False Universals and the Science of Religion: Max Müller and the Episteme of Cosmopolitan Imperialism

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Notes

1. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 189–91 and 243–45. See also Byrne, Natural Religion, 183.

2. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance.

3. Müller, Science of Religion, 19.

4. Chidester, Empire and Religion, 59, 88.

5. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 243–45.

6. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 247.

7. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 317 and 314.

8. Habermas, “Awareness of What is Missing,” 16.

9. The main binary, universal-particular, also appears in verbal form as a contrast between besondern and verallgemeinen. See Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 369.

10. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 256.

11. Ibid., 256 and 265–66.

12. Ibid., 267 and 257.

13. Ibid., 258 and 260.

14. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 244–46.

15. Clooney, Comparative Theology, 12–13.

16. Hahn, Commentaries, 27.

17. Hahn, Interbeing, 17 and 23.

18. Newland, Introduction to Emptiness, 8.

19. Müller, Science of Religion, 14–16.

20. Concerning the gender politics of religious fundamentalism, see Masha Gessen’s scholarship, for example, which chronicles the centrality of virulent homophobia to President Vladimir Putin’s politics and to his Orthodox Russian supporters. Virulent heteronormativity and patriarchy are typical of many devotees of religious fundamentalism. See Gessen, Future is History.

21. Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 267–68 and 261. I have altered the translation.

22. Ibid., 267.

23. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 1–5; Habermas, “Awareness of What is Missing,” 15–23.

24. Habermas, “The Political,” 21–22.

25. For an excellent comparative analysis of religions and one that eschews the ethnocentric husk of Western universals, see Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making I. Maraldo brilliantly contrasts Christian theism and nontheistic Eastern traditions and delves deeply into comparative religious politics.

26. Byrne, Natural Religion, 216.

27. Müller, Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, 229–32.

28. On nontheistic and non-moralistic religious traditions, see, for example, Moeller, The Moral Fool.

29. Müller, My Autobiography, 293.

30. Müller, Science of Religion, 8.