Prof. Amit Chaudhri writes in the TLS
To include the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in a series called “Footnotes to Plato” may seem odd for many reasons – some obvious, some less so.
Why is it 'odd'? Indian thought was known to the Greeks. Pyrrho went to the Punjab. Socrates is supposed to have met a 'gymnosophist'. It makes sense to include Indian thought in a book series about Philosophy- which Whitehead described as 'footnotes to Plato'. Some suggest Whitehead influenced Radhakrishnan. But Whitehead is unreadable.
But to address the oddity is invigorating, and offers a way of considering the necessity of placing these works in the wider discussion, as well as the historical and conceptual impediments to doing so.
There is no oddity. Moreover, 'wider discussion' tends to be utterly cretinous.
Among the impediments is a logistical one which reveals how, in the West, value and significance are attributed according to certain classificatory norms and not others. I don’t mean the “canon”; I’m referring to a more basic category: authorship.
Indians think the Gita and Upanishads have authors whose names are mentioned in the texts. Many Indian claim descent from one or other of such authors. The reason both 'authors' and 'texts' are so important to Brahminical Hinduism is because this has a direct bearing on deciding law-suits re. inheritance and property conveyancing etc. This is why the Brits invested so much time and money on studying Dharmasutras. There were British barristers who did an M.A in Sanskrit so as to ply this lucrative trade. Aurobindo and Chesterton's headmaster at St.Paul, apart from being a fine Classicist, had Masters degrees in both Sanskrit and Law. Thus, because he had high 'transfer earnings' he was well paid and allowed to run things as he thought best.
“Footnotes to Plato” (like Western philosophy), is, generally, as much about the philosophers as it is about the philosophy. In fact, the field of knowledge called “the history of Western philosophy” could just as easily be called “the history of Western philosophers”, inasmuch as Western philosophers are the sum total of their lives and works, and we often defer to both biography and thought when we interact with the philosophy.
This is also true of Indian philosophy. Sankara's philosophy is different from Ramanuja's philosophy. We are welcome to interpret this in the light of the different socio-economic histories of Kerala and Tamil Nadu respectively.
Each body of work has a personality, but so does its author; in almost every case, we can, literally, put a “face” to the work, whether that’s a photograph of Bertrand Russell or a fourth-century BC bust of Plato.
We can put a face to Radhakrishnan or Matilal. The Greeks, it must be admitted, were superb sculptors. But we can't be sure traditional representations are accurate.
What do we do with a philosophy when there’s no philosopher in sight? The absence constitutes a problem in giving, and claiming, value.
But this difficulty does not arise in India. We know exactly who was the author of each school. They put their names into their texts.
Meaning and significance in Western culture are not just features of the work, but pertain to, and arise from, the owner of the work – the author is the work’s first owner; the author’s nation or culture (“Greece” or “Germany”, say; or “the West”) its overarching one. The Upanishads and the Gita, on the other hand, come to us as the New Critics said poems should: without the baggage of biography.
But this is not true of Indians who are familiar with their own heritage. They will tell you lots of anecdotes about the lives of the philosopher-Sages who founded our various sects.
To read them is to confront language, form and text alone, without the distraction or temptation of dwelling on the author’s milieu and life.
This may be true of non-Indians or deracinated Indians. But it does not apply to most people with names like Amit or Sumit. On the other hand, all Iyers are as stupid as shit- which is why we deserve Educationally Backward Caste Status.
One might recall that the New Critical turn against biography is related to a privileging, in the twentieth century, of the impersonality, rather than the emotional sincerity or conscious intention, of the creative act.
New Criticism was useful to pedagogy because 'close reading' could elicit information about a student's intelligence. Also, few people still learned poetry by heart. They would not instinctively know whether they were reading Dryden rather than Defoe.
This development is not unrelated, I think, to the impact that certain Indian texts had on modernity after they were translated into European languages and put into circulation from the late eighteenth century onwards.
In which case the thing should have appeared where circulation was greatest. How come the German Romantics intense engagement with Indian texts- Schlegel set up a Sanskrit printing press and became the first of a large number of Indological professors at German Universities- did not emphasize 'impersonality'? Lachmann went to get lengths to establish the historicity of the author of the Parsifal legend. The German cult of Shakespeare was intensely psychologistic. That's why Cantor or Carl Schmitt, when in the doghouse, would identify with the Bard Avon and write of him as either an impostor or a persecuted wretch.
