First, I am not referring to the views of the generality of people in the countries where various epistemic systems have been dominant in their history. I am referring to specialists in the business of knowledge, those whose conceptions of the character of knowledge and how it may be assessed dominate the scholarly and educational systems of a civilization.
Along those lines, therefore, I am not referencing simply any Indian or any US person. I am referring principally to philosophers, particularly since their perspectives often underline the metaphysical and epistemological frameworks of other disciplines.
I refer, therefore, to the classical tradition of Indian philosophy and its post-classical heirs. The beauty of Indian philosophy is the conjunction of the mystical and the ratiocinative. Along those lines, I argue that the kind of knowledge privileged as the ultimate goal of the earlier systems, a form of knowledge also related to the ratiocinative strands of the tradition, is not subsumable in ratiocinative, linear terms. At its most radical, it is even described as incapable of expression and best suggested through symbols, as in the famous Zen Buddhist story-Zen being a Chinese/Japanese development from Buddhism's birth in India- of the Buddha's disciple responding with 'thunderous silence' when the teacher asked him to state what he had learnt from his teaching.
I describe that epistemic strategy as supra-rational because it is described by a point of view as being rational, rational in the sense of being coherent and intelligible according to particular parameters, but parameters understood as transcending and subsuming conventional understood forms of rationality. A classic evocation of that point of view comes from the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, referring to 'the knowledge that knows nothing'.
One approach to exploring this form of rationality is developed by the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, whom I understand as dramatizing the inadequacy of conventionally understood rationality to grasp the essence of reality by demonstrating the self contradictions inherent in conventional ratiocination. Beyond these contradictions lies the ground of being, not reachable by intellect, I understand he concludes.
I also understand a related goal and strategy is employed by the Arab philosopher Al-Ghazzali in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
In that context, religion is not equivalent to mysticism. Mysticism occurs in religious and what may be called non-religious contexts. I described mysticism as "seeking to penetrate to the source of existence through a direct engagement rather than remaining at the level of thinking about or referring to this reality but experiencing it".
The Indian approach to mysticism cannot be limited to religion understood as faith and hope. The Yoga Sutras of Pantajali, a foundational Yoga text, for example, is a technical manual describing a technique of mental discipline directed at transcending the mind as it is conventionally understood. The focus is on method of mental control, not on worship, devotion, or prayer. The only faith relevant in that context is the faith that the practice is worth engaging in. Even the Buddha's primary teaching is described as centred on such an experimental and technical strategy, not in worship of or prayer to or faith in any referent.
As for medieval Western thinkers like Anselm and Aquinas who tried to prove the existence of God through reason, I would not dismiss them. Their conviction that logic could do the job completely was flawed but the strategies they developed may be seen as valid within the sphere of platforms for correlating faith and reason without insisting on the absolute fit between both forms of rationality.
Cause-effect thinking is universal but may be approached differently in various cultural forms, as different from limiting such forms to particular countries but better understood as epistemes that are prevalent at a point in time among particular people.
In describing Enlightenment rationality, I am focusing on what I understand as its core contribution to Western thought, the emphasis on ratiocinative thought as the primary criterion for developing, assessing and communicating knowledge, building ultimately on the Aristotelian emphasis as different from Plato's more pluralistic strategies. Even their contribution of the possibility of reaching universal truth remains resonant in the sciences, since the difference between sub-atomic and more inclusive levels of physical reality are intelligible within an expanded framework in which both the laws governing both domains of physical reality are understood to be ultimately coherent rather than disruptive. In other disciplines, varieties of understanding are now privileged in the Western academy, but only extreme relativists would hold that these varieties are not open to examination through empathic criticism.
thanks
toyin
Toyin, maybe it is a question of human rationality and reason, not a cultural specific creation. That is not the enlightenment.
To be human is, among other things, to reason and to enter into language. Isn't that true? In a sense, even animals can reason to some extent. We just do it better.
But if reason's foundation is cause-effect thinking, we all share it.
As far as the use of reason in given cultures, I'd say the same. Not in speaking of their religious beliefs, which are not rational. People don't believe in god because it is reasonable; they hope, they have faith. But the reasonable attempts to prove god's existence with st anselm and medieval thinkers is silly.
Religions are about what lies outside the sphere of reason, and so are universal. As is reason, and long before the enlightenment came along, and ultimately debunked religion. "ecrasez l'infame" is what Voltaire said.
