Free will in Indian philosophy

Free will is one of the most central topics of Western philosophy. In contrast, it is hard even to find an adequate synonym in Indian philosophy. Why? Possibly because:

1. 1. Indian philosophy is not dominated by Theism as a philosophical position (there have been several theistic philosophies, but the core of Indian philosophy —Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Buddhism, Jainism…— does not need a personal God),
2. 2. the theory of karman introduced determinism as a pre-condition, so that the only option left was some sort of compatibilism and everyone automatically adjusted.

Most Indian authors are in fact by default compatibilists. They assume automatically that we are determined by karman, but also that karman is not an inestricable chain. If it were one, no liberation would be possible without a Divine intervention. Predestination is, thus, admitted by some Theistic schools such as Madhva's one (and possibly presupposed by some verses of the Bhagavadgītā referring to eternal hell). However, predestination cannot be accepted by all the schools who stress the importance of one's path, such as Buddhism, nor be a philosophically viable option for the schools who do not recognise a personal (and, hence, arbitrary) God as fundamental to their system. If there is no God arbitrarily deciding to rescue the one and send to hell the other, what would be the rationale of predestination? A Materialist might answer that one just happens to be among the lucky ones or not, but materialism is, again, an extreme position within Indian philosophy.

On the topic of free will in Indian philosophy, see this post (and all other posts under the tag "free will").

Non-ontological approach in Mīmāṃsā

What is prescriptive (normative) and what is just descriptive in the Brāhmaṇas and in Mīmāṃsā?

Elaborating on the identifications frequent in the Brāhmaṇas, Lars Göhler (Reflexion und Ritual in der Pūrvamīmāṃsā, 2011) writes:

Mylius (1976:146) writes that the [identifications in the Brāhmaṇas, E.F.] are based on the desire to systematise reality. The style and formulation of these identifications hint, however, also at a further purpose: The Brahmans did not just ascertain such identities, they conjured up them: in the identifications there is not only an ''is'', but also an ''ought''.

(Mylius (1976:146) schreibt, dass ihnen der Wunsch, die objektive Realität zu systematisieren, zugrunde lag. Stil und Formulierung dieser Identifikationen deuten aber noch auf eine weitere Absicht hin: die Brahmanen haben diese Identitäten nicht nur festgestellt, sie haben sie geschworen: In den Identifikationen findet sich nicht nur ein ''Sein'', sondern auch ein ''Sollen'', Göhler 2011: 20).

This harmonises with the caution against a default ontological interpretation pronounced by Göhler at the beginning of his book. Moreover, it throws some light on the prescriptive approach to the Veda which is typical of Mīmāṃsā. If one focuses on how the Brāhmaṇas and then the speculation on them do not merely describe reality, but rather prescribe how this should be, some of the striking peculiarities of Mīmāṃsā (and of Indian philosophy), such as the complex semantics of artha, meaning at the same time 'object' and 'purpose', become clearer. A little bit later, Göhler convincingly argues that also pramāṇa has in Mīmāṃsā a rather normative meaning (''Damit gehört Pramāṇa eher in die Nähe von Gültigkeitsbegriffen im Sinne von 'normativ gültig' oder 'handlungsverbindlich' '' (Göhler 2011: 36). Even MS 1.1.4, with its rejection of sense perception as instrument to know dharma is audaciously re-interpreted by Göhler from a non-descriptive perspective. The sūtra states that sense perception is animitta. This is usually understood as meaning that it is not the cause of the knowledge of dharma. By contrast, Göhler stresses the ritual background of nimitta and translates as follows: ''it does not promote (a ritual action creating something new)'' ("[…] sie veranlasst nicht (eine rituelle Tätigkeit, die etwas Neues schafft)'', Göhler 2011: 38).

In my opinion, the opposition between a descriptive and a prescriptive approach is a fundamental one when looking at Mīmāṃsā and possibly at Indian philosophy in general. A prescriptive meaning, further, cannot be interpreted through a direct-realist lens, insofar as it cannot directly correspond to an external state of affairs already existing at the moment the sentence referring to it is uttered. In other words, this is a further case of a non-ontological approach current in Indian philosophical texts (the topic has been recently discussed in this very interesting post by Jayarava).

What do readers think? Further evidences of non-ontological approaches?

