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Chapter 3: India in Friedrich Schlegel’s Comparative History of Philosophy
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51 3 India in Friedrich Schlegel’s Comparative History of Philosophy Philosophy is nothing other than history of philosophy if one understands history correctly. —F. Schlegel (undated)1 From these investigations it emerges sufficiently that the Indians had real philosophy in both form and method and that, at this time, we lack only sufficient documents to be able to incorporate it into the history of philosophy. —F. Schlegel (1804–5)2 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was a wonderfully erratic personality. His career path led him through literary criticism, university lecturing, journalism, novel writing, Oriental philology, historical studies, and diplomacy. At the time of the French Revolution, his literary values were neo-classical; his politics pro-revolutionary; and his philosophy Fichtean idealism. By his twenty-fifth year, however, he had turned away from both Fichte and neo-classicism. By age thirty-six, he had converted to Roman Catholicism and had become a political conservative . He began work as a diplomat and propagandist for the Austrian government. Between 1797 and 1808, he wandered in and between Germany and France as an impoverished writer and lecturer. Born in Hannover, this son of a superintendent of the Lutheran Church died in Vienna as a member of Catholic Austria’s political and intellectual elite. For a long time, he was remembered mainly for being one of 52 Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy the literary theorists of Romanticism, but in 1950 Raymond Schwab christened him the founder of “the Oriental Renaissance.”3 Also, historians of linguistics credit him with propagating Sanskrit studies in Germany. They recount how Schlegel brought attention to the common ancestry of the languages of Europe with Persian and Sanskrit. His work, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) of 1808, inspired other Germans to delve into comparative language studies.4 Schlegel was also the first historian of philosophy to treat Asian philosophical ideas together with European ones in “one basic historical and systematic context.”5 His history of philosophy is the beginning of comparative—in the sense also of cross-cultural—history of philosophy.6 Schlegel’s career as an Orientalist began after he arrived in Paris in late 1802 or early 1803. He studied Persian with Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773–1832), who later became a professor of Oriental languages at the Collège de France. Schlegel studied Sanskrit with help from Alexander Hamilton, the British naval lieutenant and member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, detained in France after the resumption of war with Great Britain. In a letter dated May 15, 1803, Friedrich informs his brother, August Wilhelm, that he was learning much from the British officer: I have not only made progress in Persian, but have finally reached my great goal, that is, to know Sanskrit. Within four months I will be able to read Shakuntala in the original text, although I may still need the translation as before. It has demanded tremendous effort due to a great complication and a particular method of guessing and labor, since I had to learn the elements without elementary books. Lastly, to my great benefit, it so happened that an Englishman Hamilton, the only one in Europe besides [Charles] Wilkins to know the language and know it fundamentally, came to my aid with advice at the very least.7 Schlegel visited the Bibliothèque Nationale for its numerous Persian and some two-hundred Sanskrit manuscripts. In a letter dated August 14, 1803 to August Wilhelm, he wrote that he spent his days copying from Sanskrit manuscripts and lexicons. He worked on Sanskrit three to four hours daily, spent another one or two hours going through his work with Hamilton, and then worked another two or three hours in the evening.8 Three months later, Friedrich thought [44.223.36.100] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:49 GMT) 53 India in Friedrich Schlegel’s Comparative History himself competent enough to begin a verse translation of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā.9 A partial translation of the drama, along with his other translations of Sanskrit texts, was appended to Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Schlegel spent 1804–8 in Cologne, where he composed and delivered lectures on the history of philosophy to an audience of three patrons. These lectures were edited and published by C. J. H. Windischmann three decades later.10 They are included in the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe as vols. 12 and 13, bearing the...