SK Arun Murthi asks in the pages of Scroll-
Did Indian culture recognise an independent field of study called philosophy?
The answer is, yes. Darshan-gyan is philosophy just as eusebia is dharma that is piety. The Greeks said Pyrrho learnt scetpical philosophy in the Punjab. But it was from gymnosophists- i.e. naked (Digambara?) monks.
Even educated Indians have a distorted understanding of this discipline.
Stupid ones may do. Murthi is stupid.
A recent encounter with a friend led to a chat about philosophy – philosophy being the subject that I taught and wrote about as a profession. As is so often the case, he had a glorified sense of everything Indian, including philosophy – though, from my conversation with him, I gathered that he had no idea of what Indian philosophy is beyond showering eulogies on what he considered to be a pure Indian philosophical tradition.
If the dude was Hindu, he probably belonged to a sect founded by a philosopher- e.g. Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha etc.
When I told him that my research was on the philosophy of science from the Western analytic tradition, his immediate response was whether I accept Western philosophy at the cost of rejecting Indian philosophy.
e.g the doctrine of karma. Actually, you can do so by saying it is part of 'Maya' or delusion. The point about adhyaropa apavada nyaya- i.e. superimposition and negation of the superimposition- is that it is reflexive. There is no superimposition and thus there can be no negation of it. The purpose of the exercise is to move from a conception of Saguna Brahma- i.e. a God of whom various qualities can be predicated (e.g. having the highest perfection)- towards the realisation of that such a being would necessarily be Nirguna (i.e. outside the net of predication) save for specific purposes. This does not mean that it isn't useful to sometimes act in a delusional way- e.g. to pretend Mummy is your enemy and it is up to you to foil her dastardly plan to get you to do your homework rather than watch TV- it just means that the games we play are merely games. India is unusual in that its great Iron Age Epic- the Mahabharata- explicitly mentions learning statistical game theory as the cure for the 'Just King's' vishada or mental depression and abulia. Murthi doesn't get that when Sankara says that things without qualities or specific features can be approached by this method of attributing a quality to them and then showing why that attribute can't inhere in it, he is not failing to clarify the nature of ignorance. This is because ignorance has no nature. It is merely a lack of a specific understanding regarding that of which nothing can be predicated save for some contingent or utilitarian purpose. But one could say this of Mummy. She is beautiful but she would be beautiful even if deprived of all beauty. She is Mummy to us but she is also a young and carefree maiden with a song in her heart and her thoughts in the heavens. It may be that Yoneda lemma applies to both Mum and God- i.e. we can have a representation of all their interactions- but precisely for that reason, predicates are merely superimposed upon them by one interaction to be negated by another. Thus Mum is a Mum but is a baby for her Mum. Similarly, for Advaita, there is reciprocity between worshipper and worshipped. However when it comes to nescience, delusion, 'Maya' or 'mulaavidya'- there are no interactions, no Yoneda lemma, nothing. There is no Hindu 'original sin' or Gnostic curse. This isn't to say that no purpose could be served by asserting otherwise. But that is a utilitarian matter- i.e. a transparent pragmatics involving no ontological commitments. Imperative statements are often of that kind. They are 'mere puffery'. Still, a particular sect is welcome to turn the thing into a shibboleth and incorporate it into its 'matam' or dogma. Philosophical error can indeed arise if correlation is taken for causation or, more simply, if a causative role is given to a mere shibboleth. But such is not the case with Hindu 'Shruti'- i.e. Scripture which is purely imperative and thus need display no causal chains or structural or alethic content. I suppose, the foundational knowledge at which STEM subjects aim is, for the present, similarly occulted or unclear. In that sense, the love of a thing is on the same footing as the thing itself. Indeed, Hinduism asserts a reciprocity between the two which could certainly be interpreted in a severely occasionalist way such that if it was not knowable how the thing was done, it could not be done. But Hinduism has never asserted that interpretations have naturality, unicity, consistency, completeness, etc. Perhaps this was because of the type of 'discrete mathematics' used at that time for administrative and commercial purposes. Perhaps not. Fuck would I know?
