Vishva Adluri's Gay Nescience

   Nescience is the word an older generation of babus used for Maya- Illusion. 

What Parmenides called 'Opinion'.

As in 'every asshole's got one'.

   Adluri & Bagchi are perhaps punning on this usage, as well as on the title of a work by Nietzsche, in their  recent book 'The Nay Science'- which is an attack on Nineteenth Century German Indology; in particular, its narrowly historicist Philology, not the as yet ongoing Credentialist Ponzi Scheme of its associated, though utterly anachronistic, Academic availability cascades. .

I say this without malice.

  After all, Poetry, if only as Socio-proctology, is nothing other than that 'giving the finger' to whatever spewed the questing fewmet of its current dead metaphor- or resurrected Christ- thus occasioning no Pilate like equivocation, or washing of hands, unless 'many fingered' Time is its own Angulimala and, in Guru-dakshina, keeps pruning all but one of its digits, such that Bergsonian Duration is, as kshanikavada, but its own univocal, for scholastic, stink.

   Why did German Professors study Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic and so on? One answer is that Germany was divided up into a lot of little Princedoms which competed with each other to attract gamblers to their casinos, invalids to their spas, music lovers to their Opera Halls, pilgrims to their Cathedrals and students to their Universities.  German economic backwardness meant that young men had to spend a long time getting more or less worthless academic credentials before either sinking back into pedagogic drudgery or securing a berth in the bureaucracy or the liberal professions. 

  Life in Germany was very cheap compared to England and some particularly cretinous or declasse English kids, like the 16 year old the older Schlegel had to tutor in Persian, would constantly turn up requesting tuition in 'Oriental languages'.

I should explain, so long as the British Monarch was also King of Hanover, some Germans could get jobs with the East Indian Company and thus a grounding in Oriental languages was useful.

German pedants, having little better to do, soon established a reputation for scrupulous text editing and other such donkey work in these fresh fields for scholarship.  It must be said that these donkeys did sometimes halt and bray their dismay at the incomprehensibility of what they, not studied, but slaved at. This sort of philology wasn't entirely inutile because Colonial powers- more especially the East India Company- were prepared to pay a little for this sort of research. Why? Well, a historicist philology or hermeneutic is useful for lawyers and bureaucrats. A forged sunnud or inscribed copper plate might give itself away by an anachronistic reference or collocation. The same is true of hermeneutic rules- mimamsas- which function as equitable remedies. These can be discriminated on the basis of their metaphysical foundations as having or lacking prescriptive force with respect to a legal dispute within a given sect. In particular, since an inheritance issue might hang on who or what is the proper 'substitute' to discharge a ritual obligation; Philology is first philosophy, Purva Mimamsa,  and Hermeneutic's terminus ante quem- i.e. the limit prior to which no apoorvata- novelty and therefore meaning- can arise.

 But, for that very reason, Hermeneutics, to get anywhere, is always turning into an Uttara Mimamsa and thus ever thereafter can only propagate itself as infinite defeasibility and supine sublation.  This at any rate was the view of such learned advocates and Judges- like Chief Justice Gajendragadkar- as were actually descended from scholarly Mimamsikas. Thus, as a matter of fact, not conjecture, the Indian Mimamsaka tradition turned into a sort of Social Choice Theory- though, alas!, not yet one of a Posnerian, or Coasian, or Mechanism Design type. Instead we had the clown Katju. But the thing will happen- or perhaps already has and I didn't notice coz, gotta face it, I'm often off my head on drink and, in any case am as stupid as shit. Not in a good- id est Mallu- way either; me being, much to the shame of my Iyer ancestors, more dhobi ka ghat, than Palghat.

