Amartya is an uncommon name arrived at by adding a suffix to a name common among Hindus- viz. 'Amar', 'not dying'- immortal. However, amar in Bengali also means 'my' or 'ours'. Thus an affectionate 'oikeiosis' (sense of belonging together) is created between the giver of this name and its recipient.
It is normative in India to give a child an auspicious name so he may live to a great age and attain immortal virtue or renown. There are plenty of people with names meaning 'immortal'. However, it was considered unusual, when the poet philosopher, Tagore, add the suffix (in grammar a suffix is called pratyaya) 'tya' to 'Amar' (not dying) thus creating the name Amartya for the grandson of the Sanskrit Professor employed at Tagore's Shantiniketan.
What does this suffix 'tya' mean? Savants would say it is the technical term for प्रत्यय (pratyaya) (a suffix or a termination) in the Jainendra Vyakarana. This word is formed from the prefix- 'pra'- which means 'before' or 'primarily'- and ends with with 'ya' which means 'like', 'similar to'. In ordinary terms, 'tya' denotes following, or coming after or descending or having descended. Speaking generally, it is not an 'essential' quality predicated outside time. It is dynamically associated with what it qualifies but is subordinated to it. Thus the Gods churned the oceans to gain 'amrit'- the elixir of immortality. But we call Gods only those who drank the amrit. Amartya thus is the name of a god who is a god only in consequence of having partaken of Amrit.
Moreover the name of this God has been created through a 'pratyaya' (which, in the Vyarakran grammatical science is described as the attaching of a suffix so a new meaning becomes known) which was itself a 'pratyaya'! The thing is born, indeed is 'twice born', of itself!
No wonder the word 'pratyaya', in itself, signifies something very high in Hindu philosophy
Yogapedia explainsPratyaya is a key concept in Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga. On the path to union with the Divine, the yogi first begins with many thoughts or impressions, which are gradually reduced to a single pratyaya or thought. At this point, the yogi has reached the state of meditative awareness. In this context, pratyaya is the object of meditation.
In dharana (concentration and perceptual awareness), the sixth of Patanjali's eight limbs, the yogi learns to prevent other thoughts from intruding on his/her efforts to focus on the pratyaya. In dhyana (contemplation and meditation of the Divine), the seventh limb, the yogi learns to sustain awareness of only the pratyaya. The eighth limb, samadhi (union with the Divine), is achieved and the yogi becomes one with the pratyaya.
Thus 'pratyaya' means becoming one with oneself. When a Guru (Tagore's title was 'Gurudeva'- Guru-deity) does 'pratyaya' to a word he is making that word's meaning more like itself. In this case, he is naming a person 'the pratyaya of 'amar''- i.e. the one who mediates on immortality and who thus achieves it. However, what is achieved through a sequence of volitional, disciplined, actions is different from the same thing existing spontaneously or without any effort of will. This intuition may not be captured by standard logic or set theory.
I am not a Guru. But I am a South Indian Hindu. We are notorious for arriving at idiosyncratic etymologies by playing around with a common knowledge 'nirukta' of verbal stems. Thus, I might say, when one dies or begins to die, one becomes unlike oneself. Things and beings, in a state of nature, are 'ama' and subject to 'amata'- contingency, corruption and eventual annihilation. Righteousness is 'rta'. The corruptible, perishable, 'ama' must be yoked to Righteousness- 'rta'-to get 'amarta'. Here I would have to stop. I don't know 'rta'- a Guru must instruct me. I may make myself immortal only in the annals of infamy if I seek to proceed any further on my own.
For ordinary Hindus like me, the Guru- or Sangha of like minded seekers- establishes what is the proper 'Rta' and thus what defeats 'amata'- sickness and perishing. The 'pratyaya' of the self is what makes it more like itself. It is that churning of amrit which then endows that truer to type, more meaningful, amartya form to the self-questing self.
The poet Tagore, whose distinctive philosophy had already been celebrated by India's most famous philosopher- S. Radhakrishnan- gave the name Amartya to the grandson of the Sanskrit Professor at his own Shantiniketan College. This was by no means a casual or unreflecting action. It was expressive of a highly evolved philosophical view. But what was that view?