As in Aristotle, who cautions against akrebia- i.e. seeking a greater precision than the subject matter affords- Hindus adopted a pragmatics of 'economia'. For Murthi, this lack of precision, or clarity, is a sign that, not philosophy, but Indian philosophy is defective. But one could equally say that all Tarskian primitives, of an epistemic type, are 'nirguna'- i.e. predicates applied to them are merely contingent and utilitarian and are ripening toward negation or sublation. Alternatively we could just mention the intensional fallacy and move on to do something useful. Murthi never took that step.
This idea of acceptance and rejection, perhaps, presupposes Western philosophy and Indian philosophy as being mutually exclusive and conflicting thought patterns – where one has to be accepted and other rejected on the grounds of truth. It implies that if one carries forward her study in one, the other is automatically rejected.
No. The question was simple. Do you believe in karma? Do you think you will get a better future birth by observing Dharma? A particular Scientist or Philosopher might say yes. Another may so no. If this dude had said 'yes. I believe in karma and dharma.' there could be an interesting conversation. An Iyer might quote Sankara. An Iyengar may invoke Ramanujan's trinity of bimba, pratibimba and darpan. After that, they could quote bits of the Brahma Sutra or the Rg Veda to each other to great mutual satisfaction.
This, to me, seemed a bit surprising. To think in terms of acceptance and rejection, in such a naïve manner, is untenable and inappropriate
it is perfectly tenable and may be appropriate provided you aren't talking to a cretin.
as far as philosophy is concerned.
Nope. If the matter is philosophical then just as good an argument for it can be made as against it.
I was unable to convince him.
Because you are stupid.
The general distorted understanding is that Indian philosophy is a unified body of knowledge
It is sufficiently unified under the rubric of 'darshan-gyan' just as Western metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, are sufficiently unified under the rubric of 'Philosophy'.
and all the discourses about it are an exploration of a monolithic narrative of an esoteric truth that stands in direct conflict with other philosophies.
Who says it stands in conflict with anything else? All we claim is that Indian philosophy originated in India amongst Indians. There may have been some influence from Greek philosophy. There may not.
Much work on classical Indian thought was produced and documented by Western Orientalists.
But 'classical Indian thought' was produced and documented and transmitted by Indians.
They referred to these thoughts as systems of Indian philosophy, also known as darshanas.
Because that is what Indian Pundits told them.
It is also held as a general opinion, sometimes derived from these Orientalists, that Indian philosophy is a repository of spiritual insights that no other worldview possesses
there was no such claim. Orientalists knew that Pythagoras had a theory of metempsychosis similar to the doctrine of karma. They knew that the Greeks attributed one school of philosophy- that of the Sceptics- to Indian gymnosophists.
– a view that has gained a more aggressive voice under the present Hindutva political regime.
Nonsense! The current regime wants economic growth. If Modi starts babbling about philosophy, nobody will vote for him.
Some believe that the pinnacle of philosophical excellence was reached in the Vedanta school of philosophy, a view that is contestable.
Indians of other schools- e.g. Samkhya/Yoga, Nyaya/Vaisesika- did contest it.
For precisely this reason, one of the questions that has often come up for discussion in scholarly circles is whether Indian culture and civilisation recognised an independent domain of discourse or a discipline of study called “philosophy” – a discursive analytic tradition that has features that typically characterise it as philosophical.
The answer is yes. This is also true of Buddhism and Jainism. What is distinctive about Indic religion is that philosophers created separate sects. Iyers follow Sankara. Iyengars follow Ramanuja.
Frank Thilly, in the introductory chapter of his book A History of Philosophy, claims that oriental thoughts like that of the Hindus do not go beyond faith, mythology and poetry.
So what? He wasn't an authority on the subject- indeed on any subject.
More precisely, the implication of this contention is the question whether there is some Indian analogue to what the Western civilisation, derived from Greek thought, has called “philosophy”.
Since the Greeks said there was Indian philosophy, it follows that it did indeed exist- some silly American cunt called Thilly notwithstanding.
This question did arise as a consequence of the Indian encounter with European thought in the 19th and 20th century.
Nope. The Brahmo Samaj could be said to represent that encounter. But it was boring and stupid. The game changer was Darwin. Suddenly bodily resurrection seemed silly. Maybe, karma was the way to go.
