Why I Admire German Idealism

In recent years I have come to deeply identify with German philosophy, and especially with the years of German Idealism from roughly 1780 to 1830. This has been a surprise to me. What in God’s name do German thinkers from 250 years ago have to do with me?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

I certainly didn’t expect this. My first interest in philosophy in high school were Indian philosophers like the 8th century Adi Shankara, the 19th century thinker Vivekananda and the 20th century thinker Sri Aurobindo. And when I started to study philosophy in American philosophy departments, my focus was mainly on Wittgenstein, and on contemporary philosophers such as Rorty and McDowell. The history I was introduced to in classes was the standard fare of Descartes to Kant, and then from Russell to Quine. I took several classes on Kant and found them fascinating – if a bit remote. I wasn’t sure there was a universal reason which Kant had championed, and then when in recent years philosophers started to discuss Kant’s racism, it felt like Kant was a symbol of white supremacy. There were no classes back then at Cornell and Harvard on Fichte, Schelling or Hegel, who were treated as confused mystics to be kept from philosophy departments. My attitude to this was general disinterest. As far as I was concerned, I was trying to get Indian mystics into the conversation of global philosophy. Why should I bother with German mystics, if that is what Fichte and Hegel were?

If someone asked me during my time in academia what I was trying to do at the deepest level of my interest in philosophy, I would have said something like, “I am trying to bring together Aurobindo and Bertrand Russell, East and West into a global philosophy.” I didn’t actually say this back then because this synthesis was so far in the back of my unconscious that I felt unable to articulate it in the philosophy departments I moved in. Things have changed now. Many academic philosophers in America still don’t care about Aurobindo, but such an interest is now at least articulable.

Ironically, just as my long standing interest in bridging Russell and Aurobindo is now statable in academia, I have come to think the current standard way of articulating that interest is mistaken. It is in fact the mistake I made for decades since I started thinking of it as Russell on one side and Aurobindo on the other.

My mistake was I reified Western and Eastern philosophy and then made Russell and Aurobindo the figure heads of those reified traditions. I imagined Western philosophy was this thing happening over here, and Eastern philosophy was this other thing happening over there – like the two traditions were land masses separated by a vast ocean.

And it was striking that when I thought of Western philosophy, I mainly thought of British philosophers like Russell and American philosophers like Quine. I equated Western philosophy with analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy, as it was after WWII, with Anglo-American philosophy. The two world wars, and especially Nazism, made it seem like Germany was the heart of European Supremacy and that England and America were more cosmopolitan and open to other cultures.

So when I thought about German philosophy it was under this haze, as if it were the most conservative element of the land mass of Western philosophy. I had a strong sense that this wasn’t really true since the philosophers I was most drawn to were Wittgenstein from Austria and Heidegger from Germany. But why was I so drawn to Wittgenstein and Heidegger? It seemed that they too were fighting against the scientific bent of analytic philosophy and were trying to make room for spirituality and mysticism in the modern world. So they seemed like allies in my attempt to bridge the scientific Russell with the mystical Aurobindo. But then again, Heidegger was a Nazi for a few years. And like most analytic philosophers, I saw Wittgenstein not really as an Austrian philosopher but more like a transplanted British thinker – precisely the kind of identity Wittgenstein rejected. I knew Wittgenstein resisted that characterization, but I was unsure what the alternative could be.

It is hard to overstate how much Nazism has affected the way German philosophy was received in England and by extension in America. Fichte and Hegel in the early 1800s were strongly pro nationalistic thinkers – at a time before Germany was actually unified in 1871. So in the 20th century it was to assume that Fichte’s nationalism is just a precursor to Hitler’s nationalism.

A second reason for a distorted view of German idealists was the rise of the modern scientific research university at the beginning of the 20th century. This led to the revolution in philosophy departments Russell and Moore started at Cambridge in the early 1900s.

