The German Gita

This book charts the initial interpretation of the Bhagavadgità in German intellectual circles with special attention to the way in which local philosophical and philological debates inflected its fundamental concepts.

Auteur

Bradley L. Herling holds a full-time instructorship in the Core Curriculum at Boston University.

Résumé
How did the Bhagavadgata first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgata around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgata and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews.

Contenu

Chapter 1-Theoretical Introduction
Chapter 2-Herder and the Early Flowers of India in Germany
Chapter 3-Herder Gathers the Gita's Flowers
Chapter 4-The Dilemma of Pantheism in Friedrich Schlegel's Gita
Chapter 5-A.W. Schlegel's "Indian Sphinx": The Riddle of Gita Translation
Chapter 6-German Absorption in the Gita: von Humboldt and Hegel
Chapter 7-Conclusion
Bibliography