Philosophy: The Embodied Self and Shadows of Ignorance | A Contemporary Introduction to Indian Philosophical Debates

Instructor: Arindam Chakrabarti

May 20 to 22, 2009 | 9:30 am to 5:30 pm
M.C. Ghia Hall, Mumbai

Without presupposing any previous acquaintance with Sanskrit or English philosophical texts, this course is designed to introduce the audience to some central questions of classical Indian metaphysics, logic and epistemology. The aim will be to dispel the popular misconception that all Indian philosophy is religious or mystical. In order to give a flavor of how meticulously analytic and rationally argumentative Indian philosophy has always been, we shall select three questions and go through some conflicting answers to them with supporting arguments. These are:

1. What is the nature of darkness (which has been the standard metaphor for Ignorance)?
2. What is the nature of that self which desires pleasure, power and knowledge but is covered with the shadow of its own ignorance? How is the self related to its ego-marked body?
3. What is that knowledge that can remove this ignorance? Why and how should we live and die in this world?

The last question will be discussed in the context of a close study of Isha-Upanishad, the briefest but deepest Vedic text on the purpose of human life. As a glimpse of the diversity of alternative interpretations of the same philosophical texts, we shall study both Samkara’s (8th century) and Sri Aurobindo’s (20th century) interpretations of this Upanishad, and critically review their sharp differences.

Lectures:

Day 1:
1. The Debating Hall: a brief overview of Indian philosophical systems
2. Are Indian philosophies mostly mystical and spiritual? Evidences for a negative answer.
3. Are Indian philosophies dogmatic and God-obsessed? Skepticism, atheism and materialism in classical Indian philosophies.
4. Rationality in Indian Philosophy: The basic structure of Indian Logic
5. How could something come out of nothing? Inquiry into the origin of the universe and the theme of darkness concealed by darkness.

Day 2:
6. What is Darkness? Is a shadow anything more than absence of light? Rethinking an Ancient debate between Nyaya and Mimamsa through exemplary treatment of Shadows in European Paintings and in the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.
7. What is absence? If Darkness (tamas) or Ignorance” (avidyā) has causal power could it be a merely negative absence?
8. What is ignorance? What do I know when I know that I am ignorant of something or do not know what I am?
9. What does this word “I” refer to? The problem of the self.
10. Nyaya arguments for the existence of the permanent soul (Atman): An exercise in critiquing and defending a sound inference.

Day 3:
11. Whose Wealth? Whose Knowledge? Whose mental states? A Critique of the concept of ownership and possession.
12. Enjoy a full life by giving up attachment: The metaphysical basis of the ethics of the Isha Upanishad, verse 1.
13. Food, hunger and the Body: Upanishads on corporeality and consumption.
14. What is death? How should we die? Plato’s and Bhagavadgita’s arguments for immortality of the soul compared in the context of Upanishads’ concept of dying.
15. Overcoming death: How our actions outlive us. Does work bind or release the self? The murky concept of Karma.

Arindam Chakrabarti is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, in the USA, for the last 12 years. Educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and at Oxford University England, he specializes in Contemporary Western Philosophy of Language and Analytic Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind. He has also been trained in traditional Sanskrit logic and epistemology over the last thirty years. His publications include three books in English, two in Bengali and one in Sanskrit on issues of contemporary Western philosophical logic and theories of knowledge. He is also interested in classical Indian aesthetics and is currently writing a book on the moral psychology of emotions.