The conventional philosophical view of both Vedanta and Buddhism was that an intensive meditative practice of metaphysical discrimination (Viveka) or 'mindfulness' (Satipatthana or Smṛtyupasthāna) was the true 'elixir' defeating death. Indeed, 'Vikshepa' (inattention, madness) is said, in the Mahabharata, to itself be death. However, Tagore's contact with Japan had highlighted the 'instantaneous' samadhi (satori) attained by zany, if not crazy, Zen monks. This was related to the Buddhist understanding of 'hetu-pratyaya' (cause-condition) as still being part of the web of pratityasamutpada- (dependent origination) which can be instantaneously overcome by a purely intentional state.
The meaning is that a 'law-like' (i.e. rational, deterministic) sequence of thoughts may fail to yield what can be achieved by a 'law-less' leap. However, the law-like sequence could 'verify' that that the 'law-less' leap had indeed arrived at the sought after solution. This is similar to the notion of P not equal to NP and is of great interest to computer science.
In Tagore's time, the rise of Japan helped valorize Bengal's own vigorous tradition of reverence for 'mad' Brahmin or Sufi adepts who had gone far beyond the realm of Identity and Dissolution. Their 'law-less' leaps were approved by the 'law-like' verification protocols of the orthodox. Tagore's own rationalistic 'Brahmo Samaj' had been displaced by the intuition based 'Ramakrishna Mission' and its great advocate Swami Vivekananda. Indeed, great European thinkers, like Tolstoy were influenced by Ramakrishna's teachings.
However, Bengal had even more radical Spiritual personalities.
Consider the rising young philosopher, Jadunath Sinha (who accused Radhakrishnan of plagiarism). He had met and received 'drik diksa' (initiation by means of a glance) from the antinomian Shakta priest-sage Vamaksepa (aka Bamdeva). This was no mere theological or philosophical connection of an abstract sort. According to the Om-Guru website-
It is said in Sinha's family that Suniti Manjari Sinha, Jadunath's wife, died twice. In 1933 she was declared dead by the doctor, and he even filled out her death certificate. The corpse stayed in the house at Meerut for six hours while the local men went to find a bier to bring her to the cremation ground. Jadunath, his son Amiya Kumar and his friend Jyotirmaya Banerjee waited with the body, when they had a joint vision. They saw Vamaksepa standing in his subtle form with a trident in his right hand and his other hand in a position of blessing. He stood over Suniti's body. They bowed before him, and after a few minutes they heard Suniti's voice say feebly, "What has happened to me?" She lived another 23 years, until she died the second time in 1956. He discusses in 1959 how his love of his wife became a love of the divine, and his love of Caitanya was transformed into a love of the goddess:"The death of my wife was a watershed in my life. It roused my spiritual life and turned my mind inward. It awakened my intense desire to see the holy places of the Hindus in India. I saw with her all holy shrines and deities of northern India. Then I undertook a tour of south India without her. My visit to Puri gave me mental anguish because she yearned to see Puri and the deity of Jagannath. I took the impression of Caitanya's footprints on a block of stone near the pillar of Garuda, standing on which he used to see the deity everyday. Gradually my devotion and love of Caitanya was transformed unconsciously into devotion and love to the Divine Mother. My visit to Kali at Dakshineshwar worshiped by Ramakrishna, and to Tara worshiped by Bama Ksepa at Tarapith, filled me with Divine Mother-consciousness."
Jadunath Sinha, who had a successful career as an academic philosopher, gravitated- as did many other highly educated Indians- to Sri Aurobindo (himself a Cambridge graduate and one-time Revolutionary) and the Ashram presided over by 'Divine Mother' at Auroville.
This type of religious belief permeated the atmosphere of 'bhadralok' (educated gentry) Bengal and Tagore's Shantiniketan was itself a product of a similar, perhaps more chastened, spiritual quest.
What is noteworthy, is that, for the Bengali Hindu or Sufi Muslim, there had been an antinomian reversal such that the 'viyogini' (the one separated from the beloved) had become superior to the 'yogi' (united in meditation to the Absolute) and the vikshepa (mad- e.g. Sinha's 'Bama Ksepa' which literally means 'mad Bama') over the possessor of viveka.