   Quite apart from its use to John Company, Sanskrit- because of its relative artificiality and synthetic nature- turned out to be a good examination subject for signalling purposes and, anyway, one could always get a research degree by editing or translating some freshly recovered text from a midden so orthogonal to Church & State as to itself constitute a mittelstand- prompting, perhaps, Victor Hugo's remark- 'India ended up becoming Germany'- and the pompous pretence that such soulless drudgery would help bring tens of millions of Souls to Christ or Rupees to Mammon or Untermenschen to the Gas Chamber.
  Finally, it must be said, Sanskrit literature was a welcome change to Greek and Latin because it didn't revolve so incessantly around fucking little boys in the ass. Indeed, pederasty features hardly at all in Indic literature which, in consequence, attracted the impecunious German pedant who generally spent his youth as a tutor in a bourgeois household sighing for the deep bosoms of the elder sisters of his charge, whose buttocks, by contrast, emblematic of the indignity of the pedagogue's vocation, remained an object of disgust. A French scholar, in a similar position, would have fucked the lad's mother in the hope that she might advance his career, but German matrons were both poorer and less gallant. Indeed, German poverty pushed its young savants into Transcendentalism and Pedantry, rather than Pederasty and Politics, in much the same manner that Sanskrit differentiated itself from Persian in this regard. Interestingly, Persians felt no shame in relying on Dictionaries and Tazkirahs compiled by Kayastha donkeys while, later on, Brahmans were perfectly content to rely on German mules in a similar manner. 

  Plato, though comfortably off, wanted to set up a College, like Isocrates- the successful teacher of rhetoric. Why did Plato want to become a rector? Was it because he was interested in the rectums of young boys? This is the disarming explanation he offers in his Socratic dialogues- like the Phaedrus- which, on the surface, is about how to get a young lad- who might be richer, bigger and stronger than you- to let you fuck him in the ass by telling him you don't love him rather than that you do and will die of grief unless he bend over right away.

  Clearly this sort of literary production, written in graceful prose, would have a ready, if narrow, market. People would say- 'Cool! Plato is setting up an Academy so as to fuck rich young hunks for free. He's a smart fellow! We should get in on the action'.

  Actually Plato had a hidden agenda. He wanted kids to study Math and contribute to Knowledge, not just learn Rhetoric so as to make a lot of money as advocates. 

  How did Plato manage to turn a cunning scheme to get gilded youth to put out gratis into something worthwhile- viz. the cultivation of the exact Sciences? Well, he first pretended that there was a subject called philosophy which wasn't rhetoric though it might look like it and then showed that if rhetoric could get a rich and muscular kid to spread his cheeks for you because you say you don't love him, then philosophy could go one better in that you wouldn't even need to mention love. In fact, you wouldn't even have to actually fuck the kid and go around town boasting about it in order to get credit for your conquest. That rich kid would count as your eromenos nevertheless. Indeed he might even dedicate a heroon to you so you'd be remembered for generations to come as a great big nonce.

SOCRATES:  go now to Lysias and anyone else who composes speeches, and go as well as to Homer  and anyone else who has composed poetry either spoken or sung, and third, go to Solon and anyone else who writes political documents that he calls laws: and say 'if any one of you has composed these things with a knowledge of the truth, if you can defend your writing when you are challenged, and if you can yourself make the argument that your writing is of little worth, then you must be called by a name derived not from these writings but rather from those things that you are seriously pursuing.

PHAEDRUS: What name, then, would you give such a man?

SOCRATES: To call him wise, Phaedrus, seems to me too much, and proper only for a god. To call him wisdom's lover-a philosopher-or something similar would fit him better and be more seemly. 

PHAEDRUS: That would be quite appropriate. 

SOCRATES: On the other hand, if a man has nothing more valuable than what he has composed or written, spending long hours twisting it around, pasting parts together and taking them apart-wouldn't you be right to call him a poet or a speech writer or an author of laws? 

PHAEDRUS: Of course. 

SOCRATES: Tell that, then, to your friend. 

In other words, if rhetoric can enable you to fuck a kid using an argument you can yourself refute, you are actually a philosopher not a fucking pederast because you are free do otherwise- your own argument does not constrain you. If you can't refute the argument you used to fuck the kid, well then, all you did was fuck a kid because you are just a big fat pedo, that's all. What's so great about that? You might as well just have hit him on the head with a blunt object- because that's what your speech or poem or law amounts to- a blunt fucking object you flail about with till it connects with the cranium of some unlucky lad whom you bestially sodomise. Your parents must be so proud.

