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3 Röth’s entire three-volume tome, Geschichte unserer abendländischen Philosophie, weaves a narrative, hardly unusual of the Romantics, that represents ancient Indian thought as a form of intellectual preparation for Western thought, but at the same time as a kind of childhood of genuine spirituality.
4 Halbfass, IE, 145.
5 Halbfass, IE, 81.
6 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die unter dem Namen Bhagavad Gita bekannte Episode des Maha-Bharata. In his Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (G. Reimar, Berlin, 1841).
7 See Bradley Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the Early German Reception of Indian Thought (Routledge, New York, 2009), 217–18.
8 Halbfass, IE, 86.
9 Young Kun Kim, “Hegel’s Criticism of Chinese Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 28:2 (1978), 173–80; 173–4. (Hereafter HCCP).
10 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, E. S. Haldane trans. (Humanities Press, New York, 1955), 146. (Hereafter HP).
11 Hegel, Berliner Schriften 1818–1831 (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1970), 185–8. (Hereafter BS).
12 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans. (Botoche, Ontario, 2001), 187. (Hereafter PH).
13 Halbfass, IE, 90.
14 Hegel, BS, 150, 157.
15 Hegel, PH, 180–1.
16 Hegel, PH, 174–5.
17 Hegel, HP, 125.
18 J. J. Clark, The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought (Routledge, New York, 2000), 42.
19 Hegel, HP, 121–2.
20 Hegel, HP, 120–1.
21 Kim, HCCP, 174.
22 Halbfass, IE, 97–9.
23 See Urs App, “Notes and Lectures by Schopenhauer Related to Vols. 1–9 of the Asiatick Researches,” in Schopenhauer Jahrbuch 79, 1998, 11–33; Urs App, “Schopenhauers Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus,” in Schopenhauer Jahrbuch 79, 1998, 35–56, 38; Douglas L. Berger, The Veil of Māyā: Schopenhauer’s System and Early Indian Thought (SUNY Press, Binghamton, 2004), 33–6. (Hereafter VM).
24 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, E. F. J. Payne trans. (Dover, New York, 1966), xxivi. (Hereafter WWR).
25 Schopenhauer, WWR 1, 3–4, 7–8, 419.
26 Berger, VM, 71–86.
27 Halbfass, IE, 111.
28 Schopenhauer, WWR I 352, 365; On the Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne trans. (Beghan, Providence, 1995) 207. (Hereafter BM).
29 Schopenhauer, WWR I, 409–12.
30 Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur (Haffmans, Zürich, 1988), 312. (Hereafter WN).
31 Schopenhauer, WN, 313.
32 Schopenhauer, BM 44–5; WWR 2 475; WWR 1 356–7.
33 Schopenhauer, WWR 2 624–5.
34 Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, Konstantin Kollenda trans. (Basil, Oxford, 1985), 187.
35 Schopenhauer, WWR 2 166–8.
36 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Spiller et al. ed. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971), 88. (Hereafter CW).
37 Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993), 54. (Hereafeter ATAR).
38 Versluis, ATAR, 55–63.
39 Versluis, ATAR, 63–8.
40 Versluis, ATAR, 70–1.
41 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Gillman ed. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970), XVI:32. (Hereafter JMN).
42 Emerson, CW, II:18.
43 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson ed. (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1903–4), VI:30. (Hereafter CPW).
44 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson ed. (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1910–14), VI:426. (Hereafter JRWE); Versluis, ATAR, 66.
45 Versluis, ATAR, 66–9.
46 Emerson, CPW, XI:472; JRWE, VI:403.
47 Johann Figl, “Nietzsche’s Early Encounters with Asian Thought,” in Nietzsche and Asian Thought, Graham Parks ed. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993), 51–63. (The collection of essays is hereafter abbreviated as NAT).
48 Mervyn Sprung, “Nietzsche’s Trans-European Eye,” in NAT, 76–90; 77.
49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist in Werke in drei Bänden, K. Schlechta ed. (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 1966), II:1224. (The collection is hereafter abbreviated as WDB).
