Hegel's Holiday

Hegel’s Holiday

For some time now I've been thinking about writing something about Hegel and his curious points of view, how they may be related in a tangential way to my own personal journey to surrender.  I'm not sure if this is the article I set out to write, but it may serve as notes towards a subsequent piece.

Hegel was the rock star of philosophers in his time.

He even looked like a rock star.

You’ve all heard of Hegel: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. But how did he come to play a role in Indian Philosophy? Some of his ideas are helpful in understanding Krishna consciousness. My own gurudeva, Śrīdhara Mahārāja referred to Hegel constantly in his talks. And yet this German idealist had nothing but contempt for India, for Hindu thought, and for the Bhagavad-Gita itself. How did he come to be so influential in modern Vedantic interpretation? When I was working as an editor at Guardian of Devotion Press, we often came across this question. Śrīdhara Mahārāja made numerous references to Hegel.

In order to better grasp his ideas I went to the library and checked out Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and his infuential Lectures on the Philosophy of History. My work was something along the lines of “fact-checking.” We didn’t want to publish Śrīdhara Mahārāja misrepresenting Hegel’s views. Some scholarly Hegelian readers might take umbrage and criticize our guru of being ignorant of philosophy. I wanted to see where in Hegel, he says, “Die to Live,” or “The Absolute is By Himself and For Himself.”

Having traveled to Germany in the 1980s and even having lived in Berlin in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, I had the chance to study the language a bit. But Hegel was baffling. Not only did he have an arcane and impossibly difficult philosophical system, but he had invented his own language in which to explain and discuss it.

Take Geist, for example. Geist may be translated as “Spirit” or “Ghost,” two widely different meanings. Phenomenology of Geist contains quite profound ideas. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness and experience. Self-reflection is key to this philosophical approach to ontology where the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness are seen as the basis of reality. The phenomenological schools of philosophy, where one attempts to understand how consciousness is the basis of reality differ from analytic schools where the world is viewed in terms of objects which react upon each other in the time-space continuum.

Hegel is the last of the great philosophers to explore idealism: “Is the world in the mind, or is the mind in the world?” is the basic question that fascinated philosophers like Berkeley, Locke, and Hegel. Hegel developed a system to respond to these ontological questions, one that touches on the basis of reality in a sense very close to the Vedānta. His thought resonates in the work of other philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

And yet, while Hegel’s views have some resonance with Vedantic interpretation, it was hard for me to understand why they would be whole-heartedly embraced in India.

Hegel’s impact on the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century European thought is beyond question, but he is little studied and less understood today. He had a wide influence on thinkers from left to right, from Marx to Heidegger, especially in terms of his dialectic and the dynamism of his logic. In his lectures on the advancement of Spirit, the ancient “Oriental World” was considered as a period in history where Spirit was only dimly realized and freedom could scarcely be thought of.

In fact, Hegel’s views on history are patently Eurocentric. Hegel contemplated Christianity as the absolute religion. His criticisms of India practically verge on racism. But this is a superficial analysis of Hegel’s depth, his entire thought.

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt

Hegel had developed a theory of the evolution of civilization which had classified India’s mythology and superstition as primitive, when he came across Wilhelm von Humboldt’s translation of Bhagavad-gita. His criticism of Humboldt is almost a knee-jerk reaction from someone who had invested quite a bit in proving that there was a progress of history from primitive culture to modern European Christianity.

When he was confronted with the wisdom of the Bhagavad-gita, he reacted negatively, by criticising Humboldt and his translation. Perhaps out of European pride and German nationalism, he considered it necessary to refute any claims that India had a deeper sense of philosophy than the Germans. And yet his exposure to the Bhagavad-Gita compelled him to call into question the very basis of the claims he had previously made about the place of Indian thought in world history. And as he grappled with the claims put forward by Humboldt in his essays, Hegel was forced to confront the underlying similarities between Indian thought and much of contemporary German philosophy, especially the thought of Kant and the Romantics.

This confrontation may have been destabilizing for Hegel for two reasons: First, the recurrence of themes present in Indian thought in the modern world would seem to call in to question the central narrative scheme of Hegel’s philosophy of history in which each historical cutlrue and its products make up a moment in the development of Spirit that is world history. Second, and perhaps most disconcerting for Hegel would be the idea that his own thought, which had its roots in Kantian Critical philosophy might also share these profound affinities with Indian thought. These possibilities might have provoked a reaction in Hegel’s thinking that was expressed in his “Anti-Indian” attitudes and his angry rejection of Humboldt’s work. It was as if he was resentful upon discovering that many of his most interesting ideas had been stolen from him, plagiarized by Vedantists, thousands of years before he was born. Imagine his rage at finding that his work was not at all original, but had been anticipated by Shankaracharya, by Madhva, and by the great thinkers of India long before he had contemplated the phenomenology of the spirit.

