Everything about Max M Ller totally explained
» For the Danish Colonel Max Müller, see Second War of Schleswig. For the Catholic philosopher see Max Müller (Catholic intellectual).
Friedrich Max Müller (
December 6,
1823 –
October 28,
1900), more commonly known as
Max Müller, was a
German philologist and
Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of
Indian studies, who virtually created the discipline of
comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of
Indology, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the
Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.
Life and work
He was born in
Dessau, the son of the
Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller, whose verse
Franz Schubert had set to music in his song-cycles
Die schöne Müllerin and
Winterreise. Max Müller's mother, Adelheide Müller, was the eldest daughter of a chief minister of Anhalt-Dessau. Müller knew
Felix Mendelssohn and had
Carl Maria von Weber as a
godfather.
In 1841 he entered
Leipzig University, where he left his early interest in music and poetry in favour of philosophy. Müller received his
Ph.D. in 1843 for a dissertation on
Spinoza's
Ethics. He also displayed an aptitude for languages, learning the Classical languages
Greek and
Latin, as well as
Arabic,
Persian and
Sanskrit. In 1844 Müller went to Berlin to study with
Friedrich Schelling. He began to translate the
Upanishads for Schelling, and continued to research Sanskrit under
Franz Bopp, the first systematic scholar of the
Indo-European languages. Schelling led Müller to relate the history of language to the history of religion. At this time, Müller published his first book, a German translation of the
Hitopadesa, a collection of
Indian
fables.
In 1845, Müller moved to
Paris to study Sanskrit under
Eugène Burnouf. It was Burnouf who encouraged him to translate the complete
Rig Veda, using manuscripts available in England.
Müller moved to England in
1846 in order to study
Sanskrit texts in the collection of the
East India Company. He supported himself at first with creative writing, his novel
German Love being popular in its day. Müller's connections with the East India Company and with Sanskritists based at
Oxford University led to a career in Britain, where he eventually became the leading intellectual commentator on the
culture of India, which Britain controlled as part of its Empire. This led to complex exchanges between Indian and British intellectual culture, especially through Müller's links with the
Brahmo Samaj. He became a member of
Christ Church, Oxford in
1851, when he gave his first series of lectures on comparative philology. He gained appointments as Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in
1854 and as Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. Defeated in the
1860 competition for the tenured Chair of Sanskrit, he later became Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Theology (1868 – 1875), at
All Souls College.
Müller attempted to formulate a philosophy of religion that addressed the crisis of faith engendered by the historical and critical study of religion by German scholars on the one hand, and by the
Darwinian revolution on the other. Müller was wary of Darwin's work on human evolution, and attacked his view of the development of human faculties. His work was taken up by cultural commentators such as his friend
John Ruskin, who saw it as a productive response to the crisis of the age (compare
Matthew Arnold's "
Dover Beach"). He analyzed mythologies as rationalizations of natural phenomena, primitive beginnings that we might denominate "
protoscience" within a cultural evolution; Müller's "anti-Darwinian" concepts of the evolution of human cultures are among his least lasting achievements.
Müller shared many of the ideas associated with
Romanticism, which coloured his account of ancient religions, in particular his emphasis on the formative influence on early religion of emotional communion with natural forces.
Müller's Sanskrit studies came at a time when scholars had started to see language development in relation to cultural development. The recent discovery of the
Indo-European (IE) language group had started to lead to much speculation about the relationship between
Greco-Roman cultures and those of more ancient peoples. In particular the
Vedic culture of
India was thought to have been the ancestor of European Classical cultures, and scholars sought to compare the genetically related European and Asian languages in order to reconstruct the earliest form of the root-language. The Vedic language,
Sanskrit, was thought to be the oldest of the IE languages. Müller therefore devoted himself to the study of this language, becoming one of the major Sanskrit scholars of his day. Müller believed that the earliest documents of Vedic culture should be studied in order to provide the key to the development of
pagan European religions, and of religious belief in general. To this end, Müller sought to understand the most ancient of Vedic scriptures, the
Rig-Veda.
Müller was greatly impressed by
Ramakrishna Paramhansa, his contemporary and proponent of
Vedantic philosophy, and authored several essays and books on him..
An 1907 study of Müller's inaugural
Hibbert Lecture of 1878 was made by one of his contemporaries, D. Menant. It argued that a crucial role was played by Müller and social reformer
Behramji Malabari in initiating debate on child marriage and widow remarriage questions in India.
