Book Review: Righteous Republic; The Political Foundations of Modern India

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India

By Ananya Vapeyi

Vajpeyi’s ‘Righteous Republic’ is a challenging, but extremely rewarding read and an important contribution to the growing body of Indian intellectual scholarship. The book has as its primary aim the explication of the term ‘swaraj’ or self-rule. In critiquing both past and present scholarship in the area, Vajpeyi argues that scholars have focused inordinately on what the concept of political sovereignty entailed for India’s founding fathers without paying sufficient attention to the first portion of the term, namely the self. How exactly did India’s leading nationalist thinkers conceive of the relationship between self and sovereignty? What did the swa in swa-raj mean to them and how did they go about conferring content on that term? These are hugely important questions but have, as the author persuasively argues, been inadequately addressed in much of the literature on India’s intellectual history. In reading the search for the self through India’s founders, Vajpeyi focuses on five thinkers: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore.

The author argues that the search for the self ‘took the form of an attempt to recover a line of moral inquiry from a welter of Indian traditions’. Vajpeyi suggests that traditions are text-centric; that is to say, texts constitute the building blocks of tradition. This characterization of traditions as text-centric may come across to some readers as inordinately parochial buts its persuasiveness as a characterization need not detain us here- what is important is that once Vajpeyi characterizes traditions in the way that she does, she can then proceed to argue that the best or most insightful way of tracing the founders’ search for self is to examine the manner in which they engaged with particular Indic texts of premodernity. Vajpeyi writes: ‘Rather than trying to figure out where the five founders stood with regard to the idea of “Tradition” as such, I examine particular intellectual engagements with traditional texts that each one undertook, and bring out the categories of selfhood that emerged from these acts of interpretation’.

So what are these texts that India’s founders are said to have engaged with in their attempt to search for the self- the self whose political sovereignty they all struggled to reinstate. Vajpeyi argues that Gandhi’s search for the self is brought out most clearly and compellingly in his engagement with the Bhagavad Gita; Nehru’s search is clarified by looking at his engagement with the texts and artifacts of the Mauryan Empire. Kalidasa’s Meghadhuta is the relevant text for Rabindranath, Abanindranath’s search is reflected in his conceptualization of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal and finally; Ambedkar’s agonizing search for the self is best explicated by examining his engagement with the classical texts of Buddhism.

The claim that the political foundations of modern India derived from classical and historical Indian intellectual traditions is not a new one; the beauty and importance of Vajpeyi’s book, however, lies in its meticulous explication of the ways in and terms on which which India’s founders engaged with the rich knowledge traditions of their past. In fashioning a sense of Indian selfhood, these leading thinkers utilized the vocabularies, themes and concepts embedded in the text-rich traditions of India’s past, employing them in inventive ways to address problems that those traditions had probably not envisaged themselves. The founders engagement with Indian texts of premodernity and their employment of indigenous conceptual categories and idioms to deal with the ‘crisis of the self’ and the issue of political sovereignty enabled them collectively to formulate their values and visions in ways that were intelligible to the Indian masses who although themselves participants in the swaraj project lacked the resources by which to articulate the precise nature of their existential predicament.

Vajpeyi’s book is a thoroughgoing attempt to demonstrate the ways in which India’s rich intellectual, aesthetic and moral heritage influenced the Indian founders collective search for selfhood. In this attempt, the book succeeds masterfully.

Book Review: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea; The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

Austerity: The History of Dangerous Idea

By Mark Blyth

 

Blyth’s ‘Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea’ is a tremendously well-researched and well-written critique of austerity and the assortment of political and economic policies that it inevitably gives rise to. Blyth’s central thesis is that austerity is a dangerous idea since it is riddled with all sorts of internal contradictions and is easily prone to misapplication in practice. Moreover, he argues persuasively that, in its real-world application, austerity imposes a disproportionate burden on poorer households. The book itself is structured into three parts. In its first section, the book examines the current economic crises and fleshes out their causes and consequences. In so doing, Blyth provides us with a perspicuous account of recent economic history, which in turn enables us to better understand our current economic climate. Without going into the economics of the section, Blyth exposes the deeply mischievous manner in which ‘austerians’ have marketed what was essentially a private banking crisis into a sovereign crisis, insinuating ingeniously thereby that profligate national governments are to blame for our economic problems and not the financial elite who are as a result exonerated from the more serious wrong doing. In the second section of the book, Blyth reviews the intellectual history of the Austerity idea, from the Enlightenment to the present, and examines various historical attempts at its employment, concluding in the end that austerity economics have invariably failed to deliver by way of increased economic growth and increased competitiveness. In the final section of the book, Blyth, by way of conjecture, considers what would have happened if governments had not embraced the austerity agenda and concludes the book by offering his own proposals on how the economy and the financial sector in particular could be better managed. All in all, this is a fantastic book, lucid in style, trenchant in its analysis and persuasive in its critique.

