Savitri Era Learning Forum: Daya Krishna

Showing posts with label Daya Krishna. Show all posts

January 31, 2013

What Nandy considers as being lost, Mehta considers adventuring to the Other

Contemporary Indian thinkers not in varsity curriculum - The Times of India Jan 31, 2013 CHENNAI:

The study of contemporary Indian philosophers like K Satchidananda Murthy, Daya Krishna and K C Bhattacharyya needs to be incorporated in the curriculum of universities in the country, scholars said here on Wednesday.

While classical western philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein and Indian thinkers like Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Nehru and Radhakrishnan need to be studied, importance also has to be given to contemporary philosophers, they said. The scholars were speaking at a seminar on the 'Philosophy of Professor K Satchidananda Murthy' organised by a Delhi-based NGO Centre for Studies in Civilizations (CSC) and the Madras University's department of philosophy.

Member secretary of CSC Bhuvan Chandel said Delhi and Punjab universities had "old syllabi anchored more to western thinkers". However, she said wisdom is now dawning with the Jawaharlal Nehru University recently revising its syllabus to take on board contemporary Indian philosophers. Till four years ago, JNU did not have a philosophy section. She lamented that contemporary Indian philosophers were not given their due and there was no sincere effort to study them.

R C Pradhan, professor of philosophy from the central university of Hyderabad, noted that only since the 1990s have some universities included K C Bhattacharyya in the curriculum, while Daya Krishna and Murthy are yet to be incorporated in the programme of studies. Prof Satchidananda Murthy, who passed away last year, is regarded as one among the outstanding philosophers of the younger generation.

Ashis Nandy on Aurobindo – A Tale of Inauthentic Modernity: Savita Singh January 30, 2013 by Pratilipi Blog

Nandy concludes Aurobindo’s story rather somberly, as in his reading after so much pain, Aurobindo’s bid for self-recovery still remains an unconsummated gain; in place of authenticity he seems to have attained a compromise between the East and the indispensable West… For Aurobindo, discovering the East-in-the West became a transcendent goal and a practical possibility… Nandy does not end his story of Aurobindo’s encounter with modernity and its intervention in his life here. He still has a far more depressing ending, which he simply adds to the story as a closing note… Most certainly, there is another way of reading Aurobindo’s life. It could be quite enlightening to bring in another reading here offered by another significant hermeneutical thinker of India, Prof. J.L Mehta, who takes Aurobindo’s own statements about his life as an authentic rendering of its truth. He treats them as more meaningful beginning of his life’s story…

On this reading, what Nandy considers as being lost, that is, Aurobindo having lost to the West, Mehta considers it as a mere adventuring of the self to the Other, experiencing it in all its otherness as its own part. For indeed, Mehta works with a hermeneutical insight as far as human understanding is concerned. He writes, ‘so long as we live encapsulated within one tradition, our own, and in the language that embodies it, we can think and move and have our being only within the horizon of reality opened by it. We are free within it, for it is of essence of tradition…. But we are also limited by it, prevented from seeing what other tracks of vision may have brought to life. We are hence unfree” and that, even ones own must be learned after voyaging far into what is the other”.

Depicting the complexity of a hermeneutical life as that of Sri Aurobindo, in which he arrives at an understanding of himself and that of the West as part of each other, Mehta locates this understanding emanating from the Vedantic as much as from a Heideggerian sources. He brings in Heidegger to illustrate the interesting relationship the self has with its other, a position which Aurobindo spawned by living out the kind of existence he did. Aurobindo’s life came with a certain kind of depth where any stark differences between the self and the other simply got dissolved.

[Prof Savita Singh is Professor and Director of the School of Gender and Development Studies, IGNOU. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on 'Discourse of Modernity in India: A Hermeneutical Study', and earned her degree from Delhi University. Fathoming the Depths of Reality: Savita Singh in Conversation with - Roy Bhaskar, Savita Singh - 2003 - This book presents the main features of Roy Bhaskar's philosophy in a readily comprehensive form. The result is probably the simplest and clearest statement of the themes and development of his philosophy ever published.] 6:48 pm

December 29, 2012

Hayek, Zizek, Heehs and Elst

Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader Sachidananda Mohanty - 2012 - Preview - I believe that Peter Heehs is right in his analysis and observations. While the intersection of religion and nationalism remains an unresolved issue and Heehs has not ventured 'to set forth in systematic form', his own vision of Sri Aurobindo's views—he does it elsewhere—his point about the existing prejudice and misunderstanding against Sri Aurobindo is a valid one. What I propose to do next is to underline key aspects of Sri Aurobindo's social vision that make him a front-ranking thinker of contemporary culture.

Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 132 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - I think that the case for the interpretation that his overriding motive is empiricist is a good one. My chief reason for identifying this additional affinity is, as before, to try to comprehend his positions as fully as possible, ...

While mystic experience does stand out not only justificationally but in his idea of the nature of divine life, Aurobindo's stress is on a continuity, mutual value, and mutual reality obtaining between the mystical and and our more ordinary ...

