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Philosophy Proper

Between about 1780 and 1830 the histories of philosophy came to begin with the Greeks. Peter K. J. Park gave the change a book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (2013). As a reviewer quotes him, he puts the question as “When and how did the history of philosophy become the story of Europe, of the West, of Greeks and Germans?”, and, as the reviewer summarises him, traces race-based arguments from Meiners on to Tiedemann and Tennemann. In the publisher’s summary of the book, the outcome was a “march of progress from the Greeks to Kant” in place of accounts that had begun in Egypt or Western Asia, with the other traditions “relegated to the study of religion”.

Christoph Meiners, in his Outline of the History of Philosophy (Grundriß der Geschichte der Weltweisheit, 1786), argued from the Greeks themselves: kein alter Griechischer Schriftsteller die Wissenschaften seines Volkes [den Bar]baren zuschreibt, no ancient Greek writer ascribes his people’s sciences to the barbarians; several instead give ausdrückliche Zeugnisse über die Kindheit und Mittelmässigkeit der Kenntnisse Asiatischer und Afrikanischer Völker, express testimony to the infancy and mediocrity of the knowledge of the Asian and African peoples. Kant’s Logic, compiled by Jäsche from his lecture notes (1800), drew the line by kind of knowledge. Philosophical knowledge is the speculative knowledge of the universal in abstracto, so Unter allen Völkern haben also die Griechen erst angefangen zu philosophiren, of all peoples the Greeks first began to philosophise. The others made concepts intelligible only durch Bilder in concreto, through images in the concrete, like the Chinese and some Indians today, who treat God and the immortality of the soul but do not investigate these objects by concepts and rules in abstracto; and Egyptian wisdom, beside Greek philosophy, was ein bloßes Kinderspiel, mere child’s play.

The historians then made it a rule. In Halbfass’s account, Tiedemann excluded the Orient on a concept of eigentliche Philosophie, philosophy proper. Tennemann, in his Manual of the History of Philosophy, wrote that “all nations have not an equal claim to a place in the history of this science”; “The Greeks are the nation whose originality of genius has created an era in the history of this science”, while “The Orientals … never attained to the same eminence”, since “Their doctrines were constantly invested with the character of Revelation”, and “Their climate, their political constitution, and despotic governments, with the institution of castes, were often obstacles to the free development of the mind”. So “The true commencement, therefore, of the history of philosophy must be sought among the Greeks … the epoch of Thales” (tr. Johnson, 1832).

Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy say: “Philosophy proper commences in the West … Thus in the West we are upon the soil of a veritable Philosophy.” Of the Orient, “no philosophic knowledge can be found here … The Eastern form must therefore be excluded from the History of Philosophy, but still, upon the whole, I will take some notice of it”; what is called Eastern philosophy “is more properly the religious mode of thought and the conception of the world belonging generally to the Orientals”. Confucius was “only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom — one with whom there is no speculative philosophy”, and Cicero’s De Officiis “more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius”. Of India he allowed that “in modern times men have learned to recognize real philosophic writings”, and the Nyāya “may be compared to the Logic of Aristotle”. Arabian philosophy “flourished to an extraordinary degree, in spite of its here not displaying any specially characteristic features”, and what he had to say of it “chiefly concerns the external preservation and propagation of Philosophy” (tr. Haldane). Two historians of the change place Hegel differently. For Halbfass, Hegel’s separation of philosophy from religion “contributed to a restrictive use of the concept of philosophy”, which the academic historians then pursued without his world-historical horizon (India and Europe, 1988). Park, as a reviewer summarises him, makes Meiners the founder of the reordering and Hegel its high point, returning to a position the Kantian historians had already formed.

Against the current ran the Romantic reading of India. Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808) gave a book to Indian philosophy, and asked the reader to take its systems nicht als philosophische Systeme, not as philosophical systems, but as epochs of an orientalischen Denkart, an Oriental way of thinking, since they were ursprünglich alle mehr als bloß Philosophie, all originally more than mere philosophy; Park, as the reviewer reports him, reads it as a defence of Indian philosophy as genuine philosophy. Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin Oupnek’hat (1801–02), made from a Persian translation, gave Europe the Upaniṣads at second hand, and Schopenhauer read them there. The access to the Vedas, “opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones”, he wrote in the preface to The World as Will and Representation (1818), adding that their aphorisms may be deduced from his own thought, “though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case” (tr. Haldane and Kemp). Later he wrote: “In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!” (Parerga II, in Max Müller’s English). How India read its own works is on Philosophy in India.