 

The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

By David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu

‘The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills’ is a powerful and persuasive critique of governmental attempts to curb fiscal expenditure in an attempt to enhance economic growth and reduce public debt. The book’s central aim is to shed greater light on the human and health costs of austerity politics and economics. The authors argue that healthcare spending, when carried out productively and wisely, can strengthen national economies and heighten national well-being. Countenancing their arguments and undergirding their thesis is an impressive and meticulous body of research which establishes, quite conclusively, that the higher the dose in which austerity was administered in a country, the more people died or deteriorated health-wise. Relying on their findings, Stuckler and Basu point out that countries, which have suffered recessions but yet have continued to maintain governmental spending on health care have managed to avoid deterioration in their citizens’ well-being. Notwithstanding the frequent recourse to statistics in the book, the authors have managed to produce, to their credit, an eminently readable book that is rich in analysis and insight but thankfully un-polemical in its tenor.

The Sacred Image in Hindu Religious Thought

The ritual worship of sacred images occupies a central role in the religious practice of many of Hinduism’s devotionally-oriented traditions. Indeed, Hinduism’s rich and diverse iconography often distinguishes it from other great world religions, who, notwithstanding certain exceptions, tend to view the practice of image-worship with severe disapproval. These latter traditions have often conceived, thought and spoken of image-worship in largely denunciatory terms seeing it, for example, as a theologically ill-informed departure from ideal norms of devotional conduct. The practice was also attacked for the metaphysical connotations it seemed to engender: it was argued that portraying God in an image was to suggest that God could be described or defined; to do so however was to imply an unthinkable limitation on the part of God.

My intention in this post is not to study these critiques in any great detail but simply to bring to light the ways in which these critiques are themselves sustained by certain assumptions and metaphysical positions that cannot be said to be of universal applicability. I would like to suggest that these critiques derive their cogency, in part at least, by operating within or by reference to certain ontological and/or metaphysical theories that end up shaping the way discourse around the issue of image worship is expressed or conducted within those respective traditions. If what I am suggesting is true then, it seems to me, a number of implications follow. First, it suggests that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Second, and more pertinently for the purposes of this post, it indicates that understanding the practice of image-worship requires an intimate understanding of the ways in which that practice is informed by and operates within the cultural matrices of that particular tradition. The job of the theologian, then, is to render transparent or intelligible the cultural matrices that shape and inform a particular set of religious practices.

Many of the ideas and arguments that I express in this piece are developed and expressed far more systematically by Peter Bennett in a tremendously insightful article that he wrote for the Journal of Vaisnava Studies many years ago. (I would be more than happy to provide access to Bennett’s piece for those readers so interested). He alerted readers at the outset of his piece to a simple but all-too-often forgotten point about the nature of religious practice and its relationship to conceptual orientations more generally and urged readers to remember that ‘attitudes towards divine images are inextricably bound up with ideas about the universe held by their worshippers’. As such, ‘the philosophical premises underlying the relationship between humankind, the world and the divine, [in Indian religious traditions] are fundamentally different from those of the Near-Eastern monotheistic traditions [and so] it is all too easy to misunderstand devotees’ statements about their beliefs if they are interpreted using categories borrowed from alien systems of thought.’