For Müller, the study of the language had to relate to the study of the culture in which it had been used. He came to the view that the development of languages should be tied to that of belief-systems. At that time the Vedic scriptures were little-known in the
West, though there was increasing interest in the philosophy of the
Upanishads. Müller believed that the sophisticated Upanishadic philosophy could be linked to the primitive henotheism of early Vedic Brahmanism from which it evolved. He had to travel to
London in order to look at documents held in the collection of the
British East India Company. While there he persuaded the company to allow him to undertake a critical edition of the Rig-Veda, a task he pursued doggedly over many years (1849 - 1874), and which resulted in the critical edition for which he's most remembered.
For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of
nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism. He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined
supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is 'a disease of language'. By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view 'gods' began as words constructed in order to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names:
Zeus,
Jupiter,
Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word 'Dyaus', which he understands to imply 'shining' or 'radiance'. This leads to the terms 'deva', 'deus', 'theos' as generic terms for a god, and to the names 'Zeus' and 'Jupiter' (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking closely resembled the later ideas of
Nietzsche.
Nevertheless Müller's work contributed to the developing interest in
Aryan culture which set Indo-European ('Aryan') traditions in opposition to
Semitic religions. He was deeply saddened by the fact that these later came to be expressed in
racist terms. This was far from Müller's own intention. For Müller the discovery of common Indian and European ancestry was a powerful argument against racism.
In 1881, he published a translation of the first edition of
Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason. He agreed with
Schopenhauer that this edition was the most direct and honest expression of Kant's thought. His translation corrected several errors that were committed by previous translators. Müller wrote, "The materials are now accessible, and the English-speaking race, the race of the future, will have in Kant's Critique another
Aryan heirloom, as precious as the Veda — a work that may be criticised, but can never be ignored."
His wife, Georgina Adelaide (died
1916) had his papers and correspondence carefully bound; they're at the
Bodleian Library, Oxford. The
Goethe Institutes in India are named
Max Müller Bhavan in his honour. Müller's son
Wilhelm Max Müller was also an important scholar.
Response
Müller's comparative religion was criticized as subversive of the Christian faith. According to Monsignor Munro, the Roman Catholic bishop of
St Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow, his 1888
Gifford Lectures on the "science of religion" represented nothing less than "a crusade against divine revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity". Similar accusations had already led to Müller's exclusion from the Boden chair in Sanskrit in favour of the uncontroversial
Monier Monier-Williams. By the 1880s Müller was being courted by
Charles Godfrey Leland,
Helena Blavatsky and other writers who were seeking to assert the merits of "
Pagan" religious traditions over Christianity. The designer
Mary Fraser Tytler stated that Müller's book
Chips from a German Workshop (a collection of his essays) was her "Bible", which helped her to create a multi-cultural sacred imagery.
Müller distanced himself from these developments, and remained within the
Lutheran faith in which he'd been brought up. He several times expressed the view that a "reformation" within Hinduism needed to occur comparable to the Christian Reformation. In his view, "if there's one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it's the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed.... Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states". He used his links with the
Brahmo Samaj in order to encourage such a reformation on the lines pioneered by
Ram Mohan Roy.
In a letter to his wife, he said:
» The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years.
Munro had argued conversely that Müller's theories "uprooted our idea of God, for it repudiated the idea of a personal God." He made "divine revelation simply impossible, because it [histheory] reduced God to mere nature, and did away with the body and soul as we know them." Müller remained profoundly influenced by the Kantian
Transcendentalist model of spirituality, and was opposed to Darwinian ideas of human development, arguing that "language forms an impassable barrier between man and beast." Though he took the view that Christian
morality was superior to Vedic traditions, his Gifford lectures rejected the concept of direct divine revelation in favour of a trancendental model of spiritual insight, which, in his view, was perfected in the
Vedanta. However, at the very end of his life he embarrassed some members of the Brahmo Samaj when he wrote to them asking them to declare that their version of Hinduism was now a form of Christianity, and that they'd become Christians.
Some controversy has arisen in certain quarters in
Hindu nationalism over Müller's interpretation of Vedic culture. In recent years he's been accused of using his scholarship to undermine Hinduism and encourage Christian missionary work.
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