But a lot more people listened to billy graham than to poor old Voltaire.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Friday 23 February 2018 at 11:00
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pluriversalistic Dialogues between Asia and Europe:Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin
You have a point but your argument is limited by the fact that it is being conducted from within the same epistemic template you are describing as truncated.
What is that template?
The emphasis on reason as the primary arbiter of knowledge.
Freud emphasized the irrationality or circuitous rationality of the the unconscious but in the context of a method he worked out to give it rational coherence.
The same for those other thinkers and disciplinary formations you mentioned. The focus is on forms of linear logic, even if value may be accorded to various forms of rationality, all of them ultimately subsumed by the capacity to present ideas in terms that make sense in basically mathematical terms, a form of logic that is readily mutually validated.
I am not sure about Nietzsche, however.
The point I am making is that the dominant epistemic model of Western scholarship- conceptions of how best to arrive at or assess knowledge- was systematized in the Enlightenment and has not changed. The Enlightenment world view has been expanded by such developments as you listed " Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Cultural studies, ideals of diversity, material and historical studies, quantum theory, quantum entanglement" and other unusual ideas from science, but the entire edifice is built on linear reason.
Let us compare that with Indian philosophy, for example. A central school of Indian philosophy is Yoga, of which there are various kinds. Central to the foundational text of Yoga, though, the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali, is the aspiration to bypass and transcend reason in order to reach a higher form of rationality that does not operate through the ratiocinative powers of the mind. Classical Indian philosophy is built, to a large extent, on this aspiration. Post-Western contact Indian philosophy, even when it engages with Western thought, and even among its professors in Western universities, such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Bimal Krishna Matilal and Jornadon Ganeri, different generations of Western educated, Indian experts in Indian philosophy working in Western universities, made it their business to engage with the supra-rational element in Indian thought, demonstrating its validity as a form of knowledge and the synthesis achieved within the tradition between the the supra-rational and other firms of rationality.
Western scholarship, however, since after the Middle Ages, has kept this aspiration to the supra-rational confined to religious contexts and has not developed the scope of approaches to exploring this aspiration that Indian thought has. The Indian Bhagavad Gita and the Dialogues of Plato may be said between them to encapsulate most of mystical approaches conceived so far, , this aspiration to the supra-rational being essentially a mystical vision, seeking to penetrate to the source of existence through a direct engagement rather than remaining at the level of thinking about or referring to this reality but experiencing it, but the scope of Platonic thought cannot be said to be replicated in the Western academy which is more comfortable with the linear rationalities of his student Aristotle whose works do not seem to demonstrate Plato's epistemic and expressive variety.
Thinking aloud. Not claiming expert knowledge or even adequate understanding of all the relevant fields in this discursive sweep.
thanks
toyin
On 23 February 2018 at 14:42, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Toyin,
In the circles of academe I am familiar with, and especially in the dominant institutions that include not only universities, but publishing houses, journals, associations like the mla, your statement would not be accepted. Dominant enlightenment rationalism, the unified subject, were attacked from freud to Nietzsche, and gradually were supplanted in all the humanities fields by poststructuralism about 60 years ago. Since then deconstruction directly attacked that tradition, especially with derrida's notion of phallogocentrism, and simultaneously with lacanian analysis. High theory is no longer dominant, but what has replaced it? Cultural studies, ideals of diversity, material and historical studies, etc. nothing suggests a return to rationalism.
If you want to argue that all these developments are incidental to the sciences, I suggest you consider quantum theory.
Entanglement. Etc
If you want to argue that STEM is now dominant, I would agree. But the direct line from the sciences of the enlightenment ended with schroedinger. And even the historians now have had to accommodate notions of discourse theory since haydyn white and his tropes came along
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/
people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/ From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Friday 23 February 2018 at 00:33
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pluriversalistic Dialogues between Asia and Europe:Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: 'Sunthar Visuvalingam' suntharv@yahoo.com [dia-gnosis] <dia-gnosis@yahoogroups.com>
Date: 22 February 2018 at 20:03
Subject: [dia-gnosis] Lakshmi Bandlamudi, "Introduction: Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin" (Springer India, Feb 2018) - our dedications
[p.15>] Long before the arrival of Bakhtin's ideas in India, philosophies from India, particularly the discourses in philology, reached the Bakhtin Circle. One of the most prominent members of the Bakhtin Circle, Michael Tubianskii, was an Indo-Tibetan scholar who brought Hindu/Buddhist perspectives into the Circle. Craig Brandist, an intellectual historian who heads the Bakhtin Center at the University of Sheffield, traces the circuitous pathways (in Chap. 2) through which Indian philosophies reached the European soil and the complicated relationship that European intelligentsia and, in particular, the Soviet scholars, developed with the esoteric texts from India.