To understand the ways in which attitudes towards divine images are shaped by a (potentially prior) commitment to a set of cultural or philosophical assumptions, a study of the status of sacred objects in Western thought is vital. Bennett argues that sacred objects in the West (and certainly in the East as well) have been conceptualized in terms of their communicatory potential: they straddle the boundary between the human and the divine and thereby create the means by which communication between the two realms can be effectuated. Importantly, this agent of communicatory potential is ‘revered not for itself, but for the entity for which it stands’. In this sense, Hindu devotional traditions differ in their conceptualizations of the sacred image insofar as they are far more likely to describe their sacred images as being actual manifestations of the Deity. In this sense then, and this is an important issue to which I shall return, discoursing about sacred images in ways that maintain a strict categorical distinction between the image and the Deity seriously misrepresents the nature and significance of the image in as it is conceived in such traditions. 

The deeply ambiguous manner in which sacred objects have been regarded or conceptualized in Western thought can be brought out somewhat effectively by examining, if only very briefly, the theological debates that took place in the later patristic period in the Eastern Byzantine Church. The image or ‘icon’ was understood by the Eastern Church as capable of acting as a window through which the devotee could catch a more intimate glimpse of the divine realm than would otherwise be possible. However, a faction known aptly as the ‘iconoclasts’ spoke and wrote derisively of the practice, condemning it for its role in seeking to juxtapose the sacred to the profane. Those defending the practice, however, often did so on explicitly theological grounds. The grounds they sought to rely on were many but one of the more cogent set of arguments they used to countenance the practice relied for its efficacy on ‘incarnational logic’, the same sort that was used to explicate Christ’s position in earlier Christological debates. A particularly compelling example of the use of such arguments is best provided by the important eighth century thinker, John of Damascus. John of Damascus argued that the theological fact of the incarnation of Christ provided a powerful foundation for the employment of images and icons in religious and devotional practice. In defending the use of sacred images for liturgical and devotional purposes, John employed a unique incarnational approach, asking first where the impropriety lay in using physical materials to depict or convey divine truth. The use of physical materials to depict divine truth cannot itself be the problem, surely, John argued: after all, bibles used paper and ink (material substances no less) to depict divine truth. Moreover, Christ himself died on a wooden cross to save the world- in which case, material objects were themselves implicated in the salvation of the world. Indeed, Christ’s incarnation itself was the greatest and most forceful expression of the immaterial assuming material form. And, of course, notwithstanding their transubstantiated status, were not the bread and the wine physical substances, and yet capable of mediating divine truth through their employment in the Eucharistic Sacrament. John argued that the same logic, therefore, applied to the use of icons: notwithstanding their materiality, they were capable of conveying divine truth and therefore to proscribe their use in devotional expression would be to preclude an important way of apprehending the divine world. As an aside, this recourse to incarnational logic to countenance the practice of image worship is mightily fascinating since it resembles the approach adopted by the Sri Vaisnava tradition in their attempt to develop a theology of the sacred image.

What the aforementioned discussion does, I hope, is to alert readers to the type and sort of vocabulary and grammar employed in talking about sacred images in devotional worship in the West. I am going to argue that the sort of assumptions and underlying principles that engender the use of such vocabulary are in certain important respects foreign to the cultural matrices that shape and inform image worship in Hindu devotional traditions. In other words, the monotheistic, dualistic tendencies that inform the interpretation of sacred objects in the West are ‘less than useful as they stand for understanding the internal dynamics of Indian beliefs and practices.’ In a remarkably perspicacious passage on this issue, Bennett writes: ‘In contexts where the subject and object of worship are not opposed in a binary way, but are seen as manifestations of the same entity, then the appropriateness of dualistic analysis is open to question for it tends to place an undue emphasis on categorical dichotomies at the expense of understanding categorical overlapping, merging, and ultimate categorical identity.’

Conceptualizing the sacred image exclusively in terms of its communicatory or mediatory potential overlooks the sense in which for some Hindu traditions, the significance of the sacred image lies not so much in its alleged mediatory potential but rather in its status as an object of devotion itself, ‘that is as [a] viable, tangible manifestation [of] divinity.’ In other words, the mediatory potential of the image then lies not so much in its ability, if at all, to symbolize the divine either didactically, representationally or analogically, but rather in its capacity to manifest the divine.

In other words, in contrast to Western religious traditions wherein the distinction between the sacred image, the devotee, and the deity are reducible to categorical and absolute dichotomies, Indian religious philosophy entertains the possibility of such distinctions being dissolved in view of the fact that the devotee, the image and the deity are particularized aspects of divinity, manifestations then of a single entity. This understanding then forms part of Hinduism’s cultural matrix and therefore informs the practice of image worship within Hindu communities.

