German philosophy and the idea of India

The unifying themes or commonalties of western Orientalist discourse have frequently been emphasized at the expense of the differences between European intellectuals' portrayals of the non-European world. But the diversity of such portrayals should not be downplayed. The representations of India in eighteenth and nineteenth-century German philosophy, for example, are noteworthy for their diversity. A study of German philosophers' representations of India sheds light upon the manner in which Herder, Kant, Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche situated German culture in relation to the so-called Orient. This analysis of cultural mapping and cultural geography reveals the range of German philosophers' perspectives on India and also discloses the existence of paradigmatic structures around which their representations of cultural contiguity and distance were organized.