7 - The Ambivalence of a Spiritual Quest in India: Waldemar Bonsels's Indienfahrt

Summary

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the spiritual and cultural identity of many German intellectuals came under pressure as a new sociocultural paradigm—economic (proletarization and industrial capitalism), political (democratization), and scientific (empirical models of knowledge) replaced older traditions and values. To put it more boldly, the spiritual integrity of the human being seemed for many thinkers to have been relegated to the junk heap of a Darwinian world, in which living beings clashed over resources and struggled for survival. Such tensions resonate frequently in the era's debates over science and human knowledge. The Buddhist advocate Theodor Schultze (1824–98), for instance, rebukes the scientific method as overly attached to organic nature, in which, as he posits, “nicht mehr die ‘Lebenskraft’ wohl aber ‘das Leben,’ ‘der Organismus,’ ‘die Natur’ und dergleichen Subjekte mehr als unmittelbar wirkende Mächte oder Prinzipien auftreten, weil der Verfasser nicht im Stande ist, die Vorgänge des Lebensprozesses bloß aus den Kräften der unorganischen Natur zu erklären.” Paul Dahlke (1865–1928), a medical doctor and another Buddhist devotee, admonishes: “Je weiter der menschliche Geist vorwärts schreitet, um so breiter und entschiedener klafft der Spalt zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft.” Yet these concerns cannot be relegated to the discordant voices of a few fringe intellectuals. A quick glance through the more mainstream Protestant and Catholic journals published during the Kaiserreich (1871–1918), for instance, also reveals the widespread aversion to “materialism's” predominance and a growing sense of spiritual vacuity among the era's intellectuals.