Reality, Religion, and Passion

Real­ity, Reli­gion, and Pas­sion: Indian and West­ern Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa Gos­vami by Jes­sica Fra­zier, 2009, Lex­ing­ton Books.

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This is one of the most dif­fi­cult books I have read in a long time due to my lack of a strong back­ground in West­ern phi­los­o­phy, and its use of unfa­mil­iar tech­ni­cal philo­soph­i­cal jar­gon and describ­ing the posi­tion of one philoso­pher using the posi­tions of sev­eral other unfa­mil­iar philoso­phers (espe­cially the first half which deals with Gadamer). It seems to be aimed at an aca­d­e­mic audi­ence. Yet I feel it was worth the effort for the insights gained by look­ing at Rupa Goswami’s teach­ings in a new light. What are they? Let me explain using some brief excerpts since Jes­sica Frazier’s lan­guage says it bet­ter than my para­phrases would.

Philo­soph­i­cally under­stood, “real­ism” goes beyond sim­ple thought about real­ity; it entails self-critical reflec­tion on the very notion of real­ness. The con­di­tions for real­ism and a real­ist debate arise where a thinker or cir­cle of thinkers begin to sus­pect the pos­si­bil­ity of some­thing that is “more” real–even “ulti­mately” real, above and beyond the self-evident, every­day real­ity that is merely “there.” (8)

She says, “it is Gadamer’s Aris­totelian affir­ma­tion of tele­o­log­i­cal identity-in-change that will be shown to share impor­tant insights with Rupa Gosvami’s cor­ner­stone con­cept of rasa” (50).

Gadamer picks up on Plato’s Par­menidean por­trayal of all things, iden­ti­ties, or uni­ties as being ambigu­ously one and many, exist­ing and not exist­ing as such simul­ta­ne­ously, point­ing to the same ambiva­lence cham­pi­oned as a solu­tion to the prob­lem of the One and the Many by those Hindu philoso­phers who “main­tain that both iden­tity and dif­fer­ence are true of the rela­tion between the one and the many. (50)

We do not merely have the option of apply­ing a spirit of pas­sion to Being, nor is pas­sion merely inter­wo­ven into the Being’s phe­nom­e­nal fab­ric; our pas­sions, under­stood as tele­olo­gies, cor­re­spond to the tele­o­log­i­cal essence of all forms and things. This is true for Gadamer much in the way that the world for Rupa Gos­vami is explained as form (rupa and prakriti) pro­lif­er­at­ing through the “dialec­ti­cal dynamic of love.” (67)

Through the lan­guage that Gadamer employs, and through its “fun­da­men­tal” and “tran­scen­den­tal” char­ac­ter, this model of Being as the flux of uni­fied and divided forms is sub­tly but surely apoth­e­o­sised in Gadamer’s phi­los­o­phy. Here, as in the case of var­i­ous post-Vedantic schools that arose in India, a holis­tic, fun­da­men­tal analy­sis of exis­tence based on the evi­dence of sheer phe­nom­ena, yields a view of real­ity that must eschew rad­i­cal dual­ism, and locate foun­da­tional and divine value in the finite, imma­nent world.

The fun­da­men­tal struc­ture of Being as “[onto­log­i­cally] One and [onti­cally] Many is what Gadamer dis­cov­ers in Leib­niz in the idea that the monad is itself a uni­verse, reflect­ing the world within itself. (68)

In Gadamer’s case, the impli­ca­tion is that non-finite absolute tran­scen­dence is a pow­er­ful reli­gious ideal, but a false one, whereas Being as ubiq­ui­tous form, energy, telos, inde­ter­mi­nacy, mean­ing, beauty, and spirit–these are ideals into which we should be happy to assim­i­late our own iden­ti­ties. It has been writ­ten of Rupa Gosvami’s con­cep­tion of the divine that it is really a “con­cen­trated form of Being”–on a suf­fi­ciently atten­tive hermeneu­tic read­ing, the same might be said with regard to Gadamer. (76)

Rupa Gosvami’s syn­the­sis of Samkhya and Vedanta philoso­phies yields a meta­physics in which appar­ent sub­stances such as phys­i­cal mat­ter are them­selves only forms of the one true ulti­mate sub­stance that is the divine (brah­man or Krishna).… some of the source texts of Rupa Gosvami’s tra­di­tion, such as the Brah­mavaivarta Purana, play with the pos­si­bil­ity that the pro­lif­er­a­tion of forms have a more foun­da­tional exis­tence than the appar­ent ubiq­uity of sub­stance. (80)