(This is something I’ll return to later.) The Upanishads and the Gita claim to be neither the work of an author nor the word of God (as many religious texts do).
No. They claim to be a record by a named individual of what some Holy dude said to some other slightly less Holy dude or dudess.
They record a variety of thought-processes and arguments. They’re among the first poetic-critical works to make the biographical reading redundant.
Nonsense! There is great poignancy in knowing Vyasa, father of Shuka, progenitor of the Kauravas, is recording the Gita. The Upanishads are family texts for those descended from Vedic Rishis. We know the biographies of those concerned and this adds pathos to mathos.
They don’t contain “an author’s thought”: their subject is thought itself.
But no literary work, save one composed by chaos, does not contain the author's thoughts even if their subject is nought itself.
“Who impels us to utter these words? Who is the Spirit behind the eye and the ear?” are among the first lines of the Kena Upanishad.
True enough. But plenty of mimamsaka lineages descend from the author. It is a family text linked with the udgatrs. It relates directly to what my paternal ancestors did for a living. The subject is not 'thought itself'. It is a particular kind of thought associated with proper performance of soteriological rituals. Suppose an udgatr came across a shopkeeper scratching his head to find a way to boost profits. Should he just price gouge? The udgatr, if he were a sensible man, might say 'you are thinking too small. You must expand to gain scale and scope economies. Otherwise, you will price yourself out of the market.' Only in a soteriological context would the udgatr quote the Kena Upanishad so as to prevent a client from surrendering to gross superstition or magical thinking.
Of course, neither the Upanishads nor the Gita could be a footnote to Plato in a literal sense,
They could be contained within a footnote to Plato. Indeed, some savants thought Parmenides had been influenced by the Indians. Information of that sort could certainly find a way into a footnote. Moreover, since there is much doubt as to the dating of Indic texts- which are likely to have existed in an oral form long before they were first written down- causal arguments from a purported Indic ur-text might, and have indeed actually, been made.
because the earliest of the first, composed around the sixth century BC, precede him by about two centuries; the second, from the second to the third century BC, is near-contemporaneous with the Greek.
So, the Upanishads
could in Amit's literal sense have been a footnote to Plato. As for the Gita, we know the Greeks associated Dionysius with India. It is certainly possible that the Orphic Mysteries drew upon Indic sources at one remove.
The Upanishads are part of the Vedas, an agglomeration of beliefs, rituals, practices and texts in which the origins of Hinduism are said to lie.
This is not true. The Vedas are considered Revealed 'Shruti'. The Brahmanas, Aranyaka/Upanishadas are its priest-craft's needful ancillary texts.
How homogeneous a belief-system the Vedas comprise is anyone’s guess, since some of the most powerful passages of the Upanishads are oppositional and argumentative, and have to do, implicitly or explicitly, with testing the parameters of intellectual convention.
This is not 'anyone's guess'. It is something Brahmins know about because they have been thinking about it for thousands of years. Amit- presumably a Kayastha by birth- is simply ignorant. What he will say next is anyone's guess. But, whatever it is, we know it will be stupid.
The Vedas may be a convenient umbrella term,
But aren't in fact any such thing for tens of millions of Brahmans and hundreds of millions of practicing Hindus.
but, if the Upanishads are an important part of the Vedic corpus, they’re certainly not a placid expression of an established Vedic world view.
They are a pure and beautiful expression of a sublime world-view which Hindus affirm was indeed that of the Vedic Seers.
They themselves, through the nuanced rethinking of both the assumptions of early Hinduism and of the habits of thought itself, are trying to establish something. Their language is critical rather than sacerdotal.
The Upanishads do criticise a materialistic interpretation of the Vedas. But their language is sacerdotal and soteriological. They establish Vedanta which is the mainstream orthodoxy for most Hindus. Moreover, from the earliest times, Hindu mimamsakas have distinguished vidhi (substantive injunction) from Arthavada (encomium and embellishment) in Scripture.
By contrast, the polemics of Shraman 'gymnosophists' was highly critical and 'interrogative'. It was these naked ascetics who influenced Pyrhho.
They’re more interested – and this is true of the Gita too – in interrogating consciousness rather than admonishing the non-believer.
They admonish materialistic interpretations. They don't 'interrogate consciousness' as the Yoga-Samkhya or Jaina or Buddhist philosophy does. Rather they establish Vedanta as the pure and original 'Mimamsa' or hermeneutic for Vedic Scripture. The Gita, reflects the acceptance of Yoga-Samkhya as an orthodox Hindu 'darshana'.
