Heidegger and Vedanta: Reflections on a Questionable Theme
Vedanta is an orthodox school of Hindu theology which holds the Vedas to be uncreated. It is monist and affirms karma (reincarnation).
What is questionable can sometimes be worthy of thought,
No. It is always worthy of thought unless the question is idle or foolish. However, of what is unquestionable, thoughts- however bitter- are futile.
and what is unthinkable can sometimes be glimpsed as that which thinking is about.
No. The thought that such glimpsing is possible is thinkable but idle or foolish.
Both Heidegger and Vedanta thought amply illustrate this.
Hindu thought is idle or foolish if there is no soul and no rebirth and no enlightenment or 'liberation' from the karmic cycle. Advaita Vedanta is idle or foolish if there can be no identity of soul and universal soul. An idealistic conception of Advaita may affirm that there is a 'transcendental ego'- a pure, unchanging structure of awareness. It is the "subject" that observes and is itself the one abiding object of which nothing can be predicated. The question was whether Husserl's 'bracketing' or 'phenomenological reduction' was a way to establish this. An alternative view was that what Sankara did was like Hegelian 'sublation'. If Heidegger's thought, as a criticism of Husserl, was idle or foolish, then a philosopher adhering to Advaita- e.g. Radhakrishnan- would need to see if Husserl's program could support Sankara's point of view. Alternatively, the Idealist could say 'Sankara is a religious thinker. Soteriology is separate from Philosophy. Vedantic soteriology is linked to Vedic orthopraxy (vigyan) and is supported by different dogmas (matam). Similarly Christian soteriology is founded in Christ, not some variety of neo-Kantianism. Philosophy, by itself, can't provide a proof of God, or a proof that there is an immortal 'atma' (soul) unless there is at least one 'absolute proof' (in the Godelian sense). Thus it is different from Theistic Religion.'
It would be perfectly reasonable to say Heidegger and other 'existential' thinkers enable the philosopher to keep the religious realm separate from his own subject rather than claim that it is reducible, or supervenient, upon it.
This is not the route Mehta takes. He babbles about Weberian 'disenchantment' & the romantic trope of the old Gods withdrawing and hiding themselves from the increasingly mechanised world of men.
No other justification can be offered for the following very questionable enterprise of bringing together two disparate ways of thinking, so wide apart in time and in their entire context.
Some German philosophers were influenced by Vedanta. Was Heidegger influenced by them? Up to a point. Equally, prominent Indian philosophers- e.g. Radhakrishnan who achieved cult status in the UK in the Thirties- were influenced by German philosophy. Some sensible points might be made in this connection.
The attempt can have unquestioned validity only for those who believe, like Nicolai Hartmann and many contemporary comparativists, that there are “eternal problems” in philosophy,
which would be 'open problems' in other disciplines like mathematical logic.
everywhere and at all times the same, or, with Paul Deussen, that it is the same voice of the Eternal Truth that is heard by thinking spirits everywhere. Perhaps, however, the task of thinking, in the comparative sphere, is not limited to the search for what is common to the thought-content (the thoughts, the Gedanke, the answers given) of two different philosophical traditions, or the construction of new concepts overarching them, nor to the quest of motifs in another tradition that may supplement a deficiency in one's own and so “enrich” it. Perhaps there is, beyond this, the more exciting, in the end even more rewarding, task of trying to see and lay open the hidden truth of the paths taken by thinking (the Denken, the movement of thinking, the questions asked) in each, and letting questions arise in the process and stay with us, without seeking to come up with precipitate answers.
Mehta found this rewarding and exciting. But, a Hindu might well ask, did he in fact know the 'paths taken by thinking' by Vedic priests whose livelihood derived from performing complex rituals or chanting the Vedic psalms in the prescribed manner? To do so, he would himself have had to perform karma kanda or else observe and carefully question those who did so.
This involves a movement of thought that is less like an arrow in flight toward its target than a roving and a rambling, a movement to and fro, between two different realms of discourse and vision, an exploration of two different topologies.