Oddly, it turned out, Plato was onto a good thing. Even people revolted by the thought of pederasty have to admit his Academy was a success. Why? Well, there is a sort of opinion, or illusion, which on encountering its antithesis, can stop being merely an opinion or delusion and turn instead into a 'game against Nature'- i.e. a sort of language which doesn't have to be strategic, it can go beyond rhetoric, go beyond kairos (timeliness) and, as its own palinode, feast its gaze on a realm of Timeless Mathematical abstraction or Parmenidean Aletheia.

  No doubt, vulgar people may be able to benefit from the discoveries this enables us to make, but by defining philosophy as a type of love which has no goal or bliss point whatsoever, we remain unstained by the circumstance. Our Academy has differentiated itself from the Agora- Town & Gown have been set at odds- there is a 'costly signal' giving rise to a 'separating equilibrium' which henceforth can be used to circumvent an information asymmetry problem in the market for 'domain-general' brain workers or, more realistically, to propagate this 'noble lie'.

  Philosophy, it must be said, can carry on as a Scientific Research Project, or as its own species of literary Art- and all Art, Rorty's trajectory reminds us, but Daedalean wing'd aspires, to that thinning of the ether where only its pure Science, or Techne,  suspires- id est that Schopenhauerian perfection of Music we now term revenge porn- and so pedants will continue to write books in the hope of being cited by those whose brains they've buggered to buggery but who, it is hurtful to acknowledge, yet will forgetfully breed, despite themselves being the unwitting internet vectors of that by which they are named and shamed.

  Of course, Socrates doesn't actually say all this in the Phaedrus. But he closes by praising Isocrates who opened a School like the one Plato will open except Plato's will be better coz it will teach Maths- i.e. a type of language which isn't strategic at all, being actually a self-governing method, a self-learning program- a peeping-round-corners palinode against whatever currently blinds it- and thus not something 'pooling' equilibriating Thoth himself could confine in a book, though that book be  Thamuz's vernal- i.e. bitter for costly signalling- bodily resurrection,  such as, in the former case, you might  purchase for your son in the market so as to spare yourself the stiff fees charged by the amniotic Academy for, as in the latter mode, his 'snatak' second, or Celestial, re-birth- which, I need hardly say, is univocal with Ved Vyasa's loss of Shuka, leaving him at our very morning of the World cheerless and bereft.

This last, raises a question in my mind.

Suppose Ramanujan had access to a first rate Mathematical Library.

Would he have needed Hardy?

On the evidence, yes.

Ramanujan stayed with a forefather of mine in Madras and did have access to a pretty good library.

It wasn't enough.

Is Maths necessarily a Yoga- is it founded upon 'suhrit praapti'- the gaining of like minded peers?

I don't know.

However, there is a reason to believe that if P=NP, Maths needs no Academy.

 No pre-destined Wrangler- that acme of Tambram Edwardian educational ambition- need read Math at Cambridge because Maths would everywhere and at all times read univocally- i.e. without pollachos legetai- because its Being would also be its own Nature- i.e. its Purusha would be its Prakriti.

This solitary Yoga, God his own Guru, is the opposite of Grothedieck's or the Gita's.

Why?

  Well, if it requires a similar number of steps to solve a problem as it does to verify the solution then Math can be completely mechanised. What's more, such a math would be both the physics and the metaphysics of Aristotle in that the Time Class of its solutions and verifications would be the same- i.e. they would feature a broadly commensurable number of steps.

  The same point, without loss of generality, might be made about philology and hermeneutics. Why? How so? Well, if a Hermeneutic is non-dissipative of Philology then something like Noether's theorem applies. Essentially a differentiable symmetry must be present and therefore some conserved law or property of the system must be equally available to both. As I've pointed out elsewhere, two symmetries, those of karma and dharma, are a covering set for the Mahabharata and, what's more, its internal author fathers their reciprocal collapse because the very parrot beak of his text's repetition yet is as the unfurling of meta-erotic wings mentioned in the Phaedrus, such that Life, that ultimate of dissipative systems, gives everything a shove and calls it Love. Why is Life so beastly? The answer is that that it is a fractal Red Queen race- if Philology is something living then Hermeneutics has an algorithmic method for creating new texts more or less 'as good' as any text it claims to have an interpretation for.  In other words, if hermeneutics can have an 'oracular' property with respect to a text, it can also be its Creator God who is the opposite of otiose. This is a stronger claim than that a poet, like Mutanabbi, can be a prophet. It is that a pedant can be a poet.
Since Hermeneutics does the same thing as 'verification' in complexity theory, we can appeal to the notion of 'relativization' and draw the conclusion that some interpretive solutions must be philologically unimplementable save adventiously or by an almost infinite sequence of steps.

