8
“All other Oriental doctrines, however disguised by error and fiction, are found in, and
dependent on, divine and marvelous revelations; but Pantheism is the offspring of unassisted
reason [“ist das System der reinen Vernunft”: “is the system of pure reason”], and therefore
marks the transmission [Übergang] from the Oriental to the European philosophy” (F. Schlegel,
“On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” 490, with my interpolations; original available in
the Kritische Ausgabe 8: 243).
9
“[C]riticam et grammaticam Bhagavad-Gîtae rationem ... satis expedisse mihi videor;
philosophicam nondum attigi” (A.W. Schlegel xxiv) [it seems appropriate to me to have worked
out the critical and grammatical basis of the Gītā; the philosophical I have not yet touched upon]
(my translation).
10
For an extensive treatment of these impulses in Schlegel’s translation, see The German Gītā
183–97. See also my essay “Epilinguistic Hypophecy” in Epilanguages: Beyond Idioms and
Languages.
11
For another nuanced version of this theoretical balancing act, see the introduction to Dorothy
M. Figueira’s The Exotic: A Decadent Quest.
12
See Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship; Dorothy M.
Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity; and A. Leslie
Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism.
13
The “micro-physics” of practice is a concept that guides Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison. See 29–30.