How was one to square this with the rather Victorian, puritanical, unitarian, rationalist, Brahmo tradition which Tagore, as the son of the Maharishi, was obliged to uphold?
At the beginning of the Thirties, Tagore- who had met Einstein and knew of 'Bose-Einstein' statistics (Tagore dedicated his only book on science to Bose, who later became VC of Shantiniketan)- was very much aware that Rationality (Viveka) as associated with 'mechanistic' or 'deterministic' processes or ways of thinking might be the path to destruction and ignorance, not enlightenment and progress.
Furthermore, Tagore was aware that some of the brightest people around the world looked to him, personally, to help mankind by using his poetic gifts to find new words to illumine a path to Freedom as Mutuality. To give one example, the great L.E.J Brouwer proposed (during the terrible years of the First World War) that Tagore, along with 5 other great savants, be invited to lead an International Academy of practical Philosophy and Sociology so that 'spiritual forces and values' could inform mutual understanding and discoure. Brouwer hoped that new words and expressions could be found in Tagore's works which could serve to foster a vision of reality as arising from radical interdependence rather than a Darwinian struggle, red in tooth and nail.
In this connection, the late, greatly mourned, Roddam Narasimha drew attention to an old problem in Indian philosophy which also arises in the most up to date work in maths and computing science and linked it to Brouwer's method of using 'choice sequences'
Narasmiha is drawing attention to the manner in which the 'choice sequence' of a 'creative subject' is 'non-deterministic' such that mathematical objects may be seen to change over time. The 'cunning' of 'yukti', is the Hegelian 'cunning of reason'. It is 'kairotic'- i.e. 'timely'- and corresponds to Buddhist 'kshana sampatti'.
Returning to Tagore, as a Brahmin poet, he was aware of the Mimamsa tradition of considering actions to give rise to names. 'In the beginning was the verb'. Moreover as the 'Gurudeva' of his community, in giving a name to a Sen (i.e. a Baidya who, no matter what profession he followed, would- by an Indic convention- be considered as using 'yukti' expertise in a therapeutic manner) Tagore would have felt that he was creating the 'pratyaya' self of what Brouwer would have called a 'creating subject'.
It may seem implausible to many that rural Bengal was brimming with geniuses who understood Brouwer and Weyl and so forth. Yet, the intuition behind Brouwer &c was actually more pressing for rural Indic 'bildungsburgertums'. Why? India, by reason of diminished State Capacity, had to use sampling and probability techniques. On the other hand, India's vast size meant that Statistical theory could burgeon more among its 'learned' castes. Indeed, the Indian Statistical Institute- founded in Bengal- is the only example of an 'Oriental' institution which was explicitly nominated as the model for an American Research University.
We see this Indian emphasis on Statistics, Combinatorics & Probability Theory in the Mahabharata itself. Yuddhishtra has to learn Statistical Game Theory to overcome 'vishada' depression. 'Sankhya'- mathematical skill- was highly prized. In Bengal, there was the scandal- obvious to Sen's class- that the traditional 'calculator' gave much better estimates of yields than those arrived at by well qualified bureaucrats. Thus, during the Second War, we find the 'settled' districts turning in worthless estimates while the traditional patwaris of the non-settled districts- that too in Bihar!- were doing quite a good job. It may be that this indigenous tradition arose through a community of autistic savants working collaboratively with others who had developed insights in this matter. What is certain is that such 'calculators' existed and their testimony re. yields were considered accurate and objective. De Morgan, who was born in India, writing in the mid nineteenth century, is dismissive of India's addiction to heuristics. He thought calculus represented 'modernity' and the 'scientific temperament'. The scandal that 'discrete maths' and ad hoc heuristics was outperforming Cambridge Wranglers who used advanced calculus was more apparent to the small town bhadralok than the elite in Calcutta. Sadly, Sen's generation of mathematical economists were obsessed with calculus and thus wrote nonsense. In contrast, Tagore's immersion in rural work had taught him that indigenous methods worked. Getting in 'experts' might help- but only because of their wider knowledge of the world. They weren't more rational in the sense of getting better outcomes by ratiocinative means.
As a matter of fact, Amartya Sen- triumphing over cancer of the mouth- did become a 'Samkhya' expert- but of the De Morgan type- and tried to use his mathematical ability to heal his own country from poverty and disease. Sadly, mathematical economists turned out to be shite at both maths and econ and everything else. Still, they were good people who deserved safe spaces in the bureaucracy or the Ivy League or the Ivory Towers of the UN.
It is interesting that Amartya Sen's first friends at Presidency College- all very bright and successful people in their own right- reveal that they considered his name to be unusual. Yet, they were high caste Hindus whose knowledge of Sanskrit 'Vyakaran' was good (in those days, Sanskrit was a 'scoring subject'. Ambitious kids mastered it so as to get scholarships to study more useful subjects). It must be that they felt there was some special significance- some foreshadowing of an epistemic 'unthought known'- in a name which, ironically, we now link with programmatic imbecility and incontinent virtue signaling.
What's in a name? Quite a lot, actually, if your name was not just unusual but given to you by a great Sage. An entire philosophy- a 'darshana' or indeed a theophany- might be encoded in your name. Your trajectory in life might illustrate a particular modality of a universal force or value. In other words, your struggle against death would be a 'model' of an ethical or spiritual theory.
Tagore's lectures at Oxford, given a couple of years before Amartya was born, were published as a book titled 'The Religion of Man'. It begins thus-
Light as the radiant energy of creation started the ring-dance of atoms in a diminutive sky and also the dance of the stars in the vast lonely theatre of time and space. The planets came out of their bath of fire and basked in the sun for ages. They were the thrones of the gigantic Inert, dumb and desolate, which knew not the meaning of its own blind destiny and majestically frowned upon a future when its monarchy would be menaced.
Then came a time when life was brought into the arena in the tiniest little monocycle of a cell. With its gift of growth and power of adaptation it faced the ponderous enormity of things and contradicted the unmeaningness of their bulk. It was made conscious not of the volume but of the value of existence which it ever tried to enhance and maintain in many-branched paths of creation, overcoming the obstructive inertia of Nature by obeying Nature’s Law.
But the miracle of creation did not stop here in this isolated speck of life launched on a lonely voyage to the Unknown. A multitude of cells were bound together into a larger unit, not through aggregation but through a marvellous quality of complex inter-relationship maintaining a perfect co-ordination of functions. This is the creative principle of unity, the divine mystery of existence, that baffles all analysis. The larger cooperative units could adequately pay for a greater freedom of self-expression, and they began to form and develop in their bodies new organs of power, new instruments of efficiency. This was the march of evolution ever unfolding the potentialities of life.
More specifically, Tagore said-
The divine principle of unity has ever been that of an inner inter-relationship. This is revealed in some of its earliest stages in the evolution of multicellular life on this planet. The most perfect outward expression has been attained by man in his own body. But what is most important of all is the fact that man has also attained its realisation in a more subtle body outside his physical system. He misses himself when isolated he finds his own larger and truer self in his wide human relationship. His multicellular body is born and it dies; his multi-personal humanity is immortal.So, immortality is having 'multi-personal' humanity. This sounds like Sen's claim to an irreducibly plural Identity. However, Tagore's conception is intutionistic, evolutionary and dynamic. Sen is insisting on a 'presentist' plurality of identity such that dynamics are frozen up. This is like Voldemort whose final horcrux is Harry Potter himself. Voldemort is not interested in evolving- i.e. becoming more like Harry. He just doesn't want to die and has used a cunning and evil method to do it.
The question is- what follows attaining Tagore's conception of immortality? What is the 'pratyaya' of 'amar'- for an inuitionist? What action is performed by it?
There were plenty of people in India who claimed to have never died. Some also claimed to be able to live in several bodies simultaneously. The Hindu religion did not deny these claims and even the Muslims might claim to have met the immortal 'Al Khizr' who showed Alexander the path to the 'waters of life'.
What was it that these 'multi-person' immortals were doing? What great achievement was theirs?
More modestly, what benefit does Society gain by granting superior ontological status to some but not others? Would, as the Hassidic Jews said, some great disaster befall Humanity, if unknown 'zadigs' were to cease their benevolent existence? In Sufi Islam, too, there was the notion that certain Siddiqs were the 'qutbs' the pillars which upheld the world. The Theosophists had popularized the notion that hidden Mahatmas- some on the astral plane- secretly upheld the West's vast, seemingly knowledge based, Empire.