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But before Russell and Moore could enact their revolution, German idealists had enacted a different academic revolution a century earlier. German idealism in the early 1800s was the philosophy of an academic revolution in Germany. In the medieval universities, the higher, more prestigous fields of study were “the higher faculties” of theology, medicine, law and so on. Philosophy was seen as “a lower faculty” which taught logic and rhetoric – which were seen as basic training for college students and not very grand. This is why most Englightenment philosophers were non-academics – they preferred the freedom to think out of the university to being a philosophy professor who had to be subordinate to theologians and to the other higher faculties.

Universities in the time of the French revolution of the 1780s and 1790s were in a precarious situation. In France, they were actually abolished for a time as sites of old privilage and religious dogma. In the place of universities were academies and new technical schools more geared towards particular subjects. England had only Oxford and Cambridge, and they were generally seen as conservative and focused on classical education. Because unlike France and England, Germany wasn’t ruled by a single ruler, and wasn’t even a single entity, but consisted of hundreds of local kingdoms, there were a great number of smaller universities with more freedom. Still, the question even in Germany was: should there even be universities? To use language that is popular nowadays, we might say that the medievel universities “bundled together” disparate things which were pulling apart in late 1700s. The medievel universities brought together religion (with theology dominating), politics (the university as an arm of the king’s dominion), and mainly future jobs for its students as priests. It was because this bundling together was so intense in France that universities were abandoned along with the revolt against the King and the Church. In protestant Germany, there was no single religious institution. And since Germany wasn’t unifed, there wasn’t either a single ruler. So what would be point of having universities as opposed to just academies where people can do research (as was common from the 1600s), and vocational schools where people can be inculcated into various professions?

It is striking how none of this is common knowledge in contemporary academia. There is a whole mythology in academia that the contemporary university goes back to Plato’s academy, as if the university is this continuous institution going back 2,500 years. But this kind of generalization covers over all the interesting details. In 1800 the university seemed less like Plato’s academy than like an extension of the Vatican or the Emperor. Without the links to the church and the king, what holds a university together?

It is commonly said that Kant is the first great modern philosophy professor. But this is said as if he just happened to be a philosophy professor who was great – as if the concept of “philosophy professor” must have been as common then as it is now. But this is very far from reality. In fact, part of Kant’s greatness as a philosophy professor is that he gave a distinctly modern interpretation of what it is to be a philosophy professor. And indeed what it is for there to be a modern university.

Kant’s great institutional achivement was to substitute philosophy in the place of theology, and to revitalize the university with philosophy as the unifying force of the institution. This is hard to fathom now because philosophy departments are so clearly not the center of universities now. This is because the contemporary sense of philosophy as taught in philosophy departments is a much more emaciated conception – something like the under laborer to the sciences, where the sciences are now the undisputed engines of most universities.

In German Romanticism and its Institutions, Theodore Ziolkowski writes:

In [Fichte’s Jena lectures in 1794] we sense a clear anticipation of the academic transformation that Kant was to formulate a few year later … in 1798: the transformation, namely, that catapulted philosophy – that is to say, the arts and sciences – out of a subservient position as mere prerequesite for theology, law and medicine, and into a new superiority over and above all the specialied professional faculties. Most importantly, however, in Fichte’s lectures we see emerging the view that all knowledge is a unified whole, that the scholar is the individual whose role it is to understand that unity, and that the university is the place where such understanding most appropriately takes place….

[Similarly, in his 1802 lectures] Schelling [maintains] it is philosophy that seizes the whole human being, liberating his mind from the limitations of a unilateral education and elevating it into the realm of the general and the absolute.

So Kant and the German Idealists did was to substitute philosophy for theology as the foundation of all knowledge, and place the university centered on philosophy as the foundation of the modern, scientific secular society. For the German Idealists, philosophy is where it all comes together: science and spirituality, arts and politics, the individual and the communal, the human and the cosmos.