If there is a topology, there is a well defined set. True, an expert in karma kanda may be able to relate everything in an Upanishad to its Brahmana (priestly instruction manual) in which the Vedic text is elaborated upon. However, some rituals mentioned there have disappeared. We may say, 'such and such Saint has given us a good enough gist of the matter'. Sadly, knowing the gist isn't enough to reconstruct 'the paths taken by Vedantic thinking'.
There are no predetermined rules for a game of this kind,
because it is a type of playing with yourself. What's important is that you wipe up after yourself.
only the playing of the game can generate the rules, if at all.
I suppose there are no rules for playing with yourself. What matters is that you wipe up after yourself.
So much by way of apology for the following fragmentary, somewhat Heideggerian, remarks on this questionable theme.
The theme is not questionable in itself. One may well ask how and why priests performing particular rituals sought to link them to a grander Monistic Soteriology which may have arisen independently in ancient India. However to do this one would need to begin with their lived experience of conducting those rituals and their intuition that they would be inefficacious or soteriologically fatal if they were not performed with right cognition.
Deussen quotes the following passage from Sankara's Commentary on the Brahmasutra (I, iii, 33) as ‘‘characteristic for Samkara period as well as for his theological conception": 'For also, what is for us imperceptible was for the ancients perceptible; thus it is recorded, that Vyasa (the author of the Mahabharata and others used to meet the Gods and [Rishisj face to face. But if some would assert that, as for those now living so for the ancients also it was impossible to meet with gods and the like, they would deny the variety of the world; they might also maintain that, as at present, so also in other times, there was no world- swaying prince and thus they would not ac-knowledge the injunctions referring to the consecration of kings; they ought further assume that, as at present, so also in other times, the duties of castes and Asramas had no stable rules, and thus treat as vain the canon of law which provides rules for them. We must therefore believe that the ancients, in consequence of pre-eminent merits, held visible converse with Gods and [Rishis]. The Smrti also says (Yogas Sutra 2, 44): “through study is gained] union with the beloved godhead." And when it further teaches, that Yoga bestows as reward the mastery of nature, consisting fin the freedom from embodied being and its laws, and thereby] in the ability to become as small as an atom and the like, this is not to be rejected out of hand by a mere dictatorial sentence. Samkara goes on to quote the Sruti (Svetasvatara Ufmmsad 11, 12) pro- claiming the greatness of Yoga, and adds that we do not have “the right to measure by our capabilities the capability of the Rishis who see the mantras and Brahmana (i.e., the Veda).” Samkara remarks in conclusion, From all this it appears that the Itihasas and puranas have an adequate basis. And the conceptions of ordinary life also must not be declared to be unfounded, if it is at all possible to accept them. The general result is that we have the right to conceive the gods as possessing personal existence, on the ground of mantras, arthavadas, itihasas, puranas, and ordinary prevailing ideas.
This is not an important passage. It is obvious that if you are a priest or a follower of Shruti & Smriti, you accept the Deity even though you have never seen him. People who say 'you are performing some absurd actions for no reason known to you' are wrong. You are praying to God in the manner prescribed by Scripture.
Here, the gods are absent
No. A thing may be present though we do not see it.
but they are not denied; they have withdrawn from man’s sight
No. Some men may that sight right now. It is just that if someone says 'can you see God when you pray to him? Does he answer you back?', you can reply 'nope. But my prayer is according to prescribed forms. There were great seers who did see God. We follow their precepts.'
but still form a presence on the horizon.
Sankara never says anything of the sort.
A world has passed, but its links with the present are not broken.
Nor does he say that. Everyone knows that there still are great seers or devotees. Maybe one such exists in the neighbouring district. Who knows? Maybe our next door neighbour has the beatific vision though he doesn't give himself any airs and graces on that account.
