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The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation by Theodore Roszak

The Summer of Love. Vietnam. Woodstock. These are the milestones of the baby boomer generation Theodore Roszak chronicled in his 1969 breakthrough book The Making of a Counter Culture. Part of an unprecedented longevity revolution, those boomers form the most educated, most socially conscientious, politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen. And they are preparing for Act Two.

The Making of an Elder Culture reminds the boomers of the creative role they once played in our society and of the moral and intellectual resources they have to draw upon for radical transformation in their later years. Seeing the experience of aging as a revolution in consciousness, it predicts an “elder insurgency” where boomers return to take up what they left undone in their youth. Freed from competitive individualism, military-industrial bravado, and the careerist rat race, who better to forge a compassionate economy? Who better positioned not only to demand Social Security and Medicare for themselves, but to champion “Entitlements for Everyone”? Fusing the green, the gray, and the just, Eldertown can be an achievable, truly sustainable future.

Part demographic study, part history, part critique, and part appeal, Theodore Roszak’s take on the imminent transformation of our world is as wise as it is inspired—and utterly appealing.

Theodore Roszak is the author of twenty books, including the 1969 classic The Making of a Counter Culture. He is professor emeritus of history at California State University, and lives in Berkeley, California.

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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating‚ by Walter C. Willett, M.D.

Amazon.com Review

Aimed at nothing less than totally restructuring the diets of Americans, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy may well accomplish its goal. Dr. Walter C. Willett gets off to a roaring start by totally dismantling one of the largest icons in health today: the USDA Food Pyramid that we all learn in elementary school. He blames many of the pyramid’s recommendations–6 to 11 servings of carbohydrates, all fats used sparingly–for much of the current wave of obesity. At first this may read differently than any diet book, but Willett also makes a crucial, rarely mentioned point about this icon: “The thing to keep in mind about the USDA Pyramid is that it comes from the Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for promoting American agriculture, not from the agencies established to monitor and protect our health.” It’s no wonder that dairy products and American-grown grains such as wheat and corn figure so prominently in the USDA’s recommendations.

Willett’s own simple pyramid has several benefits over the traditional format. His information is up-to-date, and you won’t find recommendations that come from special-interest groups. His ideas are nothing radical–if we eat more vegetables and complex carbohydrates (no, potatoes are not complex), emphasize healthy fats, and enjoy small amounts of a tremendous variety of food, we will be healthier. You’ll find some surprises as well, such as doubts about the overall benefits of soy (unless you’re willing to eat a pound and a half of tofu a day), and that nuts, with their “good” fat content, are a terrific snack.

Relying on research rather than anecdotes, this is a solidly written nutritional guide that will show you the real story behind how food is digested, from the glycemic index for carbs to the wisdom of adding a multivitamin to your diet. Willett combines research with matter-of-fact language and a no-nonsense tone that turns academic studies into easily understandable suggestions for living. –Jill Lightner –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry, Harper San Francisco, 1992.

From the big bang to the present and into the next millennium, The Universe Story unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity’s evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.

Mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme and historian of cultures, Thomas Berry present an outstanding vision of our place  in the cosmos. In Universalist Radha-Krishnaism, I say,

Scientific explanations of the universe like the big bang theories and evolution constitute reasonable scientific models and explanations of how creation came about.… They also engage in creating a sort of myth that appeals to the modern imagination and world view.… Religious interpretation adds meaning to science, and science adds grounding in twenty-first century cosmology to religion. (102)

Although I had not read The Universe Story when I wrote that, it certainly fills the bill on all counts. I did not write much in my book about the nature of the universe we inhabit, since I prefer to leave such matters to those who are better qualified to write on that subject. I can now refer my readers to The Universe Story for a fuller understanding of a cosmology which is extremely compatible with Universalist Radha-Krishnaism.

I hope these few brief excerpts which follow will inspire you to read the whole book.

Earth seems to be a reality that is developing with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. (3)

Fifteen billion years ago, in a great flash, the universe flared forth into being. In each drop of existence a primordial energy blazed with an intensity never to be equaled again. (7)

This future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as resource, all for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern. (14–15)

The birth of the universe was not an event in time. Time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. The realm or power that rings forth the universe is not itself an event in time, nor a position in space, but is rather the very matrix out of which the conditions arise that enable temporal events to occur in space. Though the originating power gave birth to the universe fifteen billion years ago, this realm of power is not simply located there at that point of time, but is rather a condition of every moment of the universe, past, present, and to come. (17)

The universe is a coherent whole, a seamless multileveled creative event. The graceful expansion of the original body is the life blood of all future bodies in the universe. (18)

Always and everywhere, it is the universe that holds all things topgether and is the primary activating power in every activity.… the universe is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. (27)

To tell the full story of a single particle we must tell the story of the universe, for each particle is in some way intimately present to every other particle in the universe. (29)

Just as the universe story has never before been told in this manner, so too the senses of meaning, even the sense of the sacred, that this story carries with it is something new both in its modality and in its order of magnitude.… The important thing to appreciate is that the story as told here is not the story of a mechanistic, essentially meaningless universe but the story of a universe that has from the beginning has its mysterious self-organizing power that, if experienced in any serious manner, must evoke an even greater sense of awe … Nor is it the case that this story suppresses the other stories that have over the millennia guided and energized the human venture. It is rather a case of providing a more comprehensive context in which all these earlier stories discover in themselves a new validity and a more expansive role. (238)

This book is far from dull scientific reading, but rather an exciting adventure which we are caught up in.

FLORENCE, LATE 15TH CENTURY

Florentine’s famed sculptor Donatello and his assistant Agostino di Duccio tried the marble first, and later artist Antonio Rossellino was commissioned as well to complete what they had started. Yet all of them had abandoned it roughly cut. Nothing was visibly emerging from the stone yet and nothing promised to anyone. In 1501 the members of the Wool Guild and The Boards of Works of Cathedral (Duomo) of Florence have decided to do something with the marble block lying down in the backyard of the cathedral. The huge slab of weathered pure white marble was known then as “The Giant.” They say it was over 5m tall, but unusually narrow, wide, badly proportioned for a decent figure, weighing well over a ton, lying in the dirt exposed to rain, hail, tramontanas (northern winds of Tuscany) and snow, scorching Julys and many frosty Decembers.

Some have advised it should be cut in two because it was already seriously damaged (it looked like a big, deformed letter ‘K’ after Antonio Rossellino has finished with it), and then used for something else rather than a sculpture. A tombstone perchance? If it was not good for the living, it is better apt for the dead. Or perhaps it was good for two smaller, life-sized figures, some well draped apostles or saints tucked in the niche of some little church? The Boards were resolute — something should be done with it, and they have advertised the opportunity, calling artists for commitment and submissions of ideas.

Many, including famed Leonardo da Vinci who has returned from Milan, waived at the opportunity. Who cares about such a grotesque rock? Too much scuff on it! And stone chiselling was not up to Leonardo’s taste; too dirty, and “all educated people knew sculpture was a lower art” .. unlike, ah, painting. Nonetheless, the Boards have received a sketch from one sculptor that was promising something bold. The sculptor swore it will keep the marble in one piece and carve the sculpture worth of Florence. During this time, the city-state was occupied in numerous wars, and the people needed encouragement, a paragon to reinvigorate their spirits.

The sketch was submitted by a 26 year old Michelangelo Buonarotti, then almost unknown Florentine sculptor, a young artist who did not even have his own studio. Unquestionably too valiant attempt for someone with no fame, public endorsement or recognition. He had just arrived from Rome, where he had finished his marble piece ‘Pieta’, known only to a few Florentines.

Now, for the first time, he realised that the drawings that had satisfied the Boards were no longer of any use to him. He had outgrown these elementary stages of his thinking. All he knew for sure was that his was to be David he had rediscovered, that he would use the opportunity to create all the poetry, the beauty, the mystery and inherent drama of the human body, the archetype and essence of correlated forms.

