Chapter 7 The Making of a Book of Wisdom: Hermann Keyserling and Richard Wilhelm’s I Ging
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Abstract
In the Anglophone world, we usually associate Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) with the I Ching, the English translation of the Book of Changes (Yijing) which first appeared in the United States in 1950. But the I Ching is actually an English version of Wilhelm’s I Ging (1924). Divided into three sections, this chapter will examine the German context in the making of the I Ging. I will argue that in addition to the well-known partnership between Wilhelm and Lao Naixuan (1843–1921) in producing the I Ging, there was also an equally important partnership between Wilhelm and Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946), who led the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt. More significantly, the Wilhelm-Keyserling partnership strongly shaped Wilhelm’s view that the Book of Changes could give answers to the pressing problems of the Weimar Republic. In the I Ging (and later in the I Ching, in more subdue forms), we find Wilhelm focusing on the political wisdom in the Book of Changes. This political reading is in stark contrast to the mystical-psychological reading advocated by Carl Jung (1875–1961) in his famous “Foreword” to the I Ching. As such, we must treat the I Ging and the I Ching as two different texts. While the former was written for German readers in the Weimer Republic, the latter was written for American readers in post-WWII USA.