Open Access in South Asian Studies

Should we give up "traditional" journals? After all, why should the government pay me for doing researches my colleagues cannot afford to read because of the high prices of scientific journals?

Dominik Wujastyk keeps on stimulating the public of the Indology mailing list he founded with references to articles such as this one by George Monbiot. Here is a short quote:

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose. […]

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

It’s bad enough for academics, it’s worse for the laity.

Personally, I try to upload all my papers (as drafts) on academia.edu and I wrote far more blog posts than articles. However, I need articles on peer-reviewed journals in order to access public funding (the last FIRB programme in Italy expects from a young researcher to have at least 10 or 15 printed publications). Beside that, I am still inclined to think that publishers may do an important job (and one readers alone would not be able to do), insofar as they:

1. 1. select articles (distinguishing bona fide scientific ones from ones which could attract readers but are not soundly founded),
2. 2. check articles (emend typos, suggest appropriate fonts for "unusual" languages, etc.),
3. 3. look for relevant peer-reviewers,
4. 4. provide feed-back,
5. 5. edit articles (although I must say that in my personal experience all the editorial comments I received came from non-paid guest editors or the like),
6. 6. distribute articles.

This cannot be done for free and if it does not generate profit, it must be state-funded. Of course, one is left wondering why products by Brill or Springer are so much more expensive than excellent journals published elsewhere… But this only means that journals and books should cost less, not that they should not cost at all.
Would not readers (if left as the only judges) prefer articles on "The Buddha in your every day life" rather than on "Was the Brahmajāla Sutta post-Aśokan?"? Even granting that many articles of the latter type could disappear without anyone noticing it, don't you agree that text-based research is needed, although it might look not as fun as "applied Buddhism" (etc.)? Or can one imagine that scholarly trained readers will automatically select an open access platform where only "scientific" articles are published and ignore the others? If no one is paid to select them, would not readers just select them because of their authors, thus making it almost impossible for a young researcher to be read?


What do you think? Where do you publish?

Philosophical creativity

Are contemporary philosophers just bound to write footnotes to Plato's works?

Arindam Chakrabarti is one of my personal favourite scholars of Indian philosophy. He masters Sanskrit and philosophy, both Western and Indian, at the same time. In a very recent essay he discusses the feasability of philosophical creativity. He recalls a conversation he had with a poet who told him that poetic creativity

is a constant battle against the staleness of words and thoughts. The battle is often lost by most poets por philosophers], but sometimes it is won with those very stale words and thoughts (A.C., New Stuff: On the Very Idea of Creativity in Philosophical Thinking 2011).

Personally, I tend to think that the battle can only be won throught those very stale words and thoughts. This is also the reason why I enjoy reading Sanskrit philosophical commentaries, especially post-classical ones, since their authors were well aware of the fact that a glorious tradition was already behind them.

(I am grateful to Daniel Raveh's 2011 book Exploring the Yogasūtra who made me discover Chakrabarti's text.)

On fields of Indian philosophy which need a creative thinking to come into existence, see this post (on applied Indian philosophy).

Usage of commentaries

Should one use commentaries? Or are they just the lesser evil?

One of the positive traits of Kei Kataoka's last book (Kumārila on Truth, Omniscience and Killing. A Critical Edition of Mīmāṃsā-Ślokavārttika ad 1.1.2 (Codanāsūtra), Vienna 2011) is how much of its methodological approach is explicitly offered to the reader to ponder about. Kataoka discusses his choices and describes his criteria, at the risk of raising criticism. This is apparent in the case of the interpretation of Kumārila, since Kataoka strongly upholds the view that commentaries may be used only as a third and last resource (after Kumārila's own other texts and Kumārila's predecessors' ones) and that one should be cautious in using them and always make readers aware of the fact that one is doing it:

A scholar who reconstructs a temple, if he has no choice but to use later materials, ought to explicitly mark the items so that other scholars will not be left in ignorance and confusion. Reconstructing an original idea of the seventh century through an interpretation in the eleventh century, for example, is anachronistic if unconsciously done, however labor-saving it is and however aesthetically attractive is the result (Part 2, pp, 108-9).

