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I recently received a note from Prof. Nirmalya Chakraborty (Rabindra Bharati University) about an exciting new digital library. It includes three categories: Navya-Nyāya Scholarship in Nabadwip, Philosophers of Modern India, and Twentieth Century Paṇḍitas of Kolkata. You can find the site here: https://darshanmanisha.org
You can learn more about the project from the following announcement.
Anouncement
Introducing the Digital Library Project
By
Bhaktivedanta Research Center, Kolkata, India
Right before the introduction of English education in India, a new style of philosophising emerged, especially in Bengal, known as Navya-Nyāya. Since Nabadwip was one of the main centres of Navya-Nyāya scholarship in Bengal during 15th– 17th Century, many important works on Navya-Nyāya were written during this period by Nabadwip scholars. Some of these were published later, but many of these published works are not available now. The few copies which are available are also not in good condition. These are the works where Bengal’s intellectual contribution shines forth. We have digitized some of these materials and have uploaded these in the present digital platform.
As a lineage of this Nabadwip tradition, many pandits (traditional scholars) produced many important philosophical works, some in Sanskrit and most in Bengali, who were residents of Kolkata during early nineteenth and twentieth century. Most of these works were published in early 1900 from Kolkata and some from neighbouring cities. These works brought in a kind of Renaissance in reviving classical Indian philosophical deliberations in Bengal. Attempts have been made to upload these books and articles in the present digital platform.
With the introduction of colonial education, a group of philosophers got trained in European philosophy and tried to interpret insights from Classical Indian Philosophy in new light. Kolkata was one of the main centres of this cosmopolitan philosophical scholarship. The works of many of these philosophers from Kolkata were published in early/middle of twentieth century. These philosophers are the true representatives of twentieth century Indian philosophy. Efforts have been made to upload these works in the present digital platform.
The purpose of constructing the present digital platform is to enable the researchers to have access to these philosophical works with the hope that the philosophical contributions of these philosophers will be studied and critically assessed resulting in the enrichment of philosophical repertoire.
We take this opportunity to appeal to fellow scholars to enrich this digital library by lending us their personal collection related to these areas for digitization.
The website address of the Digital Library is: www.darshanmanisha.org
For further correspondence, please write to:
epistemic-justification
nathannobis
A woman looking in a refrigerator. Is she epistemically justified in believing there is almond milk in the fridge?
“To admit to any intention to use chemical substances, whether found in nature or synthesized in laboratories, in the aim of changing one’s apprehension of reality, is to leave the guild of the philosophers behind, with all its constricting norms and shibboleths, and to join the company, over in the deep end of the pool of life, of sundry countercultural weirdos and deviants.”
So writes Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot) in an article in Wired, in which he discusses, in his characteristically erudite manner and enviably delightful prose, his use of psychedelic drugs.
[detail of painting by Kelsey Brooks, from “Party Drugs” exhibit]
This shows, I think, just how conservative philosophy remains, in some respects, as an academic discipline. At a cultural moment when psychedelics are getting a second wind, and even someone as upstanding as Michael Pollan has moved from counseling us to eat our roughage to praising the benefits of microdosing, philosophers are conducting themselves as though it were still 1950, when we wore skinny ties to colloquia, got funding from the RAND Corporation to work on decision trees and other such narrow and straitlaced endeavors, and all knew that it is the unaltered and wakeful mind that has exclusive access to the forms and qualities of the external world.
Yet we don’t know any such thing:
For all our efforts, we still are not one step closer to apprehending the things in themselves. It is not that science hasn’t progressed—of course it has—but rather that the problem is conceptual and not empirical. You can’t perceive the thing that lies behind what you are perceiving, since the instant you do perceive it, it no longer lies behind but is front and center. Given what appears to be this logically necessary stalemate between us and the world, it seems inevitable that alternative accounts of the fundamental nature of reality—alternative ontologies, as we say—should keep returning and drawing off at least some philosophers who get fed up with an external world that demands our loyalty yet refuses to show itself.
In at least some of these alternative ontologies, the visions that come to us unbidden, in the liminal states of insobriety, hypnagogia, or theurgic ecstasy, are not to be dismissed out of hand as obstacles to our apprehension of truth, but may in fact be vehicles of truth themselves.
And so we get this professionally- and self-aware “confession” and recommendation:
I am aware I’m pushing up against the limits of respectability dictated by the implicit norms of my discipline, but I’ve gone about as far as I was ever destined to go in the ranks of this guild, and I’ve got nothing, and no one, to be afraid of. So I’m just going to come right out and say it: I am a philosopher who has taken an interest, of late, in psychedelic experimentation, and I find that my experiments have significantly widened the range of accounts of the nature of reality that I am disposed to take seriously. If you think you are in an emotional state to handle it, and in a legal jurisdiction that permits it, and you think you might benefit from being jolted out of your long-held ontological commitments, then I would recommend that you try some psychotropic drugs as well.
What’s to be gained? Perhaps more of that thing philosophy is most certain to produce: uncertainty. Smith says:
I am significantly less cocky now, my cluelessness is more evident to me, a constant that accompanies me in each moment of the day. No one seems more pathetic to me, now, in their own cluelessness, than the self-styled “realists” who prejudicially and without any grounds go on supposing that they have a firm grasp of concepts like “nature,” “matter,” “being,” “thing,” “world,” “self,” that this grasp flows directly from their acceptance of the plain evidence of reason buttressed by empirical discovery, and that the question of how many kinds of being there are, and of the nature of these beings, is one that has been definitively settled over the past few centuries of naturalistic inquiry…
While I remain as uncertain as ever about the ultimate structure of the world, I also have new inclinations, and new sympathies, toward accounts of it that had previously struck me as altogether off the table. That widening is itself a sort of newfound knowledge, even if it contains no new certainties.
Smith shares how some of the insights he has gained or developed while experimenting with drugs. Understanding how far out he might sound to the rest of us—while the article appears in Wired, it does seem like he is writing especially to his fellow philosophers—he voices, and answers, some skeptical questions:
Are any of these lucubrations to be taken at all seriously? Or do they just describe how the world appears to one sorry fellow who’s got a “brain on drugs”? (Readers of a certain age will at this point picture an egg in a frying pan.) Well yes, of course it’s a brain on drugs, but this just returns us to the original problem: Your brain is always on drugs. That is, there is always a neurochemical correlate to any of your conscious perceptions whatsoever. You might be tempted to say that supplementing gets in the way of correct perception, and that the only reliable way of apprehending the world as it is must depend only on the default setting of the mind, with no extras. But again, even this setting delivers us delirious hallucinations for about eight hours out of each 24. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of any valid argument against supplementation…
Read the whole thing here.
Smith is not the only philosopher who has been paying attention to psychedelics lately. Chris Letheby (University of Western Australia) authored Philosophy of Psychedelics, published by Oxford University Press in 2021, as well as a number of articles about psychedelics (for example, he makes points about the possible epistemic benefits of psychedelics in his 2016 “The Epistemic Innocence of Psychedelic States“). Last year saw the publication of Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience (Bloomsbury), a collection edited by Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (Exeter). This year, a collection edited by Letheby and Philip Gerrans (Adelaide), Philosophical Perspectives on the Psychedelic Renaissance, is due out from Oxford.
Discussion welcome.
Related: Philosopharmacology
A good example of Berlin's style of philosophizing is found in his introduction to The Age of Enlightenment. (Here is a link to an online version of the book; link.) The extensive essays in the volume are devoted to Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, with shorter pieces on other writers. Berlin organizes his treatment around a reflective discussion of how philosophical questions are different from empirical or logical questions.