Carnival in all its dimensions—colorful festivities, boisterous laughter and mockery of authority—has been an integral part of cultural life in India. There is a deep regard for the wisdom of folly embodied in the vidūṣaka—the ritual clown or the wise fool in performance traditions, whose acts are blatantly anti-philosophical and anti-establishment, but whose intent is to restore the philosophical injunctions of the parent-religion. Sunthar Visuvalingam's chapter (Chap. 3) is an exposition of 'transgressive sacrality' as depicted in the Bhairava tradition. The chapter introduces the reader to Abhinavagupta's works on the aesthetics of laughter and the Tantric tradition and draws crucial distinctions from Bakhtin's discussion of the carnival. Sunthar points out that while Bakhtin saw carnival as having the liberating potential in response to the rigid Stalin era, the carnival in India is seen as part of an ever-present dialectic between order and chaos and interdiction and violation. Since the carnivalesque has been so intricately woven into the Hindu mainstream through the semiotics of transgression, Sunthar argues that the resources of tradition could be brought into the global arsenal to disrupt various forms of existing and emerging tyrannies.
As a French Indologist and philosophical anthropologist, Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam (Chap. 4) engages in a deep comparative analysis between the original works of Rabelais (which she reads in French, meaning that little is lost in translation) and Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais and Abhinavagupta on transgressive laughter, which has at its core the principle of 'freedom' (svātantrya). The chapter takes the reader into the Rabelaisian world in medieval France with its bold defiance against all forms of authority. According to the author, Bakhtin's reading [<15-16>] of Rabelais is limited because it is meant to resist the Stalinist oppression; whereas, the liberating world of Kashmir Saivism sanctions freedom from compulsions that come from within and the social taboos that are imposed from outside. The author argues that the school of Kashmir Saivism is built on two seemingly contradictory movements of saṅkoca—the philosophy of ascent, contraction and abstraction— and vikāsa—the philosophy of descent, expansion, and the concrete, and that the interplay between these two exercises lead to freedom and self-realization. Elizabeth argues that the comprehensive philosophy of Abhinavagupta, unlike Rabelais and Bakhtin (whose views in comparison are somewhat limited), offers a holistic and cogent philosophy of laughter that has the liberating potential at the psychological, sociological, political, and spiritual levels. [<p.16]
Lakshmi Bandlamudi, "Introduction: Intellectual Traditions of India in Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin" (Springer India, Feb 2018)
[p.37, note 1>] The "transgressive sacrality" (TS) paradigm was originally, and more fully, elaborated in my seminal 1985 conference paper (Visuvalingam 2014), in relation to laughter, the clown, Abhinavagupta's esotericism, the question of ethics, and interreligious dialogue, before posing the liberating prospect of a "global spring" modeled on carnival. The semiotics of transgression, its Vedic roots, and the centrality of the consecrated (dīkṣita) brahmanical sacrificer and his tantric prolongations to the Hindu symbolic universe, were expanded in 1989 (Visuvalingam, Dīkṣita). Having vowed never to return unless formally invited to India—that I had left by April 1989 after living city-bound in Benares for 17 years—it was a pleasant surprise to receive an email in mid-August 2011 from an unknown Indian professor of psychology‚ Lakshmi Bandlamudi based in New York‚ asking me to deliver the keynote address to the "Bakhtin in India" conference (Gandhinagar, 19–21 Aug. 2013)‚ though I had not yet read this Russian theorist. Whereas my 1985 TS typescript had been widely plagiarized, esp. by American Indologists among whom it had been freely distributed‚ Lakshmi had gone through much trouble to acquire the paper and rethink Bakhtin in its light. Only subsequent to that keynote address am I being invited with all expenses paid to Abhinavagupta conferences in India. Unfathomable though the will of God, I remain grateful to his willing if unwitting instrument. [<37]
[p.46, note 9>] […] I first discovered 'transgressive sacrality' around 1980 through exposure to—then continuing collaboration in—my French wife Elizabeth's research on the brahmanicide Bhairava, Abhinavagupta's supreme divinity. Marriott's much earlier fieldwork on Holi that I discovered only at our first meeting in Chicago on my birthday in June 2009 confirmed my insights into the (Indian) carnival, for the secular American anthropologist had arrived at the same TS dialectic without coining the term. This essay is therefore appropriately dedicated to these two precious souls. [<46]
Sunthar Visuvalingam, "Carnival and Transgression in India: Towards a Global Spring?"
