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Orientalist Constructions of India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ronald Inden
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Extract

Now it is the interest of Spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and (positive) Being generally—or the Idealism of Existence—is established. This Idealism, then, is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions;—one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination. Since, however, it is the abstract and absolute Thought itself that enters into these dreams as their material, we may say that Absolute Being is presented here as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 139).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Tr. by Gerth, H. H. and Martindale, D. (Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1958).Google Scholar This book has been crucial in setting the agenda for the sociological study of India (and especially of ‘modernization’ or ‘Westernization’) in the last twenty-five years. The last chapter, ‘The General Character of Asiatic Religion,’ p. 340Google Scholar, makes it quite clear that Asia excludes the Middle East.

2 His global treatment is divided into three volumes. One is entitled ‘Primitive Mythology’. The other two deal with ‘civilization’. One is entitled ‘Occidental Mythology’; the volume on the Orient does include a treatment of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, but takes great pains to show that, very early on, this part of Asia was culturally continuous with the West. It then turns to the true cultural Others of Asia, India and China. First published in 1962 (New York, Viking), it has been reprinted many times, most notably by Penguin.

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4 Cast into outer darkness by Russell, Bertrand (18721970)Google Scholar, the logical positivists, and Karl Popper (b. 1902), Hegel, a rationalist and idealist, has had a very bad reputation among the mostly empiricist and realist scholars of Britain and the U.S. in this century. It is, therefore, not implausible to suggest that most Indologists in those countries have probably not read his seminal Philosophy of History. Basham, A. L., The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove), p. 487Google Scholar, mentions Hegel only in connection with the part his reading of Indian texts may have had in the development of his ‘monism’. He does not, however, refer to him in his discussion of Indology (pp. 4–8). For a brief review of Hegel's views and his treatment earlier in this century, see Cottingham, John, Rationalism (London: Granada, 1984), pp. 91108.Google Scholar More extensive is the ‘reading’ of Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), especially pp. 389427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Hegel and Indian philosophy, consult Halbfass, Wilhelm, Indien und Europa: Perspektiven ihrer geistigen Begegnung (Basel: Schwabe, 1981), pp. 104–21.Google Scholar

5 American Council of Learned Societies; in Britain one would also want to mention the University Grants Committee.

6 Social Sciences Research Council; its British counterpart is the recently renamed Economic and Social Science Research Council.

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8 Ibid., pp. 122–8.

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56 For some of the connections of Jung and of Goetz, Zimmer, and Eliade with Coomaraswamy, see Lipsey, , Coomaraswamy, III, 203–4, 210–13.Google Scholar A brief account of Goetz's career by Kulke, is to be found in India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, edited by Deppert, Joachim (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 1323.Google Scholar For the work of Kulke and his associates, see The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, edited by Eschmann, A., Kulke, H., and Tripathi, G. C. (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978).Google Scholar

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