The Greeks had carved bodies from their white marble of such perfect proportion and strength that they could never be surpassed; but the figures had been without mind or spirit. His David would be the incarnation of everything Lorenzo de’ Medici had been fighting for, that the Plato Academy had believed was the right heritage of man: not a sinful little creature living only for salvation in the next life, but a glorious creation capable of beauty, strength, courage, wisdom, faith is his own kind, with a brain and will and inner power to fashion a world filled with the fruit of man’s creative intellect.

His David would be Apollo, but considerably more; Hercules, but considerably more; Adam, but considerably more; the most fully realised man the world has yet seen, functioning in a rational and humane world.

– Irving Stone, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’

Almost no other story, or a context, relates to the power of vision and beauty better than this narrative of Michelangelo’s astounding effort, when despite all odds and all the others who have failed in their attempts he has discovered and chiselled out a masterpiece from the abandoned block of marble. That’s the statue of his David, today admired in the whole world as the epitome of the Renaissance endeavour and insight, and it’s a universal symbol of highest of art.

INDIA, 15TH CENTURY

Another narrative that flows almost parallel with Florentine’s own is from the 15th century India. Indian subcontinent is witnessing an uprise of the bhakti (love) movement inspired and led by Krishna Chaitanya, a God-crazed monk and scholar from west Bengal. A very unusual lad, of Michelangelo’s own age when he had accomplished David, and of abundant inspiration. Under Chaitanya’s influence bhakti movement spreads around the country, everyone talks about it. It changes people’s lives, shifts social tides to be more respective towards oppressed, poor, outcast and women, change people’s expectations from life, hopes and destinies. But what had led to it?

Before Chaitanya, India’s social and religious life — so closely weaved — were deeply influenced and modelled upon philosophies, teachings and resulting worldviews set by two foremost figures from the past: Buddha and Shankaracarya. Little we know about their whereabouts that can be considered factual, but their reach was visible all around and long after them. They have both tried to chisel the marble block of the reality and society with their vision and reach, but what have they accomplished?

Born in a royal family in northern India (or perhaps Nepal) in either 5th or 6th century BC according to sources, prince Siddharta (later to become Buddha, or wise) very much gives up on the world permeated with misery, despotisms, social injustice, unsatisfied emotions, cruelty, famine and death. And he hits the marble with a few strokes of hammer just to show us there’s no real substance in it: marble is faulty and we should withdraw inside instead, keeping ourselves away from sculpture. We can’t make it better or different — if we think we can, we will only fall in deeper into the webs of entanglement, and thus more misery. Chisel through no chiselling, says he. He drops the tools, puts on mendicant’s clothes and leaves the block in the mud of the paradox of life. We can compare Buddha and consequent teachings with Agostino di Duccio.

One thousand and a few hundred years after the Buddha, Shankaracarya comes under the limelight with his chisel and tries to make a few extra strokes to that same marble of reality Buddha had started to carve and then abandoned. Shankaracarya drives his thrust deeply into one side on the slab as he talks to the audience, smashing it severely and pointing to all to see that marble dust and chips scattered are simply a block transformed; they don’t actually exist. An unusual twist he does: There’s no reason to carve anything at all, says he. Everything is perfect already just as one giant, undefined slab. Any attempt to differentiate a form within it, to make anything out of it, is futile and is a second rate venture. It’s no less than an illusion. He never asks himself how come the reality has already created itself up to this stage. He waives at the opportunity to think deeper, then glues back all the chips, spits on the dust, forms it into a mud and glazes the stone with it. He leaves the gnarled, deformed block further weathering in the hot Indian sun and monsoon rains. Shankaracarya is our Antonio Rossellino.

Many centuries later, and after some others who have glanced upon the stone, Krishna Caitanya decides to take up the task of making something substantial out of the weathered block. Society crumbles apart in lack of meaning and cohesion, women are denigrated, outcast left in dirt and disease. So called wise rule, but just to help themselves live better at the expense of others. What idea is there to add, or to subtract? Isn’t it futile to do anything? Is it possible to carve anything out of it now? Chaitanya promises he won’t break the block — he’ll make one figure, but composed of two. They’ll be same and different, but beautiful and intertwined. He chisels out an amazingly handsome figure of God-dess Radha-Krishna: the ideal of both human and divine virtues and beauty in the Indian aesthetics. Both female and male divine, reflecting best of human values, embraced in ecstasy of love. And we’re together with them too, never separated, ready to carve out ever new joys and divine sports from the reality that never replenishes itself. Stone is suddenly transformed into a meaning, and stone chips and dust fall into the environment apt for that meaning to be observed and understood. Suddenly we have a reality that arches over everything accomplished and imaginable in the past.

