Amit Chaudhuri shitting on Eliot & Kant

What did TS Eliot mean when he described himself as a '“Classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”? The answer is that he was expressing sympathy for an 'Action Francaise' type Right Wing French intellectual position but in an English idiom, if not context.

 More specifically, Eliot was identifying Lancelot Andrews as a spiritual and aesthetic progenitor. Andrews had been schooled from an early age in Greek and Latin and Hebrew, Eliot in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Both had a wide knowledge of the literature of the Continent as well as an appreciation of contemporary theatre and literary developments.. Eliot was from America but was not a Republican. He was a royalist at a time when many Emperors had lost their thrones and Communism was a rising force. In religion he was 'High Church' though, no doubt, his family may have been Unitarian. Was Eliot an Arminian- i.e. opposed to predestination (or Occasionalism)? Did his 'Royalism' stress the monarch's duties as Governor of the Church of England? Or would he- as Churchill would, during the Abdication crisis- insist that the King could marry an American divorcee? The answer, thankfully, was that Eliot held no strong views on such issues. He was not a controversialist. There was a hermetic side to him characterized by a high seriousness of purpose though not perhaps any great intellectual clarity. 

Amit Chaudhuri's latest essay, published in n+1, points out that Eliot wasn't actually speaking of himself. He was speaking of the point of view of the essays in his book. However, there is no reason to doubt that the essays in his book reflected his own views and preferences.

Chaudhuri says 'My interest lies in the word “classicist,” whose meaning, in the context of Eliot’s work and the cultural history it springs from, I have long puzzled over.

Why? A classical languages is defined as An ancient language that has an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own, and has a large and rich body of ancient literature. Tamil is a Classical language. English and Bengali are not. 

 I’d like to dwell on the word, and a cluster of other words that are equally odd and make comparable interventions. 

There is no intervention. Either a language is ancient and has a copious, original, literature of its own, or it is not a classical language at all. 

I think of these terms as “odd” because, although they are, or were, words that had reliable lexical and conceptual meanings, they had become subtly angular in the way they were used by a few writers. Eliot’s “classicist” is, like the other words I’ll discuss in this footnote, at the crossroads of cultural history.

Can Amit show that Eliot used the word in some subtle 'angular' way? Perhaps. But he doesn't do so in this essay. Instead he shows that Eliot felt uncomfortable with what he had written. This is understandable. The formula was too neat. Moreover, it clearly applied to a lot of British people who, however, might find it difficult to believe that an erudite American would share their convictions. What was lacking on Eliot's part was 'oikeiosis'. He was appropriating something which was foreign to his own heritage.

No sooner does Eliot make his three categorizations about his essays than he says, in the next sentence, that “I am quite aware that the first term is vague, and lends itself to clap-trap; 

Why? The answer is that there was no longer a consensus as to what a 'Latinate' style should look like. Ezra Pound translated, or transcreated, Petronius one way, whereas the eighteenth century would have done it quite differently. However, that is a debate which has died down. We no longer think that Latin should be translated in a Latinate diction. But we would describe a person who translates from Latin or Greek as a Classicist if they have a scholarly knowledge of those languages.

I am aware the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is even worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; 

Eliot was simply wrong. Royalists wanted the Monarch to remain as Head of State. Republicans- in Ireland and India and elsewhere did not. As for 'temperate conservatism', surely it is preferable to intemperate, drunken, hooliganism or bigotry? 

the third term does not rest with me to define.”

Eliot's scruple was imaginary. An Anglo-Catholic layman was welcome to define his creed as he pleased. 

 Is the vagueness of “classicist” the same as the vagueness of “royalist”? In what way do they veer towards “clap-trap”? 

Something vague may be bogus- a case of mere play-acting or confusion. Eliot had been trained in Philosophy. Following Bradley, he was alert to the inner contradictions in our quotidian conceptions and glib self-descriptions. 

I don’t know enough about Eliot’s royalism to venture anything except that the term “royalist,” like “anglo-catholic,” expresses a tendency that had lain dormant in the poet and had to be, by 1928, for whatever reasons, identified.

It would be quite natural for a man, in 1928, to feel that Europe had been happier under crowned heads. 

 I think “classicist,” though, comes from an older, revolutionary moment in Eliot’s thinking. I remember reading somewhere that, by calling himself “classicist,” Eliot was simply reminding his reader that he wasn’t a Romantic.

Or a 'modernist'- though, clearly, his poetry was modern in form and in much of its content. I think, by 1928, you contrasted the old fashioned to the modern if you wished to disparage the former but you might say 'this is a classic' to contrast it from gimcrack stuff of a fashionable kind. 

 My first response on encountering this explanation was confusion: what was it about the Romantics, particularly, that made Eliot uneasy? The commentator may have said—or I may have concluded—that it had to do with emotion; with utterances like Wordsworth’s “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Which is a perfectly classical sentiment. Poetry didn't merely represent powerful passion it also had the power to stop the maniac running amok. 

 At some point I may also have connected “classicism” to Eliot’s rejection, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, of the idea that a poem is a vehicle for the emotions of the poet. Eliot points out that his interest lies, instead, in “significant emotion” (my emphasis): “emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” 

This was an age when homosexual acts were punishable by law. Poets needed to make a distinction between what they themselves had done and what occurred within a poem. On the other hand, for Eliot as a religious poet, it was important that people feel that he was writing of things that were real to him. He was not advertising a product which, to his knowledge, might not exist. 

Eliot’s “classicism,” then, echoes T. E. Hulme’s definition of the “classical in verse”: “even in the most imaginative flights there is a holding back, a reservation.” More problematically, it also echoes the right-wing Frenchman Charles Maurras’s advocacy of monarchism in politics and classicist clarity in literature (as opposed to Symbolist vagueness). But Eliot’s use of the word comes from a very different—a more culturally ambiguous—history than Maurras’s position.

Eliot knew Hulme, the Imagist poet, and was aware that Romanticism was associated with Revolution. Hulme picked up the notion that Evolution occurred by leaps- mutations- rather than gradual cumulative change. On this basis he concluded 'these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.'

Amit wants to suggest that Eliot was influenced by something quite outside his milieu whereas the least marked reading of his work is that he was a man of his time striking an attitude with a degree of caution not to say casuistry not unnatural in a philosopher who had a troubled personal life which some of his contemporaries were aware off. 

The word “classicist” is hardly used anymore except in conjunction with the prefix “neo,” in order to designate an architectural and artistic style. Without the prefix, it usually refers to a person who has something to do with the classics, or the classical, where these terms denote a European and specifically a Graeco-Roman inheritance. A few characteristics come to mind as a shorthand for the architecture and art of Greece’s classical period: it is formal; it is representational (in the case of sculpture) and figure-based; it provides (again, in Hellenic sculpture) the provenances of realism; it is orderly. It comprises a static storehouse, frozen for eternity.

That may be. But we also speak of things as 'classic' if they have a quality which is more than just that of their day. There is some compelling symmetry or scrupulous and harmonious construction which sets the thing apart. Something is classical if though it has often been said, it has never been so well expressed.

What does this storehouse—which we encounter, reified, in the sections displaying classical sculpture in the Louvre—have to do with, say, the imploded form of The Waste Land?

They represent order and rationality and civilization just as the trenches of the First World War represented a disciplined and highly organized barbarism which had brought the Bolsheviks to power. 

 Eliot’s 1922 poem creatively reuses a number of sources, including classical ones (the story of Tiresias, for instance)—but in what way does its assemblage share the classicism of a bust of Plato or an iambic by Archilocus? 

Archilocus's iambics were informal, entertaining, and often scurrilous. He and Plato have nothing in common. I suppose one could say Eliot's poem grips the reader as Archilocus's poetry gripped his readers who however felt he often crossed the line of decency. 

What relation does Eliot’s use of “classicist” in 1928 have to the sentence in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that states, running counter to the assumptions of historians, that “[tradition] cannot be inherited”? 

It has to be practiced. Rahul Gandhi inherited power but refused to become a Minister or Prime Minister so as carry forward his family tradition. Property can be inherited. You actually have to do a job to be qualified to continue to hold it even if you are offered it on account of your Daddy once having done it. 

What to say about the way Eliot, in the same essay, ascribed to “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country” not a linear movement from “classical” to “modern” but “a simultaneous existence” and “simultaneous order”? 

This is perfectly sensible. The same poet might write a popular song while turning out rigorously constructed works cast in classical forms. 

Here is a critic who’s arguing with the foundational teleology on which a periodization like “classical” rests. 

But that 'teleology' is silly. We get that not everybody in ancient Athens was engaging in Socratic dialogues. There were blokes who engaged in horse-play and other chaps who were busy making money while the vast majority were preoccupied with managing their family property. 

Yet characterizing his own essays, he describes his temperament as “classicist.”

For a reason T.E Hulme had clarified. He might as easily have said 'High Tory'. 

 If “classicist” has a new meaning, then,

its meaning was 'conservative'- opposed to romantic revolutions which might end up like those of Lenin and Stalin. 

 to do not with European inheritance 

but Eliot was concerned with that inheritance which, because of Britain's conquest of India, included the Sanskrit classics which he had studied at Harvard. Paul Elmer More's translation of Bhratrhari is perfectly classical. Indian scholars- including revolutionaries like Lala Hardayal and Aurobindo- were integrating the Greek and Latin canon, but also Shakespeare and Milton and Racine- into the Sanskrit tradition. Tagore had won the Nobel prize. Sarojini Naidu was a celebrity in London when Eliot was yet to make his mark. It was Naidu who got Fenellosa's widow to entrust his manuscripts to Ezra Pound. 