This essay is dedicated to Lakshmi Bandlamudi, whose invitation to present a plenary paper to our "Bakhtin in India" conference (Gandhinagar, 19–21 August 2013) has renewed my personal ties with India after a very long absence.
Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, "The Rule of Freedom: Rabelais, Bakhtin, Abhinavagupta"
Friends,
The final print version of our two chapters are now available at the original links:
http://www.svabhinava.org/
abhinava/BakhtinInIndia/ Bakhtin&Rabelais_ ElizabethVisuvalingam-frame. php
http://www.svabhinava.org/
abhinava/BakhtinInIndia/ Carnival&TransgressionIndia- frame.php
Enjoy!
Sunthar
PS. I've just prepared a modular course on laughter-and-humor that offers a series of experiential workshops to explore the phenomenon and its implications from within….
[Rest of this thread at Sunthar's post (18 Feb 2018) at
From: Sunthar V.
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2018 7:17 AM
To: Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com; 'WTC-911 ' <WTC-911@yahoogroups.com>; 'MeccaBenares (egroup)' <MeccaBenares@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: 'Dia-Gnosis' <dia-gnosis@yahoogroups.com>; 'Chicagoland Desis' <ChicagolandDesis@yahoogroups.com >; 'JerusalemBenares ' <JerusalemBenares@yahoogroups.com >
Subject: [Abhinavagupta] "Modi a match for Trump as he picks his own foreign policy course" (MK Bhadrakumar) - Indo-Iranian friendship, a question of (spiritual) sovereignty (svātantrya)
[p.51>] Swami Vivekananda, who stands at the fountainhead of Indian nationalism, interreligious dialogue and Hindu revivalism, burst upon the world's attention on Sep. 11, 1893 here in Chicago. He endorsed the prophetic vision of the Founding Fathers, but grounded its contingent and evolving political arrangements on the (nondual) spiritual realization of the identity of (supreme) Self and Other. That is why he deliberately chose—upon washing, Christlike, the feet of his immediate disciples—to shed his mortal coils on the Fourth of July that he had humbly celebrated with a makeshift Star-Spangled Banner in his Indian monastery, by composing an ode invoking Independence Day for all humanity. His definition of 'Hinduism' as a benevolent "tyranny of the sages" is just as applicable to the (outer forms of the) other religious traditions, which are all based on the unique realizations and revelations of the few precocious souls, who laid down the stringent law for us lesser mortals in conformity with the requirements of time, place, and other limiting factors.. The Swami was dazzled by the progress of science, the innovative spirit of enterprise, and the emancipation of women, during that narrow time-bound window of opportunity when restless Americans had begun stirring to what more might lie beyond their newfound prosperity and what the rest of the world had on offer. But the nondualism (advaita) he preached in return for their childlike inquisitiveness and unstinting generosity was not so much an exotic spiritual icing on the American Pie but the missing foundation that he felt hoary Indian wisdom could provide. [<p.51]
>
Sunthar V., "Carnival and Transgression in India Towards a Global Spring?" (Bakhtin in India, Springer India, 2018)
>
MK Bhadrakumar, "Modi a match for Trump as he picks his own foreign policy course" (Asia Times, 13 Feb 2018)
Friends,
I'm happy to announce that our collective volume on Bakhtin in India has just been published with the e-book already available and the print version following on its heels:
http://www.springer.com/us/
book/9789811063121
Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture: Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue Through History
The Russian Mikhail Bakhtin could help translate Abhinavagupta's insistence on spiritual autonomy (svātantrya) into the pragmatic exercise of national sovereignty for statesmen like PM Narendra Modi.
Enjoy!
Sunthar
[Rest of this thread at Sunthar's post (28 Jan 2018) at
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