This vision of philosophy and the modern university had a tremendous impact in the 19th century. Randall Collins writes in The Sociology of Philosophies:

German idealism was the ideology of the university revolution. In support of this premise are four kinds of evidence: (1) the major German idealists were among the prime movers of university reforms; (2) the contents of the Idealists philosopies justified the reform, and the succession of major Idealist positions closely corresponded to contemporary prospects of the reform movement; (3) the French Revolution, as surrounding context, produced in Idealist ideology of spiritual freedom only in Germany, where it meshed with the interest of the university reformers, where by contrast in England and France the chief ideologies of the revolutionary period were neither Idealist nor university-oriented; and (4) whenever the German university reform was adopted elsewhere [like England and America], a generation of Idealist philosophers appeared, often in indigenous forms….

When Kant proposed to make the philosophical faculty arbiter of the other disciplines, he was carrying out a line which made academic careers in themselves superior to careers within the church; it simulataneously raised the power and prestige of those who practiced academic science, and elevated their salaries to equal those of the other higher faculties. When Fichte envisioned university philosophers as a new species of philosopher-king, he was putting in the most flamboyant form the tendency for academic degree holders to monopolize entry into government administration. The basis for these arguments had to be worked out in the concepts of philosophical discourse; but the motivation for creating these concepts came from the realistic assessment that the structure was moving in a direction favorable to a self-governing academic elite…The entire system went into a period of controlled expansion that lasted into the 1900s.

It is tempting to think that universities just morphed from their theological medieval instantiations into their contemporary scientific instantiations. As if we could go from the 1600s to the 1900s in a flash. But this wasn’t the case. The transition to the modern scientific univeristy was enabled by philosophy first playing the dominant role of the unifier of knowledge in the 19th century.

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This history of German Idealism and its transformative effect on the university has gotten lost in the haze of the academic revolution of the early 20th century. For by 1900, university subjects had started to get so specialized that it was seen as asburd that there could be any unified knowledge as such which brings together physics, biology, arts, math, history, economics, politics and so on. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw the rise of the associations of particular subjects and the rise of PhDs as the way to get certified for one’s specialization in a given subject. In this context, the German idealist vision of philosophy was looking pretty old fashioned. This is the transformation that the birth of analytic philosophy tracked. Russell and Moore reconceptualized the philosophical department from the Idealist sense of the unifier of all knowledge, to a department that analyzes language of the various subjects, and without any sense that there has to be a cohesion between such analyses.

So what does all this have to do with my initial vision of bringing together Russell and Aurobindo?

Simply put, the way I formulated the problem was to already accept the categorizations which made bringing them back together impossible. By the time Russell and Aurobindo came on the scene and developed their philosophies in the first half of the 20th century, it was impossible to bring them together. They were already functioning in a context where scientific philosophy and spiritual philosophy were pulling apart and had little to do with each other.

The main feature of German Idealism is that it was a modern, non-theologically based attempt at a synthesis of modern science and spirituality. The holism that German Idealism championed tried to see the world simultanesouly as the world which science studies and which is the locus of the growth of a spiritual, self-transcending consciousness of human beings. The Enlightenment of the 18th century had freed science and rational reflection from the dogmas of religion. But the German Idealists believed that in the process the Enlightenment had divided human beings against themselves into a mechanistic natural part and a disembodied mental part. Their grand aim was to reconcile this division by reinterpreting both nature and spirit, both science and spirituality so that they can be part of a harmonious whole. They sought to harmonize the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

It was precisely this spiritual dimension of holistic knowledge which enabled the German Idealists to put philosophy in the place of theology. In their view, philosophy was the secular, naturalistic version of religion, and the university was the place where the rising middle class can be inculcated into this new mode of self-consciousness.

This was pretty much exactly the vision of the university I had when I was an academic. As I was reorienting myself to the German Idealists in recent years, I came to see that far from their being white supremacists or fuzzy mystics, they were my intellectual fore fathers. Philosophy is filled with movements: the Enlightenment, the logical positivists, the ordinary language philsoophers, the pragmatists, the phenomenologists, etc. And at various points I was drawn to different of these traditions, especially to ordinary language philosophy. But I never really identified with the movements as a whole. They seemed not expansive enough to embrace the vision of bridging science and spirituality – as well as the east and west vision – which I was moved by.