There is no question that Hegel’s thinking evolved over time, and yet he had set down his ideas about India early in his career in the Phenomology of Spirit. How odd that a philosopher whose views are really in sympathy with Indian thought had such contempt for Indian culture, without ever having visited India.

The understanding of Indian thought under discussion in Phenomenology of the Spirit really comes from the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Schelling’s views contributed to Hegel’s concept of what he called “Natural Religion.” Hegel calls this “flower religion,” or “animal religion,” and criticises the “idolatry” he sees in Schelling’s representation of India. Of course, the criticism of Hindu religion as “idolatry” is as well-known as it is superficial, for it betrays an absolute lack of understanding of the great ideas discovered in Vedanta. It’s easy for Hegel to then place “idolatry” and “animal religion” at the primitive beginnings of philosophical thought and develop his thesis about evolution in religion from the primitive views of animism to the compassionate religion of divine love as seen in Christianity.

In his own time, Hegel was reacting against a facile Romanticism which invited Germans to hearken back to intuitive and ecstatic pagan mythology and poetry. Hegel’s determination was to make the understanding of the spirit “scientific.” Thinkers like Schlegel and Schleiermacher, who promoted a romantic theology of feeling and intuition, were really Hegel’s nemesis, since they promoted a sensual view of the divine.

Hegel felt that any direct route to immediate unity with God was too easy: in its impassioned rush to know the Absolute immediately, the romantic attitude has no patience for the moments that make up the life of the whole. The rapturous ecstasies of romantics like Byron and Shelley, achieved through opium and orgiastic frenzy would only lead to pipe dreams. For Hegel, philosophy was both science and meditation on the absolute. He was determined that truth-seekers should go through the process of contemplation before declaring enlightenment.

In any case, it is clear that Hegel was constantly engaging with Indian thought and his study influenced his thinking in significant ways. His thought moved in a crooked way, just as his dialectic moves through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to a higher understanding.

Hegel asks us to conceive of the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; as stages which are not merely differentiated but which supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. This constant movement makes each moment of truth flow towards its opposite as part of an organic unity. The movement embodies contradiction as positive supplants negative and yet as moments of an organic unity each realization of truth is as necessary as the the one that came before. Each discovery is as important as the last and this equal and opposite movement constitutes the whole. So the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

In Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel posits that knowledge itself is reality and that reality is both mental and spiritual. Hegel expounds this organic emergence and coalescence of knowledge and reality, his “dialect” through a simple example: that of ripening fruit: “The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way, when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom.” [Phenomenology of Mind, Preface. J.B. Baillie, London 1949]

But the question remains, how and when did Śrīdhara Mahārāja come into contact with Hegelian ideas? And how did he enfold the dialectic of German idealism into the Vedantic views of the Gaudiya Vaishnava siddhānta?

Some clues to this conundrum may be found in a study of the so-called “Bengali Renaissance.”

The Bengali Renaissance begins in the 19th Century with the intellectualism of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and continues until the middle of the 20th Century with the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. This was an intellectual awakening in Bengal that confronted the colonialism of the British Raj with vibrant literary, cultural and religious movements. These movements intensified after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and grew more powerful to the turn of the 20th Century. At this time Bengal was the seat of the British Government; as a response to the power of the independence movement in Bengal India’s capital was moved from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1911 by the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge. By this time Calcutta was a hotbed of revolutionary ideas.

The names of men who took part in this cultural ferment are readily recognizable: there were nationalists like Aurobindo Ghose, (later Śrī Aurobinda) and Shubhas Chandra Bose, Industrialists like P.C. Roy, intellectuals like Bipin Chandra Pal and Rabindranath Tagore, and great religious thinkers like Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Bhaktisiddhānta Saraswati.

We know that Śrīdhara Mahārāja studied at Presidency College, (now Presidency University). We might look to some of the thinkers and lecturers at Presidency College to get an idea of whether Hegel had any standing in those days.

It’s hard for me to imagine that Śrīdhara Mahārāja read Hegel in German; it seems more likely to me that he absorbed Hegel as part of his liberal education. We know that he studied law at Presidency College. One of the interesting intellectual figures involved with Presidency College at the time was a man named Brajendranath Seal, or B.N. Seal.

Brajendranath Seal (1868-1938) was a Bengali intellectual who occupied the prestigious King George V professorship of philosophy at the University of Calcutta between 1913 and 1921. During this time he published an analysis called “Comparative Studies in Vaishnavism and Christianity.” He may not have been a Gaudiya Vaishnava in the school of Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, but he was a contemporary thinker involved in understanding the relationship between Western and Vaishnava thought at a time when belief was still important in quotidian life. He spent much of his early scholarly life fascinated with Hegel and in his later life turned to Vaishnavism.

While he rejected Hegel’s views on history as parochial and Eurocentric, he was interested in Hegel’s views on the subjective evolution of consciousness.