Among the subjects they call into dispute is the matter of how we think about the Creator, or whether it’s at all possible to “think” about Him or Her.
There is no dispute in Vedanta as to how Brahma should be thought of. Rather, a method of sublation is prescribed so as to go from a partial, materialistic, conception, to one that is pure, holistic, and entirety spiritual.
According to a dominant version of the Judeo-Christian model, so influential to how we conceive of authorship (given the “author’”is a creator), God makes the world, is fundamentally exterior to it, owns, oversees and governs it, and, when appropriate, comes to its aid.
Such a view is perfectly compatible with Hinduism. All that Vedanta claims is that this view can, or must, if the aim is release from re-birth, be sublated. At the very least, it should not give rise to sectarian strife of a bigoted kind- unless the thing is funny.
At the outset, the Kena Upanishad, which has to do with whys and wherefores, dismantles the causality of creator and creation, not through assertion, but a series of negations and inversions:
In that case Amir was lying when he said these texts 'interrogate consciousness'. Rather, they are declarative and imperative simply.
What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be Brahman; and not what people here adore.
So quit bargaining with God, or engaging in magical rituals to harm your enemies.
What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to be Brahman; and not what people here adore.
So stop trying to catch the eye of the Lord by showy rituals. Don't 'adore' wealth and fame. It is not for bestowing such tinsel that the Lord is adored by the wise.
… I do not imagine “I know him well”, and yet I cannot say “I know him not”.
This is true of all one loves or finds surpassingly beautiful. I know my Mum very well. But each time I think of her I find something richer and stranger in her beauty that I wake anew to wonderment.
He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.
Indeed. A learned man may be able to point out my Mum's various excellences better than I could dream of doing. But I knew her best when I was but a babe. The weight of years and such vanity as I mistook for wisdom have diminished my ability to reach towards her in thought. Yet, when as helpless as a babe and most desperately in need of her, she is simply there.
There are also the paradoxes in the Isa Upanishad to take into account, which overturn the idea of a creator looking upon their creation from above: “The Spirit, without moving, is swifter than the mind … He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all”.
The work of the adhvaryu is different from that of the udgatr. They are concerned with different ineluctable modalities. Yet the genius of Vedanta is to present a synoptic view.
These are not assertions; they’re subversions.
Nonsense! They are hermeneutic assertions. Only if you believe that Holy Writ is a manual for conjuring up demons to kill your enemies would you deny these assertions.
Idols are not being ejected from a sacred space, as they were by Moses; structures of thought are being challenged.
Idols are irrelevant. We are speaking of a Soteriological tradition without idols though most Hindus see nothing wrong with 'murti puja'.
What’s being subverted is the way both a laity and a clerical establishment think: “not what people here adore” refers to the first, while the priestly hierarchy is dismissed in these phrases – “those who imagine he can be attained by thought … He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple”.
Amit is being silly. The Upanishads were the ancestral teachings of hereditary ritual specialists though no doubt their patrons were welcome to acquire, or even contribute, to this knowledge. Indeed, 'lay figures' might possess a superior 'madhu vidya' and impart it to hereditary priests as happens in the Chandogya.
The Upanishads, then, can hardly be called originary.
They describe themselves as reflecting on that portion of Scripture which it was the duty of a particular hereditary class to memorize and transmit.
They sound more like the latest in a series of disagreements; a great deal has preceded them, and reached a state of ossification before their arrival.
Not to Hindus. This may have been the view of German philologists who never set foot in India.
Among what they challenge is a particular sense of causality regarding the relationship between creation and creator, which seems to have been extant when they were composed.
Causality is not challenged. Chorismos- an ontological gap between Creator and Creation- is challenged. Obviously, a Being powerful enough to cause Existence to arise out of Nothingness is not like a carpenter or a mason who exists separately from the chair he made or the wall he built.
Many traditions believe in a first cause, after which the universe comes into existence and before which there was nothing.
This is equally true of Hindu traditions.
The Upanishad’s conception of consciousness – “He moves, and he moves not”; “He is far, and he is near” – complicates the point of origin.
Indic Religions affirm cycles of creation. But this scarcely matters to Soteriology.
Again, unlike Descartes’s belief that thought is both a product and a proof of existence, the Upanishad’s “What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think” introduces an absence at the heart of thought.
