HPI 01 - Begin at the End - An Introduction to Philosophy in India

[music] Hello and welcome to the history of philosophy in India, by Janardin Ganari and me, Peter Adamson, fraught you with the support of the King's College of Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofilosophy.net. Today's episode begin at the end, introduction to Indian philosophy. It is oneself which one should see and hear and on which one should reflect and concentrate, for by seeing and hearing oneself and by reflecting and concentrating on oneself one gains the knowledge of this whole world. In these lines of the Brajhad-Aranyaka or Great Forest, Upanishad, we are invited, even exorded, to philosophise. We are promised that an examination of the Self or Atman will lead ultimately to an understanding of all things. Either here nor anywhere else in the Upanishads do we find the word "philosophy". No surprise there, the word "philosophia" is ancient Greek. Accordingly, historians of philosophy mostly restrict their attention to the intellectual traditions that can be traced back to the Greeks. Philosophy was born with the Presacratics, reached maturity with Plato and Aristotle and then was inherited by the Romans, the Medievals, and the moderns. It has been pursued more or less without interruption for the past two and a half millennia in Europe. This is what people mean when they talk about "western philosophy". Yet, the word "philosophy" was also known to the Islamic world, where the so-called "philosifa" thought of themselves as engaging in the enterprise begun by the Greeks. They presented themselves as the successors of Plato and Aristotle, even when they lived far from Europe. The greatest philosopher of the Islamic world was Avacena, and he held from modern-day Afghanistan, which hardly makes him a western philosopher. It is this broader story, the story of philosophy among cultures that used the word "philosophy" that has been explored so far in the history of philosophy podcast. In the almost 250 episodes to appear so far, the ideas of thinkers from ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic world, and Medieval Christendom have been explored without any gaps. And that story is continuing. But in this series of episodes, we'll be looking at a tradition of philosophy that arose independently of the Greeks' philosophy. We'll be looking at the philosophy of India. For this purpose, I've teamed up with expert Janardin Ganari, who, like me, is a professor of philosophy, and unlike me, is the author of numerous books on Indian thought. We've divided the labor with each of us bringing something to the podcast series. While Janardin has detailed knowledge of Indian thought, I have a microphone, and it's my voice you'll be hearing in the episodes to come. We've written the podcast together, but the silent partner Janardin deserves most of the credit for what you'll be hearing. He's taken the lead in deciding what we should cover, and has usually written the first draft of each script. The episodes are also going to be appearing on a separate feed and have their own numbering. This is so that you won't have to deal with a confusing mixture of episodes on European medieval and classical Indian thought. In the future, my hope is to use this second feed for further podcasts on other cultures where philosophy arose independently, including Africa and China. Still, despite these differences of authorship and presentation, the series on India forms a part of the larger series that is the history of philosophy podcast. It's not a spin-off or an afterthought, but an attempt to show that beginning in antiquity India has been the home of a great philosophical tradition, whose importance complexity and subtlety can compare with anything that's so-called Western philosophy has to offer. You might already be wondering, though, whether it really makes sense to speak of philosophy in this context if Indian thinkers were not responding to the Greek tradition of philosophy. To this, my answer would be twofold. First, don't let Janardin hear you say that. He makes his living off this Indian philosophy business and you wouldn't like him when he's angry. And second, India has produced literature bearing all the hallmarks of philosophy as it is standardly understood. We'll be discussing material of philosophical interest in text as early as the Vedic writings, especially in the Upanishads, but it's easier to make the point with works that come along somewhat later. Consider the case of the Vigrahavya Varthani, or refutation of my opponents, written by the radical Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna in the second century AD. The title promises arguments and arguments are what you get. Nagarjuna wants to defend his trademark view that nothing has Svabhava, meaning independent reality. Rather, all things are dependent and relative, or as he would say, empty. In a technique as fundamental to Indian philosophy as to the procedures of the medieval universities of Europe, Nagarjuna sets out criticisms of his own position and then responds to them. His imagined opponent tries one of the oldest tricks in the philosopher's book, which is to show that Nagarjuna will refute his theory simply by trying to state it. When Nagarjuna says nothing has independent reality, the opponent asks what status this very statement has. After all, if nothing has independent reality, then neither can this statement, so the statement itself is empty. But if it is empty, then it makes no positive assertion at all. The opponent anticipates that Nagarjuna might say that the statement is purely negative since it is a mere denial of existence. But this will not work, since even a denial of existence must itself be something existent. To all this, Nagarjuna responds by insisting that his statement is not a thesis or proposal of any kind, either negative or positive. He compares the situation to that of an unreal magical being trying to block the action of another unreal magical being. In a future episode, we'll get into the question of what sense if any Nagarjuna's response might make. For now, the point is that this is all indisputably philosophy and of a broadly familiar kind. We have a realist pitted against a skeptic. We have accusations of self-refutation from the realist side. We have the skeptic making careful distinctions between different kinds of speech act and even inventing creative