Eliot could have put on a kaftan and gone off to Shantiniketan. He chose to become a High Church Tory who, later on, was a leading spirit in a group of right wing intellectuals whose most significant member was Michael Polanyi who, unlike his idiot brother Karl, actually affected post-War economic policy. 

but with creating a disjunction between the artist and the work

when has such a disjunction not existed? It is rare for an author to lead a life as interesting as his work. Byron and D'Annunzio- but also Jeffery Archer- are examples of the disjunction being effaced. Perhaps Amit thinks J.K Rowling is actually a wizard. 

—between the emotion in the poet and the emotion in the poem—in which history can we place it?

The history of literature has always recognized the disjunction. Homer didn't actually fight at Troy or sail to Ithaca. Was he a contemporary of Achilles? Did he live many centuries later? The Greeks had asked these questions. But they agreed that Homer's epics were situated in Greek history. Less controversially, Socrates's dialogues are situated in Athenian history. I may say 'Socrates once met an Indian gymnosophist. Thus everything in the Dialogues is actually about Jainism or some other Indic religion.' But this would be a very eccentric point of view. 

To me it seems that the word needs to be located in a cultural interface that begins to occur in the world from the 18th century onwards,

Classicism as relating to Greek and Latin literature, is a usage attested from 1620. It was the revival of Greek learning which permitted Church Latin to be superseded. Moreover, vernacular languages gained from fresh translations directly from Greek sources. By 1470, three Byzantine scribes were working in England. By the end of the 15 century, Sir Thomas More was learning Greek at Oxford.  Amit simply doesn't have the sort of background knowledge of England, its religion and its history, which those who went to school in this country generally possess. 

and which propels the anti-humanist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Renaissance drives of some varieties of romanticism, and of modernism.

This is nonsense. There is no variety of classicism which is 'anti-humanist' or 'anti-Enlightenment'.  It is a different matter that Eusebia is required to hold irrational 'Dionysian' tendencies at bay. But that is true of any Society.

The Renaissance occurred because of the migration of Greek scholars and the revival of Greek scholarship. Why is Amit mentioning the 18th century? By then, the ancient wisdom of the Chinese and the Indians had become available while the Sciences had made great strides. 

The drives are liberatory.

Really? Being 'anti-Enlightenment' is liberatory? How?  

Their aim is to free up art and thought from the parameters of Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism:

The Enlightenment had no magic power to stop art from going crazy or doing stupid shit.  

parameters that are representational, and whose representational ambitions include (through, for instance, perspective in painting) the mastering of reality.

But Chinoserie had entered Europe by the mid to late Seventeenth Century! Even in the Sixteenth century there was Medici porcelain which however was not economical to market for technical reasons.  

“Personality,” “emotion,” and “thought” are key facets of the post-Enlightenment, post-Cartesian “individual.”

Sez who? Everyone has always had personality and emotion and thought. What is Amit smoking?  

The interface I’m speaking of—with key texts and artworks from Japan, China, Africa, and India—leads to a breakdown of these concepts.

Really? If you import some porcelain from China or some wood carvings from Africa, then civilization breaks down? Europe mustn't just deport darkies. It must ensure none of their art or their poetry or music enters the continent.  

The breakdown is transformative and playful. I would see Eliot’s “classicism,” and other terms used by his predecessors and contemporaries—“disinterested”; “impersonality”; “emotion”; “reality”; “form”; “thought”—as part of a new, affirmative, anti-Enlightenment language that emerges with and participates in this breakdown.

Surely, the language remained the same- it was not new. Perhaps Amit means that words like 'reality' meant something different because of a 'breakdown'. But what was the new meaning?  

These terms engage in a dismantling of the Enlightenment’s ownership of meaning by laying claim to a larger world-history of thought and artistic practice.

But the Enlightenment did not own meaning. In any case, the thing had been as dead as a dodo since the start of the Nineteenth century. The Church's power had declined. Nothing could revive the Inquisition and the Auto da fe. The Scientific Revolution in Physics, which dates from the Seventeenth Century, was completed by the work of Darwin and the geologists before Eliot was born. By the 1820s, Europe had plenty of fake Indian and Chinese and Ethiopian and Persian poems and romances in its various languages. What's more, during the course of the Nineteenth Century, German and other European savants became better Sanskritists than most Indians! 

Amit says that behind Eliot's 'classicism' 

I find not Greece

 because Eliot hadn't chosen to specialize in Greek. But he'd taken two years of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at Harvard.

but the wide availability in Europe, from the 18th century onwards, of ideas and histories to do with the non-representational and the non-binary.

But Chinese and Indian and African art was representational and just as binary as European art. Women were not depicted as having dicks. Trust me on this. In the old days, before there was porn on the internet I visited a lot of museums and art galleries to discover what lasses might look like without their clothes on.  

In this context I’d also place two terms Eliot first used, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” nine years before he wrote the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: “significant emotion” and “escape from personality.”

But they are adequately explained by referring to their antonyms- petty peevishness and narcissistic wallowing.  

What histories and ideas are these? Let’s begin with the circulation of two poetic-critical-philosophic texts that Eliot had studied closely, as had his predecessors: the Upanishads and the Gita. From the first—brought to France in Dara Shikoh’s Persian translation from India in the 1760s by Abraham Hyacinthe-Duperron, translated then by him into French and Latin, and the Latin version published in 1801—comes an idea of equanimity and impersonality that is neither Judaeo-Christian, 

because it is Hindu, dude 

in that it is not transcendental;

yes it is. The Gita features a bloke who is actually God almighty!  

nor European classical,

coz Indian aint in Europe 

in that it is not orderly and Apollonian;

Yes it is. There were Greeks in ancient India who became Vaishnavites. The type of augury used by Brahmins is Apollonian not chthonic. 

nor an Enlightenment construct,

Sir William Jones squeezes into the Enlightenment. Goethe's Shakuntala is very much part of the Heiterkeit cult of sunny serenity. 

in that it is not legal, institutional, and remote.

The Enlightenment had nothing to do with the Roman Law tradition. No institution embodied it. It was not remote but as intimate as the book in your hand.  

The Upanishads and the Gita (Charles Wilkins’s English version appeared in 1785) used a number of words, some in common with each other, that could be translated into “equanimity,” or “peace,” or “impersonality,” or “disinterestedness,” or “reality,” or, interchangeably, as all of these.

Nonsense! A lot of Hindus know the Upanishads very well because their ancestors handed them down and it was an obligation to study them. It simply isn't true that Hindus were stupid or unable to express themselves with precision.  

Among them are brahman (not Brahmin, the priestly caste, or the god Brahma), and shanti, ordinarily translated into English as “peace.”

Though, as with 'karma' or 'nirvana', one needn't bother to translate it. Namaste! 

Eliot, in a reference to the Upanishads, closes The Waste Land with “Shantih shantih shantih,” and alerts us, in his notes, that “peace” is not an adequate translation: “Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word.” But the Biblical phrase is not quite an equivalent either,

it is good enough 

and Eliot will spend—has by then already spent—many years fashioning critical-creative equivalents,

if so, it was time wasted 

and moderately late offshoots like “classicist,” for terms and formulations he’s encountered in the Upanishads and Gita.

But 'classicist' is not a new coinage anymore than 'royalist'. There is less to this than meets Amit's eye. 

A few questions come up as we look again at “shantih” at the end of The Waste Land.

Eliot had quoted the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad in the 'what the Thunder said' portion of the poem. It made sense to end with Om, Shanti, Shanti. 

If this word comprises “a formal ending to an Upanishad,” is The Waste Land a version, parody, or poetic-critical-philosophical reimagining of an Upanishad?

No. It is obviously a deeply personal poem but one that reflected a terrible period in history.  

Does the term “formal ending” hint that “shantih” comprises not a culmination, or a sublimation, of the poem’s agonized subject matter—that it’s simply a ritualistic closure?

Nope. If we heed 'what the thunder said'- i.e. exercise self-restraint, charity, and mercy- then we are on our way to 'metanoia'-  being healed and enjoying peace.  

Is the poem itself both a critical-poetic and a ritualistic act,

It is certainly a poetic act. But no ritual is associated with it.  

and, therefore, measured and equanimous? Are we to understand The Waste Land in formal and shant, rather than agonized, terms?

Fuck does this mean? We understand that the poem is about some bad shit that went down but if we do good and sensible things then there's a happy ending.  

This “shantih” at the end of The Waste Land returns the reader to Eliot’s struggles with articulating the concepts of peace or equanimity in his 1919 essay. Here’s an instance of the struggle:

When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

 There is no struggle here. If you've got a good mind then it doesn't turn to shit when bad shit goes down. It stays sharp. I suppose a great surgeon, with a great self-possession, who suddenly gets shot might retain enough self-possession to operate upon himself, extract the bullet and sew himself up. I wouldn't be able to do it coz I'd be shitting myself and passing out and coming to only to howl loudly, shit myself some more and pass out once again. I suppose, some struggle may be involved in studying medicine and then struggling to control your inclination to shit yourself and pass out and so forth but once that struggle is over then you might remain cool and self-possessed when everybody around you is shitting themselves and passing out. Then, you'll be a man my son. 