No it doesn't. That which enables the mind to think is present, not absent, at the heart of thought. Buddhism has a different theory- kshanikavada or momentariness. There is only the bare and empty present illuminated by the lightning flash of 'cetana' intentionality.
If thought can’t conceive whatever it is that produces it, then thought can’t be wholly present –
Nonsense! I can't conceive my parents in the way they conceived me. This does not mean I don't fully exist or can't have kids of my own. But God isn't a father in the only way I can be a father because God is infinitely greater.
a formulation that’s antithetical to the Cartesian proclamation.
Rubbish! Occasionalism is one way to reconcile Descartes and Vedanta.
And since causality constantly reasserts itself as a default mode of thinking throughout history, the Upanishads remain, essentially, oppositional.
Not if we embrace Occasionalism as the Gita does. Even otherwise there are many workarounds. Like the Jains one could have a 'parinami dhravya' or dynamic notion of substance. Indeed, Umaswati, Nagarjuna & Sankara unite all three Indic religions on the basis of 'observational equivalence'. The Matam (doctrine) is different but the Vigyan (Science or Praxis) is the same.
Amit is ignorant of all this. He has read some Western books and because he is of Indian origin he thinks he can write any old shite and no one will call him on it coz Black Lives Matter innit?
They can’t occupy the space of established thought, being opposed to that space.
Yet that is precisely what happened.
Nor can one reduce either the Upanishads or the Gita in sociological terms to being “Brahminical”
because Brahminism was a service industry reflecting the views of those who 'paid the piper'. Thus Philosopher Kings play a big role in some Upanishads and, of course, in the Gita.
without losing sight of the fact that their language is critical-poetic –
No, their language is entirely soteriological. Manuals on Aesthetics are 'critical-poetic'.
that is, they raise a critique through paradox and metaphor
but if the purpose is soteriological then no 'critical-poetic' work is being done save by tendentious imputation
– rather than dogmatic or hieratic.
The truth is Brahmins conserved this heritage- which they were welcome to view as dogmatic and hieratic- and, till relatively recently, generally made their living by so doing. Even if more remunerative employment was available they kept up this study for spiritual reasons or, perhaps, 'just in case' the worst should befall and they found themselves penniless refugees.
This extraordinary choice of expressive language constitutes a strategy.
No. A strategy may regulate choice of language. It is not constituted by it.
Poetry is the only tenable form of thought for these two texts,
Nonsense! The Upanishads contain prose passages. Both poetry and prose do the same thing. That is why we understand Amit's prose version of what Lord Krishna said-
for, as Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita, “Neither Vedas, nor sacrifices, nor studies, nor benefactions, nor rituals, nor fearful austerities can give the vision of my Form Supreme”.
Because, this can be gained only by either 'chakshuchi vidya'- which was gifted to Arjuna but which he didn't want to accept- or else by Lord Krishna's own gift of divine eyes, which Arjuna does accept but only for this specific purpose.
If the list I’ve quoted covers the recognized intellectual and practical activities of the Brahmin,
It doesn't. A Brahmin, like a person of any other profession or no profession at all, is welcome to humbly adore Yogishvara- the Lord of Yoga- Krishna himself. This 'bhakti marga' is why Brahmins are reconciled to their humble lot in life.
we might say that the Upanishads and Gita are alt-Brahminical: they were written by anomalous Brahmins.
This is not the view of the Brahmins themselves. No doubt, a Kayastha with a hereditary hatred of Brahmins may say 'so and so did good work. True, he belonged to that evil caste. But, he was an anomaly.'
The role these texts play (along with Buddhism) as the chief underground, often unacknowledged,
why 'unacknowledged'? It was prestigious to claim an acquaintance with Sanskrit works. Many who did so were bluffing- or, like Voltaire, had been taken in by a forgery.
resources of modernity and modernism begins with their advent onto the world stage through Latin, English and German translations.
Because Indians are incapable of modernity. It had to be imported from the West. Why stop there? Why not say 'Indians were hanging by their tails from trees eating bananas. Then Whitey came and showed them how to behave like human beings?'
Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron retranslated fifty-two Upanishads from Persian translations and commentaries into Latin in 1796, and published them in 1801–2.
But Voltaire had been fooled by the 'Ezourvedam' in 1760. Information about Buddhist and Hindu texts had begun to circulate in Europe by the first half of the Seventeenth Century.
These became key texts for Arthur Schopenhauer (“It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death”), among others, and later for T. S. Eliot.
Eliot learned Sanskrit at Harvard from Paul Elmer More.
Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), an Orientalist scholar and typographer, began to learn Sanskrit in Banaras in the 1780s from Kalinath, a Brahmin pandit, and to translate the epic, the Mahabharata, into English. The project remained unfinished but a chapter, the Bhagavad Gita, was published in London in 1785 as the Bhagvat-geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon. The Gita then appeared in French in 1787.
So what? There had already been a craze for China. India had been familiar for two hundred years. The first English author to live and write in India did so at the end of the Sixteenth Century. But Indian Religion did not look very much unlike European Religion. When the Portuguese first arrived in South India they worshipped in Hindu temples believing them to be Christian Churches. Unlike China, where you had a great Empire and a widespread Civic Religion based on filial piety, India held no great mysteries. However, as 'Deism' and well-bred disdain for the Church took hold, a fear of Revolutionary anarchy grew with it. This led to a reaction against the mid Eighteenth Century Philosophical preoccupation with 'Natural', rather than 'Revealed' Religion. In 1740, Hume wrote
'Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties. ’Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings. And these improvements are the more to be hoped for in natural religion, as it is not content with instructing us in the nature of superior powers, but carries its views farther, to their disposition towards us, and our duties towards them; and consequently we ourselves are not only the beings, that reason, but also one of the objects, concerning which we reason.'
In a sense, Hume was right. But it took two hundred years before people like Godel, Tarski & Von Neumann, Nash etc created the mathematical and logical tools necessary for the task. Since the Nalophkyanam along with the Vyadha Gita is dual to the Bhagvad Gita and since it says that the Just King must learn Statistical Game theory, it follows that there could be no 'Modern' reading of the Gita till quite recently. Thus the European reception of the Gita could only be Theistic, which was reasonable, Deontological, which was silly, or some stupid Racist shite which, alas, was inevitable.
The impact of the Upanishads and Gita proved particularly powerful in the domains of the aesthetic and the literary, and in the formation of a particular experience of secular modernity.
The Jesuit discovery of Chinese literature had more impact at an earlier date. The Chinese epitomized rationality and civic virtue. Yet they were not Christian. This fed the cult of 'Natural Religion' and Enlightened Deism. But, if the masses no longer feared Hell fire, what was to stop them cutting off the heads of the Aristos and grabbing their land? What of the new
bildungsburgertum? Whither lay their duty? Must they be cogs in the machine of Absolutism or could they do something to change its nature? Europe had its own Pietist- Pietas is the Latin translation of Eusebia which is how the Greeks translated 'Dharma'- and Mystic traditions. The Upanishads were easily assimilated to this. The Gita however dramatized the dilemma of the
bildungsburgertum caught between two worlds, as Arnold says, one dead and one powerless to be born.
This at any rate is the conventional, the sensible, view. Amit is not sensible. He writes-
To the literary imagination, it provided new ways of thinking about the author’s relationship to their work, giving the latter a mysterious independence that’s not reducible to authorial intention or biography.
But this was the pre-modern attitude to Literature. It was anonymous. Who was Qoheleth? Who cares? Consider the success achieved by Ossian. Indeed, had India not existed in a manner which outmatched the imagination of a Tom Moore or a Southey, it would simply have been invented. The literary imagination, it seems, is ahead of what it feeds on. The market is demand driven.
Engaged in a new project that would turn out to be Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote to his friend and lover Louise Colet in 1852: “I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is … No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent”. He adds: “the author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere”.
Who wrote the Chanson Roland? Who greatly cared till the modern age? Flaubert, 'the ageing hysteric', felt he had to curb his lyricism so as to render versimilitude passional and engrossing.
Where does this model of the creator come from – one who’s not an overseer or governor, but both in the work and out of it?
We know because Flaubert told us.
Partly Flaubert owes the conceit to Baruch Spinoza, whom he adored. But he was also immersed in Buddhist texts, and it’s inconceivable he wouldn’t have known the Upanishads, where the conceit has its earliest and most succinct expression: “He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all”.
But, Flaubert as a Frenchman would have already encountered in Pascal that intelligible and infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
In Calcutta, the creation in the early nineteenth century by Hindus of a reformist-intellectual sect called the Brahmo Samaj also depended on the Upanishads as it distanced itself from traditional Hinduism, turning, instead, to a niraakar creator – a creator, that is, without form or outline (aakar), Flaubertian in character: present everywhere and visible nowhere.
The Brahmos were Unitarian and had adopted Islamic iconoclasm as did the Arya Samaj and numerous other sects. As compradors, they enriched themselves unconscionably, clamored for unrestricted British migration to India, and spat bile at their orthodox detractors.
The Brahmo Samaj is often seen to embody a move away from polytheistic Hinduism to the monotheistic world view contained in the Upanishads;
It was viewed by Evangelists as the first step to conversion.
Charles Wilkins, in his Preface to his translation, had made a similar observation about the Gita, in which he found an echo of Unitarianism. But this account of the turn is slightly facile, I think, and the comparison to monotheism doesn’t really hold. There’s no “god” in the Upanishads in any conventional sense.
Yes, there is- in the conventional Hindu sense. Isha means Lord. Ishvar, from the same root, is the God of the Brahmos and Arya Samajis and so forth. Yogishvara- the Lord of Yoga- is Lord Krishna and the Gita is a devotional text dedicated to him. Ishvar has long been accepted as the Hindu equivalent of 'Allah' as in 'Ishvar Allah tere naam'- which Gandhi's Ashramites added to Raghupati Raja.
There’s certainly no single controlling power in it commensurate with God in the Old and New Testaments, or with Allah in the Qur’an.
There certainly is. Brahma, Ishvar, Vishnu- all mean exactly the same thing as God.
It is, in fact, an interrogation of consciousness.
No. There is an assertion, itself based on the concerned Veda preserved by a hereditary sept of ritual specialists, which is considered by Vedanta to be the authoritative hermeneutic for it.
The turn to the Upanishadic comprises not a turn to the monotheistic but to the non-representational,
But this turn to 'the non-representational' is to be found in the Eleatics! Why go to the Ganges when the Greeks are close at hand?
and it’s the non-representational that had an immense impact on Schopenhauer and later Friedrich Nietzsche,
There is an iconoclastic element in Protestantism. Pietism of the Schliermacher type considers representations, e.g. that of the Holy Trinity, as having no real place in consciousness. The Romantic Sublime can be detached from uncomfortable journeys into the wastes and the wilds so as to be enjoyed, non-representationally, in postprandial armchair reveries.
though they, as well as G. W. F. Hegel, confused it with nihilism in a way that Flaubert obviously didn’t.
But Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and so forth didn't know Sanskrit. Karl Krause did. His theology is 'Reconciliationist'- i.e. man eventually merges with God.
The artistic response to the Upanishads is a deeper and truer one in the end than the response of the philosophers.
You can't respond to things you don't know. Flaubert did not know the Upanishads. T.S Eliot did. He had studied Sanskrit. Eliot was a Theist. His 'response' is deeper and truer than any shite Amit writes.
The non-representational, as a secular aesthetic category, became hugely significant to Rabindranath Tagore: as something that’s neither God nor deity, but is sacred.
God
is deity and all that pertains to His Worship
is sacred.
The sense of a sacredness that doesn’t have an obvious connection with a recognizable deity was a profound resource for the experience of secular modernity, both in India and outside it.
But, for Hindus, there is an obvious connection- because of Hindu scripture- between
any sense of sacrality and God.
From the Gita comes the definition of a peculiar kind of action – at once invested, passionate and detached – that would contribute deeply, I think, to the critical-aesthetic notions of “disinterestedness” and “impersonality”.
Matthew Arnold was genuinely affected by the Gita. But what he took from it was the imperative to be true to one's own nature while acting in concord with other men in the pursuit of perfection. His work, as he conceived it, was never 'disinterested' as opposed to truth seeking. It was never 'impersonal' precisely because it was individual and independent. His critical-aesthetic notions were melioristic and rejected Macaulayan triumphalist historicism.
The Gita is an interruption in the narrative of the Mahabharata.
No. It is the dual of the Vyadha Gita. Both Gitas are intended to dispel 'vishaada'- akrasia or abulia.
The brothers Pandava, after returning from the thirteen-year exile into which they’d been sent duplicitously by their cousins, the Kauravas, find they won’t be allowed to reclaim their kingdom. The two clans go to war, but, on the eve of battle, Arjun studies the opposite camp in a state of despair, and asks his charioteer Krishna how he can possibly slay cousins and uncles he’s known since childhood.
The obvious answer would have been- he can't, since Drona and Bhishma have the boon of dying only at their own wish. Arjuna should worry about getting killed, not killing. But Arjuna has an 'asvamika', unvested, boon of clairvoyance. Krishna Devakiputra too gained a similar boon in the Changogya. Thus the Gita is a symmetric game of a particularly piquant kind.
Krishna says many things in this conversation, including odd, counter-intuitive pieces of advice: “Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.
This is not counter-intuitive. If you set your heart on the reward but despise the work, you won't do it but may try to steal or cheat your way to what you desire. Then you end up in jail feeling sorry for yourself.
'Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires, be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind – a peace that is ever the same”.
If your mind is distracted by greed for reward or fear of punishment, you will scamp your work. Moreover you may experience abulia or akrasia. This is common sense. Mums and teachers have been saying stuff like this to kids from the beginning of time.
To what kind of work might success or failure be redundant?
Every kind of work must hold success or failure to be redundant for the duration of the work. You cook food so as to eat it. But eating it is a redundant activity
while it is cooking. True, there are one or two ingredients you can pop into your mouth while raw. You may also sample the dish from time to time. But, generally speaking, this is unnecessary from the nutritional point of view. Your should wait till after the dish has been fully cooked. It is only then that your success or failure as a cook can be determined. If the food taste good and you don't keel over vomiting, you may say you have succeeded.
By the time the Gita’s Krishna was first heard in Europe, all judgements were deemed, by the Enlightenment, to be either subjective or objective.
That is still the case, though, of course, there is no objective criteria of demarcation between them. The Gita confirms this common-sense view.
What kind of judgement escapes this binary by being at once passionate and detached, made in earnest without mindfulness of outcome?
Subjective judgments which are 'passionate' but 'detached' include Deontic & Aesthetic judgments & judgments made behind what Rawls would call the veil of ignorance- i.e. which apply to you without your prior knowledge. A preference is not a judgment. An unconsidered grabbing of what you like may represent a lapse in judgment.
Immanuel Kant addresses this in a shift in his own thinking, in his writings on aesthetics in 1790: he characterizes “beauty” as being “purposeful without a purpose”.
Because the object is not subsumed under a concept. Rather there is a free play of the Imagination which is not purposeful like cognitive judgments.
Also, he classifies aesthetic judgement as being “disinterested”, or untouched by what we ordinarily understand as desire. In the binary imposed by the Enlightenment, “disinterested” will be seen to be the opposite of “interested”; that is, impartial as opposed to biased, or objective rather than subjective.
Kant was part of the Enlightenment. His transcendentalism was a means of escape from a common sense empiricism of a crude, materialistic, sort. At one time, beauty was thought to relate directly to utility because that which was pleasing to the senses tended to greater longevity and more healthy progeny. Then people began to see that thin women and lofty mountains have a beauty of their own.
But “disinterestedness” is a breakdown in the binary; it indicates aesthetic experience’s ability to be simultaneously involved and disengaged – a contradiction that the Enlightenment is deeply reluctant to allow for.
The Enlightenment had no problem with the notion that we may judge our own actions to be wrong or that a particular course of action is right even if it harms us. Why have judges if our Society believes that everybody will always choose only what is best for themselves? Why go to Court if you know the judge will always give the verdict in favor of the guy who can pay the bigger bribe?
Five years separate the Gita’s appearance in English, and three years its translation into French, from Kant’s intervention in aesthetics. It’s unlikely he’d have been unaware of the work, or made his sui generis departure without it.
It is unlikelier that Kant would be foolish enough to believe that beauty pleases our senses for biological reasons. He was living at a time when it was fashionable to go into raptures about 'sublime' scenery- snowy mountains and unpeopled wildernesses- rather than stately parterres and well ordered plantations.
The second time such “disinterestedness” appears as a concept, when Matthew Arnold redefines what criticism is, the link to the Gita is clear, and doesn’t require speculation. Arnold had read Wilkins’s translation in 1845, and he returned to it constantly. In 1865, he wrote of criticism,
that it must try to uncover the truth. Thus he was of the school of Lachmann-
“id quod recensere dicitur, sine interpretatione et possumus et debemus- before interpretation there must be 'recension'- i.e. the patient spade work to uncover the facts must first be completed before we can pronounce on the matter.
radically, not only as the expression of taste or opinion, but as a form of disengaged engagement without obvious consequence,
so, patient spade work rather than first planting the evidence and then digging it up and saying 'Aha!'.
making the connection to the Gita 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”.