The issue here, to be clear, is not so much about the status or reducibility of the aforementioned dichotomies but rather the extent to which they problematize discourse in this area. So, for example, an Islamic critique of image worship is itself shaped by a set of philosophical and theological premises that view the universe in dualistic terms, based invariably on ‘dichotomies of humane-divine, earth-heaven, profane-sacred and material-abstract’, assumptions that are then intrinsic to that system itself and not therefore necessarily applicable to alternate systems of thought. I suggested at the outset of my essay that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Thinking theologically then, as a member of a Hindu devotional tradition, I may grant that the Islamic objection to image-worship makes sense and works at least on its own terms- however, I would then go on to argue that under altered premises, the critique loses much of its cogency and effectiveness. If Hinduism shared the philosophical premises of Islam, the Islamic critique of image-worship would be fatal- but given that it doesn’t share such premises, the latter critique cannot be said to add or detract meaningfully from Hindu understandings of the status of sacred images.

Much of the same could be said for the Christian objection to image worship in Hinduism. In Christian ritual and religious art, the image is conceptualized in an intellectual environment that shares many of the premises that inform Islam’s understanding of image worship. The acceptance of a dualistic universe and the dichotomies referred to above shape the way in which the image is reflected upon in the Christian setting. It’s function has primarily been conceived of in functional or symbolic terms: that is, the symbol’s value lies either in its didactic function (e.g. an image that stimulates devotion in the devotee) or in its status as representing and thereby participating in the reality of that for which the symbol stands. Bennett writes that ‘in the latter sense its meaning reflects an influential Neoplatonic strand in Christian thought which treats divine images as symbols and hence as gross forms standing for an abstraction and only partly fathomable reality, ever vulnerable to misinterpretation by the ignorant who might take the imperfect reflection for the reality’. Christian critiques of image worship then tend to focus on the devotee’s tendency to elide the image and its prototype. However, again, this critique works only if the premises underlying it (e.g. dualism and enduring dichotomies) are true. As Bennett writes: ‘But surely in a universe where the apparent gulf separating the two worlds is unreal, then the reverse might hold true. Enlightenment might only occur when image and prototype, material and abstract, man and divine, signifier and signified, are experienced in their underlying unity.’

In contrast to the tendency ever-present in western philosophical traditions to treat the sacred image as at best a symbol standing for a higher, more intangible reality, Hindu devotional traditions have evolved an understanding wherein the material image and supreme divinity are ultimately undifferentiated: that is, ‘the symbol is that which it symbolizes’. As Bennett writes then, to call the image a symbol in a Neoplatonic or Aristotelian sense would be to devalue its inherent sanctity and thereby to misrepresent the nature and significance of the sacred image in Hindu devotional traditions.

So as to conclude, I tried to argue at the outset of this piece that conceptualizations of sacred images are deeply rooted in a set of philosophical premises that shape and inform the way the sacred image is spoken or written about. I have sought to argue that an understanding of the role of sacred images in Hindu religious practice requires an understanding of the cultural matrices that shape Hindu religious thought and practice. Theologizing about the sacred image in Hinduism then is best achieved, as Bennett writes, by rejecting the imposing categories of western thought in favour of terms indigenous to the Hindu devotional traditions. The assumptions and prejudices that we bring to bear in our discourse on this area has for too long obscured our understanding of the status of sacred images in the Hindu setting and precluded us thereby from deeper engagement with the theological issues at play in the debate. As Bennett’s important summation points out: ‘it is necessary to expose the inappropriateness of those theories which presume universal relevance and yet, in their binary and dualistic frameworks, remain steeped in the cultural universes wherefrom they are derived.’ Hindu devotional traditions operate within a different cultural universe, with different beliefs and practices. ‘Western categories would serve only to disguise its underlying principles, impose significant issues of its own, and misinterpret the dynamics of the relationship between human and divine.