Ironically, it was the movement of German Idealism, which the various 20th centuries movements rejected as passe and outdated, which I can now identity with as at least attempting to do the grand synthesis of science and spirituality which I was drawn to. And what is most surprising is that they placed their attempt at the grand synthesis right at the heart of a reconceptualization of the modern university.

Now, as it happened, German Idealism did fail in its attempt. But still, it failed while trying – in my view – a much grander and more exciting vision than most either 20th century scientific philosophers or spiritual mystics aimed for. The German Idealists were trying to square the circle and combine science with spirituality through academic philosophy. In the 20th century this attempt itself came to seem absurd – so much so that the true radicalness of their aims have been erased for the most part from the institutional memory of academic philosophy. Like with most academic subjects now, when Kant, Fichte and Hegel are taught now in philosophy classes, they are taught in a piece meal fashion, as if they have interesting views on the mind or society or morality. But their grand aim itself – of a synthesis of knowledge and spiritual transcendence – is so out of fashion and seems so fantastical that it is hardly mentioned.

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In retrospect, the German Ideaslists got two things deeply wrong. First, as the modern university expanded, it turned out there is actually no such things as the unification of all knowledge. And so that couldn’t possibly be the task of philosophy. In the early 1800s it was still feasible to imagine that a thinker could hold all the advances of knowledge in his mental grasp – that, like Geothe, one could integrate literature, science, politics and philosophy into something like a unified whole. By the end of the 1800s, this vision was a lost cause. The knowledge industry which is the modern university started to become so vast by the late 1800s that it was impossible to imagine that anyone could follow, let alone, integrate, the advances in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, mathematics, logic, literature, history, psychology and so on. Each of these subjects started to become professionalized by 1900, siloed into their own areas of expertise. And it seemed ridiculous that philosophers could somehow not only synthesize these subjects, but actually give personal and existential meaning to the advances as the unfolding of some unitary Self Consiousness.

Just as the industrial revolution of the 19th century disrupted the idealized coziness of village life and replaced it with the factories and the impersonality of city life, so too the knowledge industry boom of the 19th century displaced the German Idealists’ cozy sense that all knowledge can somehow by unified. The modern reality – which was true well before the internet even came on the scene and which has been true at least since the mid 1800s – is that human swim, as it were, in a vast ocean of knowledge, which in its totality can be neither unified nor made sense of as a whole. Knowledge started to grow exponentially in the 19th century – and it was growing without any particular end, nor with anyone or any grounp being able to control it.

This is what made German Idealism start to seem so out of date to thinkers like Russell, Moore and Husserl at the dawn of the 20th century. The knowledge industry had been so transformed over the 19th century that the German Idealists’ vision seemed quaint – as if one were trying to understand the contemporary bustling life of Manhattan through the categories of an 18th century village. The idea that philosophers could somehow be the linchpin of all knowledge started to seem as fantastical as thinking that the Vatican is the linchpin of all forms of social interaction. The 20th century movements like analytic philosophy and phenomenology started as an attempt to make sense of this new landscape of knowledge – and to make sense of, and reconcile, academic philosophers to the new, unchangable reality that they were no longer the center of the university. And in the course of the 20th century, academic philosophy, instead of being the favored son of the university as the German Idealists imagined, became more and more the disowned step son who had better learn his place in the family if he is to have a place at the table.

This transformation of universities and the production of knowledge had a huge impact on spirituality as well in the 20th century. In Medievel times, knowledge and spirituality were unified in theory because both aimed fundamentally at knowledge of God. The German Idealists essentially secularized this by treating philosophy as the mode of inquiry through which knowledge and spiritualty came together. For Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, knowledge wasn’t just a representation of how the world was, but was also the practical consciousness of how humans engaged with the world. The Absolute was the synthesis of theory and practice, of the real and the ideal. Self-Consciousness wasn’t just a self-awareness of one’s physical and biological being, but a heighted growth of self awareness which enabled one to transcend the ordinary forms of awarenss and ideas of the self. In effect, for the German Idealists, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, had as it end and aim human self-transcendence into a mode of heightened consciousness.