The present, though impoverished, is still seen, understood and interpreted in the light of a nobler past and as continuous with it. Sankara would not perhaps have said, with Heraclitus, that “Here too there are gods,” but would have found little to quarrel with Catullus when he said of the golden age: then indeed did the gods come down and visit with men.
He would have said 'if this sentence by the Yavana had been included in an Upanishad, then the meaning is mediation on such gods is approved because 'texts, speaking of Brahman with form, have the injunctions about meditations as their main objectives. So long as they do not lead to contradiction, their apparent meanings should be accepted. But when they involve a contradiction, the principle to be followed for deciding one of the other is that, those that have the formless Brahman as their main purport are more authoritative than the others which have not that as their main purport. It is according to this that one is driven to the conclusion that Brahman is formless and not its opposite, though texts having both the purports are in evidence.' (Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Sri Sankaracharya III.ii.14 translated by Swami Gambhirananda)
Life, in this Upanisadic tradition, was still experienced as touched by the Divine,
Priests serve God. Texts devised by and for priests are going to be about God not Geology. If you are performing a priestly function and don't have at least the aspiration to be touched by the Divine- which for Theists may be just as good because it arises from God's will or grace- then yours is the life of a miserable drudge. Your position is that of a miser who is employed in giving away to the indigent the wealth of a philanthropist. You hate to see the stock of gold depleted but can earn your bread in no other way.
and the dimension of the holy provided the context for all inquiry into reality and into the nature and destiny of man, and for the pursuit of freedom and immortality.
No. There was other Sutra literature about Medicine, Math, etc. But Vedanta was created for and by Brahmin priests.
The quest for truth was still a quest for the truth of life, for the living truth, and its articulation into a coherent body of argued and examined statements; it was not just a matter of detached theoretical contemplation.
Sankara was in the God business. He wasn't saying anything about the quest for truth in chemistry or medicine or agronomy.
It was a profoundly religious quest,
Because the dude was a monk.
and yet a passionately intellectual one.
Because theological hermeneutics is an intellectual activity.
The eighth century in India, when Sarpkara probably lived and wrote, was the century that experienced the impact of the Buddhist thinker Dharmaklrti, of Kumarila and Prabhakara, thinkers of the Purva Mimamsa, of Mandana Misra, the lone-wolf in the history of Advai- ta Vedanta, as he has been aptly described, and a century which was heir to the imposing and strikingly original work of the Speculative Grammarians.
All this is irrelevant. Sankara supports an orthodox view with common sense arguments. Some feel he goes too far in a Monist direction. Dualism is better. Let God be God. We are happy simply worship him and pray for his Grace. If God wishes a particular person to receive some higher mystic union, that is his business.
But the India of this century, and of many more centuries to come, was not yet under the shadow of what Nietzsche called “the spirit of Socratism,"
there had been Indo-Greeks. The Jain Munis were known as 'gymnosophists'. Vedic orthodoxy had been challenged by Shraman sects. The Buddhists say there is no soul. But they are pious people. Does the difference in dogma (matam) matter? Perhaps not. There is 'observational equivalence' between Nagarjuna, Umaswati & Sankara. The 'vigyan' is the same. Still, for the proper performance of prescribed rituals, let each religion preserve its own traditional philosophical commentaries.
and its thinking was not primarily an operation with concepts about a reality understood solely in terms of being, but had something of the quality of meditation, reflection, and remembrance, even in the midst of the lively give and take of argument and debate so character- istic of the Indian philosophical scene. What is to be heard, thought about, and meditated upon is not a bare ontological principle or a meta- physical ultimate, ground, or arche, but a reality experienceable and experienced as sacred.
No. It could be experienced as a delusion or dream. Mehta is talking about 'dis-enchantment'- i.e. the deplorable fact that fairies have disappeared.
And the hearing, the reflecting and arguing, the meditating, the learning and teaching, the composition of commentaries and independent critical or creative works, all these activities are carried on within the dimension of the holy and the ambience of the Divine.