Book Review: Modern Hindu Personalism: The History, Life and Thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati

Sardella's 'Modern Hindu Personalism' is a fantastic work of scholarship, providing as it does, a deeply insightful and highly lucid account of the life and thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, a key theologian of the Bengal School of Vaishnavism. The author contextualizes Sarasvati's contribution by situating it within a taxonomy of modern Hinduism: this is useful since it sheds important light on the way in which the subject's work interacted with alternate strands of Hindu thinking. Moreover, by juxtaposing Sarasvati's life and work with other leading thinkers of the Bengal Renaissance period, Sardella offers us a valuable insight into the methodologies employed by various leading thinkers of the period in their attempt to negotiate the colonial predicament that they all perceived their religion to be experiencing. By offering arguably the first systematic, scholarly, and critical account of the subject's 'history, life and thought', this book fills an unfortunate lacuna in the scholarship on this period. Moreover by presenting readers with an intimate portrayal of the various complexities experienced by Sarasvati in the his attempt to successfully revive the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition, this book offers us a unique insight into the nature and politics of religious institution-building in colonial societies. Finally, by situating Sarasvati's work within the broader intellectual, cultural and political milieu of the time, Sardella offers us a penetrating glimpse into the various strands that contributed and continue to contribute to Hinduism's encounter with modernity. A fine work of scholarship, indeed!

Book Review: The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning & Metaphysics in the Vedantic Theology of Ramanuja, J. Lipner

Lipner’s ‘The Face of Truth’ is the finest exposition of Ramanuja’s theology that I have come across. Well-written and deeply insightful, the study succeeds admirably in familiarising its readers with the theology of one of India’s foremost thinkers and in so doing reminds us that there is much more to Vedanta than the non-dualistic philosophy of the great Advaitin, Sankara. Lipner’s well-informed account situates Ramanuja’s theistic worldview in the Indian philosophical context in which it emerged and identifies it as an attempt to counter the non-theistic intellectual currents that had gained currency in the philosophically competitive milieu of the time. The opening chapters of the book focus on Ramanuja’s theory of sacred language and divine predication. In contrast to the Prabhakara understanding of the nature of language (in which all language is held to be prescriptive, that is, injunctive in nature), Ramanuja argues strongly for the fact-assertive nature of language- on this account, language, particularly scriptural language, is employed to convey and express information about the nature of things, and particularly about the nature of Brahman and reality. Sankara’s theological account attributes to the Personal Lord a penultimacy that has the effect of precluding an eternal, non-sublatable relationship between God and the plurality of selves that exist. Ramanuja, in his writings, controverts this view, by skilfully arguing that no pramana or valid source of knowledge can possibly yield knowledge of an undifferentiated Brahman. Ramanuja’s system remains a non-dualistic one, albeit, one that accommodates distinctions and qualifications (hence the term visistadvaita [qualified non-dualism]. In his later chapters, Lipner presents Ramanuja’s views on the nature of the self, Brahman, and the relationship between infinite and finite being. Comprehensive in its scope and lucid in expression, this book does a fantastic job of rendering intelligible the foundational tenets of Ramanuja’s Vedantic theology. 

Book Review: Hindu Theology and Biology; The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory

This is a review of chapter two of Edelman's book.

Ontology of Body, Mind, and Consciousness

Edelmann’s objective in this chapter is three-fold: i) to provide a general overview of the Bhagavata Purana’s views on the ontological relationship between the body, mind, and consciousness; (ii) to examine the evidence often employed to countenance the physicalistic or naturalistic view of consciousness while also demonstrating the compatibility of certain forms of Judeo-Christian theology with such physicalistic theories and; (iii) to suggest that the theory of consciousness postulated by the Bhagavata Purana offers an alternative to physicalism.

It is the Sankhya/Yoga school of thought’s ontology and metaphysics that informs the Bhagavata Purana’s theory of consciousness. Edelmann does a commendable job of offering a crisp and concise review of the basic ontology that undergirds the Bhagavata’s understanding of the relationship between the body, mind and consciousness. He explains that, according to this view, the human being (and for that matter, all living organisms) are constituted of ‘three categories of substance: the physical body (sthula-rupa, deha), the mind (antar-atman), and consciousness (purusa). After enumerating the twenty-four constitutive elements of matter, Edelmann points to a fundamental difference that distinguishes the Sankhya view from its Western counterparts. In contrast to a wide range of Western thinkers, the mind along with its various constituents are categorized by the Sankhya theory of ontology as belonging wholly to the realm of matter. In other words, in common with modern biology, the Bhagavata argues that the mind and the mental realm more generally can be reduced to material nature. Whereas the mind is treated along with the physical body (or sthula-rupa) as belonging to the realm of matter, consciousness on this view is held to be ontologically distinct from matter, that is to say, not reducible to it or capable of being supervened by it.