Scholars began to debate whether these darshanas or systems of thought actually centred around soteriological matters – that is, on the concerns of salvation and liberation referred to by terms such as moksha and mukti.
No. They were aware that India had Swamys and Yogis who claimed to have gained this state. This was an empirical matter. Is the dude who claims to be 12,000 years old lying? Generally, the answer is- yes. I knew his dad at school.
What is a darshana?
Darshana refers to the genre of classical literature generally considered to be part of Indian philosophy.
No. It refers to the 'matam' or dogma handed down within particular sects.
Wilhelm Halbfass, a philosopher and Indologist,
with shit for brains
in an essay in his book, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, notes that darshana has gained “the Neo-Hindu self-understanding and self-definition”.
Fuck would he know about Hindus? I should mention I shat on Paul Hacker and thus drove him out of Bonn in 1963. Halfass was a junior Hacker gassing on about Hindu 'inclusivism'- i.e. the fear that it would eat up Christianity.
This idea was later glorified by philosophers such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Radhakrishnan was 52 and had cult status (as mentioned by Graves & Hodges in 'the Long Weekend') when Halfass was born.
as the distinguishing characteristic of Indian philosophy.
A.O Hume- the founder of the INC- was a vegetarian Vedantist before Radhakrishnan was born. Mohini Chatterjee was in Dublin captivating audiences- including the young W.B. Yeats- with talks on Vedanta at around that time.
This led to the idea of spirituality being the intrinsic orientation of Indian philosophy.
That is certainly true of Vedanta. Nyaya/Vaisesika is a different matter.
For Indian philosophers with a strong cultural chauvinist bent of mind, this idea of spirituality is what marks Indian philosophy.
It marks Vedanta because the Vedas are about spirituality and morality, not Mathematics or Physics.
The term darshana, as the Indian term for philosophy, has been analysed by Halbfass in two ways.
But he was a stupid man who couldn't analyse shit.
Etymologically, it is derived from the root “drsh” in Sanskrit which means “to see” or “to perceive”.
And is thus related to Veda (the Hindu scripture) which means 'clear knowledge' such as that which is gained by seeing with one's own eyes.
In this sense, it means the intuition of the ultimate reality or the truth.
No. It means gaining a vision of a thing or an insight into a thing. But this may not involve intuition. It can be bestowed on one without the capacity to receive it. Indeed, you can have it, without knowing you have it or wanting to have anything to do with it.
But in the doxographic sense – doxography being a literary work that compiles and summarises various schools of thought in philosophy – it merely means views and doctrines of different schools of Indian thought.
Doxography doesn't matter. Stupid pedants are welcome to do that sort of boring clerical work.
The word darshana conveys
stupid shit to this stupid cretin
the idea that this body of literature has as its aim a profound vision that transcends mere intellectual contemplation.
Such is not the case. The literature gives us the 'matam' or dogma. The Vigyan however is a matter of praxis. Similarly, reading a text book of logic or scientific method doesn't make you a logician or a scientist. You actually have to practice the thing.
The transcending of intellectual contemplation means that the emphasis is on the direct realisation of truth that leads to liberation or salvation.
Not necessarily. Intellectual contemplation may have a purely mathematical representation. We don't think there can be a Godel type mathematical proof of God, but we can't be sure.
This exclusive concern for this soteriological aspect of Indian philosophy is captured by the word darshana,
No it isn't. Nyaya/Vaiseskia (Logicism/Atomism) isn't exclusively 'soteriological'. Yet it is one of the orthodox Darshans. What is significant is that the six orthodox darshanas have Voevodsky type univalent foundations- at least for the purpose of Sanatan Dharma.
distinguishing it from the purely theoretical and analytic enterprise of Western philosophy.
This stupid cunt doesn't know that there is a lot of theology in the West. Also, Godel gave a proof of God.
This gives rise to two questions: Is Indian philosophy circumscribed by concerns about finding salvation?
No. India had lawyers and Doctors and chemists and astronomers and so forth.
And did this focus preclude Indian philosophers from engaging in philosophical enterprises purely as a theoretical exercise or as “love of wisdom”?