No. They are a sideshow. Verse 22 of the Bhaja Govindam says ' rathya carpata viracita kanthaH, puyapuya vivarjita panthaH / yogi yoganiyojita citto ramate balonmattavadeva –
The yogi who wears but a quilt made of rags, who walks the path that is beyond merit and demerit, whose mind is joined in perfect yoga with its goal, revels in God consciousness, and lives thereafter as a child or as a madman.
It is not the case that shite JL Mehta got up to with his Professorial chums in Seminar rooms was associated in some way with the ambience of the Divine.
Similarly, Heidi- who once hoped to be a Catholic priest- was no such thing even if he gassed on about gelassenheit. Still, if some German Catholics feel he struggled with what was once their common Faith to some good purpose, why cavil?
The medium is not irrelevant to the message and is often part of it. But concern for the “philosophy” of the Upanishads and the Vedanta, for their content, has stood in the way of sufficient attention being paid to the medium; the literary structure and style; the poetry and not just the prose of these writings; the rhetoric and what appear to be minor embellishments; the magico-mythic dements still clinging to an endeavor where they do not seem rightfully to belong (for example, the role of the sacred syllable Om); above all, the verses of obeisance and praise to be found at the beginning and conclusion of most Vedanta works.
This is like saying of the Vicar's sermon- 'I deplore the fact that the fellow kept mentioning Christ. This distracts us from what's really important- viz. the medium. Why did he use his mouth rather than his anus to make noises?
Turning now to Heidegger, we find ourselves in a completely different life-world; it is the world of our present-day experience,
if we happen to teach worthless shite
life as we all experience it, irrespective of how we individually choose to respond to it. The world in which and for which Heidegger writes is a world which Nietzsche meant when he spoke of “how the influence of Socrates, down to the present moment and even unto all future time, has spread over posterity like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun”; a world under the domination of that “profound illusion,” again in Nietzsche’s words, which lies in “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.”
Nietzsche contracted syphilis and went mad. Thankfully, Socrates had no influence on medical science which, in 1943, developed penicillin as a safe and effective treatment.
It is, further, a world which has been determined by the spread of Christianity and its subsequent secularization, so that, in the words of Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen, “in the spread of modern Western civilizations throughout the world something of the spirit of ‘Christianity incognito’ is at work.”
No. Christianity was and still is at work. It doesn't have to go incognito. It can announce itself and attribute any good it has done and is doing to Lord Jesus himself.
Why pretend this great religion had something to do with Socrates? Nietzsche may not have liked it- but he was as crazy as a bedbug. Perhaps, if Heidi had got a Professorship in a Catholic University, he'd wouldn't have gone to the bad.
It is a world shaped by the Enlightenment and by the spirit of technology, a world disenchanted and desacralized, as Max Weber saw.
Little kids may like fairy stories. But even they see that death is overcome by forgiveness, by compassion, by repentance. The Church needs some smart people to teach theology but even they would rather be working with the poor and vulnerable.
As Heidegger has also described it, a characteristic feature of the modern world is the flight of the gods (Entgotterung)
Very true. Thor has fucked off with my TV remote. Fuck you Thor! Fuck you very much!
This expression docs not mean the mere setting aside of the gods, a crude atheism,
get rid of goblins and gremlins by all means. Thor may be a great character in the Marvel Comics. But the Bible is not a comic-book.
the disappearance of the gods is a two-sided process. First, the world image is Christianized, in so far as the ground of the world is set up as the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute;
Physics may do this. But why bother? Shut up and calculate!
on the other hand, Christendom gives a new interpretation to its Christian character by transforming it into a world-view, thus adapting itself to modernity.
It would be fair to say that Christianity, as it spread during the Dark Ages, enabled Europe to return to a notion of a universal civilization capable of technological and socio-economic progress of a type scholars may well say laid the basis of 'modernity'.
Desacralization (Ent- gatterunx' is the state of indecision regarding God and the gods. Christendom has the largest share in the emergence of this state. But desacralization does not exclude religiosity; indeed, it is through it primarily that the relationship with the gods is transformed into religious experience (Erlebnis) as a subjective process.