analogies to bolster his case. More generally, we find that Indian thought investigates pretty well all the areas and problems central to the history of philosophy as the Greeks conceived it. There are attempts to articulate the foundations of knowledge and to reduce metaphysical reality to a few fundamental kinds of entity, or in Nagarjuna's case, to know fundamental kind of entity at all. We find arguments for atomism and for conceptions of time and space. Indian thinkers make developments in logic and present theories of ethics and political legitimacy. The upshot is that, far from wondering whether there is anything in Indian thought that corresponds to so-called "western" philosophy, it is often tempting to draw detailed comparisons between individual and Indian thinkers and specific philosophers of Greece or later traditions. Again, Nagarjuna would provide a striking example. He is reminiscent of the equally radical and methodologically strupulous "sextus empiricus", a Greek thinker who also lived in the second century AD. Another obvious parallel and one frequently drawn by scholars compares the pleasure loving materialist Chattava Kha, school to the Epicureans. Such resonances may of course be no coincidence. Didn't Alexander the Great bring his army as far as India? And aren't we told that Greek philosophers like Piro, the original Greek skeptic and inspiration for "sextus empiricus" traveled east in search of wisdom? The prospect of mutual interaction and influence is in a luring one, but for the most part we're going to avoid making constant illusions to philosophy in Europe. Instead we'll focus on Indian thought as an objective study in its own right. After all, what influence there may have been between these traditions is usually said to flow west, with Indian thought inspiring Piro or subsequent Greek philosophers like Platinus, to say nothing of much later figures like Schopenhauer. So, apart from a later episode on the influence of Indian thought in the European sphere, we'll be talking about the Indians on their own terms, with only very occasional comparisons or contrasts to the figures and ideas known to long-time listeners of the history of philosophy podcast. Though its themes and even some of its specific arguments would be at home in philosophy, as it is familiar to us from the European traditions, we should also be open to the idea that the Indian tradition may challenge and expand our notion of what philosophy is and could be. Think again about that Upanishadic exhortation to reflect on the self in order to know the world. What conception of the self and the world does that imply? What conception of philosophy and its potential? The Upanishads do not recommend idle theoretical speculation or technical virtuosity for its own sake. Nor were such abstract goals the driving force in later periods. Even Nagarjuna's radical skepticism was offered as a means to achieve the core Buddhist goal of avoiding suffering. For Buddhists, the good life is one of detachment from worldly things, and what could lead to detachment from things better than coming to see them as unreal. That there is a highest good, that this good is a way of living, a kind of human flourishing, and that practicing philosophy is a constitutive part of it, something embedded in the good life. This is not what students are typically told on the first day they show up to study philosophy at modern universities. Yet, this tendency may bring Indian philosophy closer to the roots of European philosophy, not further away. Ancient philosophy begins at the end, or at least with a conception of what our end might be. Aristotle called it "artilos", the final ant, the goal, the purpose of life itself. The French scholars Michel Foucault and Pierre Adot have proposed that the Greeks saw philosophy itself as a way of life built around what Adot has called "spiritual exercises". As the athlete embarks on a training regime, or an invalid takes medicine in hopes of returning to bodily health, so the person in search of wisdom undertakes philosophy, his or her goal being the health of the soul or of the self. Our opening quote from the Upanishads suggests that this idea had some currency in ancient India. If you want to achieve wisdom, it tells us, then begin by reflecting upon your own self. And there is plenty of confirmation in other Indian philosophical literature. For now we'll discuss just one example in more detail, a discussion of the ends of human life, which is found tucked away in four chapters of the Shanti Paravan, or Book of Peace. This is a voluminous work of philosophical reflection found within the even more voluminous Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. The Book of Peace attempts to integrate general ethical insights into the moral framework of the ethic, so there is good reason to think that it reflects values that were widely shared in ancient Indian culture. At one point, the Book of Peace poses the question, "What is the highest good?" Its answer is direct and unequivocal. The highest good is the taming of the self. We must subdue and pacify the self's inclination to reach out to things that are external to it, where external means both physically exterior and also outside of one's influence. So the taming in question is a pulling back, a drawing in, a restraint. Here one might think of a metaphor found in the Bhagavad-gita, or "som of the Lord", another part of the Mahabharata, which tells us to withdraw one's senses as a tortoise withdraws its limbs. Taming the self is a form of self-control. It means replacing fear, anger, and envy with a profound steadiness of mind, with imperturbility in the face of either pain or pleasure. When we reach out to things outside the self, we are motivated by greed, by a wish to obtain things that are in fact beyond our control. Thwarted desire and anger are the inevitable results. But with one greed in check, one lives the life of wise conduct, fearless in the face of death, greeting both pleasure and pain with equanimity, delighting in no acquisition and pain by no loss. To ask what would be the point of such a life is, it's self-pointless. There is no further goal for such a life such as wealth or fame, because living well is its own reward. Isn't this ethics of restraint opposed to the sentiment we found in the Upanishads? There, we were told to seek knowledge of the self, here in the book of peace