The “shred of platinum,” the adjectives “inert, neutral, and unchanged”—these look forward to the last line of The Waste Land;

No. The 'impassible' mind still has to do the three Da's- Damayata (self-control), Datta (giving charity), Dayadhvam (compassion)- to get to shantih. We can imagine a super-villain capable of operating on himself when lesser men would have shat themselves and fainted away. But self-control is not enough. You've got to stop stabbing everybody you don't like the look of. 

they look further forward to “classicist”;

which is unimportant. Are you compassionate? Are you helping others? If not, being a 'modernist' or a 'classicist' or whatever aint gonna get you to the Good Place.  

they also look back at the earliest known attempts to formulate a theory of impersonality and equanimity as a critical position.

What would be the point having such a theory? How does it help others? No doubt, if you are a great Sage and people ask you to codify your precepts and practices then you might dictate some such thing. But, if that aint the case you'd look silly gassing on in this vein. Try saying 'I've a theory about how to achieve equanimity' and some guy is gonna shit in your hat and then put it on your head just to see if your theory really works. If the dude is bigger than you, you may have to pretend to be perfectly happy. But, the thing is no fun. I'm not saying this has happened to me. Anyway, it's the sort of thing which probably happens to most people at some time or other in their lives.  

Through the idea of equanimity or inertness or shanti,

These are different ideas. One may have equanimity during a conflict. One may be inert but not at peace and equally, peace may be attained without impassibility or equanimity.  

there are continuities in Eliot’s nascent classicism with certain lineages in English Romanticism, especially Wordsworth: continuities that Eliot is keen to disavow.

because they don't actually exist.  

“Poetry is the overflow of spontaneous feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility,” writes Wordsworth in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. The first half of the sentence, removed from the second, is one of those articulations that lead to our vulgarized understanding of Romanticism as a rebellion against poetry as artifice.

No. It is a rebellion against emotions or sentiments as an artifice. A witty man, though under the pressure of an intense emotion, may utter something wickedly clever involving sophisticated word play. 

But I’m interested in the sentence’s journey towards its second half: the bit which Eliot, in his 1919 essay, scrutinizes disapprovingly:

We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inexact formula.

Unless it is apt- which for some of Wordsworth's poems it genuinely is.  

For [poetry] is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.

But this could be said of many things apart from poetry whereas no actual poem meets this description. There really is nothing new under the Sun.  

The two halves of Wordsworth’s sentence, joined together by a colon, are actually opposed to each other. The first half articulates the primacy of “feeling,” the second distances itself from that primacy.

Because dudes wot have intense feelings aint gonna start dipping their quills in ink.  

The colon lulls us into thinking that the first half leads to the second half. A “but” would have alerted us to the fact that the second half of the statement contradicts or qualifies the first.

There is no contradiction. There can be an overflow from a recollection. The recollection may begin in tranquility but the overflow remains.  

Wordsworth, though, makes the sentence seamless in order to capture a transition in literary history from the Romantic and reason-defying “overflow of spontaneous feelings” to the radical and provocative idea, in that domain of feeling and emotion, of “tranquility.”

Reason has no problem with an 'overflow of spontaneous feeling' because the thing is natural. Reason has to start from Nature. It can't deny what exists without becoming madness.  

Something has happened, both in Wordsworth’s sentence and in history, that has made that transition possible.

There has never been a time in history when emotions didn't overflow or when poets didn't sit around tranquilly till they remembered something which got their juices flowing.  

Within the binary of Enlightenment vs. Romanticism,

 i.e. stupid shit people who study worthless subjects have to subscribe to

Reason vs. Emotion, shanti or “tranquility” or “concentration” or “impersonality” has added a dimension, a paradox, that the terms set by the Enlightenment can’t grasp.

Nonsense! Goethe lapped the stuff up. He actually made a scientific discovery. There are plenty of romantic effusions in Voltaire or, indeed, Racine - as Stendhal pointed out. But then Jansenism could be considered Revolutionary while 'Classicism' would be cynically on the side of power. 

How can we recollect emotion when it is something we experience,

because memory works that way. I can remember my first kiss and how it made me feel. The goat however was less than happy.  

and how can we recollect it tranquilly, unless by “recollection” Wordsworth is implying a process at once distancing and creative, akin to Eliot’s chemistry experiment?

Recollect means remember. You are sitting in your armchair. Suddenly you remember that cute girl working the checkout at Bestway Supermarket. Some other memories are triggered. A moment later emotions are overflowing. You've got something you can craft into a poem. There is no 'distancing' or 'catalysis' here.  

The second half of Wordsworth’s sentence does distort meaning, it is indeed an “inexact formula,” but deliberately so. It’s part of a turn in thinking.

Because, for Amit, everything is always a part of some 'turn in thinking' such that Enlightenment gets sodomized by Romanticism but then Romanticism's dick falls off because of syphilis and then Modernity turns up and mentions its pal Impersonality who sings sea-shanties in old shantih-town. 

TO REVISIT THE HISTORY of “impersonality,” “tranquility,” “concentration,” and even “classicism” as critical terms, one needs to look at brahman in the Upanishads and Gita;

Brahman is God. Look no further.  

dhyan (“concentration” in Eliot’s sense; “thought” in D. H. Lawrence’s; diluted and gentrified to “mindfulness” in our time)

dhyana is meditation of a soteriological kind. It is concentrated, disciplined, thought aiming at salvation. 

in these two texts as well as in Buddhism; yoga (as a concept rather than a self-help exercise routine);

Yoga is a uniting of disparate disciplines or discourses on the basis of greater generality.  

ananda (“joy” or “bliss”);

of a soteriological sort 

and, of course, shanti, a relatively minor player in comparison to some of these other terms, but nevertheless key.

Soteriology aims at an end to conflict. Shanti is the final state where peace prevails.  

We have to approach these concepts as critical terms that ask for our engagement and challenge our thinking, as they challenged the thinking of their contemporaries.

Why? These are not 'critical terms'. They are not analytical or intensional in the Godelian sense. They merely connote things in common experience. They can become Schelling focal solutions to coordination or discoordination problems.

We need to see the verses, lines, and practices in which they occur not as representative texts or traditions, but as wayward critical projects that never really became mainstream, but which resurfaced later in multiple idiosyncratic critical traditions, like the Bhakti and the Sufi, across constituencies, castes, and gender.

So, 'critical projects' have magical power. Some guy writes some idiosyncratic shite and then centuries later an illiterate dervish or God intoxicated housewife starts repeating or reaffirming that shite without having the least idea of what it was. This is a wholly paranoid view. Why not just say that the Illuminati, by some magic, have been collectively incarnated in Boris Johnson & Donald Trump?  

Modernism is only the most recent of these resurfacings and engagements.

But Brits don't like 'modernism'. Nor do Indians. Indeed, the thing merely denotes cost cutting by property developers who pretend the architects who put up their cheap and ugly shite are actually 'modernists' or post-modernists' or some such beasties.  

Juan Mascaró translates brahman as “spirit.”

Why not 'Holy Ghost'?  Hindus know that Brahman means God. Some may distinguish 'saguna' and 'nirguna' but now that Muslims have little power, there is no need to persist in that distinction. 

It’s clear, early on, in the opening pages of his selections, that neither the Judaeo-Christian “spirit” nor “God” fits what is really articulated as a challenge to binary as well as linear thinking.

Why challenge stupid thinking of any sort? Only fools babble about 'binaries' and linearity. Everybody assumes you are gay or not really gay and are hinting that you will be popping out of, or popping back into. a closet nobody is interested in.  

These unusual formulations (unusual in their time; still unusual today outside poetic language) are from the Isa Upanishad: “The Spirit, without moving, is swifter than the mind . . .”; “Standing still, he overtakes those who run . . .”; “He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near . . .”

But the conclusion is that the Spirit is God.  

And in the Kena Upanishad: “What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken . . . What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think . . . What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to Brahman, and not what people here adore.”

God is so much more than our conception of Him. But so is Mum, and Dad and our beloved dog.  

Brahman, then, is neither quite “spirit,” nor a god, nor God (“what people here adore”), but an invitation to abandon the conventional binaries of the supplicatory man-God relationship; to embrace, instead, a decentering: “What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think.”

That's the Creator, dude.  There is little point pretending religious texts aint about God. 

The idea that something unable to be immediately seen or grasped constitutes an intervention is also put forward by Krishna, ventriloquizing for brahman in the Gita.

Krishna is God. No ventriloquizing occurs.  

Reluctant to reveal his true form to Arjuna,

because you need special eyes to bear that blinding theophany. 

Krishna asks Arjuna to infer his presence not from what’s visible, but from a radiance that creates transient states of visibility: “That splendor of light that comes from the sun and which illumines the whole universe, the soft light of the moon, the brightness of fire—know they all come from me.” With this decentering and interrogation of what can be known,

There is no 'decentering'. Krishna does display his visvarupa- Cosmic form.  

experienced, and seen comes a taste of impersonality, and, with it, not the attainment of salvation, but an experience of bliss or joy—that is, an experience synonymous with a freeing up of thought (ananda).

Nonsense! Decentering and interrogation do not end with bliss. They end with the publication of a worthless book which Post Grad students of a shite subject may be forced to pretend to have read.  

