Polytheism and Indology: Lessons from The Nay Science

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India has been producing knowledge for thousands of years. But entry into the contemporary globalized setting of knowledge has demanded a reckoning with powers that have sought to determine exclusively the terms upon which India might enter. The nineteenth century saw the colonization of India and its reduction to an object of study, rather than a producer of knowledge for itself and the world. This book explains why the arrival of India upon the European intellectual scene provoked a crisis, the response to which was the creation of the discipline of Indology, with the effective mission of taming India's spiritual traditions by gaining control over the interpretation of their sacred texts. Polytheism and Indology makes the results of Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee's inquiry in The Nay Science: A History of German Indology available in a more concise form, as well as broadening and deepening the scope of their inquiry.

Edward P. Butler received his doctorate in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2004 for his dissertation, "The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus". Since then, he has published regularly in academic journals and edited volumes, primarily on Platonism, the polytheistic philosophy of religion, and the theologies of several polytheistic traditions. From 2014 to 2019, he was the co-editor of an independent academic journal, Walking the Worlds: A Biannual Journal of Polytheism and Spiritwork, and presently serves on the advisory board of the journal, Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology. A practicing polytheist, he promotes the preservation, restoration and revival of polytheistic traditions around the globe as the director of the Center for Global Polytheist and Indigenous Traditions at INDICA.

This book is a celebration of The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, and a response to the challenge it poses. Its humble title notwithstanding, Adluri and Bagchee's book is no mere history, but is itself a historic moment in the Indian intellectual tradition's self-assertion in the global arena as no longer merely an object of study, but a producer of knowledge for itself and for the world. India has been producing knowledge for thousands of years, of course. But entry into the contemporary globalized setting of knowledge has demanded a reckoning with powers that have sought to determine exclusively the terms upon which India might enter. This reckoning required investigating the ideological setting of "Indology", the ostensibly scientific enterprise in which India found itself embroiled.

This inquiry has been carried out by Adluri and Bagchee with extraordinary patience, diligence and insight. The results make it evident that Indology as practiced in Germany over the course of some 150 years, far from being the pinnacle of scientific philology that it claimed to be, has constituted nothing so much as a systematic effort to delegitimate indigenous intellectual traditions in order to secure control over the interpretation of India's sacred texts in the interest of a thinly-veiled theological agenda.

In effect, India arrived upon a European intellectual scene dominated by the spiritual crisis of monotheism and, as the bearer of an unbroken polytheistic tradition of unsurpassed antiquity and vibrancy, intensified that crisis by its arrival. As such, the 'scientific' engagement with India on the part of Western academics, many of whom came more or less directly from the seminary, was hardly going to be carried out on the basis of disinterested study. Indeed, the Indologists studied in The Nay Science were by no means shy about proclaiming their conviction of Christendom's religious and also racial superiority. The analysis and understanding of these Indological tactics remains crucial for India's intellectual and spiritual future, inasmuch as there has been no sea change in Indology that would render the strategies of German text-critical philology a matter of mere history.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to facilitate the ongoing project of analyzing and confronting Indology's ideological components by making the basic results of Adluri and Bagchee's inquiry available to those who may not require those results' full evidentiary basis; and second, to expand upon those results, broadening and deepening the inquiry of The Nay Science. Part of this latter task involves making explicit certain aspects of the authors' argument which are only tacitly expressed in the text, but more fully elaborated elsewhere, particularly in other works by Vishwa Adluri, such as his doctoral dissertation, published as Parmenides, Plato, and Mortal Philosophy: Return from Transcendence (New York: Continuum, 2011), his translation of Arbogast Schmitt's Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), and miscellaneous articles on the Platonic tradition. I am aided in this task by a long acquaintance with Adluri's work, as well as by my own work on Platonism, the metaphysics of polytheism, and the theologies and philosophies of several ancient and contemporary polytheistic civilizations.

I met Edward Butler at the New School for Social Research in an intensely intellectual environment permeated by the voices and spirits of Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Reiner Schürmann. I was working on Parmenides and Plato, and Butler was working on Proclus and neo-Platonism. In a university setting where contemporary Continental philosophy, preferably in its latest incarnation, dominated, there were few students with whom we could discuss ancient philosophy. Thus began our friendship.

Butler, I discovered, had an aptitude for understanding systems of thought I found alien-the French neo-Platonists of the last century, for example. But there was more than an antiquarian interest in arcane areas of study. For us, exploring the Ancients meant to live creatively and think uncompromisingly at the end of modernity. This "end of modernity” was existentially present in the philosophers we all revered at our university, intellectuals who had fled Europe in the early twentieth century. All illusions of rationality, ethics, aesthetics, and humanity were covered in the dark shadows of these events. My own teacher Reiner Schürmann puts it succinctly:

All that European humanity has made of itself in the first half of the twentieth century, and all that it is in the process of doing to itself on a planetary scale in the second half that makes darkness so familiar to us, must have distant and profound origins. The ease with which a whole age nonetheless continues to graze, in spite of exterminations still alive in our memories and planetary asphyxiations already in our throats, gives grounds for perplexity. To think is to linger on the conditions in which one is living, to linger on the site where we live. Thus to think is a privilege of that epoch which is ours, provided that the essential fragility of the sovereign referents becomes evident to it. This assigns to philosophy, or to whatever takes its place, the task of showing the tragic condition beneath all principled constructions.

As inheritors of a civilization with an unsurpassed wealth of ancient texts, as well as a native tradition of commentary upon and inquiry into those texts of unsurpassed richness and diversity, the question of the nature and status of philology-the study of ancient writings-in the modern world would in any case be of importance to the self-understanding of contemporary Indians. But there are reasons why the study of Indian texts in the West holds a special concern, and requires a special inquiry. This inquiry into the history and presuppositions of Indology, that branch of modern philology concerned with the Indian textual tradition, particularly as practiced for more than a century and a half in Germany, is the task of The Nay Science.

German Indology, with its peculiar 'historical- critical' or 'text-historical' method, for many years successfully promoted itself as the cutting edge scientific investigation of India's intellectual legacy. The argument of The Nay Science, however, is that the purpose which has guided German Indology has actually been the delegitimation of the Indian commentarial tradition and the arrogation to itself of sole interpretive authority over India's sacred texts, in the service of an ultimately theological agenda. The Nay Science argues that the method informing modern German scholarship on India is rooted in Neo-Protestant theology, and that German Indologists' claim to an objectivity and agnosticism that would render them superior to the indigenous Indian commentarial tradition depends upon obscuring German Indology's own theological and metaphysical commitments. The Nay Science argues that German Indology has given itself the mission, not of understanding, but of philologically taming and purifying Indian texts.

The sense of criticism' in the historical-critical method of German Indology derives specifically from the scriptural hermeneutics of 18th and 19th century Protestant theologians such as J. S. Semler (1725-1791) and F. C. Baur (1792-1860), who sought to secure a firm ground for Christianity in the age of rationalism by separating the supposedly contingent, merely historical elements of scripture from the divinely inspired core within it. This purification of Christianity was to result in a religion freed from the contingent historical circumstances of its emergence, namely Judaism, and hence rendered universal and rational. This goal led these theologians to sacrifice whatever in scripture was construed as having been particular to the Jewish people for the sake of the 'universal' truths that alone were salvific for humanity as a whole. The theological- critical project drove a wedge, first between the Old and New Testaments, and then within the New Testament between allegedly Judaic and Pauline elements. Hence.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages