ABSTRACT
The chapter highlights Arthur Schopenhauer as a thinker marking a turning point in the history of German fascination with India – the first European thinker who fully and explicitly identified himself with Indian cultural tradition and, simultaneously, the one in whose discourse the Romanticism-rooted self-representation through India acquired a virulently anti-biblical and anti-Jewish character. The chapter underscores the peculiarity of Schopenhauer’s philosophical personality, including his “great no” (Rudiger Safranski) to Europe’s intellectual mainstream and, at the same time, his demonstrative support of the sociopolitical order of the era, Schopenhauer’s elitist sociopolitical ideal. In examining Schopenhauer’s dualistic interpretation of world history as a conflict between an India-rooted “wisdom of all ages” and a “Jewish monotheism,” the chapter demonstrates how the portrayal by Schopenhauer of India as “the cradle of the human race” and of Indian religious tradition as the original faith of the human race determined his view of Christianity and European philosophy as arenas of a struggle between the India- and Judaism-based components. Further, the chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s understanding of European modernity as a “triumph of Judaism” and his India-based alternative to European civilization. In highlighting the critique by Schopenhauer of the Jewish-Christian “most unnatural separation [of] man from the animal world,” which resulted in his demand for “animal rights,” the chapter examines Schopenhauer’s program for the “purification” of Europe “of all Jewish mythology” and Europe’s return to its initial India-rooted values. Finally, the chapter characterizes Schopenhauer as a champion of a nationalism claiming to go beyond a narrow German nationalism, one that embraced all “the peoples of the Japhetic group of languages coming from Asia.” Placing Schopenhauer within the larger context of Indo-German connections, the chapter views his narrative on the conflict between “wisdom of all ages” and Jewry as the most radical version of the earlier Romantic picture of the split of the original people (Urvolk), anticipating the later Aryan myth-based forms of racialist Judeophobia.