The experience isn’t “religious” in the classical European sense of the term;

it is bullshit. 

translated by Eliot into the language of criticism, it’s “a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all”—an alterity leading to new ways of thinking (ananda; yoga; brahman; tranquility; concentration).

But Hindu ways of thinking are the same of Muslim or Christian ways of thinking. There is only one God. Why not say Hindu Mummies are different from Jain Mummies? Both will cook you nice idli or dhokla but Hindu Mummies are nicer coz my Mummy is Hindu.  

Even as they have been trapped in categories like “religion” and the “Orient,” these concepts—Buddhistic-Upanishadic—have been domesticated as knowledge in the (for the want of a better term) Brahminical tradition, despite the anti-knowledge argumentation they’re situated in.

People teaching shite may think Religion is trapped or that 'Orientals' can't emigrate to the West and gain disciples there. The categories of the imbecile are imbecilic.  

Part of the domestication comes from the words these terms become when they’re relocated to a Western discourse—“spirit,” “self,” “bliss”—from which they are then transported back, with universalist assonances, to the “Orient.”

By whom? Professors of shite subjects? Who gives a toss about them?  

But it’s in the aesthetic-critical-imaginative domain

i.e. a handful of fools teaching stupid shite 

that their subversive capacities are repeatedly tapped throughout history.

What is the point of 'subverting' stupid shite?  

Most recently, from German and English Romanticism onward, certain German, French, and English words, used in response to those newly circulating texts, become, in the course of translation, dislocated. For instance: “Beyond my visible nature is my invisible Spirit,” says Krishna in the Gita. “This is the fountain of life whereby this universe has its being.” These tropes reshape, in paraphrases and rewritings, notions of authorship, as in Coleridge: “Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling: it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement.”

God is God. We genuinely admire J.K Rowling but we don't think she is God. Still, I imagine kids that who grew up on Harry Potter get more out of Religion than kids like me who grew up on James Bond or Robert Ludlum.  

When Flaubert, during the writing of Madame Bovary, remarks to his friend Colet that the author, in his new work, needs to be “like God in the universe, everywhere present but nowhere visible,”

Flaubert wants to be the impassible God of Augustine. He may feel pity for his heroine but will not show it. We need a Nahum Tate who shows Madam Bovary going off to America where she becomes a gun-slinger and ends up as the Governor of New Mexico.  

he, like Coleridge, is echoing the Upanishads and the Gita, both of which he would have read (like Eliot, he was deeply taken with Buddhism).

Nonsense! Coleridge and Flaubert were artists concerned with art. Their Upanishads were received as Unitarian or orthogonal to the Established or Catholic Church. The Gita, however, is theistic and compatible with sectarian deontics.  

Flaubert was using a Judeo-Christian term (“God”)

which exists in Hinduism and Confucianism and so forth.  

to subvert the Judeo-Christian model from which “godlike” ideas such as “author,” “great poet,” and “creator” emerge.

This is nonsense. Europe had authors- Homer, Plato, Virgil- before it had monotheism. Impassibility is a theological refinement and Catholic dogma.  Most people think of God as jealous, capable of rage, but very kind and forgiving.  

“Everywhere present but nowhere visible”: Flaubert is translating “God” into a brahman-like concept—

No he isn't. Madam Bovary can't suddenly see that her emotional tangles and turmoil is delusive. Instead of topping herself, she can't start meditating and gain enlightenment.  

that is, the author is not simply a producer of meaning, as they would be if they were presiding over, and shaping, their work.

Did Flaubert go on holiday while his book wrote itself?  

The author is part of the meaning that’s produced, “everywhere present but nowhere visible” (“He is far, and he is near”).

This is silly. Flaubert was writing at a time when the author of a melodramatic work could make his own views and feelings very clear. Look at Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubbervilles. The romantic novelist took a strong position on whether his heroine was or wasn't a 'good woman'. Even if the bint was doomed, the author made clear his sympathy for her. All this has nothing to do with Hinduism because even if emotion is delusional it still gives rise to karma- i.e. rebirth- though that too is delusional. The Jain novel would trace the sequence of lives of two souls who were each others 'karmic obstructors'. In one life they are business rivals. In the next they are married. Finally they are born in an age where a Tirthankara is preaching and both become monks and gain kevalya.  

The circulation of these texts from the late 18th century onward led to acts of translation and rethinking that made words step askance from immediately erstwhile inheritances and intellectually familiar usages that had been put in place by the Enlightenment, or were Judeo-Christian, or Platonic. It’s not “influence” I’m interested in, or the impact of “East” on “West”: that model of interpretation doesn’t illuminate this history.

It was translations from the Chinese in the previous century which had the bigger impact. This was because, it appeared, China had a civic, rather than theistic, Religion. Perhaps a 'natural law' could be discovered without the aid of any arbitrary Scripture or legal tradition.  

I’m thinking of the competing traditions (realism; modernism; rationalism; poetry)

all of which the rest of us regard as stupid shite which only those foolish enough to study their own language at Uni have to put up with.  

and their itineraries which have produced me, and affect me, far more than “East” and “West” have.

Amit does not know the East.  He works in the West but not in anything mission critical or, indeed, worthwhile. Moreover, his own books are crap.  

I’m also interested in how words with particular identities and backgrounds—“spirit,” “God,” “thought,” “tranquility”—take part, without comment, and perhaps without full knowledge, in a metamorphosis, a movement across meanings that leads not so much from the “West” to the “East” as, subtly and suggestively, away from the Enlightenment to a new emergence and sense of the “literary.”

So, Amit- having rejected the Religion of his own country and having shown no interest in the Religion of his new country, is inventing some bookish religion of his own. But such things already existed. F.R Leavis is a case in point. The protagonist of Tom Sharpe's 'The Great Pursuit' ending up teaching Leavisite criticism as a Religion in some Bible Belt college.  

RASA—WHICH MAY BE TRANSLATED as “aesthetic emotion” or “aesthetic juice or flavor”—is an idea set out cryptically, but influentially, by Bharata in his 2nd-century BCE treatise (on theatre and the performing arts, and, in passing, on music), the Natya Shastra. There are eight rasas in art, theatre, and music, says Bharata: adbhut (to do with wonder), veer (heroic), sringaar (to do with adornment, embellishment, or the erotic), bibhatsa (to do with disgust), hasya (related to laughter), karun (pathetic or sad), raudra (angry), and bhayanak (related to terror). A crucial observation is made by Bharata: we identify an aesthetic experience as a rasa because it’s “capable of being tasted [asvadvate].” As a result, in Bharata’s text, the conceptual becomes sensory, and the sensory (“taste”) conceptual and metaphorical.

So Art is something nourishing which, depending on how you have cultivated your tastes, can be savory or insipid. But there is also the notion that one rasa can contain all the others. That rasa is laughter. Literary criticism is hilarious. It's like my giving out tips on how to pick up super-models.  

The first critics to create a productive relationship between the peculiar non-binary thinking of the Upanishads and aesthetics did so in the domain of rasa theory.

No. The 'Brahmin' witness of Vedic sacrifices is the first critic. But Sama Veda is arranged according to aesthetic criteria. What is offered is food. Obviously you want to improve its taste. So aesthetics shapes the Sama Veda and, obviously, its Upanishad- the Chandogya. Lord Krishna incarnates it. Sankara interprets the Upanishads as Monist (Advaita- without duality) but employs binaries to explain the delusion of separateness (Maya). But there is a full blown Dualistic Vedanta which is perfectly orthodox. We say there are differences in 'matam' but not 'vigyan' with Rasa being part of the latter. Still, if I could find a 'jivanmukta' maybe I could score over the Iyengars who deny such a being can exist. But even if I did find such a personage, my own 'matam' says I'm deluded so why should I bother?

One thing is probably not completely clear in Bharata. Is, say, karun rasa, or the experience of pity, pain, or sadness (when it occurs, for example, in a play), different or indistinguishable from our day-to-day experience of these emotions?

It shouldn't be. The sight of distress- perfectly simulated or genuine should have the same effect on us. Similarly, seeing a pretty girl get naked and do suggestive things should get a hetero male horny whether or not she is merely acting the part. On the other hand, we should not react in the same way when watching an actor get stabbed on stage as we would in real life. Incidentally, this is why I'm barred from the Old Vic. 

It’s to address this aporia, which is pervasive, and with us even today, that the 9th-century critic Bhattanayaka, evidently, articulates a theory of distancing.

Which is foolish. We need to be moved by the signs of distress just as we need to be moved by the signs of erotic arousal- if we are of the right sexuality to have that response. On the other hand you don't need to rush on to the stage to stop Macbeth killing his King.  

I say “evidently” because Bhattanayaka’s works are lost; we know them through the 10th-century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta’s account of Bhattanayaka’s ideas. To put things as simply as possible: Bhattaanayaka came up with his formulations while taking issue with his famous 9th-century contemporary, the rasa theorist Anandavardhana. Abhinavagupta, an admirer of Anandavardhana, leaps to the latter’s defense a century later, and, in the process of taking issue with Bhattanayaka, reveals to us most of what we now know of his insights.

Among the principal insights is a commonsensical but provocative observation: the actor can’t be experiencing sorrow when the character he’s playing is grieving because he wouldn’t be able to complete his job if he were.

This is not necessarily true. A method actor might experience grief. A Shakespearean actor might be thinking of his dry-cleaning as he exhibits his virtuosity. But it is the paying customer alone who matters.  

