| While the German National Socialist appropriation of the Sanskrit term "Aryan" was used for the most illegitimate purposes of racially based nationalism, its promotion across twentieth-century Europe was the result of a cluster of exotic linguistic and philosophical ideas related to India, found first in works of Greco-Roman historians, and currently in those of Hindu nationalists. Such ideas and fears about origin, eschatology, nationalism, and nihilism were to expand, particularly during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, in a tangle of misinterpretation and misappropriation that largely stood outside the clearly exploitative problems of colonialism itself. This dissertation attempts to trace the history of ideas that lead eighteenth and nineteenth century English, French, and primarily German thinkers to derive nihilistic philosophies from works of Sanskrit literature that are usually considered to be life affirming. While the contributions to the Western history of ideas of figures such as Friedrich Schlegel and Schopenhauer are indubitable, this study shows in new detail how they also helped create a great deal of confusion and paradox about ideas of origin, ontology, and teleology. This dissertation argues that the use of ancient Indian religious thought in constructing a German national identity went particularly awry when the crucial Hindu-Buddhist distinction between the pursuit of material satisfaction and the pursuit of material transcendence was misconstrued. |
