Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: History Is Personal
- Prologue: Original Attributes, 425 B.C.–A.D. 1765
- I L'Âge des Ombres, 1765–1790s
- 1 As Flood Waters Receded: The Enlightenment on the Indian Origins of Language and Art
- 2 Seeds of Romantic Indology: From Language to Nation
- II Textual Salvation from Social Degeneration, 1790s–1808
- III Alternate Idealizations, 1807–1885
- Epilogue: Destinies Reconsidered, 1885–2004
- Conclusion: The Intersection of the Personal, the Philosophical, and the Political
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Seeds of Romantic Indology: From Language to Nation
from I - L'Âge des Ombres, 1765–1790s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: History Is Personal
- Prologue: Original Attributes, 425 B.C.–A.D. 1765
- I L'Âge des Ombres, 1765–1790s
- 1 As Flood Waters Receded: The Enlightenment on the Indian Origins of Language and Art
- 2 Seeds of Romantic Indology: From Language to Nation
- II Textual Salvation from Social Degeneration, 1790s–1808
- III Alternate Idealizations, 1807–1885
- Epilogue: Destinies Reconsidered, 1885–2004
- Conclusion: The Intersection of the Personal, the Philosophical, and the Political
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
None that lives dares pit itself in the over-bold contest against the German language! It is, so that short-lived I may go, with its legendary strength, from primeval diversity, to the ever newer, and yet German expression is enough; It is, as we ourselves were in those grey years, when Tacitus researched us, separate, unblended, and equal only to itself.
— Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Unsere Sprache”(1785)ACULT OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE and mythology rose up around Klopstock's poetry in the 1780s and '90s, but classical mythology retained devotees such as Winckelmann, Goethe, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The possibility of a poetic vision as subjective as Klopstock's had been presented in literature by Goethe a decade earlier, and in philosophy by Immanuel Kant still earlier. The subject of this chapter is the role of such subjectivity within a wider vision of the universe beyond the human senses. It will address three developments in German thought that foreshadowed the appropriation of Hindu and Buddhist ideas by the German Romantics: Herder's proto-nationalism and Indophilia, Fichte's extreme philosophical subjectivity, and the linguistic discoveries and theories of early French and English India scholars such as Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and William Jones.
Anthropology from a Metaphysical Point of View: Kant and Herder
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Indo-German IdentificationReconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765–1885, pp. 49 - 72Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010