Eleven centuries later, Yeats would echo this in “Lapis LazulI’ in his response to the “hysterical women” who demand that art be as immediately responsive to the world as they are:

Yeats was not echoing some guy he'd never heard of. He had his own esoteric doctrine. 

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.

What about the audience, then? Is the experience of the emotion of a particular rasa—say, again, sorrow—the same as their ordinary experience of that emotion: that is, is it, like our day-to-day emotion, a physical or personal product (utpatti)? No, says Bhattanayaka: if that were the case, the spectator would be “so pained by his (physical) sorrow (karuna) that he would never return to watch a tragic (karun) performance.”

But we don't run away when we see a woman holding her injured or dying child. We go to her assistance or stand at a respectful distance as qualified people get on with that job. We are emotionally affected as is right and proper and are likely to give money or other aid if asked to do so.  

The “enjoyment of rasa” is “different from the apprehensions from memory and direct experience”

because there is a simultaneous awareness that one is watching, and judging, an artistic performance 

; it “takes the form of melting, expansion, and radiance.” Also, intriguingly, Bhattanayaka tells us that the “savoring (bhog) of rasa is akin to the savoring of brahman.”

Which is why Vedic Shruti- 'what is heard'- is communicable.  Religious ceremonies may or may not directly produce the desired result. But participating in them can change your ethos for the better.

At this point, the role of the Upanishads in creating a vocabulary of impersonality in aesthetics is brought out into the open.

The Upanishads are merely the final portion of the Vedas. The Aitareya Brahmana, associated with the Rg Veda, authored by Mahidasa Aitareya, is considered the foundation of rasa theory which is concerned with 'atma-samskriti'- self-refinement and cultivation.  

Revisiting this extraordinary moment, we step out of the binary not only of Enlightenment thought but, well before the Enlightenment, ordinary, well-worn human, thinking—which tells us that the impersonal is the opposite of personal emotion, and therefore cold, emotionless, and aloof.

This is nonsense. A personal emotion was determined by something personal- 'I love X because X is good to me'. An impersonal emotion is determined by something all people may share 'X is lovable because X is good'. The former may have a tighter 'conceptual link to action'- you are quicker to defend the X who is good to you- but the latter may cause many more people to come to the defense of X. Amit is simply wrong to think that Enlightenment thinkers looked down on either personal or impersonal emotions. No doubt, both worked even better when subject to reason and good counsel. But Moral Sentiments were the foundation of Civic life. The opposite of Enlightenment would be Religious Fanaticism- the Grand Inquisitor burning his own mother at the stake without feeling love, or pity, or hatred. Only God matters and dogma is our only guide to doing his Will.  

Poetry and rasa tell us that impersonality, within a creative work, is a specific addiction; it can be savored and enjoyed.

An addiction is not something which can be savored and enjoyed. It is a bio-chemical dependence or craving. A creative work may be directed at a specific person- e.g. a letter to one's beloved which overflows with pet-names and private endearments-  or else it may be impersonal in that what is written could apply to a wide class of beings. Porn may be impersonal and I suppose people may get addicted to it. But porn does not have a 'rasa'. The sexual function may be engaged but Love is not. Masturbation is not a Passion. It is merely a release of an inferior type. 

And it throws light back on why the attainment of brahman is not a moral imperative,

There is no such moral imperative. Hindus are welcome to reject kevalya or mukti or whatever so as to serve the Lord through all their succession of lives.  

but a form of delighting.

Only if that is your aim. I am delighted when I get to my destination. I am not delighted when I end up on on the other end of town because I got on the wrong train.  

So Bhattanayaka’s comments comprise not only an annotation on rasa and on art, but also on the Upanishads.

Not in the opinion of the Hindus. The guy isn't considered particularly smart. Abhinavagupta however is a great sage of the Kaulas.  

Is rasa a universal, then? The sensory metaphors—“taste,” “savor”—undermine the idea of rasa being an essence, or universalizing representation, of particular emotions.

But the notion of 'atma-samskriti', already present in the Rg Veda's Brahmana, shows that 'taste receptors' have to be cultivated. The palate must be trained. 

Anything at all can be a universal. The question is whether a universal is 'real' (Platonic) or 'nominal' (merely linguistic). An essence is merely that which is true of something in all possible worlds. The fact that something has a taste suggests it actually exists. Taste is an essential property if it is not an accident. It would arise wherever the thing is instantiated. 

Amit does not known either Hindu or Western Logic. He babbles nonsense because he is a brown man forced to teach White People literature. So, he pretends he has some special insight, by reason of being brown, into the writing of a guy who knew much more about Sanskrit and Hinduism than he does. 

So do the physical and psychic registers of “melting, expansion, and radiance”:

Nonsense! The candle may have these qualities but Light remains an essence.  

rasa isn’t physical in the sense that personal emotion is,

It may be. Atma-samskriti may involve the 'aashrav' or influx of karma binding particles. There are 'idealist' matams and 'realist' matams but if the 'vigyan' is the same the doctrines are considered non-informative or merely conventional. 

but our experience of impersonality, in rasa or in brahman, seems to be physical inasmuch as it leads to change in our formation and outline: “melting.”

Or it seems simultaneously to be mental or spiritual or a methexis of some altogether different type. Non-informative predicates are infinitely compossible. Hindu thought aint shite Amit pulls out of his arse. 

In his rebuff to Sir Philip Sydney’s advice to poets, “Look into thy heart, and write!,” Eliot replied, “One must [also] look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts”: a further elaboration on “significant emotion” being unlike what we think of as emotion (“the heart”) and akin to an “expansion” and “melting” (“the cerebral cortex, the nervous system”) and a “savoring” (“the digestive tracts”).

This is nonsense. There had already been plenty of people whose love of Christ or Krishna or some other incarnation or Prophet had caused them to devote themselves 'heart and soul' to a particular cause. There had also been savants whose intellectual pleasure in discovery was as expansive and as ardent as the passion of the mystic.  

The word used by Abhinavagupta that is possibility mistranslated as “universal” is the sadharinakarata he attributes to rasa—literally, a “making ordinary” or “making simple.” I understand this word as “accessibility”—not in the present-day meaning given to it by publishers and the market, where it refers to a militancy against complexity and dumbing-down on behalf of the reader. I think Abhinavagupta means, by sadharinakarata, that rasa makes delight accessible to us. Whether we avail ourselves of it or not is our business.

Since the time of Bharata, sadharanikaran has been about conventionalized communication based on simplification and a shared (sahridaya) values and feelings. Thus when I say 'baby is cute...and so good', people understand that I like the baby. I am not planning to eat it. Anything at all can be a universal- cuteness, babyishness, goodness- and this is what makes communication effective. 

A history of impersonality would be different, then, from a history of the universal.

It would be the history of the evolution of language or theory of mind.  

The universal is an abstraction;

Not for Bradley's student. Amit needs to be grappling with the notion of the concrete universal as represented by...Old Possum. 

impersonality is neither an abstraction nor a denial of emotion. It’s a dislodging of emotion from ourselves:

in which case no person is impersonal- just as nobody who has taken a shit remains full of shit.  

a non-humancentric idea of emotion, “a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration.”

Is the thing 'God-centric'? But our personal emotions- e.g. love of Mummy or Baby- too are God-centric because, obviously, our Creator caused us to have them. We theists believe God also causes us to feel 'impersonal' emotions directed at no particular individual but the Cosmos itself.  

In this history, Abhinavagupta introduces a crucial modulation in the 10th century. He adds a ninth rasa: the shant (“peaceful” or “calm”).

I suppose this bolsters a particular esoteric doctrine or tantra which the Kaulas and some others have marvelously conserved. But it is high IQ stuff. Anyway, 'hasya' (comedy) includes all other rasas by rasabhasa (bathos or inappropriate effect). Underlying rasa theory is the notion of Lila- Reality is but a Divine play or entertainment. I suppose, the dramatic arts had already gained a very sophisticated and Pan Indian form many centuries previously. 

It’s not just an addition: it’s a judgement, via Bhattanayaka and Upanishadic concepts, on the mystery of delight, and why we don’t break down when we enact a death in a play or see one enacted;

This discovery is made by little kids who shoot us with imaginary bows and arrows and who are greatly chuffed when we stagger around clutching the imaginary arrow before, very histrionically, giving up the ghost. Amit thinks this has something to do with Upanishadic thought. How sweet! 

why we—artist and spectator—tranquilly delight in the enactment. Shant is not really another rasa; it’s the rasa we find in the eight other rasas.

Or it is another rasa in which we find all the other rasas or it is and isn't a rasa or is, isn't, both is and isn't, neither is or isn't, neither isn't, is or anything else etc.  

It already existed in them; it was why audiences in antiquity could take pleasure calmly in a range of representations, from the bibhatsa (disgusting) to the bhayanak (terrifying) to hasya (the comic).

But a lot of them slept peacefully thus attaining 'Sushupta' the penultimate state to permanent bliss. The great rhapsodists of the Celts could put the entire Court to sleep for a thousand years. 

It needed Abhinavagupta to point out, borrowing from the Upanishads (as Eliot did later), that every rasa was shant, and consequently not “emotion” but “significant emotion.”