  Aesthetics, properly speaking is unaffected by such considerations. There can always be a 'Intuitionist' Brouwerian choice sequence between solution and verification, or implementation and interpretation, such that their 'light cones' coincide and univocity is retained. However, the thing can't be codified or reduced to a formula.

   We can also dismiss certain supposedly philosophical approaches to Aesthetics which claim supervenience on what we know to be incompossible physical processes. They can't be Hermeneutic interventions but, at best, are Philological hypotheses of a historicist type.
  For example, we know that one-way functions can't exist,  and since Maths can be a Metaphysics featuring strict Aristotelian Time, we can't affirm that there is any logical reason to assume that anything like a hermeneutic of 'metaphysical closure' could have ever spontaneously obtained at any point in history before such a doctrine was explicitly uttered. Rather, the natural reading of Plato and Aristotle is one in keeping with the current state of play in Mathematics and thus features 'oracles' or 'kairos' which are wondrous because they are the precise opposite of the menstrual wound of Heideggerian wonder and give rise to, if not that labour which maiuetics addresses, then at the very least all such useful work as Mathematics immeasurably advances. This, at any rate, is my reading of the Theaetetus.

  What this means, put bluntly, for my view of the Mahabharata, is that karma and dharma have to prove so bogus, precisely because symmetries are continuous, that only the Veda gives Life or rather, by Life's exponential-time usurpation of everything merely polynomial, it becomes the mise en abyme of its own Yagnya, that black fire, or hole, in which karma collapses into dharma and dharma into Veda's yet emptier, for Indian all too Indian, giving.

 Come to think of it, this is Socrates' first argument in the Phaedo.

Anyway, the above, by reason of its prurience or peurility, is still a positivist view.

You will be relieved to hear, it is not one Adluri endorses.

  Of course, it is nonsense to suggest that Phaedrus was an iconoclast. Defacing the statues of Hermes- castrating the father of the City's Tyche, or Luck- on the eve of the departure of the expedition against Sicily, was a political not ideological act. Its purpose was to change what might otherwise be a windfall victory for the Commons into a, 'Manifest Destiny', Imperialist capturing of rents for the Elite. Andocides' part in this is well known- nowhere in his orations on the subject can we find any notion of rationalist iconoclasm as a motivating force. Still, rich kids, like Phaedrus and Alcibiades were, quite properly in the latter case, objects of suspicion. Their overweening ambition recklessly endangered the commonwealth. Plato, here as elsewhere, shows Socrates as a sobering influence, not a 'corrupter' of these influential young men.

  Orithuia, contra Adluri- or Derrida for that matter- does not die in the myth after being carried off by Boreas. She becomes the mother of various other mythological figures.  She is not a 'stand in' for Persephone at all. Rather, this Attic lass's marriage to Boreas turns him into the son-in-law and saviour of Athens, which is why he destroyed the Persian fleet at Cape Sepias- a firmly held belief, which continued to boost Athenian military morale.
  Socrates's inspired speech, at the place where Orithuia was raptured, is meant to serve a similar protective function for his fellow Citizens.
  What confused Adluri was Socrates offering an Euhemerist explanation- some girl fell to her death off a rock and so the traumatised community spoke of her as being carried off by the North Wind- but Plato's Socrates, the pharmakos, or scapegoat sacrifice, for his City, is speaking with amphiboly.

