Can you think of a saner piece of advice to anybody, rather than this? I find it hard to word it in a better way.
"To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure;
rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure
of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth
trying for." -- Geoffrey Warnock
***
Reading Jeffrey R Timm's essay 'Scriptural Realism in Pure Nondualistic Vedanta'.
A very good point about the perceptual change that happens in the
research circles is instantiated by contrasting the remarks of Eliot
Deutsch in his work, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction, in
1969 with that of his own thoughts some twenty years later.
'The exegetical dimension of Vedanta is ..........of very little
interest to Western students of philosophy. We do not accept the
authority of the Veda (or, for the most part, the authority of any
other scripture); consequently, we are not concerned whether one system
or another best interprets certain obscure passages in it.'(p 5)
Jeffrey R Timm's comments over this:
'The question, of course, was never whether or not Western scholars
could accept the authority of the Veda. The question was whether or not
something akin to a Bultmannian demythologization could be invoked to
isolate "kerygmatic" philosophical issues from the exegetical concerns
that traditional thinkers had with the text.'
Twenty years later
in 1988, in his essay, 'Knowledge and the Tradition Text in Indian
Philosophy' which appeared in Interpreting across Boundaries, Eliot
Deutsch obseves, (as commented by Jeffrey R Timm - 'marking not only a
shift in his own thinking but the maturation of a field as well')
'Something important and essential is lost when we study (and teach)
philosophy - as has unfortunately become typical in many contemporary
analytic circles - as if it were made up of a series or set of
alternative arguments, ideas, or isms capable of being abstracted from
the concrete forms in which these arguments, ideas, and theories were
presented and shaped.'(p 166)
The shift in the perspective does
not only concern the primary Text as it were but also the commentorial
traditions inherent to the subsequent and continued receptions of the
Text by the engaged and involved community. This is very aptly marked by
Jeffrey R Timm in his comments, paraphrasing Eliot Deutsch's words in
the article (p 170): 'This effort includes not just a "primary"
scriptural canon; the myriad commentaries, subcommentaries, glosses, and
so on must be taken seriously because they "form, hermeneutically,
integral parts of a continuing text" '
Reading Jeffrey R Timm
reading Eliot Deutsch is interesting in its own ways. The field of
research is so absorbing just for this reason that it is able to be
self-critical as an ongoing process.
Is it just for fun that I like to say 'Reading is itself a unique yoga'?
***
Though everybody nowadays seems to know the x y z of everything nobody knows the a b c of anything.
-- Bernard Shaw
How true !
Any way to alter or give it a lie?
I don't hope so.
But who cares..!
***
The concentration and fusion into the
whole being can never happen through me
nor can it happen without me. I become in
relation to the Thou, becoming I, I say Thou.
All actual life is encounter.
—Martin Buber, Ich und Du
What a pregnant statement ! An Upanishad in itself ! Mind is addicted to this statement now.
***
I thought of Dr Richard Dawkins while reading these beautiful and clear pieces of the great Darwin -
"Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man
and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the
same general model, why they pass through the same early
stages of development, and why they retain certain rudiments
in common. Consequently we ought frankly to admit their
community of descent. .
It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our
forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads
us to demur to this conclusion. But the time will before long come,
when it will be thought wonderful that naturalists, who were well
acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man, and
other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate
act of creation
Some of the most distinctive characters of man have in all
probability been acquired, whether directly or more commonly
indirectly through natural selection
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals,
great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have
seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and
faculties, . . . of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient,
or over some time in a well-developed condition, in the lower
animals."
(The Descent of Man)
Really a spectacular thinker, Darwin is !
***
Really Gadamer is highly interesting ! I could not have expected such a bouncer on 'prejudice' -
" Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that
they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our
existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word,
constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience.
Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are
simply conditions whereby we experience something-whereby
what we encounter says something to us. "
***
It is customary to talk of seven sages of Greece, like Solon and
others. But Richard Schacht talks of seven great philosophers who
characterize the classical modern period in philosophy. He expresses
beautifully how pivotal their contributions are, in his book Classical
modern philosophers Descartes to Kant.
"Philosophy had a
two-thousand-year history prior to Descartes, and has had a career of
nearly two centuries since Kant; but these seven men had so profound an
impact upon its course that it is almost
impossible to conceive of the very existence of the various forms of
inquiry which collectively constitute the enterprise of philosophy
today—as well as the diverse issues debated and positions taken by
contemporary philosophers of all persuasions—had they not made their
different contributions to it."
How nicely he divides the whole time of philosophy as 2000 years before
Descartes and 200 years from Kant.! This stream has received a definite
and unalterable impetus of change in more than one aspect by the seven
philosophers' inputs.!
Really a clear way to meditate on the course of philosophy's history !
***
Umberto Eco, an author of many thought provoking novels like The name
of the Rose', Foucault's pendulum and more so, of a theory of
semiotics, is no more. I feel sad even though fully aware of our common
existential predicament. But few authors have ventured on theories and
employed novel as means of articulating them. U Eco is one such.
A sentence I like very much in his 'Semiotics and the philosophy of language' is --
"The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy,
or reconstruct pre-existing sign-functions depends on the presence
within the sign-function (that is, in the network of content figures) of
a set of instructions oriented toward the (potential) production of
different texts."
As a reader I do feel the bereavement.
***
Sometimes academic philosophers do describe some interesting pictures
of abstract ideas. Here is one, on virtue, by Simone Weil, resorting to
a quote from the ancient Book of the Dead -
"There has never been a more moving definition of virtue than the
words, spoken in The Book of the Dead by the soul on the way to salvation:
Lord of Truth . . I have brought truth to thee, and I have destroyed
wickedness for thee . . I have not thought scorn of God . . I have not
brought forward my name for honors . . I
have not caused harm to be done to the servant by his master . . I have
made no one weep . . I have not struck fear into any man . . I have not
spoken haughtily . . . I have not made myself deaf to the words of
right and truth. "
(while reading a quote in - Pragmatrism and non-scientific knowledge, by Hilary Putnam)
***
Putnam
seems to conceive of Pragmatism as containing some characteristic
features like anti-scepticism, fallibilism and the like. Not only
beliefs need justification but also doubts, which is what he terms as
anti-scepticism. And one can never say that a given belief will never
need revision, which is what he terms as fallibilism. Yea it is
interesting like tying the mammoth, which anyway needs some bindings.
(while reading Richard Warner)
***
