Naina_Marbus
Active member
T. S. Eliot once wrote, “The philosophers of India make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.” Roberto Calasso would agree. In his book, “Ardor”, Calasso says:
“Indian philosophy begins and ends with something that was to become central in the West only at the beginning of the 20th century.” “Classical Indians not only wanted to think, they wanted to be aware of thinking.
Descartes asserted, “I think, therefore I am.” The Indians of the second and first millenniums B.C.E. anticipated the scientists, psychoanalysts and artists of the modern era who have undermined the Cartesian certainties of a rational self.
The hymns of the Rig-Veda manifest the belief that something “only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives.”
This is the sort of insight that once drew Western thinkers and artists including Schopenhauer, Emerson and Yeats to Indian philosophy. The European discovery of Indian texts ….alerted many in the increasingly powerful and self-absorbed West of the 19th century to ..(Indians) who had long been contemplating life’s profoundest questions and predicaments.
This was too much for the (evangelically driven) Western Christian colonialists, who were intent upon “civilizing” the natives and turning them into loyal clones; Macaulay claimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
(But, in recent times,) …engagement with the Indian past has also inspired a different model of intellectual transnationalism, one embodied early by Goethe, who wrote, “He who knows himself and others will also recognize that East and West cannot be separated.” This was more prescient than Goethe could have imagined in the early 19th century. For, the universal dissemination of science, technology, capitalism and the nation-state has knit humanity into a single indivisible unit; and for at least a century there have been no questions “that can be settled by being settled at one point,”as Paul Valéry wrote ( French Philosopher 1871 – 1945).
Exploring the Upanishads or Buddhism, these thinkers ….recognized that the quasi-religious ideologies of individual and collective salvation — whether liberalism, communism, capitalism or technicism — were doomed to exhaustion, and that any kind of triumphalism based on them — whether civilizational, national or racial — was foolish and sterile..
To this philosophical skepticism about modernity, Calasso has contributed a bracing genealogy of ideas, which transcends many contemporary conceits about literature and philosophy: Proust becomes a Vedic seer, and Prajapati, the Vedic deity of procreation, emerges as the predecessor of Kafka’s K in his form-defying books. Their ostensible range of subjects ….disguises a continuity of themes and preoccupations: the power and sovereignty of the mind and its relationship to the world, the basis of political and social order and the inescapable role of violence.
Calasso …on the Veda…The Vedic Indians did not build great empires or monuments. Rather they sought an intense “state of awareness” that “became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts.”
Calasso is aware that most of his readers would regard the ritual of sacrifice as barbarous. But he sees in this contemporary recoiling an uneasy confession: that “this world of today is detached from and, at the same time, dependent on all that has preceded it.” Sacrifice was the means to acknowledge and contain violence through religious ritual and practice. But secular society with its frenzied worship of the new gods of money and power still consumes many victims without being aware of its sacrificial nature.
Calasso.. (believes) …that the modern world can no longer explain its extraordinary violence and disorder in its own terms, and that we ought to understand the supposedly primitive customs and institutions, such as sacrifice, that linger invisibly in even postmodern societies.
One of Calasso’s interlocutors in “Ardor” …. believes that mimetic desire — the desire to own what others possess — or envy, rather than transcendental authority, now underpins social order in secularized societies. But the mutual hatred and possibility of an “all against all” war it seeds is still defused by periodic scapegoating, the identification of internal or external enemies, whose violent suppression releases the tension built up by frustrated desire and unappeasable envy.
As Calasso sees it, modern warfare cannot rid itself, even despite a sophisticated machinery of killing and high death tolls, of the “lexical legacy of sacrifice,” which now includes words like “victim, self-denial, consecration, redemption, trial by fire.”
The closing pages of “Ardor” echo(es) …. belief that “the submission of the individual to society — to the people — to humanity — to the idea — is a continuation of human sacrifice.” This has been continuously reflected in the catastrophic programs of social re-engineering from imperialism’s civilizing missions to Stalin and Mao’s socialist utopianism, and the more recent attempt to bomb whole countries into democracy, or shock-therapy them into free-market capitalism.
Today, the nation-states of Asia and Africa re-enact, in their pursuit of Western-style modernity, human sacrifice on a vast scale and more pathological form. Calasso anticipates his reader wondering, “What can be the relevance of all we read in the Veda?” He is right to answer that such “microphysics of the mind” can bring about an “abrupt and disorientating shift of perspective” and, perhaps, snap us out of both naïve reverence for and smug disenchantment with the modern world.