  On the surface, he is taking an urbane dig at the Sophists. However, in view of his tragic end, we know he is speaking of himself as the fated sacrifice who, though still an ordinary mortal, already partakes of the mystery of the Divine. Thus, Orithuia's girl friend is named as Pharmaceia- sacrificial death being a medicine for both the Philosopher's nescience as well as the misology of the Polis. But we only know this through a prophetic foreshadowing made possible by Phaedrus's presence- the Platonic love this evokes- which causes Lysisas's 'book' to act as a Uranian Galehaut or ecstatic drug such as might be used by an oracle. But Plato's dialogues are also such books. Improperly used, as for example by pedants, they are but the burgeoning of an insatiably gay nescience. However, if taken seriously as testifying to their own virtual worthlessness, they are a sobering cure, or prophylactic amulet, against programmatic stupidity, like Derrida's or Girard's, or even Adluri's, motivated by a false mimesis of their phrarmakon's apparent amphiboly. Not so apparent, actually, if we remember Soma quickens childbirth and that the Platonic pharmakon is essentially maiuetic- though constrained to a couvade.

  In the Phaedrus, Socrates puts forward something we might call the theory of 'bracketing', if not epoche, such that the greater mystery of the self puts at nought the endless task of rationalizing myths.
  Later, Socrates elaborates a theory about how the soul is affected by the God one associates with and develops a theory or re-birth on this basis. For himself, it is as though he has been seized by the amorous wind god while performing a mimesis of Lsysias's speech, but forewarned by some prompting of his genius, he stops in his tracks and utter a palinode that reverses the argument. Love is madness, it is divine possession, it is the opposite of self-control and superior in the manner that an NP 'oracle' is superior to an algorithm in P. Why? Because the self must always find it most difficult to know what it is that seeks to control. This is in conformity with what we know about Control theory so this is a positive, not historicist, reading. Notice, it would cease to be so the moment someone proves P=NP. However, so long as that problem is open, this reading poses no scandal for philology. What does pose a scandal is glaring errors of fact- e.g. Adluri saying that, for Plato, Phaedrus is free to act iconoclastically. This isn't the case at all. Socrates would have had to make a citizen's arrest of any hermokopidai he caught in the act. Why? Socrates was bound by the law- even at the cost of his own life.

Adluri knows this very well for he later quotes the Phaedo and comes to this conclusion-

  All this is nonsense. Antilogikos means debate or more narrowly Zeno's method of paradox. The Phaedrus says that if you can formulate a counter argument to whatever you are urging, you have gone beyond rhetoric and have become a philosopher. This is the familiar dialectical method which no civilisation doesn't have a version of. Obviously, a guy who says 'OMG there's a counter-argument to everything! We're all truly fucked' is brain dead.

  What does Adluri mean by saying- 'the argument for the immortality of the soul which is compared to Ariadne's thread?' Socrates gives 4 different arguments for the immortality of the Soul, but does so in a sequence suggestive of some larger mystery or path-dependence, and Phaedo's narrative thread is conventionally compared to Ariadne's as delivering us from the labyrinth of hysteresis ridden philosophical nihilism in a manner it would defy any art we possess to ever ourselves reconstruct or make sense of. This mythopoeic undercurrent in the Phaedo, suggested by the circumstance under which Socrates's death sentence was delayed, reinforces our image of the Philosopher as a sort of Man-god who offers himself as a scapegoat to deliver us from the fear of death. However, this has nothing to at all to do with logos and misology, reasoning and hating to reason, or navigating between the two, like Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. Rather, there is a connection we can't see between Socrates's four different arguments which however would be perfectly clear if we could view them from a higher dimension. It is easy to solve a maze shown to you in two dimensions- as happens when viewed from above. It is quite a different thing to do so when you are trapped within it, in a smoky darkness punctuated by guttering torches with a bull headed monster bellowing for your blood.
  Philology, as opposed to Hermeneutics, faces no great problem in all this as is proved by the fact that Plato is almost infinitely legible to us, not despite the great lapse of years but because of continuous philological labour from his time to our own.
 Facing an aporia- or open problem in mathematics- Philology has no reason to faint or draw back. Hermeneutics might, but not Philology. I suppose a truly misologic philology- like Adluri's- or is it Bagchi? or some minatour composed of both?- can represent Phaedrus as a proto-scientific iconoclast but so can ordinary ignorance or extraordinary stupidity. Nothing very wonderful is happening here.

Arjuna, in the Gita, does not say that mortal life is meaningless. Draupati does say it has something which is the reverse of meaning, it has anti-meaning,  if God is the impassable 'mayin' or bloodless puppet-master of an occasionalist universe. Remorse is delusional. Only God is stained by the evil men do. Yuddhishtra, like Draupati, makes a similar statement at the end of the Epic. God's Justice is injustice and so even if God is the sole Reality, the sole source of Meaning, yet Virtuality and anti-meaning are the hermeneutic horizon mortality must chose as truly moral.