Rupa Gos­vami never had to defend the idea that con­scious­ness is uni­ver­sally and nec­es­sar­ily present, as it is a tenet dis­cussed and rec­om­mended by some of India’s ear­li­est and most author­i­ta­tive philo­soph­i­cal texts. (81)

Gadamer’s uni­ver­sal­ity of play is uni­ver­sal at all loci in Being and across all micro– and macro-cosmic lev­els in pre­cisely the same way that the Pla­tonic One and the Many, Hegelian dialec­tic, and the Cai­tanya Vais­nava doc­trine of “incon­ceiv­able dif­fer­ence and non-difference” are universal–since as we will see, they are fea­tures of the same logical-phenomenological insight. (81–2)

both Gadamer and Rupa Gos­vami, who rid­dles his trea­tises with verse quo­ta­tions, draw on poetic examples–to draw us into the proper atti­tude of engage­ment, vital­ity, and lis­ten­ing to every­day life, and to enthuse us into an aes­thetic state of immer­sion and self-forgetting. (110)

Rupa Gosvami’s world­view, which is widely claimed to con­sti­tute a dual­is­tic the­ism, in fact, also for­mu­lates truths about the fun­da­men­tal con­sti­tu­tion of real­ity as form, motion, and tele­ol­ogy, and takes it as the ground of a eudai­mon­ian ethics not merely of self-augmenting vital­ity, but of focused and inten­si­fy­ing pas­sions. (113)

Rupa Gos­vami not only incor­po­rated the work of his pre­de­ces­sors within the philo­soph­i­cal and Vais­nava devo­tional tra­di­tions, as shown by the tex­tual ref­er­ences woven through­out his major works, he also explic­itly courted dia­logue and friendly debate, har­vest­ing the best insight of con­tem­po­rary debate on real­ity and its trans­la­tion into eth­i­cal terms. (133)

Rupa Gos­vami was one of those many philo­soph­i­cally sen­si­tive thinkers of his gen­er­a­tion who was led to com­bine reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal modes of rea­son­ing in sophis­ti­cated ways.…

In the Gaudiya Vais­nava tra­di­tion, … the syn­the­sis of pas­sion and rea­son was a cen­tral dynamic in the self-determination of the move­ment as a philo­soph­i­cally refined branch of bhakti. (136)

As in all “real­ist” sote­ri­olo­gies of the kind we are exam­in­ing, includ­ing those of Gadamer and Rupa Gos­vami, the ulti­mate human aim is to realise both in thought and action, our true natures as part of Being as a whole. (144)

Rupa lived in a mul­ti­cul­tural, mul­tire­li­gious, geo­graph­i­cally and socially mobile soci­ety in which his own expe­ri­ence had proved schol­ar­ship to be a valu­able eco­nomic, social, and spir­i­tual cur­rency. He was an Indian “Renais­sance man,” and in his hands the phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion was judi­ciously tem­pered both by the rig­or­ous demands of con­tem­po­rary logic on the one hand, and by a devo­tional read­er­ship on the other.…

In the same way in which Gadamer is a eudai­mon­ian real­ist and opti­mist about ontol­ogy and ethics, so too is Rupa Gos­vami.… Rupa Gosvami’s Hindu opti­mism stakes out a fur­ther post­mod­ern pos­si­bil­ity for real­ist belief, not as a Der­ridean wait­ing, nor an uncom­mit­ted Gadamer­ian vital­ity, but as a trans­for­ma­tive, all-consuming pas­sion. (152)

Rupa Gosvami’s bhakti phi­los­o­phy incor­po­rates the fruits of India’s own “Enlight­en­ment scep­ti­cism” into a real­is­tic world­view that draws added strength from the very fac­tors that have had a demor­al­is­ing influ­ence on reli­gious belief and real­ism in the West. (159)

He [Rupa] syn­the­sises influ­ences from a wide range of Indian tex­tual sources, schools, dis­ci­plines, and reli­gious ori­en­ta­tions, while mod­i­fy­ing and hon­ing this mix­ture through exten­sive dis­cur­sive engage­ment with other thinkers of his time. He dis­tilled con­tem­po­rary the­o­log­i­cal sources into a newly sys­tem­atic, con­sis­tent, and com­pre­hen­sive posi­tion by means of his own unique analy­sis of the nature of the divine, and the ulti­mate goals of human life. (160)