Philosophical problems arise when men ask questions of themselves or of others which, though very diverse, have certain characteristics in common. These questions tend to be very general, to involve issues of principle, and to have little or no concern with practical utility. But what is even more characteristic of them is that there seem to be no obvious and generally accepted procedures for answering them, nor any class of specialists to whom we automatically turn for the solutions. Indeed there is something peculiar about the questions themselves: those who ask them do not seem any too certain about what kind of answers they require, or indeed how to set about finding them. (1)
But unlike the philosophers of the Vienna Circle who advocated for the verificationist principle of significance and therefore categorically rejected questions like these, Berlin believes these questions are meaningful and worthy of study.
The history of such questions, and of the means employed to provide the answers, is, in effect, the history of philosophy. The frame of ideas within which, and the methods by which, various thinkers at various times try to arrive at the truth about such issues – the very ways in which the questions themselves are construed –change under the influence of many forces, among them answers given by philosophers of an earlier age, the prevailing moral, religious and social beliefs of the period, the state of scientific knowledge, and, not least important, the methods used by the scientists of the time, especially if they have achieved spectacular successes, and have, therefore, bound their spell upon the imagination of their own and later generations. (2)
Berlin construes the development of philosophy throughout the Enlightenment as the efforts of philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to find resources for analyzing these kinds of problems in a rigorous way -- e.g. mathematics or Newton's mechanics. But ultimately these efforts were rejected by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason.
The heroic attempt to make philosophy a natural science was brought to an end by the great break with the traditions both of rationalism and of empiricism as they had developed hitherto, inaugurated by Kant, whose philosophical views are the source of much of the thought of the nineteenth century, and are not included in the compass of this volume. (15)
So here we have Berlin, acknowledging the oddness of philosophical questions but respecting the reflective efforts of philosophers to find rigorous ways of approaching them using the best thinking of their times. Whether he would have used this language or not, Berlin treats this tradition as a "bootstrapping" effort to move from challenging but indefinite questions to questions amenable to rational reflective analysis.
Consider next Berlin's treatment of anti-Enlightenment philosophers (Vico, Herder, and J.G. Hamann) in Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Here is how Berlin distinguishes between the philosophical perspective of Herder and that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment:
Herder’s fame rests on the fact that he is the father of the related notions of nationalism, historicism and the Volksgeist, one of the leaders of the Romantic revolt against classicism, rationalism and faith in the omnipotence of scientific method – in short, the most formidable of the adversaries of the French philosophes and their German disciples. Whereas they – or at least the best known among them, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Holbach and, with qualifications, Voltaire and Diderot, Wolff and Reimarus – believed that reality was ordered in terms of universal, timeless, objective, unalterable laws which rational investigation could discover, Herder maintained that every activity, situation, historical period or civilisation possessed a unique character of its own; so that the attempt to reduce such phenomena to combinations of uniform elements, and to describe or analyse them in terms of universal rules, tended to obliterate precisely those crucial differences which constituted the specific quality of the object under study, whether in nature or in history. (208)
Berlin undertakes to probe more deeply into the particularism and historicism that is commonly attributed to Herder. He begins by attempting to trace some of the intellectual and philosophical lineage of Herder's views, and identifies a line of development from Voltaire and Montesquieu through Schlözer, Gatterer, and Vico (second hand), along with a number of other writers of the seventeenth century. Notably, Berlin finds that the "historicism" attributed to Herder was familiar in these earlier writers as well. Even one of Herder's central ideas, "spirit of the nation", has clear and evident precedents:
The notion of the spirit of a nation or a culture had been central not only to Vico and Montesquieu, but to the famous publicist Friedrich Karl von Moser, whom Herder read and knew, to Bodmer and Breitinger, to Hamann and to Zimmermann. (213)
So far, then, Herder is a synthesizer, although a gifted one:
If Herder had done no more than create a genuine synthesis out of these attitudes and doctrines, and built with them, if not a system, at any rate a coherent Weltanschauung destined to have a decisive influence on the literature and thought of his country, this alone would have been a high enough achievement to earn for him a unique place in the history of civilisation. Invention is not everything. (217)
So what, then, were Herder's distinctive contributions, according to Berlin? Berlin highlights three ideas: populism (the value of belonging to a group); expressionism (the capacity of art to express the individual or group's identity); and pluralism (the idea of the multiplicity and sometimes "incommensurability of the values of different cultures" (218). Berlin argues that these three ideas are new, and they are at odds with the doctrines of the Enlightenment. And Berlin's strongest philosophical ideas about Herder take the form of development of these three ideas, and their significance for later generations. And Berlin finds encapsulated in these ideas an impassioned advocacy for freedom and against centralized tyranny.