the goal is instead taming or restraining the self. But the clash is only apparent. For the book of peace, greed goes hand in hand with ignorance. Greed is a failure to understand that none of the things one seeks to obtain is going to last. The greedy person is also ignorant of the nature of his own malady. He always expects to be gratified by that one more bit of wealth or pleasure, not realizing that greed is of its nature insatiable. Anger 2 is the result of ignorance, for it is the offspring of greed and the vexation that comes with noticing the faults of others. With knowledge comes forbearance and tolerance of others. The book of peace calls the state of soul recommended here "tapas", which makes it sound as though enlightenment is available at any good Spanish restaurant. But in fact, tapas means something like "spiritual austerity". A beautiful metaphor is offered to illustrate it. One who lives wisely and with self-control treads softly upon the earth as the track of birds along the sky or a foul over the surface of water cannot be discerned, even so the track of such a person does not attract notice. Admittedly, such a life has the drawback that such a person is regarded by others as weak and simple. Good thing then that with self-control and self-knowledge comes tolerance, so that our wise person will forgive the others who look down upon him. Even this downside is no downside at all, or at least not one that will bother the danta or tamed one. His state is one of perfect prashama or tranquility. Appealing though the results may sound, should we be so easily convinced to give up on our desires, our hopes and our fears? This advice threatens to lead not just to taming the self but to extinguishing it altogether. No wonder we may begin to think that for some philosophers of India, there is only one thing you need to know to understand the self that there isn't one. Something in the wake of this suspicion is something closer to an accusation. The Indian philosophers we are told may have agreed with the Greeks about the existence and uniqueness of a highest good, but where the Greeks located this good in a life of worldly flourishing and virtue, the Indians thought of it as something that lies outside of life. Indian thinkers are the holy naysayers, mocked by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in thus spoke Zarathustra. They believe that mundane living is a condition from which we should flee and that philosophy is little more than an elaborate escape kit, a mere instrument that helps us to reach this otherworldly end but does not after all form an essential part of it. But things have changed since Nietzsche. Nowadays when we hear someone talking about the distinctively western or the distinctively Indian, we immediately realize or should realize that we are in the territory of invention rather than discovery. Contrast such as the one between the life of farmers and the world deniers are just too tidy to have any basis in historical fact. And as we look more closely at the Indian philosophers, we will see that they are not their nealists and naysayers of Nietzsche's imagination. True, a great deal is said about such transcendent spiritual goals as Moksha, Mukti and Nirvana, and these goals are represented as an ultimate idealized aspiration for all. In practice though, it is the chosen few who have ends such as these, the vast majority of human beings aspire to something less remote. There is no sharp division here between the philosophical traditions of India, China and Greece. The Chinese and the Greeks, especially the Stoics, likewise thought of the sage as having goals of a higher order, remote from anything appropriate to ordinary human beings. Human beings do not aspire actually to become sages, instead the otherworldly sage is an ideal to steer by as we pursue goals within this world. Buddhists are not really trying to become a Buddha, even if thinking of themselves as trying to become a Buddha might be a good and effective way to achieve their real goal, which is to lead a good Buddhist life. Striving for a transcendent ideal might itself be a spiritual exercise, a practice that forms a part of the good for a human being. In which case it would be a mistake to read the descriptions of the transcendental states and the means to reach them as if they were literal expressions of a path from the world of men to the world of gods. This helps to explain the fact that the ideal states of Indian thought are often described in negative, even unappealing terms. We are promised a life free from pain, free from suffering, free from anger and desire, but often free from pleasure too. European readers have frequently struggled with the idea of aiming for an existence that is so colorless, a life little better than that of an amoeba. Perhaps the very fact that the ideal states are described in such unappealing terms shows us that these are not really intended as descriptions of the good for human beings. We should instead ask how does the idea of striving to achieve such a state help one make progress, and what exactly is the attainable goal towards which one progresses as one pursues this frankly unattainable goal? Might it be that reflecting on a life entirely devoid of both pleasure and pain will help us to re-examine pleasure and pain themselves? One might be led to be wary of pleasures rather than to avoid them altogether so that one builds one's life around something other than the pursuit of pleasure. If I genuinely believe that the ideal state involves no pleasure at all, I am apt to allow myself to be nourished by the pleasures I do have without being distracted from my other goals by the need to seek out new pleasures. In other words, I may come to lead a life of restraint and self-control. Of course, we'll have more opportunities to talk about debates over the highest good, and what purpose this ideal actually played in a life lived philosophically. The earliest answers given to these and other questions are to be found in Vedic literature. But before turning to that literature, we're going to give you something like a second introduction. The next episode will offer an overview of how philosophy developed in India to give you a context for the more focused episodes to follow. So prepare to feel like Dorothy in the world. Wizard of Oz as we take you on a whirlwind tour next time on the history of philosophy in India.