But as by the late 1800s knowledge production outstriped anything any one human could understand, knowledge in the academic sense also started to be separated from spirituality. Spirituality too was being “modernized”.

When as a teenager I was drawn to Vivekananda and Aurobindo, I missed all of this background. Vivekananda had studied western philosophy in his college in India, being taught German and British Idealism in his colonial university in the 1880s. Vivekananda’s great revolution was to take the old, pre-critical, village spirituality of his teacher Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and make it a live vision for the upwardly mobile educated Hindus and, then later, to Westerners as well. Central to this vision was the idea that Hinduism was compatible with science and modern life. That The Vedas, The Upanishads and the Gita are not ancient, remote texts, but are of continuing relevance to the present. But to make this possible, Vivekananda had to essentially interorize spirituality as something beyond the burgeoning scientific knowledge. In this modern Hinduism science enters the picture as something akin to the bourgoise, middle class life. The actual intellectual revolutions in physics, biology, economics, history and so on are not relevant to the spiritual life. The intellectual revolutions happen as techonological revolutions happen – as the backdrop of life and the ebb and flow of modern knowledge production. Spirituality transcends this by seeing all the transformations of knowledge as part of the flow of maya.

Vivekananda’s reinterpretation of spirituality took hold in India and around the world because it tracked the basic reality that the fine details of the revolutions of Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Proust and so on, which were the engines of the newly formed disciplines in academia, were impossible for most people to follow. What difference does the disagreement between Einstein and Heisenberg on the nature of quantum mechanics, or for that matter, between Russell and Heidegger on the nature of Being, make to most people’s lives? Knowledge production had become central to modern society, but it was still a fundamentally elitist preoccupation – elitist not necessarily in a pejorative sense, but in the realist sense that these were the drama of ideas for a highly select group of individuals who could move in the rarefied air of the hightest levels of knowledge production. What is the relevance of all that to a person trying to find meaning in their life in the midst of family turmoil or existential dislocation in the universe?

Vivekananda’s answer was: Not much! Knowledge is just knowledge. It is the play of the mind. It has to be respected and integrated into one’s vision of the world, but at the deepest level of individual growth, it has to be transcended.

In the 1880s Vivekananda faced a choice. He was an intellectual prodigy who excelled at his studies, and could go on to be a philosophy professor. Or he could become a modern day monk to spread the teachings of his teacher Ramakrishna. Vivekananda chose the latter path, and it was a highly symbolic. Though he had studied German and British Idealism, the writing was on the wall that the splintering of subjects in modern academia was making such idealism out dated. There was no synthesis to be had between the latest advances in academia and spirituality at the level of content. By leaving academia, Vivekananda rendered the advances in academia as just the background of modern life, which people don’t have to care about anymore than they need to care about the details of how cars function or the physiological details of the body.

In this way Vivekananda heraled modern spirituality, which was to have a profound impact on the 20th century. It was a double move. On the one hand, he acknowledged the importance of academic knowledge, as long as it is seen for what it is – part of, as it were, the life of samsara, the continual shifting waves of the ocean of life. On the other hand, spirituality is what helps us move beyond the life of samsara, and so helps us move beyond the mind and even it’s great struggles for knowledge – and this move for transcendence he located in the ancient texts of Hinduism. In this way, like Kierkegaard did earlier in the 19th century with Christianity, Vivekananda made spirituality fundamentally existential and contrasted it with the intellectual life. The intellectual life is what the academics do, but spirituality is what every person can do to grow in consciousness.

We can see the influence of this picture in modern day spiritual thinkers like Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurthi or Eckhart Tolle. For these thinkers college was just a backdrop of the middle class life – almost an extension of high school. The intellectual battles will continue to happen in academia the way spiders spin their webs. The point of spirituality isn’t to partake of those battles, but to transcend them into the unfolding of one’s personal transcendent consciousness.