The German mission is not to conquer; it is to be a nation of thinkers and educators. This is their true glory. Sacrifice – self-sacrifice – not the domination of one man over another, is the proper end of man. Herder sets his face against everything that is predatory, against the use of force in any cause but that of self-defence. The Crusades, no matter how Christian in inspiration, are hateful to him, since they conquered and crushed other human communities. (229)
Another important and distinctive contribution contained in Herder's work is his emphasis on the importance and historicity of language:
Hence Herder’s stress on the importance of genetic studies and the history of language, and hence, too, the great impulsion that he gave to studies of comparative linguistics, comparative anthropology and ethnology, and above all to the great philological movement that became the pride of German scholarship towards the end of his life and in the century that followed. His own efforts in this direction were no less suggestive or speculative than those of Vico. After declaring, in language borrowed from Lavater, that the ‘physiognomy of languages’ is all-important, he insisted, for example, that the languages which preserved genders (such as Russian, with which he came into contact during his Riga years) implied a vision of a world different from the world of those whose languages are sexless; so too did particular uses of pronouns. (239)
There is much more of interest in Berlin's treatment of Herder. What is particularly striking is the breadth of Berlin's own knowledge of the intellectual and philosophical context within which Herder worked, and his ability to work out in detail the implications of some of Herder's central ideas. This is not "Herder for dummies"; rather, it is a profound and extended seminar that seeks to explicate Herder's ideas and place Herder's thought into an ongoing intellectual history.
Berlin's philosophical writings show some very appealing intellectual qualities -- exactness of observation, ability to place variation in context, and a broad knowledge of the intellectual context of a given philosopher's work. The thinker from Riga has left a permanent and always enlightening legacy.
* * * * *
Michael Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin: A Life is outstanding. Here is a link to the Berlin Virtual Library at Oxford (link), which contains a number of interesting secondary materials.
A good example of Berlin's style of philosophizing is found in his introduction to The Age of Enlightenment. (Here is a link to an online version of the book; link.) The extensive essays in the volume are devoted to Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, with shorter pieces on other writers. Berlin organizes his treatment around a reflective discussion of how philosophical questions are different from empirical or logical questions.
Philosophical problems arise when men ask questions of themselves or of others which, though very diverse, have certain characteristics in common. These questions tend to be very general, to involve issues of principle, and to have little or no concern with practical utility. But what is even more characteristic of them is that there seem to be no obvious and generally accepted procedures for answering them, nor any class of specialists to whom we automatically turn for the solutions. Indeed there is something peculiar about the questions themselves: those who ask them do not seem any too certain about what kind of answers they require, or indeed how to set about finding them. (1)
But unlike the philosophers of the Vienna Circle who advocated for the verificationist principle of significance and therefore categorically rejected questions like these, Berlin believes these questions are meaningful and worthy of study.
The history of such questions, and of the means employed to provide the answers, is, in effect, the history of philosophy. The frame of ideas within which, and the methods by which, various thinkers at various times try to arrive at the truth about such issues – the very ways in which the questions themselves are construed –change under the influence of many forces, among them answers given by philosophers of an earlier age, the prevailing moral, religious and social beliefs of the period, the state of scientific knowledge, and, not least important, the methods used by the scientists of the time, especially if they have achieved spectacular successes, and have, therefore, bound their spell upon the imagination of their own and later generations. (2)
Berlin construes the development of philosophy throughout the Enlightenment as the efforts of philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to find resources for analyzing these kinds of problems in a rigorous way -- e.g. mathematics or Newton's mechanics. But ultimately these efforts were rejected by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason.