Rupa Gosvami’s ear­lier writ­ings show that the pro­lific reli­gious move­ment that had grown around Krishna already pre­oc­cu­pied his thoughts, and many of the ingre­di­ents of his later the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal thought pre­date the meet­ing with Cai­tanya. (161)

the world view that Rupa inher­its com­bines this empha­sis on embod­i­ment, and its implicit human­ist affir­ma­tion of the con­di­tions of embod­ied per­son­hood that define human life in the world (often explic­itly con­trasted with the ascetic prac­tices of renounc­ers), with its philo­soph­i­cal resources. (162)

While Rupa and his sources were indeed prac­ti­tion­ers in the process of (re)creating tra­di­tions, they were also syn­cretic, sys­tem­atic, and philo­soph­i­cally dis­cern­ing about their range of influ­ences, and dis­tinc­tively indi­vid­u­al­is­tic in the cast of their the­ol­o­gis­ing. (165)

Rupa Gosvami’s philo­soph­i­cal posi­tion grew from Nyaya log­i­cal meth­ods, and an engage­ment with the for­mal real­ist par­a­digms of Vedanta and Samkhya ideas that were preva­lent in the Bha­ga­vata Purana and a nat­ural part of cur­rent philosophical-theological debate. (166)

As Shri­vatsa Gos­vami argues, con­tra­dict­ing Steve Rosen’s inter­pre­ta­tion, acin­tyb­hed­ab­heda is not merely a “supra-rational” con­cept, but in fact has a firm ratio­nal basis in the sophis­ti­cated onto­log­i­cal analy­sis that runs through­out the tra­di­tion. (168)

On the Cai­tanya Vais­nava model, sat-cit-ananda is rather a uni­ver­sal, infi­nite inter­rre­la­tional plu­ral­ity of which we are a part.… by Being we always mean con­scious­ness, that con­scious­ness by def­i­n­i­tion con­sists of con­tents in flux fol­low­ing a diachronic inten­tional struc­ture that rela­tion­al­ity is a uni­ver­sal and nec­es­sary fea­ture of Being. (172)

The dynamic qual­ity of Being is well estab­lished in the model of the divine as ulti­mate real­ity. Yet in most cases this nec­es­sar­ily shift­ing, tran­sient, appar­ently “non-absolute” facet of the divine is rel­e­gated to a sec­ondary sta­tus rel­a­tive to the true, chang­ing agent of change. Yet the Cai­tanya tra­di­tion, fol­low­ing the lead of the Bha­ga­vata Purana, does not accept the thorough-going char­ac­ter of this sep­a­ra­tion; rather the form, qual­ity, and move­ment of the world are the true essence of Krishna, as they are the true way to real­is­ing the divine ulti­mate real­ity. Rupa in par­tic­u­lar presses this point through rhetor­i­cal strate­gies in his lan­guage and through his depic­tion of the sense-obsessed gopis as spir­i­tual exem­plars. This is pre­cisely the kind of emphat­i­cally meta­phys­i­cal point that is repeat­edly obscured in trans­la­tions of Rupa Gosvami’s works. Hence lines that are filled with philo­soph­i­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy … lose their philo­soph­i­cal con­text when trans­lated accord­ing to dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tive pri­or­i­ties. (173)

This is a typ­i­cal mode of expres­sion for Rupa, mul­ti­fac­eted and neatly mix­ing what we might call the­o­log­i­cal, meta­phys­i­cal, and poetic dis­courses. It is in this way that his phi­los­o­phy has to be teased out of his writ­ings. (174)

Like every deity, but per­haps pre­em­i­nently so, Krishna is not only con­sid­ered to be a divine per­son­al­ity, but is in addi­tion a the­ma­ti­sa­tion of the phi­los­o­phy of the divine, and also a meta-discourse on the nature of the bhakti mode of wor­ship itself–psychologically, the­o­log­i­cally, soci­o­log­i­cally, and, of course, meta­phys­i­cally. (181)

We have seen that Rupa’s main idea, the onto­log­i­cal and sote­ri­o­log­i­cal impor­tance of rasa, is a way of enact­ing the essence of Being.… The pro­gres­sive, dialec­ti­cally struc­tured move­ments of love, and of an aes­thetic love of love, are intended to be a quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive aug­men­ta­tion of Being itself. (182)

