The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann (who worked with Gurdjieff for nearly 30 years) with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and there is a French version here: (unavailable)
This documentary was posted a few months ago and it is really quite fortunate to have access to it. It follows the life of Gurdjieff much more systematically and in detail than I have been able to do in my review of Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is full of old photos and even recordings of Gurdjieff himself and some scenes with recordings of his movements/dances. It is full of quotes and extracts from his books. If you are interested in finding out more about one of the most interesting, rapscallion philosophers/characters of the 20th century please check out this documentary.
Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am
(The pantry in Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment. Photo courtesy of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York) As related in the movie such a place was also a place of meetings and counseling. Like a friend said: show your pantry to tell you who you are.
timespace coordinates: pre-1912 regions of Transcaucazia, Central Asia (Bukhara), Afghanistan, Tibet, Pakistan at the borderlands between where the European Imperial powers were clashing in what became known euphemistically as the “Great Game”
Maybe it is offputting for many to watch a movie entitled “Remarkable Men”, and indeed apart from the early love interest of Armenian-Greek mystic, philosopher and guruGeorge Ivanovich Gurdjieff(c.1867 – 29 October 1949) and a female member of his “Truth Seeker” group, there seem to be very few women in this account of the early travels of this key figure of Western esotericism and occultism. So if you can get across this glaring and painful absence, we can move further. This is an unusual biographical drama by Peter Brooks (The Mahabharata, Tierno Bokar) based on Gurdjieff’s own accounts of his early life described in coded, fantastic and allegorical-mythmaking imagery. This is Peter Brooks version of Gurdjieff’s spiritual journeys during the early part of his life – published much later in book form. As an aside the famous Peter Brooks (theatre director) himself had an influence on celebrated Romanian Theathre director Andrei Serban who attended the International Center For Theatre Research in the 1970s.
Isn't it interesting that just a few months prior, Gurdjieff in Paris settles into the Prieuré at Fontainebleau to launch his public mystery school (although shortlived as well due to a car accident in 1924 leading to the closure of the school). Dark forces got their victories.
This TW (or X) message above got me thinking about the crossovers and different backgrounds of these early founders of modern Western esoteric teaching and their mishaps, considering that some of them did introduce and adapt traditions from the Islamic East to the West (referring here to the Sufi tradition). I consider Gurdjieff an especially interesting transitional figure because he is always changing and difficult to classify. He fits perhaps best the typical charlatan and a modern mage. Obviously, he is openly a jack of all trades, curious about everything, but he is being very frank about his shifty nature. First: I never read his teaching so I am not familiar about his metaphysics beyond what this movie lets us glimpse. Let’s remember that for Gurdjieff humanity in already in a state of trance and needs to be shocked and de-blocked (practices that will later became familiar on the West Coast counterculture). This need to be awakened from such slumbering (zombie) shambling sleep-walking state is also found in recent Black Horror movies – see Jordan Peele’s exceptional Get OUT. There is even a book that digs for the links btw the coded texts of the Harlem Renaissance and Gurdjieff, more particular of Toomer a celebrated autheur going to Paris/Fointainebleu and transferring some of his ideas across the ocean. G. himself feels like a streetwise character, a farceur, living off hypnotherpy or painting and selling sparrows as canaries to tourists. I quite appreciate this image.
I was not so much interested in the veracity or accuracy of his own autobiographical accounts. But are these miraculous encounters or highly symbolic and allegorical visions so unique? I was curious about ways of imagining a (modern) invented performative tradition as invented by others (a mysterious Eastern Brotherhood – so not so much ‘cultural appropriation’ as searching legitimation for new practices selling them as primordial). What about this series of sacred dances – the“Gurdjieff movements” depicted at the end of the movie?
Gurdjieff was a man of his times, not in any sense exceptional. It was a time of constant traffic across disciplines, geographic and cultural borders, of strange scientific beliefs and newly discovered invisible worlds (the Old Quantum theory) that ended up with bizarre metaphysical reshuffling. Although there is a lot of talk about the unexplained, about mind-body-emotional problems and unexplained events – Gurdjieff’s life is well situated in its context, yet maybe completely unfamiliar to most of us in the early 21st c. This is not an attempt at demysticatuon, but a way to appreciate syncretic and hybrid methods and spiritual/mundane comingling at a time where Islamophobia and entrenched fundamentalism keeps bringing misery to many places of the world (thinking about Rohinja in Myanmar or the Muslim minority in India or the plight of Palestinians everywhere).
