See also: Müller
Friedrich max Müller (December 6th, 1823 - October 28th, 1900), more known under the name of max Müller , was a philologist and German orientalist, one of the founders of the Indian studies and compared Mythologie. Its own interpretations (also called solar mythology ) were criticized thereafter but it had introduced a new field of study specialist in comparative literature.
Biography
Wire of the romantic poet Wilhelm Müller, Müller knew Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Carl Maria von Weber was her godfather. But at the university of Leipzig, it left the music for the study of the Sanscrit and the Indian mythology.In 1846, it came to England to study Indian documents and it was to live the remaining one of its days there. He became professor of philology compared with Oxford then professor of compared theology (1868-75). He analyzed mythologies like rationalizations of natural phenomena, the primitive beginnings of science from the evolutionary point of view. This model is the part of its work which seems more to have aged.
Müller in particular sought to in general study in the texts of the vedic culture the bases of the Indo-European cultures. It prepared a critical edition of the Rig-Véda which took to him nearly 25 years (1849 - 1874).
He was also a novelist and its novel German Love had a certain success. Müller was also related to Indian intellectuals like the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj and the Indian attempts at Syncrétisme.
Work
For Müller, the vedic Indian culture represents a worship of nature and the gods are of the active forces of the nature which were personified, of the physical phenomena converted into characters.
Müller summarized its theory by saying that mythology is a “ disease of the language ”. The words of process become descriptions of beings and accounts. The gods would thus have started like concepts before being used like proper names.
Thus, the god-father of the Indo-Europeans appears under various names, Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. All these names come from the word Dyaus which it analyzes like “brightness” and which gives the words “deva”, “deus”, “theos” like common nouns for a god, and names of “Zeus” and “Jupiter”. Thus a metaphor becomes ossified, as in certain ideas of Nietzsche. But Müller had not applied its criticism to all the religions and considered that the Christianisme was morally higher than the Hindu cultures than he studied. On the other hand, its theories on the original cultures “Aryan” were not accompanied by racist theses .
Its articles and its correspondence are with the Bodleian Library in Oxford
See too
Source
- max Müller, compared Mythology , edition established, presented and annotated by Pierre Brunel, Robert Laffont, Books, 2002.
External bonds
- max Müller, Test of compared mythology , Foreword and introduction, First part, Second part and conclusion, Editions A. Durand, Paris, 1859, pp. 47-100.
Quotations
- If I were to quote the country in the world which received the most richnesses, of power, beauty, I would quote India. And if I were to say under which sky the human spirit had the most problems to solve and found the greatest number of solutions deserving the attention of all, there still it would be India. All the life is there, presents, under the sky of India, with sharp. in what India can teach us
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