50 Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, WDB, II:1222.
51 Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, WDB, II:1179.
52 Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, WDB, II:1182.
53 Nietzsche, qtd. in Halbfass IE, 128.
54 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Walter Kaufmann trans. (Vintage, New York, 1974), 74.
55 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann trans. (Random House, New York, 1974), 297.
56 Sprung, NAT, 186.
CHAPTER 37
THE OTHER
MICHAEL MACK
37.1 INTRODUCTION: THE IMMANENT FRAMEWORK
ENGAGEMENT with the Other partakes of both cultural anthropology and ethics. This chapter therefore investigates the ethical as well as anthropological concerns of various German nineteenth-century philosophers starting with Kant and culminating in Nietzsche’s critique of Kantian ethics as well as in Nietzsche’s mixture of cultural and psychological anthropology. The framework in which nineteenth-century German philosophers perceive the Other is not that of traditional religious ethics. The transcendent reference point of traditional religion has disappeared.
In order to better understand this disappearance in nineteenth-century German philosophy it is necessary to discuss briefly the so called pantheism controversy which F. H. Jacobi provoked through the 1785 publication of his Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza. In this polemical text Jacobi argued that all rational philosophy cannot be anything else but nihilistic; exempt of any beliefs and convictions (religious or otherwise). Jacobi composed his pamphlet Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza in order to put an end to the spectral haunting of Spinoza’s immanent thought. The outcome was the exact opposite: Jacobi’s writing of 1785 sparked a fascination with the seventeenth-century philosopher of immanence that enthralled almost all German philosophers of the nineteenth century. As I have shown elsewhere, Jacobi employs the expression “A specter has recently been haunting Germany [bold type face in Jacobi’s original publication]” (Mack 2010: 3), which is exactly the same as that Marx uses at the opening of his Communist Manifesto of 1848: “A Spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism” (Tucker 1978: 473). Marx conscientiously borrowed his turn of phrase from Jacobi’s 1785 pamphlet. Through this inter-textual reference Marx subtly suggested that by 1848 the spectre of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence had assumed the shape of communism.
Ghostliness appears to be another word for otherness. The spectre is radically other: it seems to be transcendent and yet is radically immanent: it is from somewhere else and is nevertheless present here in this place—Spinoza in Germany and communism in Europe. Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence appears in the threatening and uncanny ghostliness of anti-god, the satanic. Thanks to the controversy around Jacobi’s pamphlet this sinister reputation of immanent thought soon vanished at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The issue of the supremacy of the Christian Western tradition was, however, still an important element of Kant and Fichte’s idealism, as will be discussed in section 37.2.
37.2 KANT, FICHTE, SCHOPENHAUER, FEUERBACH, AND WAGNER’S HOMOGENOUS UNIVERSALISM
We are accustomed to think of Immanuel Kant as the early champion of universal human rights. Such referential accounts often neglect, however, that it was no one less than Kant who brought the notion of race to the level of scientific dignity at the end of the eighteenth century (and following Kant, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, even though in contrast to Kant “Blumenbach seems never to have departed from his earlier view whereby races as permanent divisions ‘ran into one another by unnoticed
passages and intermediate shades’” (Bernasconi 2006: 86)). Discussions of Kant within the context of race still meet with considerable resistance. After all, the German philosopher of the Enlightenment has come to epitomize all that is valuable within modern European history. It is time to ask whether this identification is not deeply fraught and flawed. It seems to be fraught, because not only is Kant one of the most prominent theorists of the modern concept of race but as Michael N. Forster has recently shown, he is quite unwilling to engage in a non-discriminatory manner with different cultures and religions. Instead of advocating cultural diversity, Kant constructs a homogenous universalism. His version of anthropology
assumes a fundamentally homogenizing position concerning the mental outlooks of different cultures (for instance, Kant considers them all to be implicitly committed to a single moral principle, the “categorical imperative”); it shows little or no interest in the interpretation of cultural Others, or appreciation of the difficulties attendant on such interpretation; it accords great significance to racial differences, and purports to explain the distinctive mental characteristics of different cultures as innate racial differences; and finally, despite Kant’s official cosmopolitanism, it devotes a good deal of space to disparaging non-European races for what Kant alleges to be their racially determined negative characteristics (for example, the Caribs of South America and the Jews). (Forster 2010: 201)
As we shall see in his critical response to Kant, Herder developed an alternative to Kantian homogenous universalism. Herder’s ethical and anthropological thought created the contours of what Forster has recently called pluralist cosmopolitanism: “However, Herder embraced a distinctive ethical stance which might in contrast [i.e. to Kant’s homogenous cosmopolitanism] be called pluralist cosmopolitanism: commitment to the equal value of all peoples, despite, and indeed in part because of, the diversity of their mental outlooks and in particular their values” (Forster 2010: 212–13). Forster’s argument about the racial foundations of Kant’s anthropology and ethics has been backed up by recent investigations and indeed this chapter will further develop the striking alternative to Kantian homogenous universalism which can be found in Herder’s writing and thought.