I am talking about mostly a diverse bunch of largely stateless, transnational persons – that used to travel anonymously or under pseudonyms, takeing on the new routes of transnational capital and globalization to spread ideas, search for like-minded comrades, translate revolutionary texts (including SF )avidely read mystical literature but also smuggle guns to mutineers and anti-colonialists compadres. They were also incarcerated and eventually had to pay a high prize for their conspirative activities. It was also a brutal time of accidents and disasters. Gurdjieff was just lucky enough to survive and live through some horrible car accidents. Such lives are amply described in a recent remarkable study where a series of truly remarkable men and women of which I am pretty sure you never ever heard because they are not part of the Western canon nor part of history we were tought of in schools (East bloc or West)-: Underground Asia and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper.
The “miracle” of these “remarkable” men was pulling through a time of crisis with large-scale deportations, populational exchanges and forced displacements (see 1923 Turkish Greek population exchange) culminating with the WWII 1940s and its aftermath, but also trying to find a new modern identity. While living incognito and in hiding at the very heart of European imperial centers they gathered acolytes, escaped genocides and developed ways to survive amidst repression, looming wars and often very violent nation building. They were shaped by a widespread cat-and-mouse Great Game across geographic borders, religions, cultures and classes.
How to orient yourself in such an uncertain world in tatters, how to find succor, opportunity or build friendships and instant connection across races, cultures and social classess? I think here comes the compass known as “The Enneagram” a diagram presented by Gurdjieff to the world in 1916 that was supposed to offer a way to access the inner dynamics of the universe and its harmonic order beyond an apparent order.
I am not trying to minimize the mystical or spiritual value of Gurdjieff but to recognize that these erratic searches of seeking THE meaning and transferring ‘wisdom’ across much of Asia (Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Mesopotamia, Ottoman Empire) do have a historical and geopolitical foundation and world system reasons. My reading here is that this “wisdom” should be also seen as some more banal – as a counter-espionage of sorts. It is almost a cliche (since Kipling) that the sacred men were also purveyors of strategic data as much as local lore and Orientalist know-how (in the Edward Said sense). You could always become a potential informant as well as a recruit and snitch for a foreign power. Also, they had to escape the widening and collaborative net of counter-revolutionary forces, because the French, British, and Russian Tsartist secret police were becoming more aware and more paranoid and intent on precluding any serious attempts on the part of their colonial subjects to revolt. Their future colonial prospects and intra-imperial scuffles were to be secured at any price. Suffice to say they had back then as much success as the current Homeland Security in the US and most of their actions were supported by xenophobia, racism, and jingoist sentiment to spy on suspicious ‘foreigners’.
Gurdjieff’s account of his pre-1912 years should be seen as more akin to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (published in 1901). It is not just the Imperial fantasy of impossible control, ‘native’ Informants were necessary to the imperial enterprise and information across immense swaths of territory had to be gathered. Such growing Imperial Archives grew larger and larger following the need to document and surveil subaltern populations, refugees and immigrant movements, filtering for potential terrorists and “internationalist” anarchist or socialist elements. The threat of disorder, of anti-imperial and anti-British or anti-French mutinous conspiracy that might endanger the hegemony of the Western powers was largely overblown but violent repression and exploitation left unchecked always tends to accumlate. Fragile post colonial states followed and it all morphed into something more devious and even more genocidal during the Cold War (see the Djakjarta Method and Kissinger’s role). In the wake of early 20 c anarchist bomb attacks and their attempts to topple the authoritarian ruler and monarchies all over Europe (who were largely related by blood alliances altough purported enemies during the Great Game), the various police forces established crucial data flows, exchanges, forming a worldwide dragnet of secret service and Interpol collaboration.
Intellectuals also played an active part in that. Orientalists were the new specialists embroiled in the Great Game since the very beginning. This was of course the time of the Western expeditions along the former Silk Road in the search for archeological loot and manuscripts. The hunt for manuscripts was done without any qualms as regards the right of Europeans to carry of ‘finds’ from non-European lands. An almost textbook example of this is the life of Hungarian-born British archeologist Aurel Stein and the major expeditions to Central Asia—in 1900–1901, 1906–1908, 1913–1916, and 1930 he undertook. From the French side – the French Sinologist and Orientalist Paul Pelliot– both famously ransacking the Dunhuang throve of manuscripts is also part of this tale. As British sinologist Arthur Waley puts it:
“The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote the British sinologist Arthur Waley. “I think the best way to understand [the feelings of the Chinese] on the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking.”