Hinduism does have lots of Gods but Vedanta is Monistic. Religious experiences- e.g. attainment of nirvikalpa samadhi- may be achieved by a devotee of a particular deity at a particular place but it is related to 'Nirguna Brahma'- God without predicates.
Once it comes to this, then the gods have indeed fled.
Not from Hindu India. One may say of Catholic Italy, that the Saints took the place of the tutelary gods.
The consequent emptiness is filled up by the historical and psychological investigation of myth, as a substitute.
That is a type of scholarship. It has nothing to do with the toiling masses who keep alive a sacred geography.
The question of Being, as Heidegger poses it, is marked by a radical putting into question of all that has led up to this present state, of the entire Greek-Christian tradition of thought which he sums up under the word “metaphysics.”
Islam, too, knew Aristotle. Hinduism & Buddhism, however, appear not to have been directly affected by his metaphysics though there may be some borrowing in terms of astronomy & mathematics & medical science.
Equally radical is his attempt to so transform “the question of Being” itself, from its original formulation by the Greek thinkers, through the thinkers of medieval Europe, down to his own initial manner of posing it, that this questioning itself becomes a path of preparing for a possible future in which the dimension of the holy may once again give meaning to our world, no longer forsaken by the gods, and man heal himself through a thinking which has freed itself at last from its tutelage to the Greek paradigm.
There were neo-pagan groups at that time. But, in India, they would have been orthodox. Vedanta could be found at their bottom by those who had an interest in putting it there.
The world-historical context in which Heidegger raises the question of Being is one which he has described as “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the devastation of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything creative’’
Or as Swinburne put it-
'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
'We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
In Hindu India, however, no ascetic sect triumphed or, even if it did, forced the gods of the forests and the fields into hiding. Ganapati is to be found in Japan. Indeed, the double bodied Kangiten of the late Heian period is like our Ardhanarishvara. There seems to have been a convergent evolution in this respect.
The essence of this darkening of the world is the absence of God, as Holderlin experienced it, in this destitute time, to which we ourselves still belong. Heidegger’s explanation of the neediness of this time is worth quoting in full: For Holderlin’s historical experience, the appearance and sacrificial death of Christ mark the beginning of the end of the day of the gods.
'Great Pan is dead'. Plutarch says this happened at the time of Tiberius. Was it a reference to Christ? No. All gods had not died.
Night is falling. Ever since the “united three” — Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ— have left the world, the evening of the world’s age has been declining towards its night. The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the “default of God.”
This is the theme of 'birha'- love in separation as applied to the Deity. The Viyogini is considered superior to the Yogi. Longing is more intense than union.
But the default of God which Holderlin
poor fellow, he went mad. His mate, Hegel, poor fellow, didn't.
experienced does not deny that the Christian relationship with God lives on in individuals and in the churches; still less does it assess this relationship negatively. The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it.
Religion still gathers people of all sorts to it.
The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world's history.
I suppose JL Mehta didn't spend a lot of time watching Televangelists or visiting Mega-Churches.
The time of the worlds Night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. If has already grown so destitute, u can no longer discern the default of God as a default, 1 1 The question of Being, as it unfolds in Heidegger's thinking, is directly relevant to this destitution of the present age, "for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss'"; it is a reaching down into the abyss, experiencing and enduring it, so that a "turning of the age" and the return of the gods may be prepared for through a rethinking of Being.
Plenty of people wrestle with their Faith. They may see this in cosmic terms. But they calm down and become happy and productive when they return to the Church and lay down a self-imposed burden.
With all his originality and brilliance, Samkara writes as at one with his tradition, a tradition mediated, if is true, by the passing of the Vedie age and by a long period of Buddhist intellectual and religious dominance, but yet unbroken.