After offering a brief overview of the various elements that are said to make up the physical body or deha, Edelmann shifts his attention to the second aspect of the human being, namely the ‘subtle-physical body’, which is divided up, according to this view into four interrelated parts- ‘mind (manas), intellect (buddhi), ego (ahamkara), and awareness (citta)’. This division is intended to reflect the different functions or vrttis of each part. Without delving too deeply into the functional definitions of each aspect of the mental world, the salient point to take away here is that ‘unlike prominent forms of Western dualism, the mind and intellect in the Bhagavata are functions of matter, processes that have no life or self-awareness in themselves; they are only subtle aspects of the same material substance of which tables and chars, for example are made.’

The Sankhya school postulates consciousness as constituting the third and final aspect of the human being. As stated above, this school departs from conventional Western accounts on the subject, by treating consciousness as ‘ontologically distinct from the mental functions and from the body’. It is the ego or ahamkara (an aspect of the mental realm) that acts as the glue, ‘binding consciousness, the observer of all the mental functions and the physical world’ to the body-mind complex. It is the ego that is responsible for the formation of a person’s sense of identity. As Edelmann puts it crisply, ‘the function of the ego is [to] attach or fasten the transcendent self to a particular mind-body complex.’

The implication of this view can be said to be three-fold: identification with the body: (i) is unnatural; (ii) causes suffering and; (ii) removing consciousness from identification with the body and mind is the ‘key to happiness’ and liberation. Note here that consciousness’ identification is not just with the body; if that were the case then upon death the purusa would achieve liberation. Nowhere however in the Bhagavata is such a view supported. The key thing to note here is that the predicament purusa finds itself in has as much to do with its identification with the body (gross) as it does with the mind and its various aspects (the subtle body). At death, though the gross body perishes, the subtle body continues to exist, travelling ‘with the self from one body to another, retaining memories and emotional dispositions’. This view, then, offers a useful illumination of our perceived tendency to come to this world equipped with a seemingly wide and diverse range of psychophysical predilections and predispositions.

In an important paragraph in this chapter, Edelmann explains how the Bhagavata’s view, as the aforementioned account sought to detail, contrasts with Cartesian-style substance dualism. The latter view essentially holds that the body and mind are constituted of different substances and while ‘the first is extended in space, the second is not’. As I hope that the former account has helped to make clear, this view is not shared by the Bhagavata. To recapitulate, the latter view holds that the mind and body together constitute aspects of the same material substance. There is therefore, at least in a substantial sense, no material difference between mind and body. The Bhagavata however does retain some element of the substance dualism claim since it asserts that consciousness is ontologically distinct from the mind-body complex.

Edelman’s economical recapitulation of the aforementioned account is useful: ‘In summary, the Bhagavata presents the living organism- humans and animals in particular- as a composite of three parts: consciousness (purusa), the subtle-physical body, and the physical body. The subtle and physical body are, however, reducible to one category of matter, whereas consciousness is not. When combined, the result is called a jiva or embodied being. The ego fashions the self with a sense of ‘I’ and attaches it to a particular mind-body complex. The result is that consciousness falsely identifies with a particular mind-body complex.’

In his next section in the chapter, Edelmann sets out to define physicalism and in so doing seeks to provide ‘the scientific, theological, and philosophical reasons that have caused many thinkers to adhere to a form of physicalism’. The definition that he offers, though remarkably succinct, does a useful job of conveying the basic, foundational tenet of the outlook: physicalism, Edelmann argues, describes the view that consciousness or mind is ‘dependent upon the brain, comes from the brain, or is reducible to the activity of the brain’.

Darwin’s evolutionary narrative is identified by Edelmann as a key factor contributing to the widespread acceptance of physicalism (at least as applied to the human mind) among the scientific community. In contrast to Platonic or Cartesian theories of ontology, the evolutionary narrative suggests that the mind is materially related to the brain and that the mind/brain evolved for adaptive reasons. Consciousness, on this view, is rooted in matter and is the product of a particular organisation of the brain. The evolutionary narrative then does not regard the soul or the mind as immune to the evolutionary process.