The heroic attempt to make philosophy a natural science was brought to an end by the great break with the traditions both of rationalism and of empiricism as they had developed hitherto, inaugurated by Kant, whose philosophical views are the source of much of the thought of the nineteenth century, and are not included in the compass of this volume. (15)
So here we have Berlin, acknowledging the oddness of philosophical questions but respecting the reflective efforts of philosophers to find rigorous ways of approaching them using the best thinking of their times. Whether he would have used this language or not, Berlin treats this tradition as a "bootstrapping" effort to move from challenging but indefinite questions to questions amenable to rational reflective analysis.
Consider next Berlin's treatment of anti-Enlightenment philosophers (Vico, Herder, and J.G. Hamann) in Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Here is how Berlin distinguishes between the philosophical perspective of Herder and that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment:
Herder’s fame rests on the fact that he is the father of the related notions of nationalism, historicism and the Volksgeist, one of the leaders of the Romantic revolt against classicism, rationalism and faith in the omnipotence of scientific method – in short, the most formidable of the adversaries of the French philosophes and their German disciples. Whereas they – or at least the best known among them, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Holbach and, with qualifications, Voltaire and Diderot, Wolff and Reimarus – believed that reality was ordered in terms of universal, timeless, objective, unalterable laws which rational investigation could discover, Herder maintained that every activity, situation, historical period or civilisation possessed a unique character of its own; so that the attempt to reduce such phenomena to combinations of uniform elements, and to describe or analyse them in terms of universal rules, tended to obliterate precisely those crucial differences which constituted the specific quality of the object under study, whether in nature or in history. (208)
Berlin undertakes to probe more deeply into the particularism and historicism that is commonly attributed to Herder. He begins by attempting to trace some of the intellectual and philosophical lineage of Herder's views, and identifies a line of development from Voltaire and Montesquieu through Schlözer, Gatterer, and Vico (second hand), along with a number of other writers of the seventeenth century. Notably, Berlin finds that the "historicism" attributed to Herder was familiar in these earlier writers as well. Even one of Herder's central ideas, "spirit of the nation", has clear and evident precedents:
The notion of the spirit of a nation or a culture had been central not only to Vico and Montesquieu, but to the famous publicist Friedrich Karl von Moser, whom Herder read and knew, to Bodmer and Breitinger, to Hamann and to Zimmermann. (213)
So far, then, Herder is a synthesizer, although a gifted one:
If Herder had done no more than create a genuine synthesis out of these attitudes and doctrines, and built with them, if not a system, at any rate a coherent Weltanschauung destined to have a decisive influence on the literature and thought of his country, this alone would have been a high enough achievement to earn for him a unique place in the history of civilisation. Invention is not everything. (217)
So what, then, were Herder's distinctive contributions, according to Berlin? Berlin highlights three ideas: populism (the value of belonging to a group); expressionism (the capacity of art to express the individual or group's identity); and pluralism (the idea of the multiplicity and sometimes "incommensurability of the values of different cultures" (218). Berlin argues that these three ideas are new, and they are at odds with the doctrines of the Enlightenment. And Berlin's strongest philosophical ideas about Herder take the form of development of these three ideas, and their significance for later generations. And Berlin finds encapsulated in these ideas an impassioned advocacy for freedom and against centralized tyranny.