We cannot but be stunned by two approaches of Indian Duccio and Rossellino; the whole of their lives they’ve spend suggesting chiselling is a futile act, and thus have restrained themselves from any creativity or action. One wonders what they and generations of their followers could accomplish if they have devoted just a fraction of lamentation and inertia to actual sculpting? But they had no vision and have persuaded millions this life is a fail to no better avail.

However, in the same manner as master Michelangelo, Krishna Chaitanya unveils us the ultimate alchemy of life through divine creativity, love that is visible as the creative force all around us. Reality and life is to be sculpted with love, passion and vision, not left abandoned in dust. If it’s not cared for, it will be carried away by despots, vile and all the uninspired minds who will make other people’s lives a living hell. Being inactive and uninspired in life leads to neglect, misery, social collapse, enabling tyrants to rise and rule. Divine calls innumerable hands and hearts — inseparable parts of itself — to dwell and dare to unveil their own form, the embodiment of love. Don’t be afraid to better yourself and to imagine a better reality, overwhelmingly beautiful, the message is of both Michelangelo and Chaitanya.

POST-MODERN WORLD

In the manner of Michelangelo and Chaitanya, Universalist Radha-Krishnaism sees its purpose, course, and inspiration in the post-modern world. To discover the true potential in reality around, inside the society and its culture’s often undeveloped capacity many others don’t care about, have lost their interest in, or are blind to see anything new beyond the old, or the most obvious: that the world is a weathered, neglected stone bereft of meaning, very close to breaking apart.

But as long there are free men that breathe and can imagine a better life for all, there’s still hope.

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Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Harper Perennial, 2005

Beauty does not linger, it only visits.

Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm,

it calls us to feel, think, and act beautifully in the world:

to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful.

Beauty is a gentle but urgent call to awaken. Bestselling author John O’Donohue opens our eyes, hearts, and minds to the wonder of our own relationship with beauty by exposing the infinity and mystery of its breadth. His words return us to the dignity of silence, profundity of stillness, power of thought and perception, and the eternal grace and generosity of beauty’s presence. In this masterful and revelatory work, O’Donohue encourages our greater intimacy with beauty and celebrates it for what it really is: a homecoming of the human spirit. As he focuses on the classical, medieval, and Celtic traditions of art, music, literature, nature, and language, O’Donohue reveals how beauty’s invisible embrace invites us toward new heights of passion and creativity even in these uncertain times of global conflict and crisis.

All the frailty and uncertainty was seen to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness. (2)

At first, it sounds completely naive to suggest that now might be the time to invoke and awaken beauty. Yet this is exactly the claim that this book explores. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such terrible crisis. (3)

As Frederick Turner puts it, ‘Beauty … is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.’ (7)

In contrast, beauty offers us refreshment, elevation and remembrance of our true origin and real destination. In this sense, the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation, inviting us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any manufactured coherence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the diametrical opposite of all forms of fundamentalism. She invites us to surrender so that we can participate in the forming of a new and vital coherence that is native to our desire. In such unsheltered and uncertain times we yearn for this order and coherence, which brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. (8)

The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. (13)

Some gems were falling down
and some pearls scattered from heavens …
at least, that’s what they say. I was sleeping
trying to reach your hand in my dreams

They also say rain brings sadness …

Maybe I’d say rain brings hope
some new winds, twists and unfolds

You never know, even if it rains forever
when a new day will come,
bringing a moment of joy, unaltered vision
Thinning those murky clouds, silencing wuthering winds,
changing their course

and leaving yourself richer for a few drops,
coming out of sheer

happiness …

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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)