Owen Ware, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany. New York: Routledge, 2024; xx + 178 pp. ISBN: 9781032452333.
Reviewed by J. M. Fritzman, Lewis & Clark College
In this outstanding and highly recommended book, which engages both the history of philosophy and comparative philosophy, Owen Ware chronicles the reception of Indian philosophy and Yoga in Germany.
Following the “Introduction” that discusses the book’s scope and aims, Ware divides his work into two parts. The first, “Indian Pantheism and the Threat of Nihilism,” has three chapters: “The Perils of Pantheism: Schlegel and Karoline von Günderrode,” “The Song of God: Humboldt’s Philosophical Poem,” and “‘Abstract Devotion’: Yoga in Hegel and Schelling.” European philosophers were not initially aware of the different schools (darśanas) of Indian philosophy and so they did not recognize that Yoga is only one such school.
On Ware’s reading, the early reception of Indian philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) was positive. They were receptive to the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who maintained that nature and God are identical, and they believed there are affinities between pantheism and Yoga. This initial positive reception was followed by a more critical response. Rejecting his previous assessment, Friedrich Schlegel charged that Indian philosophy leads to nihilism, and Georg Hegel (1770-1831) rejected Humboldt’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gītā. However, Schelling can be seen as defending Humboldt’s interpretation.
In 1800, Friedrich Schlegel called on readers to find the highest Romantic in the Orient. Günderrode’s philosophical fictions were inspired by Indian doctrines. However, there were questions concerning the very definition of yoga. In 1826, Friedrich Schlegel’s brother, August Schlegel (1767-1845), maintained that yoga is a true Proteus, as the meaning of “yoga” seemed to continually shift. Specifying the meaning of “yoga” was difficult because European scholars did not have access to the relevant Indian texts. As a result, the ancient Indian Yoga Sutras of Patañjali were interpreted through the Bhagavad Gītā and “yoga” was understood as meaning “union with God.”
As noted above, the initial positive reception of Indian philosophy in Germany was followed by a more critical response. In his influential essay, “On the Philosophy of the Hindus,” the English orientalist Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) provided an account of the different schools of Indian philosophy. Colebrooke did not fully discuss Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, however, allowing readers to conclude that Yoga is pantheistic and nihilistic. Reversing his earlier positive assessment, for example, Friedrich Schlegel charged that Yoga entails a metaphysical nihilism that eliminates all distinctions between things, a moral nihilism that eliminates all distinctions between actions, and a practical nihilism which preaches the destruction of the self.
Ware explains why Humboldt’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gītā challenged the one-sided understandings caused by Colebrooke’s partial treatment. Humboldt maintained that the Bhagavad Gītā does not deny morality, individuality, and freedom. Citing Kṛṣṇa’s claim in the Bhagavad Gītā that “All things abide in me / I do not abide in them,” Humboldt rebutted Friedrich Schlegel’s charge that it is pantheistic and nihilistic. Humboldt distinguished between an identity pantheism, which maintains that the world is ontologically identical to God, and a dependence pantheism, which more modestly claims only that the world ontologically depends on God. In later terminology, it seems that the concept of dependence pantheism allowed Humboldt to interpret the Bhagavad Gītā as a form of panentheism. Friedrich Schelling further argued that the way in which everything ontologically depends on Brahman is absolutely free and he emphasized God’s creative glory.
Ware then shows how Hegel directly responded to Humboldt’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gītā. Hegel denied that philosophy existed in ancient India. He charged that Yoga promotes metaphysical and moral nihilism, and that it advocates pantheism and self-annihilation by wholly emptying the mind of thoughts and experiences. The Bhagavad Gītā is nihilistic because it reduces God to an emptiness that lacks all determinate content, according to Hegel, not because it ontologically identifies God and nature. Whereas Humboldt had translated “yoga” as “absorption” (Vertiefung), Hegel preferred “abstract devotion” (abstrakte Andacht) to underscore his understanding that Yoga amounts to annihilation. He further responded to Humboldt by urging that the Bhagavad Gītā oscillates between contracting everything into the empty void of Brahman and a chaotic polytheism.
Ware may not be fully aware of how obsessed Hegel was by India. He wrote 80,000 words about India, as much as he wrote about ancient Greece. He discerned parallels between his own philosophical system (to simplify: thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and the Hindu trinity (Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva). Nevertheless, Hegel failed to recognize the affinity between what he regarded as the annihilation of Yoga and his own notion of mechanical memory in the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit. In mechanical memory, spirit divests words of their meanings. This occurs, for example, when children memorize a poem by rote learning without comprehending it. By reducing words to sounds, meaning to noise, spirit becomes self-externalized within itself. Its activity becomes a mechanism. Spirit then regards both itself and its content as nothing, as absolute negativity. Spirit thereby becomes immediate and external to itself. This allows spirit to sublate everything, even itself. Had Hegel discerned the affinity between mechanical memory and annihilation, he could have incorporated Yoga as a moment in his system. Still, immediately prior to the culmination of his system, Hegel engaged the Bhagavad Gita. While he did not regard the Bhagavad Gita as philosophy, it is his system’s penultimate moment.