In contrast, the optimism of the synthesis of knowledge production and spirituality at the heart of German Idealism seems quaint and almost fantastical. We live in a world where academic specialization is such a feature of life that it seems absurd to think that those battles can have anything to do with the personal, pulsating issues of one’s own striving for meaning. But in the early 1800s, as the German Idealists were trying to help build the modern university, it didn’t seem absurd at all to them, but actually very much a live possibility. Just as I longed to connect the academic disputes in my philosophy education to the broader questions of spirituality, so too they longed to connect them into a unified vision of intellectual spirituality – a synthesis of the mind and spirit into a harmonious whole.

This vision still moves me, even though the way German Idealists pursued it is no longer plausible. They suggested a kind of identifiation between the intellectual and spiritual lives – as if all people would be able to partake of the intellectual, academic life they saw themselves as heralding. They deeply got wrong how universities, and knowledge production, would develop in an industrial world. I associate German Idealism with the innocence of my college years – the hopes of my fresh faced freshman self who saw in the university the vision of a modern, secular monastery. I identify with German Idealists because I see in them my 18 year old self. I am happy to think that my college self wasn’t as alone as he thought in his pursuits of squaring the circle of the intellectual and the spiritual lives – that 200 years earlier, some fresh faced college students had had a similar vision.

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There was, however, another thing the German Idealists got deeply wrong. And here they played a distant causal role in the pains of my 18 year old self. Just as the unification of all knowledge they envisioned now seems out dated, so too does their optimism that they were integrating the knowledge of all cultures. This was the legacy of the racism of that time, and the German Idealists were a part of that legacy.

This is most clear in Kant and Hegel. If philosophy is the arbiter of all knowledge, and which explains how knowledge as such is possible and so which can be the center of the university, how is philosophy related to knowledge seen in a global perspective? How can German philosophers in the early 19th century speak to knowledge of human beings as such? The innovations that Kant and Hegel, along with others of their time, heraled in the modern university dealt with this issue through the idea of racial heirarchies. And especially by making philosophy as the unique achievement of Europeans.

As Peter K Park showed in his book Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy: The Formation of the Philosophical Canon 1780-1930, prior to the late 18th century, it was commonly assumed in Europe that philosophy began in either Africa or Asia. There was back then no need to think that philosophy was a uniquely European achievement. Since philosphy was seen in any case as one of the lower faculties in the university, it would be strange to think it was somehow unique to Europeans.

Park argues that Kant was the first major philosopher to adopt the idea that philosophy was essentially European, and that other races were not capable of the abstract reflection needed for philosophy. Park, however, doesn’t connect this point to the key role Kant played in the formation of the modern university, and for the central place Kant gave to philosophy in the university. Seen in this institutional context, the way Kant synthesized the racial prejudices of his time with his philosophy are easily understandable.

For Kant philosophy is the center of the university because philosophy is the transcendental study of how any knowledge is possible. This means that philosophy is fundamentally a priori – it doesn’t depend on knowledge we gain from experience, since philosophy concerns the a priori conditions which make experience possible in the first place. But how can philosophy be the center of the university if the philosophers have to learn empirically what philosophers in other traditions thought?

The late 1700s was the time when Europeans were coming into greater contact with Chinese and Indian philosophies, and with philosophies from other parts of the world. There were Chairs being founded in Sanskrit or in Oriential Studies. Now, imagine you are Kant. You are trying to elavate philosophy in your university system by downplaying theology without elevating science into the place of theology. You see philosophy as the linchpin of all knowledge, and which has to be at the center of the university. And here are your colleagues starting to engage with Indian texts which seem on the surface to be dealing with questions of the self, nature and the meaning of life. It is unclear to you if this is theology or philosophy, or if it is just superstition. What do you do?