I see Kataoka's point and I deeply appreciate the fact that he spells it out. However, I wonder whether an 11th c. paṇḍit is not often in a better position than a 21st century (Western) Sanskritist to understand a text. The paṇḍit has most likely an own agenda (but so does the Sanskritist, although s/he might not be aware of it —which is even more risky) and he might try to make the text say what he wants it to say, in order to justify a certain development within the school, for instance. Whatever the case, I am inclined to think that one should take commentaries seriously. One might disagree with them, but one has to show why they preferred a different interpretation (they wanted to make a Dvaita text into an Advaita one? there were no longer Buddhists around and hence they wanted to shift the polemics against another target?).

More in general, commentaries are more than welcome if what one is reconstructing is not the Ur-intention of a certain text, but rather the understanding of it by the tradition. In Kataoka's metaphor, not the 2nd c. b.C. temple, but the Middle Age church built over it.

How do you work with commentaries? Do you acknowledge you used them whenever your interpretations relies on them?

On acknowledging one's methodology, see this post. On this book by Kataoka, see this post (discussing his translation).

The inner power of rituals

Why do rituals survive for centuries (or even millennia)? One reason could be that they are just rules without meaning (as suggested by Frits Staal) and that their formality is what preserves them notwithstanding the unavoidable changes in the mentality which initially "invented" (in its literal meaning) them.
A further postilla might be that they are rules without a fixed meaning. They do have a meaning, but this varies with time and according to the one who performs it (or, one might add, attends it).
From a study of Marion Rastelli, published in 2005 in Words and Deeds:

In their study on the Jaina pūjā, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw have shown that ritual acts have no meaning that is intrinsic to them (Humphrey and Laidlay 1994: esp. 5, 35, 41). There is no immediate correlation between the external appearance of a ritual and the meaning that is attributed to it. From the observation of a ritual action one cannot infer the meaning being ascribed to it.

This remark could end many discussions on the interpretation of Vedic rituals (was the Soma-offering initially meant to propitiate rain? Is it a fertility rite? and so on). However, one might suggest that this view only regards rituals as they are observed and that it is indeed possible to speculate about their original meaning in history.
A further consequence of Humphrey and Laidlaw's point is as follows:

If the meanings attributed to a ritual and the intentions being pursued are independent from the outer form of a ritual, the meanings and the performer's intentions can change without transforming the ritual itself.
(Rastelli 2005, p. 115)

In other words, a worshipper of a personal God may perform the same ritual a monist is performing, although attributing to it a very different meaning. One might object, again, that phenomenologically there might be huge differences in the intentions of the performers, but that these differences can be understood historically and that it is not the case that any ritual means everything, but rather that every ritual has an history and, hence, a historical stratification of meanings, partly alternative to each other.

What do you think? And how close are Staal's and Humphrey and Laidlaw's theses?

Āgamas and "Aboriginals"

Are the Āgamas the product of a non-Aryan and, hence, anti-Vedic influence in Indian culture? Are they just an evolution of the Aryan thought responding to new stimuli?

Personally, I tend to disagree with both sides of the argument. I do not think that arguments are bound to races ("Aryan" and "Dravidian" or "Aboriginal"). Ideas tend to travel faster than people and in this sense it makes (in my opinion) hardly any sense to speak of a "Dravidian" argument.

However, I could not resist writing about it after having read a statement about it by V. Varadachari in his Āgamas and South Indian Vaiṣṇavism. I do not know well Varadachari's work, but I tend to have a positive opinion of it. Anyway, here is the statement:

Suggestions have been made by some writers that the Āgamas are antivedic and should have arisen under the impact of the ways of life of the aborigines of India. It is to be observed here that borrowing, whether, linguistic, religious or cultural, is always from those who are spiritually and morally superior or politically dominant in power: minor impacts could have been there on the cultured class coming from the tribes but wholesale concept of the Āgama way of worship could not have emanated from the tribes: the Āgamas must therefore be treated as supplementary to the Vedas (vi-vii).

I understand Varadachari's agenda and his dissatisfaction with the opponents' argument. But I think he should have rather asked "What does anti-vedic mean?" instead of throwing himself into hot water. In fact, an opponent may easily reply that the non-Aryan aborigenals were the large majority of the population in South India and that they could hence easily influence the general culture through their religious beliefs and habits. A parallel could be that of a linguistic substratum. Hence, the conclusion might be true, but the second premiss (the non-Aryans were a minority) does not hold.