The German mission is not to conquer; it is to be a nation of thinkers and educators. This is their true glory. Sacrifice – self-sacrifice – not the domination of one man over another, is the proper end of man. Herder sets his face against everything that is predatory, against the use of force in any cause but that of self-defence. The Crusades, no matter how Christian in inspiration, are hateful to him, since they conquered and crushed other human communities. (229)
Another important and distinctive contribution contained in Herder's work is his emphasis on the importance and historicity of language:
Hence Herder’s stress on the importance of genetic studies and the history of language, and hence, too, the great impulsion that he gave to studies of comparative linguistics, comparative anthropology and ethnology, and above all to the great philological movement that became the pride of German scholarship towards the end of his life and in the century that followed. His own efforts in this direction were no less suggestive or speculative than those of Vico. After declaring, in language borrowed from Lavater, that the ‘physiognomy of languages’ is all-important, he insisted, for example, that the languages which preserved genders (such as Russian, with which he came into contact during his Riga years) implied a vision of a world different from the world of those whose languages are sexless; so too did particular uses of pronouns. (239)
There is much more of interest in Berlin's treatment of Herder. What is particularly striking is the breadth of Berlin's own knowledge of the intellectual and philosophical context within which Herder worked, and his ability to work out in detail the implications of some of Herder's central ideas. This is not "Herder for dummies"; rather, it is a profound and extended seminar that seeks to explicate Herder's ideas and place Herder's thought into an ongoing intellectual history.
Berlin's philosophical writings show some very appealing intellectual qualities -- exactness of observation, ability to place variation in context, and a broad knowledge of the intellectual context of a given philosopher's work. The thinker from Riga has left a permanent and always enlightening legacy.
* * * * *
Michael Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin: A Life is outstanding. Here is a link to the Berlin Virtual Library at Oxford (link), which contains a number of interesting secondary materials.
self-knowledge2
nathannobis
Readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog may be interested to learn about a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of World Philosophies: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University). The journal is open-access, and you can download the article here.
Here’s the abstract:
There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such as the Sanskritic traditions of pramāṇavāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramāṇavāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism.
I enjoyed reading the article, and I found it extremely thought-provoking. I hope readers of this blog will check it out. Also, be sure to look for the forthcoming online debate platform that Donahue mentions on p. 5! Maybe we’ll make an announcement on the blog when it’s ready. Or reach out to Dr. Donahue if you’re interested in collaborating.
Here are a few of my questions for further discussion:
My questions here are meant to be taken in the spirit of vāda to keep the conversation going. I hope others will read Donahue’s thought-provoking article and join this worthwhile conversation.
Also, if you will be attending the upcoming Central APA Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on Feb. 22, 2023, you will have the chance to discuss these and other issues in person!
Wed. Feb. 22, 2023, 1-4pm
2022 Invited Symposium: Vāda: Indian Logic and Public Debate
Chair: Jarrod Brown (Berea College)
Speakers:
Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University) “Vāda Project: A Non-Centric Method for Countering Disinformation”
Arindam Chakrabarti (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) “Does the Question Arise? Questioning the Meaning of Questions and the Definability of Doubt”
Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) “Cārvāka Skepticism about Inference: Historical and Contemporary Examples”
(More information about the conference here, including a draft program that includes several other panels on Indian philosophy.)
Works Cited
Donahue, Amy. 2022. “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Public Sphere.” Journal of World Philosophies 7 (Winter 2022): 1-14.
Matilal, Bimal Krishna. 1998. The Character of Logic in India. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari. Albany: SUNY Press.
In Part One, I discussed Sonam Kachru’s criticisms (Kachru 2021) of some of my earlier work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Mills 2017).
I ended the previous post with a question: what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say?
This attitude toward the text can challenge understandings of Western categories. Whereas most pragmatists, phenomenologists, and a certain type of analytic philosopher diagnose external-world skepticism as a metaphysical failure to appreciate the entanglement of mind and world, I think Vasubandhu suggests that entangled though mind and world may be (and it’s hard to imagine them being more entangled than in Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism!), the cognitive failure of regular human experience is a failure to appreciate how fundamentally mistaken we are in our regular cognitive lives—in light of the fact this very entanglement.
