International Conference on Atisha and Cultural Renaissance Venue: 11, Man Singh Road ,
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi-110011. Date: 16th to
18th January, 2013 - ‘Atisa Dipankar Srijnana and Cultural Renaissance’ Atisha is the last outstanding Indian scholar who
went abroad for the cause, in the 11th century. Home, Silver
Jubilee Celebration
J.N. Mohanty is Professor of Philosophy, Temple University ,
Philadelphia and Woodruff Professor of
Philosophy and Asian Studies, Emory
University , Georgia Oxford University
Press , USA
In Self and Other, J. N. Mohanty addresses contemporary
questions of post-modernism without abandoning his fundamental stand on
phenomenological method. The essays in this volume reveal a shift from an
over-emphasis on identity in classical metaphysical thinking to an emphasis on
differences without falling into the fogginess of post-modernism.
Writing
the Self [Paperback] Peter
Heehs (Author)
Book Description Publisher: Bloomsbury
Academic Publication Date: April
11, 2013
The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered
Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance
the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne.
In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions
of selfhood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume
grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed
markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best
a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have
provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the
Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more
about the self. After Richardson ,
novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though
memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new
incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined
histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature. About the Author
Peter Heehs is an independent scholar based in India . He has
written or edited nine books and published more than fifty articles. Articles
in Professional Journals and Books
2011. “The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and the
Integral Yoga: A Study in Cross-Cultural Influence”. Aries 11:2
(September): 219-247 (Pdf file
available here).
2010. “Introduction”. In P. Vir Gupta, C. Mueller, and C. Samil, Golconde:
The Introduction of Modernism in India Bangalore : Inform.
2009. “Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal ”.
In E. Boehmer and S. Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial. Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell.
2007. “Nationalism”. In S. Mittal and G. Thursby, eds., Studying
Hinduism: Concepts and Methods. New
York : Routledge.
2006. “Introduction: Appropriation as a Marketing Strategy”, written
as guest editor of Postcolonial Studies 9 (June): 113–19.
2006. “The Uses of Sri Aurobindo: Mascot, Whipping-Boy or What?”. Postcolonial
Studies 9 (June): 151–64.
2006. “Yoga/Yogi”. Keywords in South Asian Studies. Published online by Centre of South Asian Studies, School of Oriental
and African Studies, London .
2004. “Ghose, Aurobindo.” In The New Dictionary of National
Biography. Oxford : Oxford University
2003. “ ‘The Centre of the Religious Life of the World’: Spiritual
Universalism and Cultural Nationalism in the Work of Sri Aurobindo.” In Antony Copley, ed., Hinduism,
Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, Sampraday. Delhi :
Oxford University
2003. “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian
Historiography”. History and Theory, vol. 42, no. 2: 169–95.
Reprinted in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity and
Religious Identities. New Delhi : Oxford University
1994. “Myth, History and Theory.” History and Theory,
vol. 33, no. 1, 1–19. Reprinted in Robert Segal, ed., Myth (New York : Routledge, 2007).
Peter Heehs - Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes & Problems
in ... [published in History and Theory 42
(May 2003), pp.169-195]
Another habit of European scholars that got Aurobindo’s hackles up was
their tendency to trace Indian achievements back to European, usually Greek,
predecessors. Where Greek influence was evident, as in the Gandharan school of
sculpture, he condemned the work as inferior to “pure” Indian styles. Europe’s
literary criteria too were not applicable to India . Albrecht Weber’s
idea that the original Mahabharata consisted only of the
battle chapters was a case of “arguing from Homer.” It was, he insisted,
“not from European scholars that we must expect a solution of the Mahabharata
problem,” since “they have no qualifications for the task except a power of
indefatigable research and collocation. . . . It [p.178>] is from
Hindu [i.e. Indian] scholarship renovated & instructed by contact with
European that the attempt must come.”[34]
…
Chakrabarty’s project is one of the most sophisticated attempts to
arrive at an Indian, or let us say a not-exclusively-European way of looking at
Indian history, but he builds on foundations that were laid a hundred years
ago. Many of his predecessors exhibit great subtlety of thought and are not
hobbled, like him, by an excessive reliance on (European) figures like
Heidegger and Marx who, taken at [p.192>] face value, seem to
offer little support to his thesis. I examine briefly one branch of this
lineage, the nationalists of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal .
Any survey of this style must begin with Bankim Chandra Chatterji,
who, suggestively in his novels and explicitly in his essays, challenged the
right of Europeans to dictate the terms of the colonial encounter… Chatterji, Tagore,
Pal and Aurobindo were all modern in outlook and education, but they all used
religious concepts in their writings… Writers like Chatterji, Tagore and
Aurobindo laid stress on India ’s
distinctiveness because it seemed threatened by absorption into a universalized Europe . But they were also internationalists who knew and
respected Europe and worked for
intercultural understanding.[110] Their
defenders and detractors lay stress on their essentialism, but they themselves
went beyond it, contesting the validity of Eurocentrism without promoting an
equally imperfect Indocentrism.
One of the more deeply engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is
that we humans can indefinitely increase our capacity to care for others, that
we can, with the right effort and dedication, extend our care to wider and
wider circles until we envelop the whole species within our ethical regard. It
is an inspiring thought. But I’m rather doubtful…
Two of the leading liberal social theorists, Jeremy Rifkin and Peter
Singer, think we can overcome factional bias and eventually become one giant
tribe. They have different prescriptions for arriving at ethical utopia. Singer,
who is perhaps the world’s best known utilitarian philosopher, argues in his
book “The Expanding Circle” that the relative neocortical sophistication of
humans allows us to rationally broaden our ethical duty beyond the “tribe” — to
an equal and impartial concern for all human beings…
One of the architects of utilitarian ethics, and a forerunner of
Singer’s logic, was William Godwin (1756-1836), who formulated a famous thought
experiment… Godwin argues that the utilitarian principle (the greatest good for
the greatest number) requires you to save the archbishop rather than your
mother. He asks, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify
us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”[2]
Singer has famously pushed the logic further, arguing that we should do
everything within our power to help strangers meet their basic needs, even if
it severely compromises our kin’s happiness…
Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view in his recent book “The Empathic
Civilization” that we can feel care and empathy for the whole human species if
we just try hard enough. This view has the advantage over Singer’s metric
view, in that it locates moral conviction in the heart rather than the rational
head. But it fails for another reason. I submit that care or empathy is a very
limited resource. But it is Rifkin’s quixotic view that empathy is an almost
limitless reserve. He sketches a progressive, ever widening evolution of
empathy…
The world of Singer’s utilitarianism and Rifkin’s one-tribism is a
world of bare minimums, with care spread thinly to cover per capita needs. But
in favoritism (like a love relation) people can get way more than they deserve.
It’s an abundance of affection and benefits. In a real circle of
favorites, one needs to accept help gracefully. We must accept, without
cynicism, the fact that some of our family and friends give to us for
our own sake (our own flourishing) and not for their eventual selfish
gain. However animalistic were the evolutionary origins of giving (and however
vigorous the furtive selfish genes), the human heart, neocortex and culture
have all united to eventually create true altruism. Gratitude is a necessary
response in a sincere circle of favorites. Finally, my case for small-circle
care dovetails nicely with the commonly agreed upon crucial ingredient in human
happiness, namely, strong social bonds…
These are not digital Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway
strangers, but robust proximate relationships that you can count on one or two
hands — and these bonds are created and sustained by the very finite resource
of emotional care that I’ve outlined. As Graham Greene reminds us, “one can’t
love humanity, one can only love people.” Stephen T. Asma is a fellow of the
Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago, and
author of, most recently, “Against
Fairness.” FOOTNOTES [1] See
Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (Harvard University
Press, 1981). [2] See William Godwin’s 1798 Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Vol.
I (Toronto University Press, 1946) NYTimes.com
