A friend's question on Facebook triggered some thoughts that have been simmering in my mind for many years.
He posted:
He posted:
I chanced upon an article which was on 4 philosophers who were not afraid to go back to scratch. I had heard only of Sartre and Wittgenstein out of these. It is my humble contention that they had nothing useful to say either before or after their hard reset.
Which brings me to my more important question.
Why are there no Indian philosophers of any standing? People will bring up S. Radhakrishnan who also did not have a whole lot to say. Narendranath Dutt maybe but that was long ago? Eh, folks?
That was my cue to get my thoughts together and post a response. He suggested I make this an independent post, and so here it is.
You've raised a great question, and I have some thoughts on this.
1. All the theistic philosophers can be removed from consideration. Nothing they say stands up to serious scrutiny as their entire worldview is constructed upon the axiom of faith or unquestioning belief. That means most of the Indian philosophers are eliminated from consideration, except a few.
2. People nowadays make much of the idea of "decolonising one's mind" and "intellectually challenging the West". Rajiv Malhotra made a good beginning with his book "Being Different" and his HuffPost article on "Tolerance isn't good enough". He also funded studies to research and document examples of real scientific advancement in ancient India (such as in metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, water management, shipbuilding, astronomy, mind sciences, etc.) before he succumbed to Hindutva and conspiracy theories, and officially became a nutcase.
3. So no intellectual has yet arisen who can take on this task of challenging Western thought on a sound philosophical basis. I believe there is an Indic (I won't call it Indian or Hindu because I want to retain the distinction between civilisation, nation-state and religion) philosophy that can challenge all of modern Western thought. That philosophy is Samkhya.
4. The entire edifice of modern Western thought, indeed most of its science-based civilisation, is based upon the notion of the independent observer. If you can independently observe and verify what I observe, that is the basis of objectivity and evidence-based reason, i.e., what we know of as "science". But what if there is no objective reality?
5. Samkhya is a non-theistic Indic philosophy that argues that the observer is an inextricable part of the universe that they observe, and so there is no possibility of "objectivity". Indeed, this echoes the Observer Effect in physics, which is well-known but somehow doesn't seem to challenge the otherwise pervasive view of objectivity that underpins all of Western thought.
6. I have been hoping for an alternative philosophical edifice that can be constructed to challenge all of Western thought in some measure, one that is based on Samkhya. Denial of objectivity is not just a theoretical hypothesis, since the Double-Slit Experiment has proved its basis in fact. Mind you, there is some "woo" even in Samkhya, which needs to be cleaned up before it can be turned into a respectable philosophy in the modern world.
7. I would like to see an alternative civilisational worldview, a non-theistic one, based on this cleaned-up Samkhya. This is different from the narrow and intellectually lazy dream of the Hindutva crowd to replace the Western-inspired constitution with the Manusmriti, etc. We should not regress to a pre-Enlightenment worldview. We need our own Enlightenment, based on an autochthonic philosophical foundation.
Those are my thoughts on this. Would be happy to receive comments.
Contemplating the cosmos and all of existence from a fresh, yet ancient, philosophical perspective
You've raised a great question, and I have some thoughts on this.
1. All the theistic philosophers can be removed from consideration. Nothing they say stands up to serious scrutiny as their entire worldview is constructed upon the axiom of faith or unquestioning belief. That means most of the Indian philosophers are eliminated from consideration, except a few.
2. People nowadays make much of the idea of "decolonising one's mind" and "intellectually challenging the West". Rajiv Malhotra made a good beginning with his book "Being Different" and his HuffPost article on "Tolerance isn't good enough". He also funded studies to research and document examples of real scientific advancement in ancient India (such as in metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, water management, shipbuilding, astronomy, mind sciences, etc.) before he succumbed to Hindutva and conspiracy theories, and officially became a nutcase.
3. So no intellectual has yet arisen who can take on this task of challenging Western thought on a sound philosophical basis. I believe there is an Indic (I won't call it Indian or Hindu because I want to retain the distinction between civilisation, nation-state and religion) philosophy that can challenge all of modern Western thought. That philosophy is Samkhya.
4. The entire edifice of modern Western thought, indeed most of its science-based civilisation, is based upon the notion of the independent observer. If you can independently observe and verify what I observe, that is the basis of objectivity and evidence-based reason, i.e., what we know of as "science". But what if there is no objective reality?
5. Samkhya is a non-theistic Indic philosophy that argues that the observer is an inextricable part of the universe that they observe, and so there is no possibility of "objectivity". Indeed, this echoes the Observer Effect in physics, which is well-known but somehow doesn't seem to challenge the otherwise pervasive view of objectivity that underpins all of Western thought.
6. I have been hoping for an alternative philosophical edifice that can be constructed to challenge all of Western thought in some measure, one that is based on Samkhya. Denial of objectivity is not just a theoretical hypothesis, since the Double-Slit Experiment has proved its basis in fact. Mind you, there is some "woo" even in Samkhya, which needs to be cleaned up before it can be turned into a respectable philosophy in the modern world.
7. I would like to see an alternative civilisational worldview, a non-theistic one, based on this cleaned-up Samkhya. This is different from the narrow and intellectually lazy dream of the Hindutva crowd to replace the Western-inspired constitution with the Manusmriti, etc. We should not regress to a pre-Enlightenment worldview. We need our own Enlightenment, based on an autochthonic philosophical foundation.
Those are my thoughts on this. Would be happy to receive comments.
1 comment:
Interesting article. Got the link from Ananth facebook post.
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