No. Why is this cunt asking such a stupid question? Surely, he has relatives who are in to Ayurveda or Jyotish Sastra or who have recourse to Nyaya style legal arguments? Perhaps not. He may be related to bonobo monkeys.
Another term that has also come to mean philosophy in India is “anviskshiki”
Not really. Atma-Vidya is fine. Hetu-vidya or Tarka-shastra is also okay because if all you have to drink is tea, you may as well be an 'argumentative' Babu. But आन्वीक्षिकि is casteist shite and thus beyond the pale.
The term’s correspondence to philosophy was first drawn by the German scholar Herman Jacobi in his article “A Contribution towards the Early History of Indian Philosophy” in Indian Antiquary in 1918.
So what? By then, Europeans had access to Indian writing about India which, for obvious reasons, was superior. Tagore was big at that time as Vivekananda had been big previously. Lots of Yogis and Swamys were turning up to fleece the gullible.
The term appeared in the very beginning of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, which Jacobi takes as the basis of his translation. There were others who followed him on this translation. As it turns out, the etymology of anviskshiki also comes close to that of darshana. It also means “seeing”. It is this idea of right vision or realisation, associated with darshana that prevails among most people in India.
The notion of 'insight' prevails among all people.
How darshanas fail as philosophy
Since philosophy fails- its 'open questions' get closed by Science- it is a compliment to say x fails as y when y is known to be shit.
The word philosophy means “love of wisdom”.
& that you can make just as good a case for or against a proposition.
It is derived from the Greek words philia (love) and Sophia (wisdom). Pythagoras was supposed to have coined this word.
Plato's Socrates does so.
But this etymology, by itself, does not capture what the discipline of philosophy is about unless one has an understanding of what constitutes this wisdom.
Philosophy is a displacement activity which, sadly, does not cease making distinctions without a difference even after STEM subjects have closed the underlying question. This is because only stupid people go in for it.
This is an open question as far as philosophy is concerned because, from the time of the Greeks, philosophy has expanded to accommodate approaches on a diverse range of issues of social, moral and political concern as well as of the natural world.
In other words, useless cretins talk bollocks about more and more topics.
When deliberating on these concerns, the word philosophy has sometimes been and is used in a most elastic way.
This cretin is using the word 'deliberating' in a most elastic way.
In the lucidly written introductory philosophical text Living Issues in Philosophy, the authors
pretend they themselves aren't zombies
introduce the meaning of philosophy by distinguishing its informal and formal sense.
The informal sense of “having” a philosophy, according to the authors, is a “set of views or beliefs about life and the universe, which are often held uncritically”
This is 'matam' or dogma or 'a priori' truths or Reichenbach's 'axioms of coordination' or 'relativized a priori'
that refers to a certain attitude towards ideas and issues of a very general nature. These ideas include, among others, purpose of life, meaning of life, goals of living and mysteries of life and death and god. Such a broad view, as the authors rightly note, is “vague, confused and superficial”.
The can be made as precise as you want by a smart dude. But nobody can help a guy who deliberately chooses to study Philosophy and thus rots his own brain.
To go beyond this broad view of philosophy, one has to understand that the wisdom or Sophia component of philosophy lies in the process of reflecting on and criticising our most deeply held conceptions and beliefs.
Murthi spends a lot of time reflecting on and criticizing his deeply held conception that he has a nose. That's his notion of getting it on with Sophia.
A philosophical inquiry begins with problems and questions of a very general nature:
No. It begins with an intensional fallacy and then just gets stupider and stupider.
questions on the nature of the universe,
as opposed to which Collidge it attended
the problem of knowledge,
i.e. that of getting tenure or, after getting tenure, how to avoid the cretins you are supposed to teach.
meaning of freedom
not to mention why it thinks you are totes gay
and similar concerns. Secondly, it responds to such problems by making clear the key concepts and ideas it deals with.
It has no such capacity. Why? They involve Tarskian primitives and intensions without stable extensions.
Third, it inquires into the foundations and presuppositions of the subject and examines the defensibility of the assumptions it rests on.
See above. We don't know what the true foundations of our mathematics or our Physics are. Philosophers are simply too stupid to contribute anything in this respect.
Finally, the discussion proceeds by argument and reasoning.
Stupid arguments made by cretins incapable of reasoning.
