of the Vedas. The last and most important 20th century
figure in the lineage of thinkers I have referred too was
undoubtedly Martin Heidegger – who saw the type of
purely instrumental, utilitarian and scientific rationality that
had evolved since the Enlightenment as presaging “the end
of philosophy” and its transformation into science – which
he saw as the new religion – one which would entrench the
global dominance of what he called “calculative thinking”,
thereby threatening the end of thinking as such –
understood as “meditative thinking”
Germany as the India of Europe
Unlike their English imperial, military, commercial and
colonialist counterparts, the lineage of German ‘Romantic’
scholars and thinkers identified with India and saw it as their
spiritual ‘motherland’ or ‘mother culture’. In doing so they
attained a deeper self-understanding of the significance of
their own specifically German spiritual culture, language and
fatherland – recognising it as ‘the Orient of Europe’^1 ,
indeed effectively as ‘the India of Europe’. Goethe in
particular saw it as vital that Germans would not seek to
establish a military-imperial ‘nation state’ on the model of
England or France (and later America) but instead to
recognise themselves as an essentially ‘cultural state’
(Kulturstaat). Many others saw the mission of Germany as
that of guarding artistic and spiritual-scientific culture as