Although Humboldt never responded to Hegel, Schelling can be interpreted as subsequently doing so. He maintained that the grounding relation between God and humans is creative. He further claimed that human freedom and dependence pantheism are compatible. As Owen helps us to see, Schelling attempted to incorporate Indian philosophy into the history of philosophy as an aspect of his project of reconciling human freedom and dependence on God.
The second part of Ware’s book, “God, Morality, and Freedom,” has two chapters: “Yoga in the Late Nineteenth Century: Pal, Mitra, Vivekananda, and Müller” and “The Bengali Philosophers: Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharyya.” Those Indian philosophers mastered and critically engaged European thought, and defended their intellectual heritage. They demonstrated that those who had charged that Patañjali’s Yoga is nihilistic had missed its moral principles.
In the nineteenth century, Rájendralála Mitra (1822-1891) and Max Müller (1823-1900) recognized that there are two distinct versions of classical Yoga. There is a religious version, which defines the essence of Yoga as union with God and a nonreligious version, which defines Yoga’s essence as soul liberation. Mitra and Müller further perceived that Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras are more concerned with disunion than with union. That is, the Yoga Sutras seek to separate the essential self (puruṣa) from its entanglement with nature (prakṛti).
Mitra presented the first complete edition of the Yoga Sutras in English. He distinguished Patañjali’s emphasis on soul liberation, which Patañjali regarded as the highest end for humans, from the religious emphasis of Vedānta and Bhakti. According to Ware, Müller used the distinction between religious and nonreligious versions of Yoga to rebut the charge that Yoga is nihilistic. Other nineteenth-century scholars subsequently suggested that Patañjali incorporated religious aspects into Yoga, including devotion to God (Īśvara), only to attract religiously inclined followers.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Vivekananda (1863-1902) and such philosophers as Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), Surendranath Dasgupta (1887-1952), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) emphasized the unity of Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras and interpreted them within the larger context of Indian philosophy. Vivekananda emphasized Yoga’s synthesis of action (karma yoga), meditation, (dhyana yoga), knowledge (jñāna yoga), and devotion (bhakti yoga). Bhattacharyya presented Yoga as a unified metaphysical and ethical system. He distinguished absolute freedom (kaivalya) from the freedom of persons to disentangle themselves from prakṛti. Bhattacharyya maintained that yoga is a system of freedom that aims at both goals through the progressive realization of freedom. Dasgupta interpreted the Yoga Sutras as a unified system of metaphysics and ethics. He influenced Radhakrishnan, who emphasized the moral principles in the Yoga Sutras and characterized Yoga as a practice of self-perfection and self-realization.
The conclusion, “Yoga, the ‘True Proteus’,” summarizes the book. The appendix, “Images of India–Voltaire and Herder,” effectively serves as a prequel. While the writings of Voltaire (1694-1778) set the context for the subsequent positive reception of Indian philosophy, those of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) prepared the way for Hegel’s more critical engagement. As Ware outlines, Voltaire was committed to writing a world history that began in India. He interpreted Indian religion in terms of his own Deism. He maintained that Indian religion was historically earlier than the Abrahamic tradition, and he claimed that Indian religion is a pre-Mosaic source of monotheism. However, Voltaire’s understanding of Indian religion was based on the Ezour Vedam. He believed that the Ezour Vedam was an ancient Indian text, but it was written by French Jesuits. Even in interpreting the Ezour Vedam, Voltaire selectively attended only to passages that complemented his Deism. Although Herder was the first German writer to make available translated sections of the Bhagavad Gītā, he accepted a biblical chronology and the primacy of the Abrahamic tradition.
One might quibble that Ware refers to Radhakrishnan as a Bengali philosopher. Although Radhakrishnan taught at the University of Calcutta during 1921-1932, he was born in what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
On a more substantive note, while Ware shows that Schelling and Vivekananda maintained that the Bhagavad Gītā espouses a doctrine of freedom, and that they emphasized God’s playful manifestation in and as the world, this does not necessarily establish that the Bhagavad Gītā allows for human freedom, libertarian free will, or agent causation. The Bhagavad Gītā proclaims that everything is a manifestation of Kṛṣṇa, who is Brahman, the supreme Godhood. It initially seems that Kṛṣṇa is attempting to convince Arjuna to fight, which seems to presuppose that Arjuna has the freedom to decide whether to fight. Nevertheless, Kṛṣṇa also maintains that he is the sole agent, such that each event happens solely as an act of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa further claims that Arjuna cannot himself act and that he will use Arjuna as his instrument. He announces that Arjuna will fight. This seems to be a theological determinism. Schelling and Vivekananda are correct that the Bhagavad Gītā teaches that Kṛṣṇa acts freely. Yet, it is unclear whether persons, who are manifestations of Kṛṣṇa, can themselves act freely. Hence, worries remain that moral nihilism is a consequence. Nonetheless, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany is highly recommended text for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. It provides sufficient context, clarity, and explanation to make it both generally accessible and an important scholarly contribution.