In arguing for a genealogical continuity between man and animal, Darwin was also at pains to demonstrate that ‘there must be an evolutionary history to human mental traits just as there is a history to biological traits: just as bodies had evolved in response to a changing environment, so had all cognitive capacities.’ An important implication of Darwin’s theory was that it rendered incoherent and unsustainable the drawing of ontological distinctions between man and animal. Christian theology sought to justify its exaltation of humanity by arguing that humans possessed a unique set of characteristics (a soul, heightened rationality etc), which distinguished them from their fellow creatures. However, ‘all the characteristics that were said to distinguish a human being from animals in Christian theology were argued [by Darwin] to exist in incipient forms in lower animals’.

In this sense, at least then, evolutionary theory problematizes the Judeo-Christian notion of the human person and the attendant notion of human uniqueness. The implication drawn from evolutionary theory that there exists a striking continuity between animal and man poses fewer difficulties for Indic traditions. This is because such traditions have long recognized that ‘the vital consciousness that animates the human body is the same sort of vital consciousness that animates non-human bodies.’ This is not, of course, to suggest that Indic traditions do not advocate any sort of discontinuity between animal and man. Many of them do; the point here though is that such discontinuity derives less from a conceptualization of the human soul as distinctly unique and more to do with the perception that the human form of life affords heightened capacity for God consciousness.

Edelmann’s summary of the implications of evolutionary theory for the philosophy of mind is useful: ‘evolutionary theory shows [] that the human mind and consciousness evolved along with the mammalian brain through an unbroken chain of incremental steps, and thus the mind or consciousness must be no more than the activity of the brain.’

Outlining certain Christian views of the soul, Edelmann argues that such views may be reconciled with a soft form of physicalism. Recall that physicalism describes the view that the soul/mind and consciousness can be reduced to the brain or to the material. The Thomistic understanding of the self envisions ‘souls as rooted in the organisation of matter’ rather than constituting an ontologically distinct substance. Note that this view departs from the hard form of physicalism since it asserts that though the soul is rooted in the organisation of matter, the soul itself is not material. Edelmann goes on to survey the views of other prominent Christian theologians and suggests that they have all argued for a particular type of physicalism.

Edelmann’s study of Keith Ward’s theological contribution is particularly insightful. He describes Ward’s stance on evolutionary theory as follows: ‘Ward does not question that there is an unbroken chain of natural events that gave rise to consciousness, but only that the process does not have built-in purpose. For Ward, purposive and final causality are built into the structure of matter, and, as it has a propensity towards complexity all its own, external direction from God is not required.’ In other words, for Ward, absent modification, the standard evolutionary account problematizes theistic belief insofar as it characterizes the evolutionary process in too arbitrary and accidental a manner. Ward seems to suggest that the attribution of causality and purpose to the evolutionary process diminishes the conflict that such an account would otherwise have with theism.

Edelmann concludes his discussion of physicalism by exploring the implications neuroscience contributes to the field. He argues that the close relationship between brain states and mental states that neuroscience seems to have discovered offers support to the view of mind/consciousness being dependent on the brain. In a particularly perceptive paragraph, the author argues that from the perspective of the Bhagavata, neurobiologists are only studying ‘the manner in which two categories of matter (gross and subtle) relate to one another’, and not consciousness proper. Their field of study essentially entails the examination of the brain (part of the gross-physical body) ‘in an attempt to understand the mental realm (subtle-physical body)’. But, of course, since this study only involves the examination of two material categories it cannot shed light on consciousness proper since the latter falls entirely outside the scope of the material realm. On this account then, all that they can gain insight into is the ‘manner in which consciousness (purusa) observes the relationships between brain and mental events.’ As Edelmann himself puts it: ‘neurologists are primarily working with the gross and subtle components of matter, since the mental events caused by the brain are material, but these components have no relationship with consciousness itself. There is full agreement between contemporary scientists and the Bhagavata that the body and the mind are material, but in the terms of the Bhagavata neurology as it is conceived of at present does not study consciousness itself.’