Yes, this movie is also the search for the larger meaning by a small child from the Transcaucasus region, more specifically from the small Armenian town of Gyumri – in the Russian Empire somewhere in the latter half of the 19 century (~1867). He spent his childhood in the Kars Oblast which is now part of eastern Turkey (it was later captured by the Ottoman Empire). At the time was home to an incredibly diverse mixture of multi-ethnic, multi-confessional populations with a long history of traveling holy men, bards, troubadours, mystics and what the French called “fou divin” (men of crazy holy wisdom).
As part of this winds-swept, a nearly semi-desertic area the Armenian plateau “Kars Oblast was home to Armenians, Iranians, Russians, Caucasus Greeks, Georgians, Turks, Kurds and smaller numbers of Christian communities from eastern and central Europe such as Caucasus Germans, Estonians and Russian sectarian communities like the Molokans, Doukhobors, Pryguny, and Subbotniks.”. From the first moment the scene is set, instead of a contest of arms over borders and resources, we get a group of ashugh bards, musicians, and dervishes meeting in a valley since immemorial times to musically duel with each other and try to play the high note, so that the particular acoustic environment of that valley would vibrate in tune. The winner would be chosen and get a lamb if the gathered wise holy crowd agreed. That’s one of my favorite scenes (a truly Pythagorean spectacle!). It is also the one where we can see the diversity of Afghanistan (the movie was filmed in Afghanistan before the Afghan-Soviet War). So this is the entry of young Gurdjieff into a larger and fascinating vibrational universe.
An important community that had a key influence on Gurdijeff was the Yazidis (Yazidi translates to ‘the servant of the creator’) or Yezidis who suffered so much after the rise of ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State) in the wake of the destabilization of this shatter region after the US-British invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent instability and rising sectarianism. Yazidis are this very distinct ethnic-religious group part of the Kurdish-speaking group indigenous to Kurdistan that has faced persecution by nearly everyone. Yazidi’s also have been falsely accused of “Satanism” (because of the Angel worship), but their monotheistic religion of Yazidism seems to have roots in the Western Iranian pre-Zoroastrian religion.
So this is a good occasion to see how such an unlikely quest was supported and nourished by these contacts and by several texts that became available to him from various sources (including the local Dean Borsh monophysite Armenian priest). His encounters with mystical Russian noblemen, the ending with the search for the Sarmoung Brotherhood is pretty typical (probably some monstery in Tibet). There is also great social mobility involved – moving from factory work to being a mendicant to entering Sufi circles or being employed as manual laborers in archeological digs in Egypt. In tune with an era of clandestine travelers, he is always moving incognito and always stealing or otherwise obtaining his knowledge of maps by illicit means. Typical of this era of mappings and border control it is always about hidden maps and hidden places. I think even the famous Khyber Pass gets a mention. There is also a big hint of Shambhala or Agartha.
The result of this improbable and weird early encounters with “remarkable men” in order to devise a coreoghraphy of cvasi-modernist Gurdjieff dance movements – that seem to me like early contemporary dances performed by Rudolf von Laban at the Monte Verita in the Alps.
We have to relate this to other movements (such as the contemporary anthroposophic movement) but also the not-so-obvious (even if he escaped Bolshevik Russia and is by no means a Socialist) Gurdjieff practices also relate to the production of the new man and the early foundation of a worker state, prolet cult, and new avant-garde poetry. I am thinking here about the work of techno-poet and founder of the Central Institute of Labor Alexey Gastev. Gastev’s scientific approaches to work management may seem to be at opposite poles from the Gurdjieff movements, but the teaching “tree” described as being part of this “Fourth Way” body-mind-emotional teaching is similar to the teaching and motion studies of Gastev. One is supposed to be a new calibration and liberation of new worker bodies, the other is immemorial and appears derived from Babylonian times (his learning about it from the Sarmoung monastery). See and judge yourself from the description of the movie by Peter Brooks and rediscover this lost gem.
So happy friend/audio Jedi master Felix Petrescu (from famous electronica unboxed duo Makunouchi Bento) made me aware that this fabulous podcast by the likes of NZ The Flight of Conchords exists online for free (not for long though if I get it right). Jemaine Clement was the Vladislav to Taika Waititi’s Viago in that amazing vampire movie that all of you must have seen. This podcast made in 2016 is an incredibly funny silly madcap no-limits comedy piece. It is incredibly produced, sound designed, and written. It comes closest to the DE Hörspiel format I am familiar with and I rarely find it in French or EN. That said, please listen to The Mysterious Secrets of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium with an open ear and an open heart. It is definitely my favorite and one of the best EN podcasts I have ever had the pleasure to listen to.