In the course of these arguments, defending its thesis, it raises and responds to possible objections to its thesis.
But the objection stands because it is based on the plain and simple fact that only stupid people study Philosophy.
Arguments and counterarguments abound that form the core of a philosophical debate.
They also abound in a discussion as to who farted.
To what extent does the enterprise that has been defined as Indian philosophy possess such characteristic features?
If smart Indians do it, Indian philosophy will revive. If it remains the province of cretins, it won't. But this doesn't matter if the thing is merely the 'matam' of one's ancestral sect which however has pretty much the same 'Vigyan' as all the others. We can simply imitate what the best people in our neighbourhood are doing. So what if I go to the local Swami Narayan Temple though I'm supposed to be a follower of Sankara? The praxis of devotion is the same. Dharma is just piety. It is enough if some Sadhus and Acharyas keep up the distinctions between Matams (dogmas).
Some scholars of the history of philosophy maintain that India never had a legacy of philosophy.
Why stop there? Why not say it didn't have any religion? Did you know Viceroy Hardinge invented Hinduism so as to spite the Muslims? Also, Warren Hastings forced the natives to have either one penis or one vagina rather than plenty of both. Currently, Narendra Modi (real name- Nicholas Maugham- is seeking to reimpose the false binary of gender because he is a paid agent of Neo-Liberalism)
Even those who concede that India did make significant contributions to philosophy and are more sympathetic to its enterprise admit that the culture never had a term equivalent to “philosophy”.
Yet, Sanskrit dictionaries compiled by Englishmen or Germans or Russians translated philosophy as 'darshan gyan'.
It may be argued that even if there is no equivalent term for philosophy, the darshanas do take up philosophical problems for discussion. How does darshana or anvikshiki relate to the expositions of Indian schools of thought on the basic philosophical problem?
Pseudo-problems. They arise by the intensional fallacy. Indian darshanas get around this in two main ways. Essentially defeasibility is either on the basis of sublation or else pragmatic considerations. The one can be given a category theoretical representation while the other is instrumentalist.
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya,
a nutter who thought his earliest Brahmin ancestors lacked 'religious consciousness'. The Rg Vedi yajna started off as a meeting of the Indian branch of the Comintern. Agni was the comrade in charge of collectivizing the land. Sadly, some one brought along some Soma and soon everybody got high and started seeing Gods and demigods and other such bougie shite.
the Indian Marxist philosopher – to be distinguished from the founder/chairman of the Indian Council of Philosophical research of the same name – in his What is Living and What is Dead in Indian Philosophy, identifies a methodology by which one can discern a philosophical problem that these schools have considered significant.
His own methodology caused him to identify Marxism as the quickest way for his class to slit its own throat now that the Muslim problem had been contained.
That one problem is the reality of the material or physical world or otherwise.
Coz that's the main problem facing the proletariat- right? If this world is immaterial, how can we be sure we are killing class enemies rather than the ghosts of class enemies?
Philosophers of idealist leanings – that is, those who hold the view of the reality of mental ideas as against the reality of the external world of objects – hold the very abstract view that the reality is pure “spirit”.
The Universe may indeed be a hologram.
These Indian idealist philosophers reject experience and reason as valid sources of knowledge for knowing reality.
As do physicists who think the Universe is a hologram.
For them meditation and contemplation are valid means that lead to a mystical experience.
Actually, this is not necessary. It is sufficient for an Indian philosopher to be able to draw bright-line distinctions between other matams and the one he is paid to uphold.
This experience is the seeing of reality as spirit. Such an idealistic outlook is a very prominent feature of Indian philosophy.
But not of Purva Mimamsa or Vaisesika.
It is this aspect of seeing or “right vision”, the concern with liberation and salvation (moksha), that is suggested by the term darshana and anviskhiki .
It may be. It may not.
This goes to indicate that Indian philosophy was essentially soteriological,
Vedanta isn't. Soteriology may be Maya.
barring one school of Lokayata whose literature has not come down to us.
There was no need for it to do so. We are all of that persuasion when we eat and drink and make merry without thought for the morrow.
It is said to have been destroyed by the orthodoxy who considered its exponents to be heretics.