It may be some psychic benefit was received by such claims. But there was potential harm from those claiming to be Messiahs or Mahdis or Mahatma Gandhis.
Tagore, for his part, had done his best. He had warned against the dangerously intoxicating properties of Nationalism. He had pointed out that Hindus in East Bengal might be robbed and killed or simply chased away. But, by the time he died, he knew no young 'Amartya' would be able to fulfil a like role. East Bengal was lost to the Hindu. Only the question of West Bengal remained.
Amartya Sen was diagnosed with cancer at the young age of 18. It appears he has battled this terrible disease throughout his life. It may be that this caused him to value living in the present so much that he adopted what Dummett called 'presentism'- i.e. the desire to be so immersed in the present that it would be impossible to frame any description of the world as it would appear to one who was not in time.
Sen, gaining no profit from 'growth theory' or India's mischievous type of 'development economics' and rejecting historicist Marxist or Whig ideologies, turned his back on history and hysteresis and the notion of regret. Instead he took refuge in the 'one period economy' or 'one shot' Social Contract of the mathematical economists. Indeed, we may say- as Prabhat Patnaik does say- he became its great champion from the Seventies onward. No doubt, for a Leftist, there was a Cold War element to this. Sen was a useful idiot who, idiotically, was making himself useful to the wrong side. But then Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union. Suddenly it was possible to view Sen as a sort of Trojan horse. Perhaps Communism would be reconstituted on Ivy League campuses once those stupid Americans finally succumbed to Capitalism's final crisis the way smart people spontaneously do. This was the other meaning of Amartya. The bourgeois elements in a Sen must die so he may be reborn as a deathless Left Front drudge.
In this blog, I am not concerned with politics. I merely remark Sen's obstinate adherence to obsolete Research Programs; his penchant for a futile type of envenomed polemics; his utter failure to say anything not vacuous and time-wasting; as the logical consequence of his being the after-birth of an abortion. The fact is, when Amartya was born, Shantiniketan was a healthy enough embryo. Had it been financially independent and under the firm control of the Tagore family, it would have waxed rather than waned. Why? Its Arts students could earn good money because the skills and insights they gained were 'high value adding'. Sadly, the Central Government took it over and turned it into a Degree Mill and source of patronage and civil service jobs. This was deliberate abortion- not miscarriage. Left in private hands, Shantiniketan would have adapted and thrived. It would have been plural not putrid.
The same must be said for Amartya Sen. Had he made his living by his pen- which he had the talent to do- occasionally taking on specific projects of both profit-seeking and philanthropic types so as to acquire capital or experience- then he would have learned how to apply the techniques of Mathematical Economics and thus how to abandon them utterly when they were stupid or mischievous.
Instead Sen gravitated towards State supported availability cascades of a purely Academic type. This need not have represented 'abortion' as opposed to 'baby farming'. But, because the context was the Cold War, abortion was the only well funded option.
In the West, the Cowles Commission explicitly developed mathematical economics as a resource for conserving Capitalism- saving it from itself. The trouble was, Companies and Countries quickly became bankrupt if they listened to mathematicians.
In the Soviet Union, mathematicians were forced into 'Operations Research' so as to contribute to the economy and to rid these 'intellectuals' of 'bourgeois idealism'. That type of 'applied engineering' was fine and dandy. But it would have existed anyway. The mistake was to let these fools, from around the time of the 'stabilization of the cadres', think they were building Socialism. Kantorovich was a good mathematician. But his Nobel Prize in Econ is sufficient warrant for our dismissing him as a complete Kunt as far as understanding Econ is concerned. On the other hand, it may be, by calling attention to the 'shadow price' of the Soviet Unions abundant natural resources- oil in particular- the mathematical economists paved the way for Putin's oligarchy.
