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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Krishna

No opposite for the ultimate

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 13 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Augustine, Aztec, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Maffie, Krishna, Kyoto School, Laozi, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, nondualism, Śaṅkara, Satan, theodicy, Zhuangzi

I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there could possibly be an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. The problem of suffering is just too intractable.

Many nondualists, especially Sufis, would identify the nondual ultimate with that God. And I cannot accept that view. For similar reasons I am skeptical of a Vedānta view where the ultimate is sat: both being and goodness. There is too much being that is not good.

For this reason I have been inspired by a wonderful passage in Nishida Kitarō’s “The logic of nothingness and the religious worldview”:

Continue reading →

A god for the real world

04 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Deity, Epics, Faith, Metaphysics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Bhagavad Gītā, Edmund Burke, Elisa Freschi, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, Mahābhārata, nondualism, saksit, theodicy

I don’t believe in God. But if I did, that God might need to be Krishna.

I have come to believe that the problem of suffering is effectively insurmountable. That is, the vast suffering in the world clearly implies that there cannot be an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, as the God of the Abrahamic traditions is generally supposed to be.

But what about a god who isn’t omnipotent or omnibenevolent?

Continue reading →

To play a flawed role

19 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Bhakti Poets, Deity, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Play, Rites

≈ 9 Comments

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Adolf Hitler, Ali Asani, autobiography, Constantin Stanislavski, David Haberman, film, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, LARP, Muharram, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Plato, Rūpa Gosvāmi, Seven Virtues

In the past few years I’ve become involved in live-action role-playing (usually known by the acronym LARP, or “LARPing”): a cross between long-form improv theatre and tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This hobby is often maligned, partially because it looks very strange to those not involved (especially on video), and partially because of its association with the kind of intelligent but socially awkward “geeky” subcultures that develop around Star Trek, comic books, collectible card games, Japanese animation and the like. But as I’ve been a part of those subcultures all my life, this is hardly a barrier to my participation. (I hope you didn’t expect that someone who blogs about Sanskrit philosophical texts was one of the popular kids in high school.)

LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. Continue reading →

Ascent and Descent

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Bhakti Poets, Christianity, Confucianism, Deity, Dialectic, Family, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

≈ 7 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Caitanya, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, ISKCON, James Joyce, Ken Wilber, Krishna, Martha Nussbaum, pàn jiāo 判教, phenomenology, Plato, Prabhupada, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

Five years ago, on a language fellowship in India, I had more time to do broad reading in cross-cultural philosophy than grad school usually permitted. I wound up reading a lot of Ken Wilber, and had already been immersed in Martha Nussbaum’s thought for my dissertation. These two thinkers don’t have a whole lot in common, beyond coming out of roughly the same (American baby boom) cultural milieu and having an unusually wide-ranging philosophical outlook. But there is one set of categories that features prominently in both of their work, and I suspect for good reason: ascent and descent.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” Continue reading →

Seeing God’s form

13 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Deity, Epics, Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Arjuna, Bhagavad Gītā, Hebrew Bible, Krishna, mystical experience

How do you depict a perfect being? The Jewish and Islamic answer is pretty clear: you can’t. From Exodus onward, idolatry is considered a sin. In the Ten Commandments the God of Exodus tells his subjects not to bow down before idols of anything on heaven or earth, for he is a jealous God – and, the implication is, all these things in his creation are different from him. Muslim tradition becomes much more explicit on the point. Islam’s cardinal sin is widely considered to be shirk: the association of any partners with God, saying that anything worldly – such as a drawing or statue of God – shares God’s attributes. Protestants have tended to follow the Jewish and Muslim lead. Catholics have been a bit more slack about it, but still accept the basic principle through fine distinctions, saying they don’t worship images, but merely venerate them; even for them, it’s understood that there’s a fine line they’re walking, something a little suspicious about depicting God that needs to be defended.

No such suspicion is found in India. I was struck recently by the climax of the Bhagavad Gītā. The god Krishna explains to the hero Arjuna what he needs to do, and explains his own divine nature as lord of the universe. Then, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form – and Krishna agrees to show him. Arjuna can’t see it with mere human eyes; but Krishna grants him a “divine eye,” which has no such problems.

