arundhati darsana nyaya

Since a God who couldn’t die or lie wouldn’t be truly transcendent- save to one who has empirical knowledge of a mendacious, mortal, Creator- so savants have, very thoughtfully, provided this extra facility for the faithful.

In Christianity, the incarnate God does die but quickly rises from the grave before proceeding to do so much over the next 40 days that a record of His Acts could only be written down in a book larger than the world. Similarly, Sirhindi, Waliullah etc. wanted a God, for Islam, who could lie (imkan ul kizb) though most Indians found this unnecessary because, to be frank, they thought theologians to be stupid liars who had a great thirst for the blood of their rivals.

One solution embraced by the Indians and some mathematical Russians was onomatodoxy- i.e. the name of God is higher than what it denotes. This is perfectly logical. Denotation is categorical and ‘naturality’ (or non-arbitrariness) does not obtain if adjointness (by reason of optimality) is not implicit. In other words, transcendence breaks any image like relationship between God and Man opening the door to pure dependence as self-transcendence.

Schliermacher’s work influenced Grassmann who could be considered the father of linear algebra and whose work is category theoretical avant la lettre. However, this is not really a story about savants disenchanting the world to promote dharma, dependence & deontology. Grassmann’s own development (incidentally he also translated the Rg Veda) shows that the impetus came from Pestalozzi and the need to teach the children of the poor and thus raise up the Nation. Grassmann himself remained a school teacher who never got a University appointment. It seems what disenchanted the savants was the increasing enlightenment of the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Moh Tzu had asked over 2000 years ago what would keep the peasants honest if they stopped believed that ghosts kept watch on them. This was the dilemma for the esteemed pedants and paranoiacs mentioned in this article. Hardy was an exception. He knew Jude the Obscure could rise to any height provided he didn’t have ‘too menny’ kids to drag him down. Arnold was okay, all in all, and became a School Inspector or something useful of that sort. He championed German style philology over Victorian belle lettristic boosterism or bullshit. Clough ended up helping Florence Nightingale compile statistics. Good enough men in their way. Nietzche, poor fellow, was mad. He’d been made a Professor to reverse the gains made by German philology. This fitted well with Kulturkampf stupidity and the general swinishness of the German academic as incarnated by the nutcase Weber.

Doestoevsky, it must be admitted, was very bright. There is a story that Einstein said Karamazov influenced him more than Gauss and Lobachevski. Ivan’s Euclidean mind could but encompass the theodicy of the Godless Humanism of the Gulag- presided over by Dr. Faustus. I suppose we could fulfil the human need for transcendence by gloating over the shit on the carpet at the death of Stalin.

I think the author may have read a recent tendentious text mentioning Sankara’s commentary. To clarify, the Sage in question is Bahva (not Bhadva- which means pimp) who is instructing Vashkali, and though the Scriptural quotation is ‘Brahman is Silence’, the hermeneutic principle ‘arundhati darsana nyaya’ applies- i.e. the thing is like the small star known as Arundhati which is pointed at by means of nearby larger stars. In other words, sublation, not identity, obtains. There is orientation without accessibility or accuracy. Is that good enough for transcendence? Sure. Why not? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made billions teaching ‘yogic levitation’. Apparently he also tried to get it on with Mia Farrow. Back in the Sixties, that was a cool thing to do. Now- not so much. Still, it is good to know that Ringo Starr is alive and counts as the richest drummer in the world. What’s better than transcendence is surviving such traps as Thanatos lays for the Self. Basho said ‘octopus traps, these dreams under a summer moon’. Ringo attained his octopus garden. Go thou and do likewise. Om Shanti Om. ET phone home.