The distinction between rasa and emotion arises from instrumentality. Rasa is for the purpose of sitting through a performance. Emotion is for bonding and acting. In a religious ceremony there is emotion towards the deity rather than rasa. But, obviously, this depends on whether the person in question wants 'liberation' or whether they want to serve God. The orthodox Hindu position is that pure Theism is better. Shanti is all very well but it is better to be the humble instrument of the Lord working for universal welfare. Aurobindo, like Eliot knew his Latin and Greek and Sanskrit. But by the Twenties, it was the Maha-crackpot that India followed not the brilliant revolutionary turned Yogi.  

Abhinavagupta shrewdly observes that it’s the shant rasa that engenders ananda, or bliss.

Because he had a complicated esoteric doctrine and tantric practice. But, obviously, bliss can subsist without any rasa or pretext.  

This moment—the addition of the shant rasa—is a forerunner of adjustments made by Romanticism (“emotion recollected in tranquility”) and modernism (“a concentration”; “classicism”) as they reposition literary language.

There is no addition. Aestheticians merely enriched a critical vocabulary within a courtly culture which would shrink from or surrender to more virile invaders bringing a simpler faith which required less for 'sadhridayata' to be attained. Thus, hierarchy was diminished, everything could be exoteric. The future lay with the Sufi and Bhakti saints though, no doubt, esoteric aesthetics undergirded both- if permitted to do so or anybody cared for that sort of thing. 

The relation of the shant to ananda will be echoed by Eliot towards the end of The Waste Land, when he begins riffing on words from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Damyata: the boat responded/ Gaily . . ./ The sea was calm, your heart would have responded/ Gaily.” “Gay” is Yeats’s word too when he presents his annotation in “Lapis Lazuli’ on the same relationship in art between the absence of personal emotion and joy: “There struts Hamlet, there is Lear”; but “If worthy their prominent part in the play,/ [they] Do not break up their lines to weep./ They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay,/ Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”

Many had gone gaily to their deaths in the Trenches. There is no Christian Valhalla, yet, in memory, the fallen remained ever youthful, valiant and debonair. Civilization had suffered a cataclysm. On the one hand there was survivor's guilt- the best had been taken- on the other there was the unappetizing prospect of Peace as only purchasable at the price of infamy. This had nothing to do with the Upanishads- India was shaking off its fetters- or Taoist sages- China was having to modernize under military pressure. England had had a Labor Government. There would be no peace for the 'classists', the 'royalists' and- as for the Anglo Catholics- Oswald Moseley would side with the farmers who wanted an end to Church tithes.   

It’s very possible that Bhattanayaka and Abhinavagupta take their cue from the 8th-century philosopher Shankaracharya’s commentaries on the Gita and the Upanishads.

The Kaulas and Namboodris were Tantric scholars with related intellectual genealogies.  

Three words—brahman, ananda, and shanti—occur recurrently in both these texts,

as do other words like atman and brahma. We are speaking of priest-craft and theology after all.  

and Shankaracharya draws attention to the fact that ananda and shanti, through their proximity to brahman, begin to connote something different from their workaday meanings: something close to the Buddhist shunyata, or “void,” or “emptiness.”

Which is ontological and related to the doctrine of momentariness. But that is 'matam' doctrine and is non-informative. Sankara is 'mayavadi'- delusion is not nothingness. One might as well add in Umasvati, along with Nagarjuna and Sankara, so as to get the 'observational' (vigyan) equivalence between Jain, Buddhist and Hindu 'matam' or ontological doctrine.  

For coming up with this insight, Shankara’s critics refer to him as a “crypto-Buddhist.”

Theistic Hinduism has no problem with Dualism. God is God. We don't get to become one with God. Why would we want to? Selflessly serving the Lord is more satisfying and better for Society. Utility is better than Bliss.  

Ananda, shanti, and brahman—roughly, bliss, peace, and impersonality—become, to an extent, interchangeable for Shankara; and Bhattanayaka and Abhinavagupta are clever to notice the bearing this has on the radical view they’re developing, through their revisions of rasa, of art’s relationship to emotion.

Crap! These guys were hereditary priests. Sankara and Abhinavagupta are the founders of hereditary theological schools in Hinduism. Iyers follow the former. Kauls follow the latter.  

With this intervention, philosophy can be seen as a form of art-speech, and art as a form of thought or meditation.

What was the Bhagvad Gita- chopped liver? Philosophy had already attained a perfect artistic expression. But worship was always already artistic. We would need to go back hundreds of thousands of years to find the origin of the doctrine that-

The All Pervader glorifies the arts,
the Arts refine the Self (atma-samskrti).
With these the worshipper recreates his self,
that is made of rhythms, meters.
— Aitareya Brahmana 6.27 (~1000 BCE)

VERSIONS OF SHUNYATA OR “EMPTINESS” reach Europe in the late 18th century. (According to scholars like Urs App and Alison Gopnik, Buddhist thought had been arriving into Europe from the 16th century onward through a stream of Christian missionaries. I’m interested in how, and the moment at which, this worldview created an increasing self-reflexivity in literature.)

But 'sunyata' is like apophatic theology. There was always already a spiritual practice like 'hesychasm' which was similar to anything more oriental. Self-reflexivity in nowhere more fractally expressed than in the synoptic Gospel. There is a 'kenosis'- a self-emptying- which restores and renews Holy Writ by the incarnation of its own Logos.  

Shunyata is embraced by Schopenhauer, and influentially rebuffed by Hegel in 1828 in his review of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s translation of the Gita, which he rejects for its “stupefaction” and “Insichsein” or quality of “nothingness,” attributing these to the Gita’s irritating provenance in the “Yogi sitting there mentally and physically unmoved, staring at the top of his nose.”

But Schopenhauer, not Hegel, had a bigger impact on German literature. At one time Hegel was actually considered quite sciencey- he knew calculus- and maybe Category Theory can save his system from silliness. But that's high IQ stuff.  

Hegel’s is one of several Enlightenment-era mimetic readings of “void” or “emptiness,” which identify it with “nothingness” and “nihilism” (common 19th-century charges against Indian philosophies).

Amit thinks Hegel was 'Enlightenment-era'. That's cute. The dude identified 'Reason' not with empiricism but the purposive activity of Divine Wisdom. 

It’s in poetry that the idea of the void takes on an unsettling, ill-fitting, non-mimetic life, in keeping with poetry’s vocation,

as opposed to its job delivering pizzas which pays the bills 

from the late 18th century in Europe, of being a record and exploration of misplaced meanings:

Amit's ramblings are a record and exploration of misplaced meaning. But poetry it aint. It's just ignorant, stupid, bollocks.  

Now the cunt is invoking a nice pome we learnt by heart in Standard Eight-

For oft when my couch I lie

Shunyata ate up the 'on' in that line. Still, the fact remains, Wordsworth was lying on a couch. He wasn't suspended in the void.  

In vacant or in pensive mood,

either thinking or not thinking. But again, no fucking void, arises.  

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills . . .

Like many others in the Anglophone world, I read Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” first in a school textbook. It’s only now that I notice the odd juxtaposition of “pensive” (or “thoughtful”) with “vacant,” the interchangeability given to the words by the conjunction “or” (as if “vacancy” and “thought” were, contra Hegel, synonyms),

The words aren't interchangeable. They represent a 'merism'- i.e. a situation where  a combination of two contrasting parts of the whole refer to the whole. An example is 'I searched high and low'. The meaning is 'I searched everywhere'. It takes the genius of Amit to drag Hegel into this so as to pretend that 'vacant' does not mean the opposite of 'pensive'. 

and the connection set up—again, an interchangeability—between these terms and the idea of an “inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude.”

Amit never had a day-dream. He thinks Shunyata got jiggy with the Enlightenment and then Wordsworth got inner eye- which is like the Third Eye of Shiva, right?- and then bliss of solitude was causing impersonality and classicism and other such stuff.  

Apparently the poem was set off by an encounter William and his sister Dorothy had with a “long belt” of daffodils in a forest in 1802;

other people see a bunch of flowers. But Wordsworth had an encounter with them. They anally probed the fuck out of him but left Dorothy alone. This is because of impersonality of he-holes as opposed to the romanticism of she-holes. 

but other encounters are also directing and changing (“distorting,” to quote Eliot’s term for Wordsworth’s use of “tranquility”) certain words in the final verse, a distortion that accompanies the emergence of the literary (far more than philosophy at this time) as a counter-Enlightenment project.

Why do useless tossers- guys who teach Eng Lit for fuck's sake- keep going on about 'projects' and 'programs' like they are actually rocket scientists?  

The earliest formulation of the counter-Enlightenment shift in art or literature arguably occurs

in Vico? Hamann? Fuck that. In England, peeps realized that chopping off a King's head could create more problems than it solved. Just strengthen the 'artificial reason' of the Common Law and you've got 'Verum factum' which work for a living. Hume, Vico and Hegel can but ring the changes on Cicero. 

in Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), in his observations on aesthetics and beauty.

Kant is Enlightenment though he'd read, his friend, Hamann's, translation of Hume. Coleridge is romantic in that he holds speculative truths as constitutive not regulative merely. He doesn't seem to have read much Hegel but that may be because he could actually have read Hegel. 

For a thinker whose work is an indispensable expression of the Enlightenment faith in “reason,”

but Kant is saying 'reason' can't say shit about things in themselves or anything else which isn't boring shite about how true Freedom means never having a crafty wank and true Enlightenment means having absurd beliefs about the Space-Time. 

the turn that the Critique of Judgement represents has maybe not been adequately acknowledged.