Apropos Kant’s key role in the formulation of modern racism, Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott have uncovered how Kant’s seminal essay Of the Different Human Races “is widely recognized as the first attempt to give a scientific definition of race based on a clear distinction between race and space” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000: 8). Race is not affected by environmental factors (such as space) because it is immutable. By defining race as an entity that “once formed resists further remodeling” (Bernasconi 2001: 23), Kant divided humanity along the lines of permanent boundaries. As we shall see in section 37.3, in this context Kant’s review of Herder’s Ideas is crucial because it is here that the concept of race figures prominently.
However, even if we neglect Kant’s critique of Herder’s rejection of humanity’s division into immutable races, the issue of immutability looms large in another Kantian context: that of religion. I have attended to this sense of fixed religious divisions in a previous study. German Idealism and the Jews analyzes the subterranean tremors and aftershocks of a certain Kantian ideational paradigm that not only incorporates prejudices widespread in the general public of a given time, but also shapes and sharpens these prejudices into a seemingly rational, systematic, self-consistent whole.1 To embark on such an analysis, the critic has to historicize philosophy, an approach that has often been interpreted as a violation of philosophy as such. It is through such a departure from common practices in intellectual history that we are able to better understand the relation between ideas themselves and their impact on culture, society, and politics at large. As Bernasconi has judiciously put it:
We need to pursue more vigorously the task of understanding how in the West the philosophy of history lent new legitimacy to the idea that some lives are of more value than others, even to the point of tolerating genocide. To do so means departing from that habit of thought that prevails in most contemporary studies within the history of philosophy: namely, the practice of studiously isolating ideas from their cultural implications and historical effects. To understand history we need to investigate how ideas that may not be in relations of entailment still come to be bound together. (Bernasconi 2005: 145)
Kantian idealism posits a form of rational universalism from which it excludes large parts of humanity: peoples, religions, and cultures which are perceived to be irrational and dogmatic. Kant famously defines the rational in terms of an independence from material and empirical conditions.
This autonomy from the material and merely natural forms a substantial part of Kant’s revision of traditional metaphysics. His Critique of Pure Reason takes issue with the two foundations of traditional metaphysics: it attempted to prove that we can neither recognize the intrinsic worth of any material thing nor ascertain the existence of some transcendent sign system that could bestow spiritual or intellectual value on it. Embodied matter is dead rather than alive with a soul of its own. The rational attitude towards the merely natural, the merely embodied, is therefore one of utter disregard and complete indifference.
Having destroyed the traditional symbiosis between the material and the intellectual, between body and intellect, Kant proceeds to establish a new metaphysics; one whose foundation is the immanence of human autonomy. Since our embodied, merely natural environment is a matter of indifference, the only way we can meaningfully deal with the external world is by imposing the laws derived from autonomous reason onto nature. As we will see section 37.3, Herder and nineteenth-century philosophers who followed Herder—Schleiermacher, Georg Forster, August Boeckh, the Schlegel brothers, W. von Humboldt, and to some extent Hegel as well as Schelling—established an alternative understanding of reason: one which conceptualizes autonomy as the freedom and the pluralism of speech, writing, and thought.