What is the context of this remark? A young girl had strangled her illegitimate child and had been arrested. Meanwhile pompous politicians talked of the unprecedented felicity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Arnold thinks this is because the Brits weren't as studious as the Germans. They weren't philosophical. Thus they talked cant.
His essay upholds scientific philology and rational criticism based on uncovering the facts of the case. He was refuting the argument that criticism could be anything goes. You ought not to lie about what an author said. You shouldn't make stuff up. You should tax your brain rather than just jotting anything down. In other words, you must not be Amit Chaudhri writing shite about Hinduism and hoping to get away with it coz Whitey won't call him on it due to Black Lives Matter innit?
Sadly, Arnold was wrong. Germany was headed in the wrong direction. Byron knew more about one very interesting aspect of life than Goethe. The truth of the matter is that Goethe was a turgid bore who could write some lovely lyrics. Wordsworth could be a bore but was just as good. This is also true of Shelley and Byron. They knew somethings beyond Goethe's ken and were better off not knowing other things which Germans were obliged to cultivate by reason of their backwardness. Britain in the early nineteenth century was alive in a manner that Germany wasn't. That's why its Universities didn't matter much. Trade and Travel, Party politics at home and Imperial Administration abroad, were better teachers. Arnold couldn't see it because he belonged to a greyer generation. He blamed Regency poets who had breathed a freer air for his own suffocation under mid Victorian prudery and philistinism. Arnold was wrong to pin his faith on German paideia. He quotes Joubert 'Force till Right is ready'. But, Right was never ready in Germany. Force alone prevailed, to the delight of its pedagogues till the country was divided and occupied. By contrast, in England, Right did prevail though the 'physical force' Chartists failed because, as General Napier told them, they didn't have artillery.
Arnold equates 'disinterestedness' with 'curiosity', which he believed had a negative connotation only in England. Amit thinks 'evenness of mind'- ataraxy- is 'curious'. Why? Because this cretin believes in some 'pervasive binary' of his own invention.
“Disinterestedness”, then, is, in Krishna’s words, a curious “evenness of mind” irrespective of “success and failure”: it’s the dismantling of a pervasive binary which customarily places the word in an Enlightenment tradition of rational objectivity, or even points to the contemporary misuse of the word to mean “uninterested”.
Arnold merely says that it is good to uncover the truth even if there is no certainty this will advance our interests. He quotes Burke to suggest that this type of effort will turn out to be providential.
The Gita is, in fact very interesting, if read as the dual of the Vyadha Gita and thus in a game theoretic manner. Arjuna, it turns out, is genuinely curious about Yoga and, in a dramatic manner, places himself in a position to absorb its entire philosophy.
By contrast Amit has no curiosity about the Gita. He read some crap Eng Lit textbooks and formed his ideas accordingly. Yet Arnold in the continuation of the very passage Amit quotes warns against this type of laziness.
The Gita’s practice of “impersonality” points to T. S. Eliot’s attack, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, on the idea that poetry is an “expression of the personality” or of “emotion”.
Which was convenient if you happened to write like a homosexual in a country where being one could get you a stiff stretch of porridge.
It’s no accident that the final line of The Waste Land is the Upanishadic refrain, “shantih shantih shantih”, the Sanskrit word for spiritual peace or even-mindedness (which, as it happens, was promoted to being the primary aesthetic rasa or experience in Sanskrit poetics by the eleventh-century philosopher Abhinavagupta).
Nor is it an accident that the poem came out after a terrible world war. Why call Lord Abhinavagupta a philosopher? He is one of the greatest Saivite Sages revered particularly by Kashmiri Brahmans. His
Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vimarśini is considered a means to gain direct knowledge of God. This is the proof that Shanti is indeed a 'rasa'.
It’s uncertain in what way these conceptual departures would have existed in modernity if these texts hadn’t been put into circulation when they were.
There are no 'conceptual departures' here. Eliot was very much aware that anything he found in India could also be found in Europe. He was, and remained, a devout Christian- though, no doubt, he suffered much because of his first marriage.
Yet a great part of this history of ideas remains unwritten.
A great part of the history of nonsense remains unwritten for the excellent reason that nonsense is a drug on the market. Amit's achievement here is that he has shown that you can take the Brahmin baiting, Hindu hating, Kayastha out of Kolkata, but you can't beat him to death coz Black Lives Matter innit?
