Translation Please

Discussion in 'Religious places & Spiritual people' started by ChennaiExpress, Jan 18, 2015.

  1. ChennaiExpress

    ChennaiExpress IL Hall of Fame

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    This is a real fantastic thread with chock full of deep information. Will take some time to go through the wonderful conversations!
     
  2. sokanasanah

    sokanasanah IL Hall of Fame

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    There are many different thoughts in your post. Let’s see if we can untangle the skeins and deal with them strand by strand.

    There is nothing wrong in reflecting on past glory. It is not merely a matter of ‘comfort’. (I’m not sure that I like that phrasing. It sounds rather like a distressed animal nursing its wounds, the language of defeat). Every society, in every generation has to decide what it wishes to preserve of itself and what of its civilizational achievements and aspirations it wishes to propagate to the next generation as its patrimony.

    “If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.” (Terry Pratchett)

    What you are really saying, especially when it comes to science, is that you want to see someone do for India, what Joseph Needham has done for China. That is certainly a worthwhile enterprise.

    So, yes, by all means slake your thirst, drink from those ancient rivers and protect the wellsprings from poison. But, even as you do that, keep in mind the nature of that past glory and its legitimate achievements. In trying to recover what is our own, we cannot justly lay claim to what belongs to another. (And ‘belong’ is not the right word here anyway, more on that later).

    What is the nature of that civilizational achievement?
    At its most fundamental, it is this: that there are only two great metaphysical traditions in history – that of the ’west’ and its graeco-roman antecedents and that of India. (Chinese philosophy has been more practical, concerned with ethics, statecraft and social harmony). The Indian tradition on the other hand, is a true metaphysics that developed completely independently of the west. As such it represents a complementary world-view. No other traditions have grappled with the deepest questions quite so tenaciously and with comparable philosophical fecundity. The two, India and the ‘west’, have both to be understood if we are to understand philosophy.

    If any real understanding is to be reached, we cannot muddle philosophy with superstition, conjure 'science' with sleight of hand. Yearning cannot substitute for effort.

    More later.
     
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  3. sokanasanah

    sokanasanah IL Hall of Fame

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    What did the Rihis know? What is the nature of their knowledge?

    Again it is important to distinguish between philosophy / metaphysics and science. Let's use the notion of the atom as an example, since that's where this thread began.

    In the western tradition, there are three main figures credited with the idea of 'atomism' - Democritus, Lucretius (De rerum natura) and John Dalton. Of these, the first two are philosophers. Their ideas were developed entirely in the abstract. They do have counterparts in India, probably even more ancient. The Cārvāka, a materialist, heterodox, atheistic school of thought in the 6th / 7th century BCE developed similar ideas, as did the orthodox, vedic Vaisheshikas. Nothing survives of the Cārvāka texts. A little more is known about the Vaisheshikas, hence they are credited with Indian atomism. These ideas may well pre-date the atomism of Democritus, and of course, Lucretius came much later. The
    main point again, is that these are all metaphysical ideas.

    Now, even though the Vaisheshikas believed that true knowledge lay in the evidence of perception derived from nature by inference, making them empiricists pre-dating Aristotle, they were certainly not experimentalists . We had to wait until Dalton (18th - 19th cent.) for a scientific atomic theory, based on his chemical experiments and the 'law of multiple proportions', we all learn in middle school. Atomic theory as Dalton formulated it is a falsifiable hypothesis (although 'falsifiability' as a criterion for the demarcation between science and non-science is itself a 20th century idea credited to the philosopher Karl Popper). This is a crucial difference.


    So, if we are speaking metaphysics, yes, the rishis can lay claim to atomism. If we are speaking of science, they simply did not know.


     
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