You don't get paid enough to eat and drink and be merry just by saying that's a fine way to pass the time.
Have darshanas been able to capture the characteristics of philosophy mentioned above?
No. The darshanas aren't cascading intensional fallacies. What characterizes philosophy, to this cretin, is cretinism.
It is doubtful. Most of the discourses of the so-called philosophical schools give an exposition of their schools and the commentaries and sub-commentaries do make an attempt to present an argument but fall short of making one.
Because no argument can justify a dogma (matam) or a priori synthetic judgment.
For example, in arguing for the special kind of knowledge that brings liberation, they deny perception and reasoning as a means of knowing.
This is because what is Scriptural is deemed more than ipse dixit. But nothing which is ipse dixit has 'naturality' or 'canonicity' or is non-arbitrary or represents a unique solution to a coordination game.
In this case, they can never make an argument as they would end up using reason against reason undercutting their whole argument.
For the same reason, no philosopher can make a non-trivial argument which isn't self defeating.
To avoid this problem, the orthodox schools claim scriptural authority as testimony
Harvey Freidman, of reverse mathematics fame, proves, using an Angel, that math is free of contradiction. Put another way, the consistency of ZFC depends on something like Godel's 'positive property' used to prove the existence of God. In other words, Darshan Gyan is no better but also no worse than Mathematics in this respect.
and, therefore, a means of knowledge, in such matters. It is here that darshana fails as philosophy.
Only because all philosophy fails. Occupying a chair in Philosophy entails shitting in it.
But the educated layman, like my friend mentioned above, claims these discourses as philosophical.
For the same reason that there is a philosophy of math. The fact that the thing has its limitations, to our current understanding, doesn't mean Math or Hinduism aren't useful or that philosophical issues don't arise in the pursuit of either.
The average Indian’s misconception and distorted understanding of philosophy as a discipline also primarily stems from a glorified sense of darshana as sublime and profound pearls of wisdom.
Like the average Indians' conception of Math or Physics having sublime or profound aspects. Nothing wrong with that at all. Murthi is simply stupid, ignorant and bigoted. That isn't the fault of his ancestral religion. It isn't even the fault of his education. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
It has been shown in a detailed paper on how the philosophical arguments of the Advaita Vedantic view of Shankara are not substantive.
and therefore not delusion (Maya). After all, delusion is relative to something else. It is not substantive in itself. The same point may be made about Nagarjuna's Madhyamika.
Further, even in the discourses of other systems it is difficult to find rigorous arguments to credit it as a philosophical discourse.
It is impossible to find rigorous arguments in philosophy. Sooner or later you trip over an intensional fallacy unless the whole thing is a cascade of intensional fallacies. Murthi, in this essay, hasn't even got as far as an intensional fallacy. He has merely mis-specified the 'extension' of 'darshan gyan'. Since it includes Nyaya/Vaisesika, everything he has said is false. Incidentally, there is nothing stopping us from giving a representation in contemporary STEM subject terminology to both systems.
In all these discourses there has been a conflation of the doxographical “mere view” sense
Which this cunt got wrong by neglecting Nyaya/Vaisesika
and the etymological “right vision” sense of darshana
which this cunt got wrong because he is too ignorant to understand what a Grothendieck Yoga is.
making the discourses “vague, confused and superficial”, a characteristic of the informal sense of philosophy.
This nutter is confused and superficial and wholly vacuous.
This conflation, according to Halbfass, is “a symptomatic innovation of Neo-Hinduism”.
Neo-Hinduism does not exist- unless the cunt means the Brahmo Samaj or the Arya Samaj. But that has nothing to do with Sanatan Dharma. To better understand Hindu philosophy the average 'educated' Indian, assuming I am average rather than retarded, uses things like Noether's theorem to conceptualize the relationship between karma and dharma and the notion of Grothendieck Yoga to see how, and to what salutary effect, disparate systems are united on the basis of greater generality. Nothing wrong with quoting German or French savants. But Halfass wasn't a savant. He was stupid. So is Murthi. Still, if Scroll will pay him to shit on his ancestral religion, why grudge him the money? Perhaps he won't have to rent out his rectum so as to buy himself a square meal. His parents will at last feel some modicum of pride in their little retard.
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