The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700

"Segueing from Lloyd to Ganeri, I think I’m sufficiently influenced by the kind of work Lloyd does—that is, at the intersection between philosophy and anthropology—that I agree with him that that all human beings have the same not just bodies, but more particularly, more narrowly, the same brains: that more or less we’re all responding to our local environments with some minor variations in the way we understand those environments. We’re all so to speak basically doing the same thing. I believe that’s the case when it comes to, say, an analytic philosopher today and his or her counterpart in the Amazonian rainforest making sense of their own environment. So, a fortiori , if that’s the case in these examples where you couldn’t imagine any greater difference of cultural environment, it’s all the more the case when it comes to, say, looking at medieval scholastic philosophy on the one hand, and the institutions of knowledge transmission in classical India on the other hand. You’ve got elaborate, hierarchical societies with a centralised state, and complex financial and cultural and educational institutions. Of course they’re basically doing the same thing. India and China are always the easiest cases by which to convince a sceptic that we need to expand our conception of philosophy, and they’re the easiest cases because historically those civilisations develop in, I don’t want to say in lockstep, but in what’s the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam calls “connected histories”. He works on things like courtly society, medieval royal courts in Europe and India, things like the game of chess and so on. A “connected history” is one that studies, for example, royal court history in different regions on the understanding that there’s a kind of diffusion of the same patterns, and that these are not isolated developments. I don’t like the term ‘non-Western philosophy’. I think it’s denigrating in the sense that it gives us what the structuralists would call a marked category. Whereas we’re the unmarked category— That’s another very good example. So, how do we do Indian intellectual tradition justice? Not by marking it off as ‘non-Western philosophy’, but by supposing that Indian intellectual traditions have developed in a connected history together with European intellectual traditions. The work of professional historians like Subrahmanyam provides us with a good tool kit and background for doing connected history of philosophy that doesn’t segregate different traditions, but looks at them in their interconnection. You might go too far with that. In research on ancient philosophy, I could cite the work of Christopher Beckwith, for example, who wants to show that ancient Greek scepticism is in fact a pretty hasty translation of Buddhism, and that this comes from cultural contacts in the Greco-Bactrian region between Greece and India. There’s some evidence for this, but I think Beckwith’s mistake is that he thinks you need to find smoking guns. He thinks you need to find this particular person, who was in contact with that particular person, who translated such-and-such text from the one language to the other, and so on. But I don’t think you need to find that—I think you can find patterns of cultural diffusion. “Ganeri’s bold thesis is that you can find in India a development that parallels the development in Europe of the passage from the medieval to the modern periods” The genius of Ganeri’s book is already there in the title. Referring to a period of modern philosophy in India, his bold thesis is that you can find in India a development that parallels the development in Europe of the passage from the medieval to the modern periods. And just as in Europe, you can find authors who are coming forth with assertions of ‘go it alone’ scepticism you might find in Descartes—so, the rejection of authority as the privileged source of knowledge—and similar key markers of an entry into a period of modern philosophy. Why does this happen in India and Europe at around the same time? Well, because they’re both part of the same land mass, basically. And it’s a connected history. There will be others—critics in particular, nationalists who want to romanticise indigenous tradition—who will say that this is an imposition of European periodization on India. But I think what Ganeri is doing is giving us a model of how to do real cosmopolitan philosophy; that is, philosophy that refuses to take different traditions as hermetically sealed. Ganeri is a very special person because he’s of Indian ancestry, but originally trained as an analytic philosopher. People who just by circumstances of birth have a kind of bicultural access are, in that sense, just fortunate, and we need them. Just like science needs identical twins, we need these guys. [ Laughs .] I was talking yesterday to an Oxford graduate student, Lea Cantor, who’s doing comparative Chinese/Greek philosophy. She was talking about all the institutional barriers she faces, and how she has to learn to navigate different discursive communities with different expectations, different registers. If you’re a young person, you really have to be bold in order to carve out that kind of research program. When I talk to someone like Lea, I realise the problem is that the way people get funnelled in institutions discourages this, whereas it ought to be a highest priority, in my view. So, you can have bold, courageous young people like Lea Cantor, or you can have people who are lucky enough to be born into bicultural family environments. But beyond that, we can just do the best we can to learn as much as we can. Also, we can rely a lot on collaboration. In Paris, for example, we have had an ongoing community of people who work on the history of Asian science, including a lot of Sanskrit mathematics. We’ve invited Brahmin priests, for example, who have learned their mathematics largely by memorising large chunks of Sanskrit poetry that contain mathematical knowledge. I remember one guy who had to stop, close his eyes, and start doing a poetic recitation in order to remember where he was in his proof. It was mind-blowing. It was something that I’ll never have access to. I could spend the rest of my life trying to get into his mind-frame, and I just won’t have time. It’s too late. But still, just seeing that and being aware of this is already enough to stimulate, I think, some pretty serious reflection on the diversity and universality of something like mathematical knowledge. This is something I wrote a little bit about in my last book The Philosopher: A History in Six Types . There was a remarkable encounter between three people. One was Francois Bernier, who was a physician to the Royal Moghul Court in Delhi, and was himself a philosopher and basically a materialist atheist skeptic. One was Dara Shukoh, who was a Muslim-Persian prince and very fluent in the Aristotelian tradition through the Arab-Islamic transmission. And, finally, a Hindu pandit, Kavindracarya Sarasvati. They were brought together in this interfaith, inter-tradition dialogue in the 1660s. It’s a remarkable moment for revealing prejudices, limitations and similarities on all sides. What comes out of this is the general perception that both the Muslim and the nominally Christian crypto-atheist shared with one another is that these Indians aren’t really reasoning. As Bernier puts it, that they’re talking in circles. The perception was that this was because it’s not really philosophical inquiry in the sense that we understand it, it’s a kind of indoctrination. This is, in part, I think a reflection of real institutional differences. If you read a text of Indian philosophy, more particularly if you read Sutras, you will come away thinking, ‘This is incomprehensible.’ And it is incomprehensible because it’s not a treatise. It’s a recording of a kind of mnemonic technique that is implemented in the relationship between a guru and the disciple. And if you aren’t part of this relationship, then you don’t have access to the multiple meanings that are imbued in the lines that traditionally the disciple would learn, before learning why he’s learning them. It’s an intense pedagogy of rote learning that then presumably unfolds over the course of a lifelong, or many-years-long, relationship between the master and the student. If you’re not part of that dialectical dynamic, you’re not necessarily going to have access to its reasoning. For this reason, I think Bernier was wrong to say that these people didn’t care about the truth, but it’s an important lesson in the way different institutions of learning give rise to different understandings of what we’re doing when we’re seeking the truth. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Now, all of that was an aside. But what Ganeri wants to say is that yes, those institutions were there, but that’s not to say there wasn’t any kind of evolution or history to the development of these institutions. In particular, in what Ganeri calls the ‘modern period’ of Indian philosophy, you get the revitalisation of classical schools, in particular the ancient school of Nyāya , which was one of the six so-called āstika (orthodox) schools of Indian philosophy. Nyāya can be translated as ‘inference’; it’s the school of Indian philosophy that is closest to what we would call logic. So, Nyāya is innovatively asking, ‘How do we know that these classical texts were right?’ Even though, yes, the tradition is one that’s heavily grounded in authority, that doesn’t mean that it’s just a bunch of gullible suckers with no progress or development."