Every­where, in Cai­tanya Vais­nava lit­er­a­ture as in its prac­tice, the marks of a type of pan­the­ism are evi­dent. God does not dwell in objects as an obscured her­metic essence–purely purusa, “spirit” seek­ing to escape the impu­ri­ties of prakrti, “mat­ter,” “form”–but rather is enacted, aug­mented, and instan­ti­ated in the dialec­ti­cal move­ment that is the exis­tence of each entity. (189)

Krishna is entranced by his own divin­ity dialec­ti­cally com­ing to light in the world. In the Uddhava Sandesa he is por­trayed as the exem­plary devo­tee, as full of weak­ness, excite­ment, and imag­i­nal yearn­ing as are his con­sorts and wor­shipers. Much is made of the the­o­log­i­cal twist whereby Krishna becomes the devo­tee to Radha’s deity. But we must see this too as yet another man­i­fes­ta­tion of his essen­tial nature–dialectically taken up into the fun­da­men­tal ontol­ogy of rasa. (190)

In a more dual­is­tic con­text we would say that rasa is why the world was cre­ated, but here we can say that it is what the world is. We can under­stand rasa as the eter­nal third term of all dialec­tic, a con­cept of syn­the­sis and rela­tion per­son­i­fied by Radha. As this third term of the dialec­tic, love itself tran­scends Krishna as lover and object of love, and takes pri­or­ity, which is why the hal­a­dini shakti, his power of enjoy­ment, is said to be his true nature. (191)

For Rupa, reli­gious belief is on a con­tin­uum with our every­day truths and processes of rea­son­ing, because it is derived from tran­scen­den­tal meta­phys­i­cal truths that per­vade them.…

Rupa Gosvami’s works stand within a dis­course of rad­i­cal ques­tion­ing, which has cen­turies of prece­dent and arguably a greater range and depth of inter­ro­ga­tion in India than in the tem­pest of mod­ern West­ern debates. (194)

As is so widely noted, Krishna’s role in this the­ol­ogy is almost dia­met­ri­cally opposed to his mes­sage in the Bha­gavad Gita, in which he fea­tures as the par­a­dig­matic advo­cate of order, duty, and detach­ment. (200)

Here we have an image of a god who does indeed need and desire; who “floun­ders” rather than acts; who is involved essen­tially and pur­pose­fully in the world order, caught up by phe­nom­ena rather than merely on dis­play in them. His actions are seri­ous. He is fet­tered and con­di­tioned by his love. Above all, he is help­lessly engaged in a lov­ing activ­ity in sep­a­ra­tion from his beloved that is intrin­si­cally unsat­is­fy­ing. And these expe­ri­ences, as Rupa Gosvami’s lit­er­a­ture shows, are mir­rored in those of human­ity. (206)

Rupa’s texts form a post-sceptical, dia­log­i­cal dis­course in that they allow those who suf­fer to voice the the­o­log­i­cal doubts of the reader who sees lit­tle to cel­e­brate in a world con­sist­ing of attach­ment to elu­sive, finite, and sit­u­a­tion­ally cir­cum­scribed phe­nom­e­nal objects: a life of nec­es­sary dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But in so doing they intu­itively demand a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion or theod­icy of the suf­fer­ing caused by this reli­gious mode that he so elo­quently cham­pi­ons. (208)

In Rupa’s lit­er­ary por­tray­als of viraha, sep­a­ra­tion is not pri­mar­ily a the­o­log­i­cal gap that must be bridged by some sote­ri­o­log­i­cal device such as grace. It is an onto­log­i­cal mode of par­tic­u­lar being, and a mode of gen­eral Being. (213)

Radha, who has the­o­log­i­cal con­nec­tions with prakriti and Krishna’s power of cre­ation, suf­fers her sep­a­ra­tion from Krishna as a sort of sub­li­ma­tion of creation’s con­tin­u­ous birthpangs–a pain in which we all share. She is her­self a sym­bol of real­ist approaches to the world, for what she does (as devo­tional exem­plar) is never sep­a­rate from what she is (as the ulti­mate truth of exis­tence). (215–16)

Rupa is con­cerned that we become gal­vanised, and he is clear that those who feel less than pro­found pas­sion in their every­day activ­i­ties are tread­ing a lower path. (220)

Hav­ing dealt with the Cai­tanya bhakti, Vedic, and Vais­nava rea­sons for Radha’s impor­tance, he [Rupa] shifts into the dis­course of puranic Samkhya by point­ing out that as the hladini-shakti, she is the best and the truest form of all the great shak­tis of Krishna. Here he is restat­ing explic­itly what has been said pre­vi­ously in the text and else­where in his works: all pow­ers or ener­gies are really the power of hlad–enjoy­ment, glad­ness, exhil­a­ra­tion, and delight. (225–6)