Amit is an ignoramus. Yet he talks as though everybody else was very stupid and not adequately acknowledging the fact that the Critique of Judgment was as stupid as shit because Kant didn't know jurisprudence. Also, he had never been required to judge a beautiful baby contest. Had this happened he'd have understood that Judgment has to do with following rules and not getting your head kicked in by the hooligan Mother with the ugly baby. It has nothing to do with 'Reason' or 'Understanding'. The bottom line is, if you don't get paid for being a Judge don't fucking do the job.  

Could this be because Kant’s thoughts here—so radically different from the more conventional and instrumental Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764)—were at first ignored, and later placed in safekeeping in a separate box called “aesthetics,” a box whose contents were exempt from the rules of reasoning?

Kant was concerned with 'reflective judgments' which are non-arbitrary, canonical, or such as any reasoner, given enough time, would agree to. Why does Amit say they are 'exempt from the rules of reasoning'?  

Kant’s tenets in the third Critique fit poorly within the parameters of reason: for instance, the idea that the appreciation of beauty is independent of desire.

But a 'reflective judgment' is independent of desire. Suppose I were appointed to a panel to choose the best South Indian dish for a visiting dignitary. When I'm hungry, I want idli sambar. Nothing else will do. But when I have a full belly I might be able to participate in a complex argument about which is the best South Indian dish. I suppose, in consultation with others, I'd plump for a dish which requires great virtuosity to prepare and which showcases the unique aspects of our cuisine. The question is whether such a choice could be 'natural' or non-arbitrary'. The answer is- maybe, at 'the end of Time'- but for any practical purpose there is a protocol bound, buck stopped, procedure which gets us to a 'reflective judgment' we can all just about live with. This does, however, mean that I won't win Miss Teen Tamil Nadu anytime soon. 

Reason can’t account for how this notion works.

Why not? Reasoning is used by judges of Beauty and Art and so forth. For any specific purpose, there is generally a good enough solution- or else people realize there is no need for a solution.  

Of course, this peculiar formulation has already been put forward in the Gita, Buddhism, and the Upanishads,

Quite false.  Kant was influenced by the legal concept of 'deduktion' though, since he wasn't a lawyer, he didn't get that the Law is just a service industry. As Hume says Utility is the only aim of the Law. But Kant wasn't living in a properly developed commercial society either. He didn't understand utility. As for the Gita and the Upanishads and Buddhism- they were not concerned with legal arguments at all. The Indian Justice system worked in a completely different way. Furthermore the law is merely a 'samskar' in Indian thought. It has not great authority. On the other hand 'niyams'- literally 'restraints'- are important. But they are closely linked to soteriology which isn't 'one size fits all'.  

and rearticulated, by the 8th century, by Shankara, and in their interface with rasa.

Rasa is irrelevant. You don't actually have to think the world stinks to become a Buddhist or that conceptual reality is mischievously delusive to follow Advaita.  In any case, pratyeka buddhas and jivanmuktas arise spontaneously.  

Kant must be aware of, and responding to, the texts and world-views in circulation around him in the lead-up to the third Critique.

Kant was developing his own line of thought.  The guy wasn't a journalist. He may have been wrong but he was wrong in a consistent and often quite interesting way.  

The really notable breakdown in Enlightenment thought comes with Kant’s interpretation, in the third Critique, of “disinterestedness.”

Which was big, at the time, because of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers. People knew that Scotland had been a Timocracy. Its noblemen were proud and prone to violence. Endless intrigue and vendetta was holding back its people. People like Hutcheson and Adam Smith were saying 'calm down guys. Don't keep sticking dirks in each other. Learn from more cultured people. Don't let your passions get the better of you. Imitate the phlegmatic English merchant who judges all things in terms of pounds and pence. Also, when consulting a Doctor or deciding where to educate your son, don't listen to the guy who loves you and wants to tell you what you want to hear. Get dispassionate advise.'  

In the short run, people may want Judges of their own clan who will favor them. Medium to long term, it is better to have 'dispassionate' Judges and Sheriffs and so on. 

“Disinterested” is a key component in one of the Enlightenment binaries around the term “interested,” where “interested” might either imply “enthusiastic” or “invested in for an instrumental purpose” (as in, “He’s an interested party”).

This is not an 'Enlightenment binary' at all. It was considered a good thing to hate the blind fanaticism of Religion, and the capricious ways of the absolute monarch, and the superstitions and irrational practices of the rural folk. Enthusiasm in the right cause was commendable. Voltaire wasn't exactly dispassionate when he said écrasez l'infâme. 

The first definition of “interested” forms a binary with “uninterested,” or “indifferent” or “bored.” The second definition is one part of the binary with “disinterested”; that is, “objective,” “fair,” or “even-handed.” “Disinterested” is a facet of Reason—legal judgement relies on it; so does Science.

So does the Church. The priest can't bend canon law to accommodate his friend or his patron. Reason may or may not be disinterested. What matters is whether it is algorithmic or non-arbitrary. 

. (This sense of the word is almost forgotten today in daily speech. People often use “disinterested” for “uninterested,” as if the tradition of “objectivity” had vanished, leaving only “boredom” to complete the binary.) Kant doesn’t use the word before the third Critique, but he relies on the workaday meaning of “disinterested” elsewhere—as in the second Critique, where he maintains that morality should be independent of our individual preferences.

Because otherwise it wouldn't be morality- it would merely be a matter of taste. Kant thought we'd take pleasure in a thing because we find it beautiful though this does not follow at all. We may find it terrifying. When all is said and done, Kant was a deeply silly man.  

In the Critique of Judgement, however, Kant implies that, where art is concerned, we don’t proclaim a work beautiful or significant after having arrived at an objective judgement, after weighing the merits and demerits of the artwork’s facets or “message.”

This is descriptive psychology, nothing more. Kant's point is that the intuition of beauty in such cases leads to a search for the unknown 'universal' that subsumes the particular instance. But, it frequently happens that there is no immediate intuition. It may takes us much time, and costly instruction, before we find the thing other than ugly. But it gradually grows more beautiful in our eyes. 

I suppose, from the Indian point of view Kant and Haemsturhuis approach something like the notion of 'apoorvata'- novelty- which the truly beautiful endlessly displays.  

“Disinterestedness,” instead, is a specific experience, where detachment from outcome-oriented judgement makes pleasure possible; the binary breaks down.

This is a possible interpretation but the evidence for it is thin. Kant was working within a tradition of descriptive psychology which simply did not have any such thing at the time because, quite frankly, no such thing exists. I've never experienced this moment of 'disinterestedness' though no doubt I could fake it if that was required of me. I suppose, if I were paid to be a Yogi or got off on pretending to be a Zen monk, I mught say 'I can detach myself from 'outcome oriented judgement'- which is why I won't flinch if you throw a punch at me- and this makes some higher type of pleasure possible for me. You too can gain this valuable super-power for the low low price of $ 99.99.  

It is not fair-minded, evidence-dependent, and legalistic, like the lineage of objectivity in which we’re tempted to place the term; instead, it’s “nothing other than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding.”

but that state of mind is not disinterested at all- unless Darwin was completely wrong. Cognition is costly. If it does not promote adaptive fitness it gets pruned back. True, I can sit around letting my imagination have free play. Meanwhile others make money. This means they have more progeny or their progeny have greater reproductive success than me. Sooner or later my lineage dies out while the lineages of those who used their minds for a self-interested purpose burgeon and proliferate.  

Also: “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such satisfaction is beautiful.” The journeys each of the last two sentences is making, and the distance covered from the first one to the next (“faculty for judging… without any interest”; “such satisfaction is beautiful”) captures not a thought, but a historic movement.

No. It captures the end of a silly type of descriptive psychology or 'anthropology' which, however, in England had been associated with clear writing and common sense. The Germans considered Alexander Pope's Essay on Man to be a philosophical work. Bertrand Russell considered Byron a philosopher. But we still read Pope and Byron because they wrote well.

I’m also startled by Kant’s formulation of “taste” (the idea of “taste” itself was then new-minted)

It was there in Baumgarten before Kant began his career. But, it features in Aquinas and was the subject of much homiletic literature. Kant's ancestral Pietism abounded in it. Amit thinks that there was no European religion or culture or concept of taste till some savant wrote some text. He doesn't get that Professors then, like Professors now, were regarded as donkeys. 

and the way it inflects judgement with the experience of impersonality (“a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest”): the echo of rasa, both as taste and concept, in Bhattanayaka and Abhinavagupta (“the savoring of rasa is akin to the savoring of brahman”) is unsettling.

Unless you are an adult and have lived in a country where religion has not been wholly suppressed. Everything nice can be likened to coming closer to God. The Sufi, who didn't drink, nevertheless used the terminology of khamriyaat- the wine cup and the Saqi- while the Sadhu, who didn't have sex- used erotic language.  

Each one of these philosopher-critics seems to be tapping into the same array of source texts.

Fuck source texts. People were talking and going to church and carrying on all sorts of activities. Some folk got jobs teaching kids. That's where the texts came from.  

Having expressed the notion, Kant struggles with it; he suggests that “disinterestedness” and “beauty” are part of a universalizing action.

Which merely means that it is stuff everybody would agree about or, more technically, as in category theory, that a 'universal property' exists. 