He was a Namboodri. Namboodris continue to perform Vedic rituals. They are 'shrauta'. The strength of Vedanta was that it could be handed down from father to son in any or every village or forest hermitage. Buddhism had gotten used to great Universities & splendid monasteries. This made them vulnerable to rapacious invaders or Princes who coveted their accumulated wealth. Since monks are celibate, the religion can't reproduce itself in a wholly organic manner.
Heidegger, on the contrary, starts off, with Nietzsche as precursor, as a radical thinker in whom the crises of thought and sensibility in the sciences and philosophy, in theology and in literature, are gathered to a focus.
Husserl had converted to Evangelical Lutheranism. Heidi had wanted to be a Catholic priest. He came to phenomenology, like many other lapsed Catholics, through Brentano but broke with Husserl and remained distant from the Neo-Kantians who tended to support the Social Democratic party. Many were purged when the Nazis took power. But they had little time for Heid or Carl Schmitt.
Samkara too was not just a traditionalist intent on restoring the Vedic tradition but was a thinker moved by the experience of his age as destitute, pervaded by an absence and hanging in the abyss.
He didn't want to get married. He wanted to be a monk and to travel and to learn from and debate with the leading Pundits of his age. But he returned to perform his mother's last rites which was a transgression of his monastic vows. But we love him for it.
The rise and development of the Buddhist schools (and of some others) in the preceding centuries was only a symptom of this, bringing to the surface a corrosion in the very substance of things, the abyss that was opening up in the very core of what is and summed up in the formula “Everything is without a self’’ and in the elevation of the subjective sphere as the ultimate frame of reference.
This is unfair to the Shraman religions. Previously, Brahmin boys who wanted to devote themselves to study joined a Shraman sect. Sankara created one for his own type of Hindu. But similar things were happening amongst other caste lineages in other parts of India. Perhaps this had always been the case. We don't greatly care.
It is from within this awareness that Samkara understood his work and started on his way of thought,
No. Like the Brahmin priests mentioned in the Upanishads, he wanted to recover the spirit and the 'darshana' way of seeing the rituals which, for Uttara Mimamsa, are a necessary part of religion.
seeking to exhibit how it was still possible and supremely needful to think of life as grounded in Being
This isn't needful at all. Sankara was like Nagarjuna & Umaswati. In their different ways they were upholding orthodoxy and pushing back against dogmatic distinctions without a difference.
to show how experience is unmeaning and an unmitigated pain
It simply isn't unless you have tooth-ache & your wife just left you.
unless thought of as grounded in a “self,” revelatory of it and therefore alive with “the radiance of the divine” (in Heidegger’s sense).
Sankara wasn't a Professor of useless shite. He had a busy life & ended up creating a prestigious monastic order. Also, he was Tamil (Malayalam hadn't split off at that time). He had imbibed Paripadal with his mother's milk. Radiance of Thirumal is imbued in all things.
Samkara said, This tree of samsara , the round of worldly existence, which sprouts from action and constitutes the field of confusion and error, must be torn out from its very roots. Alone in pulling it out lies the fulfillment of life’s purpose. A statement like this can easily be misunderstood as a classic example of a life-denying philosophy.
Not by Hindus. Everyone knows the upside down tree in the Gita. BTW fuck is a 'life-denying philosophy'? If you are doing that shite, you are alive though you may be approaching brain death.
In reality, what it denies is not life but the death-in-life that consists in taking things as empty of a self, without a ground in Being and yet holding us in their grip through the illusion of being all that there is, exercising this magic spell over us.
India was a big country with diverse spiritual lineages. One could praise intoxication & delusion & say that there was an antinomian path to grace or you could say that you gained the same result following the orthodox path without having to spend a lot of money on booze or broads. Sankara was a dude who did well in his line of work. It was probably the most prestigious line, outside politics, for a Brahmin at that time. Heidi was a Professor of a shite subject. Its prestige was falling. Then his entire country went down the toilet. Einstein's stock was rising. If he subscribed to the 'block-universe' theory, people took note. Bergson & Husserl & Heidi had eternally shat the bed.