This is not Arjuna's view. He is an Agent not a Principal and is appalled by the foreknowledge that his duty will lead him to perform acts which his Principal will consider morally disastrous.
Yet, as Krishna points out, ethical action- in the sense of action which will change your ethos by some subtle 'aashravic' process- is impossible to avoid if we are 'yantra aaroodhani', mounted on molecular machines. Non-action too is action.

Since both Krishna and Arjuna are Agents , not Principals, there can't be any confrontation of the type Adluri suggests in the Gita.

Thus the paradigm Adluri proposes to use in connection with German Indologists doesn't exist.
What does exist is the hermeneutic coprolites those industrious donkeys left us.
Adluri, believing himself a second Uttanka, feeds on that fossilised donkey shit thinking it amrita.
The turd he protrudes as text, being, to his mind, the ouroborous by which he is fed.

Uttanka, though vouchsafed the theophany of Krishna, tries to exterminate the snakes.
Chthonic oracles, symbolised by the snake, gained salience with the spread of agriculture.
The watcher of the Sky still determined 'kairos'- or sought power over the rain cloud.
The aquifer, on the other hand, was a type of security outside Timeliness.
The Sky watching augur, surveying the fitness landscape from above, provides substantive solutions.
But their real time 'interpretation' or simulation might be non deterministic.
The chthonic oracle showed the labyrinth need not be solved immediately.
One can always go underground.
Delphi, was an Apollonian omphalos which claimed to combine both augury and oracle.
But it only broke concurrency deadlock at the price of indeterminacy in interpretation.

  Socrates offered the Self as an underground labyrinth from whose safety one could bracket that of the Minotaur while not ceasing to solve it.

NP oracles must be like snakes, not ladders, or else deadlock mounts into exponential Time.

Uttanka, untaught by Krishna's Visvarupa, urges the extermination of the snakes.

  Thus the Mahabharata originates, and like everything else in it, this origination is doubled, but only so as to preserve the snakes' occulted labyrinths. Why? Well, the Mahabharata is unique among Epics in that it says the Just King, who is a Principal, not an Agent, must learn Statistics and Game Theory in order to overcome his Vishada (Depression or abulia). But we now know no one throughout history could have a good reason to believe P=NP. Thus, the snakes must be preserved- like the Kauravas and the Pandavas, like the Tigers and the Forest, like Pythia and Apollo, so too with Garuda and Takshaka- there is a relationship of interdependence here. If the one perishes the other can not survive.

  This is a positive reading. It's not the one that Gokhale, a Professor of Statistics, had- Game Theory hadn't yet been formalised nor had Hannan come to India- so we can't blame the poor fellow too much for not warning the Servants of India in blunt enough terms to shun the idiot Gandhi.

Adluri might not be a Gokhale, but he must have seen videos of Indian poverty.

They are the Visvarupa of Gandhian hypocrisy & bien pensant Nehruvian Olympianism.

  Yet, Adluri writes as though Gandhi's spinning wheel was not as economically worthless as the Brahminical Yagynya was soteriologically worthless, at least in the eyes of the Gita.

He ends his book reproving stupid, but industrious, Germans, thus-

Banana leaves!

Right!

That's what happened.

  Actually, Vinobha Bhave tried the experiment of living upon what he could earn from the chakhri. His conclusion was that he'd starve to death if he persisted. Everybody knows that Gandhian khaddar was not a solution to India's problems. It was a vector for corrupt rent seeking, rabid communalization and secular impoverishment.

Still, it's good to know that us P.O.I desis can be just as stupid as goras.

My worry is that Adluri is intellectually under-powered.

He doesn't yet spew entirely solipsistic, self regarding, shite like Spivak, Sen, Bhabha et al.

Why?

Well, his first PhD was supervised by Reiner Shurmann- who wrote in French.

His second Doctorate was from Germany.

Screw Sanskrit, them fucking furriners can't even do English misology proper like wot we can.

Trump will settle their hash, sho nuff.

They dun took our jobs!