The author goes on to suggest that the distinction the Bhagavata draws between the mind-body complex and consciousness proper mirrors certain developments in contemporary philosophy of mind. He points here to the work of David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, who in their works argue that ‘to understand the mind one must pay attention to subjective qualia, or the sense of what it is like to be a particular organism. Moreover, qualia cannot be adequately described merely in terms of brain states because qualia is a subjective experience, whereas neurology only studies objective matter’. I won’t delve two deeply into this area because I want to post a review of Nagel’s book (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False) after I finish reading it.

In his final section in the chapter, Edelman sets out to show how and why physicalism can be reconciled with the ontology of the Bhagavata. Essentially, he begins by recapitulating the Sankhya view that the mind-body complex is ontologically distinct from consciousness (purusa). The former can be reduced to matter while the latter occupies a distinct ontological category of its own. He suggests that ‘disputes about the historical origins of mind-body are of minor importance, since they are disputes about not-self and about the properties of matter’ that do not in themselves exist in the ‘state of freedom’. This seems to me to be an important point and it therefore merits greater discussion. Edelmann’s point essentially is that the debate about the origin and development of the mind-body complex is a debate about the origin and development of a particular form of matter. Consciousness, however, is immaterial and therefore must be regarded as, if you like, a non-participant in that debate. Any study that sets out to demonstrate how the mind-body complex has evolved or developed over time cannot in therefore cast any sort of coherent judgment on the existence of consciousness. In that sense, at least then, the debates assumes a triviality since it has nothing to say about the nature of the self proper. As Edelmann explains in a particularly perspicuous paragraph, ‘Darwinism [is] concerned with, and can only make claims about, the mind-body complex, and yet consciousness is distinct from this. Put differently, if consciousness is a witness (saksin) of the mind-body, but is ontologically distinct from it, the historical origin and development of the mind-body complex (i.e. the subject of Darwinian theory) is not a central concern. A central concern instead involves understanding the separation of mind-body from consciousness’.

In seeking to suggest how the Bhagavata may respond to the issue of the evolution of consciousness and seemingly supportive neurological findings, Edelmann suggests ‘that the notion of a non-physical consciousness that identifies with the mind-body complex allows for an alternative interpretation of Darwinian evolution and the neurological correlates of consciousness. Within the ontology of the Bhagavata the non-physical consciousness (purusa) observes the relationships between the mind and brain (which are both part of nature, prakriti), and this allows one to avoid the physicalist conclusions argued for by Darwinists and neurologists’.

The key point to understand here is the notion of consciousness identifying with the mind-body complex. Let me call this the ‘identification thesis’. The author’s argument is that such an identification provides for an alternative interpretation of Darwinian evolution and certain neurological findings. The Darwinian view sees consciousness as having emerged over the course of biological evolution as the material organisation of living organisms developed. However, the ‘identification thesis’ permits for an alternative interpretation of evolutionary history, one that would suggest, for example, that ‘when the self is lined by identification to a body with a small brain, then the capacities of that brain constrain the ability of the self to think and to reason. When it begins to identify with a larger-brained body with densely packed neurons, then the capacity for thought increases, and hence the observer’s experiences of complex thought in that body increases.’ The ‘identification thesis’ argues that the mind-body complex constrains the capacity of consciousness to the extent that the latter identifies with the former. Identification enables consciousness to experience the causal relationships between the mind-body (the focus of Darwinian evolution and neuroscience) ‘even though those causal relationships are distinct from the experiencer’. The strength and cogency of the account lies therefore in the fact that it ‘allows for the evolution of mind and body as in Darwinism and for the neurological correlates of consciousness sought by neurology, yet also allows for the existence of a transcendent consciousness.’

With respect to the possibilities of dialogue (between Hinduism and Science), Edelmann bemoans the understudied and under-expressed nature of the field in theological discourse within Hinduism. He argues that the cogency of the Hindu position depends in large part on the ability of Hindu theologians to express their views on consciousness and the mind-body problem in ways that are intelligible and accessible to Western audiences: ‘If Hindu theologians were to develop a discourse in a language that is accessible to Western thinkers and that takes into account the discoveries and theories of scientific studies on consciousness, then it would be reasonable to suggest that such a discourse should be taken into consideration by Western thinkers in the course of their own investigations into mind and consciousness. Unless and until Hindu thinkers do develop their own discourse of this kind, it is unrealistic to suggest that the sciences should seriously consider them as scientific theories’.