The form Arjuna sees is clearly divine – not like the God of a Renaissance painting, who could be mistaken for a bearded old human if you didn’t know the context. But when Arjuna sees that form, he really sees it – he sees God just as God is. I think this represents a very different conception of divinity in India – divinity as divinity can be seen.

Krishna’s divine form is infinite, extending in all the directions – but with infinite numbers of eyes seeing everything, infinite numbers of mouths swallowing the dead as they go to their fates, infinite crowns on his infinite heads. This divinity is physical, visible, even tangible.

What does this mean for thoughts of a God as structuring the universe, a First Explanation with metaphysical significance for the way we understand the rest of the world? YHWH precedes the physical world, stands in some sense outside it, describing himself only as “I am that I am.” Krishna, on the other hand, seems a much more physical God, a part of the world itself, a creator of standing in some sense equal with his creation. I haven’t quite figured out what the implications are of all this. But I suspect they’re important.

Trusting in man, trusting in God

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Christianity, Deity, Epics, Faith, Free Will, Human Nature, Judaism, Morality, Prayer, Vedānta

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

20th century, Adolf Hitler, Augustine, Bhagavad Gītā, chastened intellectualism, Egypt, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hebrew Bible, hell, Krishna, Mahābhārata, Mañjuśrī, Pol Pot, Rāmānuja, Sigmund Freud, theodicy, Vishnu, Xunzi

I once heard someone – I don’t remember where – criticize humanism (however defined) in the following manner: “The problem with humanism is it leads you to deify man, and the evidence seems to be that man is not worthy of being deified.” The point resonates with me as I think about chastened intellectualism, the idea – which I associate with Freud as well as Augustine and Xunzi – that human beings tend naturally toward wrong behaviour. Individually, despite good intentions, I find it a constant struggle to be a good and happy person; collectively, the history of the 20th century is a dark litany of what happens when – as is too often the case – people’s intentions are less than good. It is difficult to have faith in humanity when humanity has not earned it.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God? Continue reading →

Kant on Yudhiṣṭhira’s elephant

06 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epics, German Tradition, Honesty, Jainism, Morality, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, Mahābhārata, Michael Sandel, nonhuman animals, Śaṅkara, Yoga Bhāṣya, Yoga Sūtras, Yudhiṣṭhira

Michael Sandel has long been fond of a certain eccentric position on the Kantian ethics of lying. Kant, as I’ve noted before, takes an absolute prohibition against lying, even in the most extreme cases: you may not even lie to a murderer seeking a fugitive. If Anne Frank is in your attic, it is wrong to tell the Nazis that she isn’t. The position is deeply counterintuitive, to say the least, but I think it does follow from Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty.

Sandel, however, claims that Kant’s position is not quite as counterintuitive as it seems. Sandel regularly makes this claim in his Justice course, which I taught for as a teaching fellow, and which Sandel has now made available to the public as a course as well as in a book. While Kant brooks no lies, Sandel says, he is quite happy with misleading truths. As evidence Sandel points to Kant’s own life:

Kant found himself in trouble with King Friedrich Wilhelm II. The king and his censors considered Kant’s writings on religion disparaging to Christianity, and demanded that he pledge to refrain from any further pronouncements on the topic. Kant responded with a carefully worded statement: ‘As your Majesty’s faithful subject, I shall in the future completely desist from all public lectures or papers concerning religion.’ Kant was aware, when he made his statement, that the king was not likely to live much longer. When the king died a few years later, Kant considered himself absolved of the promise, which bound him only ‘as your Majesty’s faithful subject.’ Kant later explained that he had chosen his words ‘most carefully, so that I should not be deprived of my freedom… forever, but only so long as His Majesty was alive.’ By this clever evasion, the paragon of Prussian probity succeeded in misleading the censors without lying to them. (Sandel, Justice, p. 134)

I was reminded of Sandel’s position recently while leafing through Śaṅkara‘s commentary on the Yoga Sūtras – Continue reading →

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