From his seat as the head of philosophy at Calcutta University, Brajendranath Seal’s influence on Presidency College would be felt by two of its prominent students: Bhakti Rakṣaka Śrīdhar Dev Goswāmī and A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmi, both of whom studied there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brajendra_Nath_Seal

While Seal was influenced by Hegel, he had his own version of how the dialectic might be applied; he could see fallacies in Hegel’s theories of history, philosophy, and logic. Hegel had dismissed the curious tales of the Puranas as so much superstition and mythology and yet his own reasoning on consciousness as the origin and foundation of reality comes quite close to the Vedāntic view. Seal embraced Hegel’s conception of Absolute Reason as By Itself and For Itself. He embraced the dialectic and applied it to his own analysis of Vedānta. Seal admired Hegel’s system: his concise exposition of logic, the applicability of his methods in varied disicplines. Hegel dealt logically with every phenomenon of natural and spiritual life and set it against the dynamic of his dialectic: thesis-antithesis, synthesis, what Śrīdhara Mahārāja encapuslated in the expression “Die to Live.”

In the end Seal differed from Hegel. He felt his method of analysis was powerful, but his understanding of Indian culture and thought had been shallow. He wrote, “Any philosophical system which fails to accept and reconcile the timeless reality and the temporal relativity at once puts itself out of court and is as unscientific as it is unphilosophical.”

He differed as well from Hegel’s triadic scheme and favoured instead an analysis extracted from the catur-vyuhic conception. Fourfold Vishnu expands as Vasudeva, Sankarshana, Pradhyumna, and Aniruddha: First dividing in two and then duplicating the division. Seal felt this metaphor could be used in philosophical analysis and so distanced himself again from Hegel.

Frustrated with hegelianism in the end, Seal turned to Vaishnavism, using the Bhagavad-Gita as a vehicle for expressing his philosophy by way of commentary “The Gita a synthetic interpretation.”

His educational syllabus was used as an educative model in colleges and universities in Calcutta and Bengal in the early part of the 20th century. His syllabus begins with the “Early Vedic” period and progresses through a study of the different systems of Vedanta, covering all the systems mentioned in Madhva’s sarva-darshan-samgraha with analysis and critique of all avenues of Indian thought. Included in his analysis were such topics as ¨principles of experience, dialectic of nescience, dialectic of the self, realism v. idealism, mechanism v. teleology, epistemology and logic, ontology v. teleology, theory of being, foundations fo the science of mythology, stages in cultural history, and the Krishna cult.

Stung by Hegel´s accusation that Indian philosophy hadn´t gone beyond the mythological stage, Seall tried to show the importance of the Puranic version in the development of Vedantic ontology and epistemology.

Part of his contribution to Indian thought was to show both British and European academics the richness of Indian Philosophy. He anticipates Carl Jung in demonstrating the value of taking mythological interpretation to a higher level where allegorical meaning can stand for deeper ideas in ontology, cosmology and epistemology. Seal demonstrated that the grand tradition of thinking and reasoning developed in Europe as philosophy has much to learn from the contemplative traditions of ethics and mysticism found in India.

Was Seal in any way responsible for shaping Śrīdhar Mahārāja’s early thought? I’m not sure. In any case, he wasn’t the only Hegelian thinker who taught in Bengal. Another name that comes up is that of Hiralal Haldar. One of Seal’s contemporaries and fellow Hegelians was Hiralal Haldar, one of his colleagues in the Bengali Renaissance who was engaged early on with the vogue for Hegel that flashed through the Indian psyche in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Haldar developed his own conception of Idealism and the Absolute as a synthesis of Hegel’s views on phenomenology and Indian Vedanta. He found in Hegel a suitable vehicle for the expression of his own subtle Vedantic views.

Haldar rejects Shankar’s unity of the Absolute, arguing that the aim or purpose of the Absolute, who is By Himself and For Himself, is his own personal pleasure. Haldar sees no reason why a Personal God would be illogical, finding that the Absolute Purpose is realized through the purposes of constituent individuals. These individuals are “relative wholes within the unity of the absolute and contribute in various and unique way to its total purpose.” [Haldar 1918:376]

In a sense Haldar is the most eloquent of Hindu Hegelians. His views may be used to support the idea of a personal God who is in His essence both positive and negative, a synthesis of Purusha-Prakriti, masculine and feminine along the lines of Rādhā-Krishna whose divine synthesis is found in Chaitanya Mahāprabhu.

Of course, it isn’t necessary to study Hegel to become Krishna Conscious. There is no need to pass from Buddhism to Shankar to Madhva to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. One may surpass all philosophical considerations merely through surrender and chanting Hare Krishna. I’m merely sharing here some of the philosophical problems I encountered while working on one of the publications we printed years ago at Guardian of Devotion Press. I began by trying to make sure that Śrīdhara Mahārāja’s Credo, “Die to Live,” was indeed somehow founded in a philosophical precept advanced by Hegel.

We may never convert Hegel into a Hare Krishna devotee, but it is fair to say that we may the enlist the Hegelian dialectic in understanding the Phenomenology of Surrender.