Why? Primarily because it is utterly delightful and full of botanical and natural history nonsense, yet a contemporary bastard of those very real colonial histories – when the search for the so-called ‘green capital’ by botanists and botanical hunters established the fortunes of Britain and ensured that the first pots made it to wet humid interiors of the Imperial Botanical Gardens of Kew. As Londa Schiebinger showed a while ago in the Carribean slave women brewed the ‘peacock flower’ into an abortifacient to ensure that no future children were born into slavery and exploitation. Such local herbal ethnobotanical lore was actively suppressed when the plants themselves got collected and traveled along the Middle Passage into Europe’s nurseries and botanical gardens. They arrived in our garden pots or plots as simple curiosities & ornamentals. That also speaks about why biological capital is still being extracted and privatized as we speak and speculated upon by biotechnological companies under capitalist regimes that grew out of the Ecological Imperialism of previous epochs.
The podcast is basically the quest of Lord Joseph Banks played by Jemaine Clement (based on the famous naturalist Sir Joseph Banks 1743-1820) and his manservant Solander (Lawrence Arabia aka James Milne who also provides the musical soundtrack) in a quest for the infamous Heaven’s Clover (a pun on Heaven’s Tree??). I´t satirizes the way early naturalists sexualized nature and genderized botanical science according to their mores, biases and values.
Botanical science was one of the few places where women were welcomed (but also only according to the Burkean binary beauty/sublime gendering of aesthetics, where women were supposed to be feminine, delicate and interested in delicate, fragile things). Botany was a harbor or research and scientific opportunity for women in a world that was as much patriarchal as it was elitist and classist. A bizarre example of applying sexual categories to classifying and identifying plants is the graphic sexual taxonomy developed by Carl von Linne in the 18th century (the inventor of the binomial classification system of species that is still in use today). Linne basically imagined that plants have penises and vaginas, and was very literal about it. He also used on purpose highly eroticized scientific language in order to recruit a wide net of botanical collectors. Others within the Calvinist redoubts of Edinborough tried to combat such “disgusting strokes of obscenity” (as Martin Kemp writes in a delightful article – Sex and Science in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora) in response to the perceived Linnean risky taxonomy. Robert Thornton had tried for example to de-sexualize plants and emphasize the logical and mathematical character of taxonomy that would thus regain the lost innocence of plants and allow women to pursue botany without embarrassment. And this is not a fiction.
Illustration showing “Cupid Inspiring Plants with Love”, in this case the Strelitzia reginae, or “queen plant”, a plate from Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807)
Suffice to say the podcast The Mysterious Secrets Of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium is suffused with such botanical conundrums, unwittingly political, theological and erotic plants, butterfly-insect collecting naturalist manias, picaresque travels and Victorian battles. Railing against hedonistic dangerous pleasures and ‘immoral’ botanical heretics (such as those exhibited Uncle Bertie) is a constant feature of them. They are mad in the best of ways – being a full-range attack on British aristocracy and privilege, its conservative values, its totally ridiculous prejudice, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, classism, and racism. They are at the same time poking fun at everything – including scientific rigor – fully indulging in exhibiting an almost Swiftean dimension of describing the habits and orthodoxy of these alternate English snobs – such as milking (back tits of a cat!) cats. There huge amounts of Orientalism – with the visit to Batavia (a pun on actually existing Batavia in the former Dutch East Indies) actually producing a breaking down of crew morale and much botanical perversity. The Anderlugians are the sworn enemies of the Gravy Islanders (both a mixture of Spaniards and Germans? but also some sort of weirdo Communists or Socialists as well).
These podcasts offer something refreshing and cheeky in terms of historical accuracy or literary solemnity. They are both trashy and highly sophisticated, more akin to the exuberance of Douglas Adam’s Hitchkickers Guide Through the Galaxy (or Oceans in this case), completely different from the usual histories and at its best described as a deeply humourous take on the excesses of naturalism and natural history. There is also a lot of speculative botany at work and speculative ethnobotany involved as with a lot of the species collected since the times of Buffon that got endowed with very (Western!) human virtues or vices, serving at times as symbols of modernist artificiality, social decay and bio-matter for theories of degeneration. Even today with the recent legalization battles around Hemp, THC, and CBD health fads we are still in the middle of such fervent and frequent botanical reshuffling.