It may be that Vasubandhu shows us something about skeptical inquiries into perception, broadly construed: such epistemological inquiries do not rely on any particular metaphysical framework. (I personally have long thought the anti-skeptical strategy of trying to reduce the epistemological problem of skepticism about the external world to a metaphysical problem of mind and world is a huge mistake, but that’s somewhat besides Vasubandhu’s point as he seems to be doing something more like working out the epistemological consequences of the metaphysics of non-dualism).
I think some contemporary interpreters fail to understand how thoroughly revisionary and revolutionary Vasubandhu’s philosophy is; whereas most contemporary anti-skeptical strategies seek to preserve regular human experience against a philosophical abstraction, Vasubandhu wants to challenge the dogmatic attachment inherent in the regular human experience of thinking our way of seeing things is the right way or the only way (a point I think Kachru and others could make better without appeals to contemporary anti-skeptical strategies!).
So, am I saying, after all this, that Vasubandhu really is a skeptic, just not as we know it? (“We” here means, I guess, 21st century academics writing in English). Maybe. I don’t know.
My own attempts in the past to argue for skeptical interpretations of classical Indian philosophers (e.g., Mills 2018) have often met with resistance precisely because most contemporary philosophers have a (dare I say it?) dogmatic attachment to a specific version of external-world skepticism inculcated in them by contemporary interpretations of Descartes and in contemporary analytic epistemology (this modern view of skepticism is in my opinion also deeply at odds with ancient “Western” skepticisms like Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism).
At this point I’m willing to cede the label “skepticism.” I no longer care whether Vasubandhu or any other classical Indian philosopher is a “skeptic,” partly due to the unwillingness of my academic colleagues to rethink their own definition of skepticism as a category, but mostly because whatever Vasubandhu and others are doing is philosophically interesting no matter what Western categories we apply to them.
It’s time to stop pretending that classical Indian philosophers have to be subjected to the procrustean bed of Western categories to be interesting or worthy of study or respect in the discipline. I study Indian philosophy because it’s philosophically interesting in its own terms, not because it can glom on to whatever’s popular in mainstream analytic or continental philosophy this month.
While I’ve moved more in the direction of the type of textual work that prevails in Indology or Area Studies, I’m not quite there, either (I never make things easy for myself!). While understanding texts in their historical context is important, at times this approach can leave one a bit too limited by linguistic history or the traditions of interpretation that came before and after a text, leaving little room for innovative philosophical understandings of individual texts (European Indology has its own problematic Orientalist history to contend with as well).
Vasubandhu was obviously responding to the Buddhist traditions before him and he has been taken up in certain ways by centuries of Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars that have come after him, but I also think Vasubandhu has something unique to say that is not captured by Buddhism in general or even Yogācāra in general. At least if we bother to listen to him carefully.
Nor am I denying that all interpretation today takes place in a postcolonial political context or that each reader doesn’t bring their own preconceptions (in a Gadamerian sense) to the text (my own philosophical preconceptions have been shaped by Buddhism as much as anything else; I learned about the Four Noble Truths long before I learned about semantic realism). I’m not saying we should assume we 21st century scholars have a transparent insight into the one true nature of a text for all times. Such would be hopelessly naïve, and in any case goes against the very spirit of what Vasubandhu is telling us about normal human experience!
Going forward, maybe I’ll say Vasubandhu was working out the epistemology of non-dualism, or maybe we can just call it early Yogācāra and let it speak for itself (even if later Yogācāra philosophers do come close to the Western category of “idealism,” I think reducing Vasubandhu to “idealism” is just as problematic as reducing him to “skepticism” or “phenomenalism” or “phenomenology”). I don’t know where I will go next, but I will keep trying to think with Vasubandhu as best I can.
Helpful though comparative philosophy can be at times, sometimes it can be yet another problematic causal factor in our experience of ancient texts. I thank Sonam Kachru for his part in inciting me to think more deeply about my own previous scholarly experience of Vasubandhu and other classical Indian philosophers, moving instead toward listening carefully to what these texts have to say for themselves.
……………………………………….
Works Cited
Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.
——. 2018. Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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