While the framework of Kant’s epistemological notion of autonomy is secular (one of immanence), he nevertheless constructs his notion of rationality (or, in other words, autonomy) on the grounds of a traditional Christian rhetoric which divides the world into a sphere of fallen nature and one of redemptive citizenship (in the City of God). As Raymond Geuss has recently argued, “Kant’s reasons for holding that people must be seen as generally acting on maxims that can be thus clearly and univocally formulated are buried deep in some of the more implausible recesses of his rococo metaphysical views about the nature of freedom, and have no plausibility without the support of these metaphysical views” (Geuss 2010: 37). Kant’s rococo metaphysics in fact secularizes the Christian metaphysical plea to die away from merely embodied this-world inclinations and concerns. The politicization and concomitant secularization of the Christian entreaty to banish worldly interests casts non-Christian traditions and peoples in the role of the demonic Other. The Other here is perceived to be incapable of sacrificing merely natural inclinations for the rational operations of duty and autonomy. Kant defines autonomy as abstract movement away from the worldly, in radical opposition to heteronomy as the inclination towards the merely natural or material world. Kantian rational philosophy promises to realize the traditional Christian city of God immanently, in this world. Cultures and peoples who are perceived to be at the mercy of merely natural inclinations pose a threat to such immanent notions of perfection.
Fichte radicalizes this Kantian idea of reason in terms not only of the doing away of natural inclination but as the sacrifice of one’s embodied life: “Therefore, the question of the possibility of philosophy depends on whether the I can perish and reason can come purely to manifestation” (Fichte 2005: 139). As Fichte makes clear, the death of embodied selves in the deed constitutes the immanent fulfillment of Christianity’s death to worldly inclinations:
In Christianity (which may in its essence be much older than we assume, and concerning which I have frequently said that, in its roots and especially in its c
harter [i.e., the Gospels], which I hold to be its purest expression, it [Christianity] completely agrees with realized philosophy), the final purpose, especially in the record of it, which I hold as the purest, is that people come to eternal life, to having this life and its joy and blessedness in themselves and out of themselves. (Fichte 2005: 182)
Fichte’s notion of eternal life is a secularized reincarnation of Augustine’s immortality within the city of God. Fichte sees in Kantian idealism the transformation of the Christian paradigm—according to which natural inclinations are to be sacrificed for a supersensible truth of redemption—from theological insight to secularized ethical and prudential action within modern politics: “Only in the last half a century, after the almost total decline of true scholarship and deep thinking, have people changed Christianity into a doctrine and ethics of prudence” (Fichte 2005: 182). As we will see soon, Schopenhauer employs a similar inflated contrast between the Platonic or Christian purity of the origins and the distortions thereafter which could only be rectified by the restitution back to the purity of Christ’s beginning thanks to the new Kantian philosophy.
From Kant onwards Jews and Judaism increasingly came to embody the opposite of modern ethics and Christian or Greek prudence. While not exclusively focused on Jews, Kant and many of his philosophers (Fichte, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and in some ways Hegel too) perceived the Jew as an oriental, non-Western and non-modern Other. Jonathan M. Hess has convincingly shown how Fichte radicalizes Kant’s opposition between the modern Christian universal rationality of autonomy (autonomy here understood as the independence of merely natural or worldly inclinations) and the backward, heteronomous Jew into one wherein the Jews plays an active counter-modern and counter-revolutionary role: “What was distinctive here is the role this negative vision of Judaism played in Fichte’s universalism, the way he paired his enthusiasm for the French Revolution with a proposal for winning the ‘war’ Jews were allegedly waging against the entirety of Europe” (Hess 2002: 141). Here we see how the fictitious construction of an immutable Jewish religion served to justify political anti-Semitism.