An Indian Sceptic – Philosophy of Daya Krishna from from Centre Right India by Koenraad Elst - Dec 28, 2012. Daya Krishna (1924-2007) had been a member of the Changers’ Club, the debating circle of friends at Delhi University, featuring the later journalist Girilal Jain, economists Ram Swarup and Raj Krishna and historian Sita Ram Goel.

Daya Krishna wisely avoids pronouncing on the difficult question of their absolute chronology… Briefly, Daya Krishna was a Hindu philosopher who knew his classics very well, and who took a questioning position. He was not a secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway. But he was not a believer either, aware as he was of the contradiction between the common beliefs about Vedic literature and what the Vedas themselves say.

The Enduring Relevance of Koenraad Elst from The Rediscovery of India by Sandeep B.

One of the defining sentences in the various analyses of post-Independence Hindu revivalism, which is also original is this: Hindus have been playing the game by the rules set by their enemies. [Ed: Paraphrased] Elst wrote this in his masterful Decolonizing the Hindu Mind in 2001. More than a decade ago. As we see, very little has changed since then. If anything, it’s gotten worse in several respects… The Intellectuals: The widely travelled, well-read, and smart ones. The ones who (rightly) want to change the narrative, who point out the inherent bias in our discourse about India and Hinduism.

A Day in the Life of a Sikh Prejudice: Pukhraj Singh DECEMBER 29, 2012 from Kafila Guest post by PUKHRAJ SINGH

“The very ink with which history is written,” allegorised Mark Twain, “is merely fluid prejudice.” By that rationale, religion can often be the quill which defaces the truth with its broad strokes, perverting history than promulgating it. And like the bastard child of these perversions, a few counter-narratives manage to wade through the tides of public opinion, carrying the dim outline of the ossified ideas that led to its tragic pursuit. But one has to have the right kind of eyes, says Hunter S. Thompson, to “see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Why Zizek doesn’t have a political program from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

From Less Than Nothing, pp. 1007-1009 (yes, I’ve finished the thing):

“Faced with the demands of the protestors, intellectuals are definitely not in the position of the subjects supposed to know: they cannot operationalize these demands, or translate them into proposals for precise and realistic measures. With the fall of twentieth-century communism, they forever forfeited the role of the vanguard which knows the laws of history and can guide the innocents along its path. The people, however, also do not have access to the requisite knowledge–the “people” as a new figure of the subject supposed to know is a myth of the Party which claims to act on its behalf…

There is no Subject who knows, and neither intellectuals nor ordinary people are that subject. Is this a deadlock then: a blind man leading the blind, or, more precisely, each of them assuming that the other is not blind? No, because their respective ignoance is not symmetrical: it is the people who have the answers, they just do not know the questions to which they have (or, rather, are) the answer….

Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that the prohibition of incest is not a question, an enigma, but an answer to a question that we do not know. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way: intellectuals should not primarily take them as demands, questions, for which they should produce clear answers, programs about what to do. They are answers, and intellectuals should propose the questions to which they are answers. The situation is like that in psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but does not know what they are the answers to, and the analyst has to formulate the questions. Only through such patient work will a program emerge.”

(title unknown) by enowning

In Al Jazeera, Santiago Zabala on the thinker of our age.

[His ability to fuse together Martin Heidegger's "fundamental ontology", Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" and Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" in order to undermine our liberal and tolerant democratic structures is a practice few intellectuals are capable of.]

A Must Read New Book on Friedrich Hayek from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Eamonn Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the libertarian economist”

It is in his accounts of why markets flourish naturally that Hayek is most persuasive, and Butler is at his best in showing the importance of this side of Hayek’s work. This means discussing socialism, which at first glance is a debate about a past that is now over. However, lessons from the endemic failures of socialism are in excellent contrast to the superior results of market capitalism, and Butler develops the contrast clearly, highlighting the untold damage done by the rising tide of deliberate rule changes that eventually clog the operations of markets, restraining them from their full potential.

Socialism is a mistaken response to how societies evolve and work. The “battle lines” may have changed from what they were in the 19^th century when socialism was an untried idea, but having been tried and failed in the 20^thcentury, the central problem remains today: how does a central agency manage a complex economy? Socialism necessarily means dispensing with an existing market capitalism, which whatever else is regarded as dispensable, the visible success of markets that grew within the margins of the millennia-old human experiences since our ancestors left the forest and plains to become shepherds and farmers 10,000 years ago, suggests that markets are dispensed with at an enormous cost.

We can contrast the experience of China and Britain since the 15^th century; China’s government deliberately ended foreign trade despite its massive technological lead. Meanwhile individuals in Britain continued trading and eventually re-discovered the ‘lost’ technologies of China which led to the spread of local markets, science and unheard of new technologies. Market capitalism flourishes under conditions of constitutional liberty more than totalitarian socialism can flourish by destroying markets. Gavin Kennedy Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University

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January 31, 2013

What Nandy considers as being lost, Mehta considers adventuring to the Other

December 29, 2012

Hayek, Zizek, Heehs and Elst