Thus it is impor­tant to note the the­o­log­i­cal point embed­ded in the devo­tional exal­ta­tion of enjoyment–it is not that enjoy­ment is the best way to wor­ship Krishna, nor that it is his most char­ac­ter­is­tic qual­ity, nor even that it is his best. It is that he him­self is the qual­ity of enjoy­ment. Only in enjoy­ment, in expe­ri­enc­ing or “tast­ing’ him, can we both be and see him.

If Being is enjoy­ment then we can enjoy as much as we like, wher­ever and when­ever we like, indis­crim­i­nately and with­out prej­u­dice as to the object of our desire. But if it is also attach­ment, direct­ed­ness, telos, then this too must be exem­pli­fied in an appro­pri­ate atti­tude to our object(s) of desire. (226–7)

In many respects, while this study aims to draw lim­ited but instruc­tive par­al­lels between Rupa Gosvami’s and Gadamer’s posi­tions, it often seems that Rupa Gosvami’s insights are the more crit­i­cally mod­ern of the two; his opti­mism res­onates with that of many of Gadamer’s con­tem­po­raries and suc­ces­sors. He dis­plays an eager­ness to affirm the valid­ity and importance–indeed, the onto­log­i­cal importance–of emo­tion as our epis­te­mo­log­i­cal guide to the cen­tral­ity of value in ontol­ogy. (230)

Again and again, this study has used the term “real­ism” in the sense of a per­spec­tive that locates the high­est value, and the foun­da­tion for all other knowl­edge and action, in the cor­rect appre­hen­sion of ulti­mate real­ity. Here we see a reli­gious expres­sion that is too eas­ily iden­ti­fied as “devo­tional” with­out acknowl­edg­ing the con­cur­rent “philo­soph­i­cal” dimen­sion of such reli­gios­ity. Krishna speaks simul­ta­ne­ously as deity and ulti­mate real­ity. (233)

Radha is an exem­plary model of Tillich’s clas­sic def­i­n­i­tion: “Reli­gion is the state of being grasped by an ulti­mate con­cern, a con­cern which qual­i­fies all other con­cerns as pre­lim­i­nary and which itself con­tains the answer to the ques­tion of the mean­ing of our life.” Rupa describes the expe­ri­ence of being impas­sioned and pos­sessed by a reli­gious ”real­ity,” remind­ing us of a neglected cor­ner­stone of real­ist reli­gious expe­ri­ence. (234)

Radha’s rea­son then is a “pas­sion­ate rea­son” lead­ing her to choose, on ratio­nal as well as purely invol­un­tary, instinc­tive, and psy­cho­log­i­cal grounds, to be guided by her pas­sions. Her coura­geous choice to aban­don free­dom, a blank plain on which no val­ues can be found, for an unend­ing pil­grim­age through the rich topog­ra­phy of the pas­sions, is the “choice” that Being has already made, and it is a path that, for Rupa, it is our most fit­ting des­tiny to fol­low. (236)

It shows us that truth is not else­where, elud­ing cap­ture by our fal­si­fi­able beliefs and metaphors. Rather, it dwells in our exis­tence and must be cap­tured accord­ing to our own par­tic­u­lar, prob­lem­atic, phe­nom­e­nal way of know­ing and act­ing. (243)

Indian phi­los­o­phy has, from its ear­li­est peri­ods and through­out its his­tory, incor­po­rated sophis­ti­cated argu­ments for vari­eties of scep­ti­cism, nihilism, and rel­a­tivism. Recog­ni­tion of this rights a long­stand­ing prej­u­dice regard­ing the sup­posed credulity and lack of com­plex­ity in Indian thought.… Rupa Gos­vami was part of a fruit­ful con­tem­po­rary dia­logue explor­ing par­tic­u­larly sophis­ti­cated, self-reflective ver­sions of these debates, and his the­ol­ogy is founded on a par­tic­u­larly rig­or­ous under­stand­ing of the whole­sale fini­tude, rel­a­tiv­ity, onto­log­i­cal unity, mutual con­sti­tu­tion, rela­tion­al­ity, and innately tele­o­log­i­cal, prej­u­di­cial, or pas­sion­ate char­ac­ter of Being. (244)

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