One of the insights of Park’s book is that this was a live question at that time. Some thinkers such as the Romantic Friedrich Schlegel were advocating treating the philosophies of other traditions on a par with European philosophy, and to develop a global, comparative history of philosophy. That is one way European philosophy could have gone in the 19th century. But it didn’t. What won out institutionally was the Kantian vision that since philosophy concerns the possibility of all knowledge, it has to be a priori, and so it can’t be the result of empirical investigation into other traditions. In this way Kant’s transcendental view merged with the developing racial ideology at the time to render non-European cultures as not having “achieved” philosophy. And with Hegel, this Kantian vision becomes deepened and fully implemented institutionally. So the very German Idealism which revolutionized philosophy and the institution of the modern university also justified and placed Eurocentrism at the heart of that revolution.

Kant and Hegel, in effect, equated the a priori nature of philosophy with what is natural and intuitive to Europeans as the philosophical traditon they are already used to studying. Even for Kant and Hegel, philosophy wasn’t so a priori that it didn’t involve studying Plato and Aristotle, or Descartes or Hume. They have to read books and that happens only through experience. But these books of the European tradition were seen as internal to philosophy and so as not really empirical at all. It involved reading but that didn’t make it empirical. Whereas reading Indian or Chinese texts seemed empirical because it involved situating the texts in Asian cultural contexts which the European philosophers can only learn through fields such as history, sociology and anthropology.

This equation of a priori philosophy with thinking through our European tradition set the stage for academic philosophy in Europe and America for the next two hundred years. Even when analytic philosophy and phenomenology rebeled against Idealism, they left unquestioned the Eurocentrism which equated the a priori nature of philosophy with engaging with the European tradition.

So now here I am as an 18 year old, wanting to study philosophy at Cornell in 1995, and trying to develop a holistic vision of my life which can integrate philosophy and spirituality. To do this through my university education, I am eager to develop my intellectual side and so to absorb my philosophy classes. And yet my classes are still premised on the idea that philosophy is only European. That means that I have to relate to Indian philosophy as if it could be at most spiritual philosophy interpreted in the modern, Vivekananda sense of being not in tension with intellectual philosophy.

The German Idealists sought to integare philosophy as both intellectual understanding and spirituality, and they saw the Kantian framework of transcendental philosophy as enabling precisely such a synthesis. But because the synthesis was strutured thorugh Eurocentrism, it meant that the synthesis as they did it could only really be possible as long as one accepts the Eurocentrism. If you are not European, the very institutional mechanisms of philosophy would force you into a splintered self and to choose sides: be either European and intellectual, or non-European and at most spiritual.

Just as the German Idealists didn’t forsee how the university would become centered in science and not in philosophy, they also didn’t forsee how the world would become global in a way that went beyond Eurocentrism. And so it raises the question: what would a German Idealism which was truly global even look like? This was the question between Schlegel and Hegel – between a compartive picture of philosophy versus a Eurocentric one. And in a different way, it was as well the question between Schopenhuer and Hegel, with Schopenhuer trying to create a Kantian view fused with the insights of Indian philosophy.

The issue of what global philosophy can look was thus an issue internal to German Idealism itself. That is how I can both admire German Idealism, and yet be critical of its Eurocentric legacy. To bring in here racism as the main cause is ultimately unilluminating. For what is at issue is what kind of an expansion of consciousness is needed to truly see philosophy as a global activity. This is not a question of simply not being racist, or of being “open” to all traditions. The challenge is precisely how to develop something coherent and unified out of the choas of such openness. What would it mean to be open to all traditions? Would that make anything philosophy? Would that render philosophy global or so amorphous as to be incoherent?

The continuing importance of German Idealism isn’t that they got it all right. Nor even that they were exemplary people who overcame their baises – they clearly didn’t. But it’s helpful to see things in historical context. The German Idealists struggled to formulate issues and institutions which dealt with our modern lives, and in particular sought to harmonize science and spirituality, unity and plurality. I admire them for their attempts, even as I am continually moved to transcend their attempts.