Sharad Nerulkar has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, diligently following the traditions and discipline of old masters, his guru, and his father. But as years go by, Sharad starts to wonder whether it’s really possible to achieve the excellence he’s striving for.” (wiki)
There is a lot of reasons one might watch this movie – it offers a good break from the usual – self-absorbed Euroamerican world (this has become a leitmotif of recent posts here it seems). There’s constant talk about New World Order and it’s telling that the Western world (led by the US) has become united against Russia’s aggression and there’s been wide protest against of the war in Ukraine in particular. This in turn produced something without precedent to my knowledge – the final rush to switch or transition from fossil fuel dependency (in view of Europe’s and especially Germany’s dependency on Russian gas as well as oil and coal) to green energies. As this takes time and there’s always the German petroleum lobby and powerful car manufacturing industry to weight in their interests (in spite of what everyone thinks) – the ironic one sided result might be a reinforcement of Saudi Arabia/UAE oil producers, already big buyers of Western weapons (Germany and France have been selling weapons in the Yemeni Civil War in what is considered the biggest humanitarian crisis of the century). India has been a surprise so far since it parted ways with the other members of the QUAD alliance on the issue of Ukraine, being part of the small (just 4 countries ) group of governments at UN that didn’t call Russia aggressor.
Since a few years, there is a new specter of economic nationalism as a result of general dissatisfaction with globalism inequalities and lopsided effects. Yet the two – centrifugal & centripetal forces ae interdependent, two faces of the same coin. Both India and China have abstained from the unanimous condemnation of Russia and this poses several problems. I don’t want to make a bigger case here – but I try to emphasize it is good to keep an eye and mind open to (ignored or transformed into the big other) large parts (&most populous) of the planet that are being excluded from our daily reality in the extended West (speaking now and writing from Berlin, Germany) or the ones that the global North has been labeling ‘broken’, ‘rogue’, ‘the end of history’, ‘integrated’ etc. This 1989 history is always being forgotten or pasted over with incredibile duplicity. There is always a lot of ‘missing’ – coverage of people living and existing elsewhere. How does one relate to such non-existing images – the scarcity of other represented realities, other lives and places?
What Disciple offers is a small sample of another world and another life – nothing from the past but a contemporary world to ours, one that is neither idealized nor exoticized. The movie is a slow burner, what’s been called ‘slow cinema’ (which I do not indulge in very often) at its best. It is a series of tableaus of concerts of classical Hindustani music (i will not go into detail since I do not want to make blunders nor pretend knowledge in this area). I have had previous contact with Indian music tradition via friends and mediators. There is today a translational and international scope of this Hindustani musical tradition that was made familiar (in the West) by phenomenal instrumentalists such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan from the 1960s on. Following the growing Indian diaspora, Hindustani music has achieved recognition everywhere and patrons as well as students from outside its initial range of dispersal and far more from its original classical origins. Classical music – wasn’t just Bach & Co, but various other non European traditions.
I like the frankness of this movie – it is really an amazing piece of cinema (not just because it has been nominated for prizes). It presents some incredible encounters with both disciple-master relations and with current striving for skill & perfection (or lack of understanding of what others consider important), a path of austerity, exercices and a whole new range of expert knowledge. I enjoyed the sense of joyless dedication (there’s does not seem to be the usual success – or Euroamerican cheering) for something quite elusive, yet also the absence of major distractions, even the scenes of mastuebation. One is exercising on and on with consummate dedication even if one keeps failing. From archival precious materials of tapes or highly specialized traditions and even masters who refuse recordings and who show us a very different facette, an anti-spectacular form of performativity. Maai – the legendary singer mentioned is a representative of Khyal tradition – (ख़याल) that is a major form of Hindustani classical music in the Indian subcontinent.
With The Disciple one can say that one enters for a short while a different world of sound – and improvisation. There is a lot of hard lessons there for us and for the eponymous disciple. A lot of the time it is not even clear why such sacrifice is included in his practice. I liked the presence of the online – and also of the whole analog tape collector mania. There is also a fine sense of irony when actor Aditya Modak encounters one such famous collector-expert that somehow smashes all his idols and provokes in him a rare show of violence. I also like the time passage and how time is measured in this movie.
Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.
I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.
For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.
For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).
I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).
These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.
With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.
That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.
TimeSpace Warps 