Neither in the Upanishads nor the Gita, however, is there a mention of the “universal”;

Amit does not know that Hindus consider the Vedas to be uncreated. This means that everything mentioned in Shruti is a universal. It is a different question whether they are all one and the same universal. 

what those texts set out is the radical, paradoxical possibility of a passionate detachment in the pursuit of brahman.

The Gita features God Almighty displaying His Cosmic Form! The Upanishads show that they are people- some quite ordinary- who have gained union with Brahman in this life! Why speak of pursuit when consummation is on the table? 

It’s a non-binary tightrope without any of the comforts of universalizing.

A tightrope must be binary. Either you are on it or you are falling. Amit is a cretin. Universalizing just means saying something which is true of one thing is true of all things of that type. What comforts does this provide Amit? Do we really want to know?

Kant translates brahman into a new, liberating sense of “disinterestedness”;

No. Kant called himself a Theist. At most he could be said to be concerned with Saguna Brahman. His 'practical' argument for Theism is self-interested, not disinterested. An ontological argument for God would be disinterested. Saying for morality to be true- and it must be if we are to achieve the summum bonum- God must exist is self-interested, indeed utilitarian. 

then half-withdraws into Enlightenment universality.

What fucking universality? Blacks are savages and should either be exterminated and enslaved? That's 'universality'?

But the translation has been done; the conceptual turn has occurred, via the now-ambiguous domain of art and beauty.

Amit's wits have been turned. He is simply babbling nonsense. We may say there is a conceptual turn with the concept of the sublime. We may quote Blake's 'Tyger' to show that Beauty might be frightening not pleasurable. But there is no ambiguity, as opposed to bad psychology, in Kant.  

Matthew Arnold revitalizes “disinterestedness” in 1865, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

No he doesn't. He says criticism must pay for itself- i.e. itself be valuable. To speak practically, a guy who says 'buy this book. It is great' adds value. That isn't enough. The critic needs to write in a way which is itself good. This is like saying an advertisement for a product should itself have some aesthetic value. We know this is true in practice- i.e. there is a commercial reason for making advertisements which may be much superior to the product. 

Arnold wrote a couple of good poems. We pity pedagogues forced to teach his tedious essays.  

His move is partly to rescue criticism from being a “secondary” form, a kind of writing that occupies a lower rung than the “creative.”

So, he was self-interested, not disinterested, since he was himself a critic.  

Before doing this, he must, among other things, benignly arraign the English character for one thing in particular: “practicality”—that is, the Englishman’s attachment to “outcome.”

Well, there was a market for that sort of scolding back then.  

Arnold wishes to replace the “interested” criticism of the time—“fake or malicious criticism,” according to Wordsworth— not with “fair” or “objective” criticism, but with criticism that is detached from outcome:

but which is pleasant enough to read- if you have a taste for tedious shite 

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word,—disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called “the practical view of things”; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all it touches

In other words, you'll be a better critic if you wrote well than if you obsessed over the work you were supposed to criticize. The problem here is that a good editor choses whom to send a book for review on the basis of their literary skill, and ability to entertain, rather than their ability to weigh up the merits of the work in question. This would not be true of Academic journals or those of a very narrow focus- but such journals soon turn to shit anyway, save perhaps in STEM subjects.  

The word “fruit” is loaded: the term of “fruit of action” occurs in Wilkins’s Gita where Krishna advises Arjuna to act without thought of the result.

All soldiers are told to act without worrying about getting blown up. Some might say 'think of the medal you'll get and all the pretty women who will want to sleep with you'. Krishna could have taken that course but he knew that Arjuna had an 'unvested boon' such that he could know in advance that his side would win. Amit is too stupid to understand the dramatic tension in the Gita. To be fair, most Indians are. We are a remarkably stupid people- at least when we write in English.  

Wilkins also introduces the words “interest,” “practice,” and “practical” in his translation, where Krishna is exhorting Arjuna to not be tied down by the “practical,” to nurture a temperament which, in the midst of acting, has “no interest either in that which is done, or that which is not done.”

Because Krishna is the God of an Occasionalist Universe. However, for Hindus, it may not be the only one.  

This phrasing is what Arnold (who had studied the Gita for two decades by the time he wrote his essay) and Kant (whose third Critique was preceded by five years by Wilkins’s Gita) would have been exposed to:

Arnold did read the Gita. Kant didn't. Amit is lying. 

it leads to the departure in the conceptualizing of “disinterestedness.”

Only in Amit's mind. But is that mind any good?  

Once disinterestedness becomes a form of impersonality, a detached savoring rather than objective, rational judgement, it also frees up criticism to be independent not only of an outcome, but also of its immediate object, the primary work; it allows us to read a work of criticism for itself, rather than as a route to understanding another text.

We can do that anyway. Oscar Wilde's criticism is still entertaining though the authors he wrote about are no longer read. There is absolutely no need for disinterestedness to turn into classism which then sucks off impersonality and then is divorced by rational judgment which however turns out to be totally gay. 

Arnold makes his associations overt: “It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism.”

In this context 'Indian virtue' means 'stupid shite'. This is because India- a much much larger country- was being ruled by a few thousand Englishmen.  

The paradoxical refusal to conflate thought, meditation, even stillness, with inaction had fascinated and provoked Arnold.

What is paradoxical in refusing to conflate apples, mermaids, and meditation? Words which mean different things should not be 'conflated'. 

In 1848, three years after he’d first read the Gita, he’d written to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough: “The Indians distinguish between meditation and absorption—and knowledge:

so does everybody. Meditation is not absorption which is not knowledge. 

and between abandoning practice and abandoning the fruits of action and all respect thereto.

though Christian prelates had been saying that they did not enjoy the fruits of their prelacy because...urm... Apostolic Poverty is a heresy! Do you really want to burn at the stake? 

This last is a Supreme step, and dilated on throughout the Poem”—“the Poem” meaning the Gita.

A theistic Hindu text.  

What kind of “action” might comprise a non-action, or vice versa?

None. 

For Kant and Arnold, it’s creative and critical activity. The shift has taken place.

But creative and critical activity had always occurred. There was no shift.  

Toward the end of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold recognizes, pre-emptively,

no. He recognizes too late yet seeks to pre-empt negative comment  

that his essay has put a strain on definitions: “But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us whatever; this criticism of yours is not what we have in mind when we speak of criticism . . .” Arnold’s reply makes another gesture at placing “disinterestedness” not in the Enlightenment, but further afield, in what he euphemistically calls the “world”:

why euphemistically? Did he mean 'the brothel'?  

“I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. How much of current English literature comes into this ‘best that is known and thought of in the world’? Not very much, I fear . . .” Taken at face value, the first sentence reads like a policy statement, and the second and third like a rant. Only in the disturbance of meaning (or “distortion,” to again invoke Eliot’s term) from which Arnold’s essay emerges do we get a sense of the move he wishes to make: to historicize this development in critical thought.

He has already made it. Indeed, everybody already had. The Nineteenth Century represented peak historicism.  

The development couldn’t have come from nowhere; and it can’t be entirely accounted for by England and Europe, unless it’s from a Europe that’s already in conversation with the “world”

England wasn't in conversation with India. It was ruling it.  

Arnold refers to. It must be a Europe, he goes on to say towards the end of that paragraph, “whose members have . . . a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity.”

Unless they had better things to do- which they did.  

The equivalence made here of “Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity” is somewhat casual and problematic, because the conceptual intervention of the last—by which Arnold means the Gita, the Upanishads, and Buddhist thought—is what propels the movement in words like “disinterestedness,” “tranquility,” “emotion,” and “practical outcome” away from the legacy of the first two.

Only in the opinion of an ignoramus. Christianity, or Judaism for that matter, came to India before it did to England. There actually were Indo-Greeks who translated 'dharma' as 'eusebia'. The Anglo Saxons were aware that they had become literate and Christianized much after the nations of 'antiquity'.  

These concepts undermine the Graeco-Roman heritage—

no they don't. Sir Edwin Arnold and others were popularizing an Indo-Greek Buddha who prefigures Christ.  

representational, idealistic, reasonable, universalizing, and Apollonian—and they will lead, in another fifty years, to modernism.

No. America was becoming modern- the Civil War was the first modern war. Industrial and technological progress led to modernism not some shite Arnold wrote.  

They create the aporia in Eliot’s “classicism”:

this exists only in Amit's imagination. The plain fact is that Arnold and Eliot were good poets but their critical work was tedious shite. You only need to bother with them if you teach Eng Lit to cretins. 

a term that (like Eliot himself) arises as much from the contrary currents and arguments implied by “Eastern antiquity” as Arnold, the Kant of the third Critique, or “disinterestedness” do.

But actually don't. Amit knew nothing about Hinduism or Buddhism. He studied Eng Lit but never got a feel for the religion and culture of England. Still, he can write in a pseudo-intellectual style that began gaining ground fifty years ago. Meanwhile, there are English Universities which are scrapping Eng Lit as an academic subject. Why? Graduates in that feeble minded shite earn less than school leavers. The thing adds negative value.  

Amit does not write well but, I suppose, chronicles, by his imbecility, the death throes of the Bengali box-wallah with buddhijivi pretensions. I may be wrong. It is possible that non-STEM education is even more horrible than I imagine. There may be people with degrees in Eng Lit who find Amit's ramblings marvelously lucid. Previously they had thought the main problem with Kant was that he had a penis. Penises cause RAPE. I'm totes triggered and can't write any more. Amit is more fortunately constituted.