For people my age- i.e. those who will die before China can prove us wrong- the West won the Cold War. Why? Western politicians told mathematical economists to go fuck themselves. Gorbachev listened to mathematical economists- Aganbegyan in particular- and surrendered Party control of the Economy. There was an immediate 'scissors crisis' and Leninism collapsed. Meanwhile, the left-liberals who had embraced mathematical economics in the belief that 'growth theory' and 'distribution theory' and so forth would, by some magic, be automatically Marxist if pursued puritanically enough, saw that they were hopelessly wrong. Hayek was right. More importantly, but sadly, not at all obviously, so was Brouwer. True, at the beginning of the Seventies there was a false dawn both in the USSR and Ivy League. It was hoped that 'networked computers' could solve all the glaring problems of the Command economy. Allende, in Chile, had a Star Trek type Supercomputer which would magically make his country rich. There would be 'Convergence' but with the West becoming more like the East. Nixon's imposing price and wage controls was the first step. Soon, you'd have full fledged Capital and Exchange controls. The North would collectively bargain with the South and that's how 'Development' would occur.
The fly in the ointment was the three fundamental problems of Computer or Data Science which collectively render mathematical econ an a priori imbecility. Henceforth, Tardean mimetics- imitating what worked for those similar to yourself but in a superior position- would be recognized as the sole driver of Development (save for useless cretins whose salaries were dependent on sticking their heads in the sand and pretending otherwise).
What were the problems which killed off the dreams of the armchair pundits?
1) Concurrency (Race Hazard) problems. Djikstra showed that dining philosophers would starve if they sought a canonical utensil-sharing, or scheduling, rule. It seems 'yukti' is not itself explainable in rational terms. Yet it is the foundation for rational choice. Rationality would starve to death or would simply be rejected unless it could use some non-deterministic means to keep itself in business.
2) Complexity. This can be tamed only by co-evolved processes but this means 'determinism' is out of the window. In other words, the savant diagnosing for Society is useless. People have to create their own 'arms races' between consumer and producer, worker and employer, sickness and medicine, ignorance and academia etc such that there is pressure on both sides to evolve robust, eusocial, public signals.
3) Computability. Waving around an 'existence proof' or an 'impossibility result' was foolish. Why? The solution concept might exist in a much higher time-class than the verification. Thus, Arrow Debreu solutions exist but can't be computed in the life-time of the Universe.
Of course, simply by saying 'Knightian Uncertainty obtains', Mathematical Econ & Poli Sci could have been kicked in the goolies and chased away. The problem was that an elite could live in a Society with hierarchies and positional goods of a wholly imaginary kind. True, the elites might be killed or chased away. But they wouldn't notice till too late. Ontological dysphoria is as ubiquitous as Knightian Uncertainty. It is perfectly possible to believe one thing while doing another. The paradises of Fools are preferable to the previsions of the Wise.
Religion knew all about this. It kept declaring peeps wot died and started to decompose to be 'immortal'. In India, you bury a Yogi before he starts smelling too bad and then say 'he is in 'samadhi'. Thousands of years from now, he will rise up.'
Some religions do extend this sort of resurrection to everybody. Meanwhile, Hindus burn their dead or those they think ought to be dead. But everybody gets to come back as Beyonce or whatever.
If Religion has managed to survive by lying about people not dying, why should academics stop talking bollocks just because everybody knows they are talking bollocks?
The answer is that both Religion and Academia stop raking in the big bucks the moment they stop generating power and wealth for those who pay for them. Thus both shite Religions and worthless academics are constantly trying to muscle in on alien territory- like pretending to care about the very poor. Meanwhile, less shite Religions and academics- those who make their patrons richer or more powerful- burgeon and eventually crowd out the useless virtue signaling tossers.
A few, like Amartya Sen, survive the destruction of their own Credentialist Ponzi scheme by reason of gender or color or the tremendous courage they displayed in fighting Fascism when they were little babies.
This was not inevitable. Suppose Sen had noticed that he was dealing with choice sequences and that Brouwer was the dude who had studied them. Then Sen could very quickly have started doing something useful. He could have defeated death by not actually turning into a brain-dead fossil.
I don't mean Sen had the intellectual chops to do Intuitionistic maths. I mean he'd have started looking at algorithms, or just quick and dirty heuristics, which save money. That pays for itself because scarce resources are used more economically. Earning a living doing this in a free-lance manner while developing your own literary style or your own philosophical insights is a perfectly respectable thing to do. You won't get much adulation but you also won't have to tell stupid lies.
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