Excerpts from Pankaj Mishra’s review of “ARDOR” By Roberto Calasso
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/ardor-by-roberto-calasso.html
“Indian philosophy begins and ends with something that was to become central in the West only at the beginning of the 20th century.” “Classical Indians not only wanted to think, they wanted to be aware of thinking.
Descartes asserted, “I think, therefore I am.” The Indians of the second and first millenniums B.C.E. anticipated the scientists, psychoanalysts and artists of the modern era who have undermined the Cartesian certainties of a rational self.
The hymns of the Rig-Veda manifest the belief that something “only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives.”
This is the sort of insight that once drew Western thinkers and artists including Schopenhauer, Emerson and Yeats to Indian philosophy. The European discovery of Indian texts ….alerted many in the increasingly powerful and self-absorbed West of the 19th century to ..(Indians) who had long been contemplating life’s profoundest questions and predicaments.
This was too much for the (evangelically driven) Western Christian colonialists, who were intent upon “civilizing” the natives and turning them into loyal clones; Macaulay claimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
(But, in recent times,) …engagement with the Indian past has also inspired a different model of intellectual transnationalism, one embodied early by Goethe, who wrote, “He who knows himself and others will also recognize that East and West cannot be separated.” This was more prescient than Goethe could have imagined in the early 19th century. For, the universal dissemination of science, technology, capitalism and the nation-state has knit humanity into a single indivisible unit; and for at least a century there have been no questions “that can be settled by being settled at one point,”as Paul Valéry wrote ( French Philosopher 1871 – 1945).
Exploring the Upanishads or Buddhism, these thinkers ….recognized that the quasi-religious ideologies of individual and collective salvation — whether liberalism, communism, capitalism or technicism — were doomed to exhaustion, and that any kind of triumphalism based on them — whether civilizational, national or racial — was foolish and sterile..
To this philosophical skepticism about modernity, Calasso has contributed a bracing genealogy of ideas, which transcends many contemporary conceits about literature and philosophy: Proust becomes a Vedic seer, and Prajapati, the Vedic deity of procreation, emerges as the predecessor of Kafka’s K in his form-defying books. Their ostensible range of subjects ….disguises a continuity of themes and preoccupations: the power and sovereignty of the mind and its relationship to the world, the basis of political and social order and the inescapable role of violence.
Calasso …on the Veda…The Vedic Indians did not build great empires or monuments. Rather they sought an intense “state of awareness” that “became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts.”
Calasso is aware that most of his readers would regard the ritual of sacrifice as barbarous. But he sees in this contemporary recoiling an uneasy confession: that “this world of today is detached from and, at the same time, dependent on all that has preceded it.” Sacrifice was the means to acknowledge and contain violence through religious ritual and practice. But secular society with its frenzied worship of the new gods of money and power still consumes many victims without being aware of its sacrificial nature.
Calasso.. (believes) …that the modern world can no longer explain its extraordinary violence and disorder in its own terms, and that we ought to understand the supposedly primitive customs and institutions, such as sacrifice, that linger invisibly in even postmodern societies.
One of Calasso’s interlocutors in “Ardor” …. believes that mimetic desire — the desire to own what others possess — or envy, rather than transcendental authority, now underpins social order in secularized societies. But the mutual hatred and possibility of an “all against all” war it seeds is still defused by periodic scapegoating, the identification of internal or external enemies, whose violent suppression releases the tension built up by frustrated desire and unappeasable envy.
As Calasso sees it, modern warfare cannot rid itself, even despite a sophisticated machinery of killing and high death tolls, of the “lexical legacy of sacrifice,” which now includes words like “victim, self-denial, consecration, redemption, trial by fire.”
The closing pages of “Ardor” echo(es) …. belief that “the submission of the individual to society — to the people — to humanity — to the idea — is a continuation of human sacrifice.” This has been continuously reflected in the catastrophic programs of social re-engineering from imperialism’s civilizing missions to Stalin and Mao’s socialist utopianism, and the more recent attempt to bomb whole countries into democracy, or shock-therapy them into free-market capitalism.
Today, the nation-states of Asia and Africa re-enact, in their pursuit of Western-style modernity, human sacrifice on a vast scale and more pathological form. Calasso anticipates his reader wondering, “What can be the relevance of all we read in the Veda?” He is right to answer that such “microphysics of the mind” can bring about an “abrupt and disorientating shift of perspective” and, perhaps, snap us out of both naïve reverence for and smug disenchantment with the modern world.
Excerpts from Pankaj Mishra’s review of “ARDOR” By Roberto Calasso
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/ardor-by-roberto-calasso.html
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