Joydeep Bagchee
Vishwa Adluri
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
The Nay Science Contents and Themes
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Abstract
The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities. The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.
Related papers
The Nay Science. A History of German Indology, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee
If one thing is truly clear after reading this distorting and tendentious book, it is that this is anything but a history of German Indology. The tome begins with a critical survey of the earliest German publications on the Mahabharata (basically dealing with only two scholars, Christian Lassen and Adolf Holzmann), and then moves on to examine the work of some half a dozen scholars on the Bhagavadgıta from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, which forms the bulk of the book. The whole thing has then been packaged (and successfully sold) as a history of German Indology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But how can a work of such limited scope claim to be a history of a rather vast academic discipline? It is the method, the authors say (p. 1 and passim); by describing the method, they claim to give us the essence of German Indology. This is all very convenient: we no longer have to bother reading thousands upon thousands of tiresome pages to grasp the history of German Indology (whatever that may be, see below), the method will disclose its dark secrets to us. However, there is a tiny problem here: Indology-German Indology included-does not have a method, or rather, it does not have a single method, as inexplicably assumed by the authors.
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in Roland Waast, ed., *Les sciences coloniales: figures et institutions* (Paris: ORSTOM, 1996), pp. 285-297, 1996
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Tue Mar 11 2014, NEWGEN
CON T E N T S
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue xi
Introduction 1
A History of German Indology 1
The History of German Indology as a History of Method 7
The Origins of the Historical-Critical Method in the Neo-Protestantism
of the Eighteenth Century 11
Defining the Scope of Inquiry 19
Plan of Study 25
1. The Search for an Urepos 30
Introduction 30
The First Phase of German Gītā Reception 31
The Birth of German Mahābhārata Studies 40
Ideas of Heroic Epic 48
The Indo-Germanic Epic 53
The Birth of Modern Mahābhārata Studies 65
Holtzmann’s Legacy to Gītā Studies 71
2. The Search for German Identity 73
Introduction 73
The Genesis of Holtzmann’s Mahābhārata 75
Polemics against the Brahmans 77
Ideas of Critical Reconstruction 79
Ideas of Epic Composition 83
Ideas of Religious Conflict 86
Ideas of Textual Corruption 91
Ideas of Historical Distortion 98
Ideas of Enlightened Religion 103
Ideas of Religious Persecution 108
Ideas of Religious Corruption 112
Ideas of Racial Contamination 121
Evaluating Holtzmann’s Textual Project 125
Mahābhārata Criticism after Holtzmann 140
A Problem of Reception 149
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viii CONTENTS
3. The Search for the Original Gītā 156
Introduction 156
The Gītā Reemerges 157
The Pantheistic Gītā of Adolf Holtzmann 163
Pantheism and the Bhagavadgītā 171
The Theistic Gītā of Richard Garbe 176
Ideas of Bhāgavata Religion 191
The Epic Gītā of Hermann Jacobi 200
Defending Philosophical Pantheism 207
The K!ৢ!!a Gītā of Hermann Oldenberg 217
Resistances to Modernity 224
A Revelation and a Mystery 231
The Trinitarian Gītā of Rudolf Otto 242
God Reveals Himself 250
An Auto-Didact among Auto-Didacts 259
The Āryan Gītā of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer 267
By Reason of Race 274
The Method Becomes Autonomous 277
The Prejudices Are Institutionalized 296
An Essay in Understanding? 297
4. The Search for a Universal Method 314
Introduction 314
The Scientization of Protestant Theology in the Critical Method 315
The Secularization of Protestant Theology in the Study of the
History of Religions 324
The Institutionalization of Protestant Theology in Indology 347
5. Problems with the Critical Method 356
Introduction 356
Steps toward a Scientific Indology 358
Steps toward a Positivist Philology 365
Construing the (Natural) Scientific Character of Philology 372
Historicism and the Seductions of Positive Sociology 381
Empiricism and the Search for General Propositions 393
Criticisms of the Positivistic Notion of Truth 403
Kant’s Critical Turn and the Significance of Apriorism 410
Rethinking the Scientific Character of the Human Sciences 413
Conclusion: Gandhi on the Gītā 433
Bibliography 447
Index 473
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