Philosophy without a philosopher in sight

The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita: ancient Indian texts that challenge Western categories, yet influenced the course of modernity

By Amit Chaudhuri

Krishna depicted in an  illustrated manuscript version of the Bhagavad Gita, late 18th century

Krishna depicted in an illustrated manuscript version of the Bhagavad Gita, late 18th century

To include the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in a series called “Footnotes to Plato” may seem odd for many reasons – some obvious, some less so. But to address the oddity is invigorating, and offers a way of considering the necessity of placing these works in the wider discussion, as well as the historical and conceptual impediments to doing so.

Among the impediments is a logistical one which reveals how, in the West, value and significance are attributed according to certain classificatory norms and not others. I don’t mean the “canon”; I’m referring to a more basic category: authorship. “Footnotes to Plato” (like Western philosophy), is, generally, as much about the philosophers as it is about the philosophy. In fact, the field of knowledge called “the history of Western philosophy” could just as easily be called “the history of Western philosophers”, inasmuch as Western philosophers are the sum total of their lives and works, and we often defer to both biography and thought when we interact with the philosophy. Each body of work has a personality, but so does its author; in almost every case, we can, literally, put a “face” to the work, whether that’s a photograph of Bertrand Russell or a fourth-century BC bust of Plato.

What do we do with a philosophy when there’s no philosopher in sight? The absence constitutes a problem in giving, and claiming, value. Meaning and significance in Western culture are not just features of the work, but pertain to, and arise from, the owner of the work – the author is the work’s first owner; the author’s nation or culture (“Greece” or “Germany”, say; or “the West”) its overarching one. The Upanishads and the Gita, on the other hand, come to us as the New Critics said poems should: without the baggage of biography. To read them is to confront language, form and text alone, without the distraction or temptation of dwelling on the author’s milieu and life.

One might recall that the New Critical turn against biography is related to a privileging, in the twentieth century, of the impersonality, rather than the emotional sincerity or conscious intention, of the creative act. This development is not unrelated, I think, to the impact that certain Indian texts had on modernity after they were translated into European languages and put into circulation from the late eighteenth century onwards. (This is something I’ll return to later.) The Upanishads and the Gita claim to be neither the work of an author nor the word of God (as many religious texts do). They record a variety of thought-processes and arguments. They’re among the first poetic-critical works to make the biographical reading redundant. They don’t contain “an author’s thought”: their subject is thought itself. “Who impels us to utter these words? Who is the Spirit behind the eye and the ear?” are among the first lines of the Kena Upanishad.

Of course, neither the Upanishads nor the Gita could be a footnote to Plato in a literal sense, because the earliest of the first, composed around the sixth century BC, precede him by about two centuries; the second, from the second to the third century BC, is near-contemporaneous with the Greek. The Upanishads are part of the Vedas, an agglomeration of beliefs, rituals, practices and texts in which the origins of Hinduism are said to lie. How homogeneous a belief-system the Vedas comprise is anyone’s guess, since some of the most powerful passages of the Upanishads are oppositional and argumentative, and have to do, implicitly or explicitly, with testing the parameters of intellectual convention. The Vedas may be a convenient umbrella term, but, if the Upanishads are an important part of the Vedic corpus, they’re certainly not a placid expression of an established Vedic world view. They themselves, through the nuanced rethinking of both the assumptions of early Hinduism and of the habits of thought itself, are trying to establish something. Their language is critical rather than sacerdotal. They’re more interested – and this is true of the Gita too – in interrogating consciousness rather than admonishing the non-believer.  

Among the subjects they call into dispute is the matter of how we think about the Creator, or whether it’s at all possible to “think” about Him or Her. According to a dominant version of the Judeo-Christian model, so influential to how we conceive of authorship (given the “author’”is a creator), God makes the world, is fundamentally exterior to it, owns, oversees and governs it, and, when appropriate, comes to its aid. At the outset, the Kena Upanishad, which has to do with whys and wherefores, dismantles the causality of creator and creation, not through assertion, but a series of negations and inversions:

What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be Brahman; and not what people here adore.

What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to be Brahman; and not what people here adore.

… I do not imagine “I know him well”, and yet I cannot say “I know him not”.

He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.

There are also the paradoxes in the Isa Upanishad to take into account, which overturn the idea of a creator looking upon their creation from above: “The Spirit, without moving, is swifter than the mind … He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all”.

These are not assertions; they’re subversions. Idols are not being ejected from a sacred space, as they were by Moses; structures of thought are being challenged. What’s being subverted is the way both a laity and a clerical establishment think: “not what people here adore” refers to the first, while the priestly hierarchy is dismissed in these phrases – “those who imagine he can be attained by thought … He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple”.

The Upanishads, then, can hardly be called originary. They sound more like the latest in a series of disagreements; a great deal has preceded them, and reached a state of ossification before their arrival. Among what they challenge is a particular sense of causality regarding the relationship between creation and creator, which seems to have been extant when they were composed. Many traditions believe in a first cause, after which the universe comes into existence and before which there was nothing. The Upanishad’s conception of consciousness – “He moves, and he moves not”; “He is far, and he is near” – complicates the point of origin. Again, unlike Descartes’s belief that thought is both a product and a proof of existence, the Upanishad’s “What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think” introduces an absence at the heart of thought. If thought can’t conceive whatever it is that produces it, then thought can’t be wholly present – a formulation that’s antithetical to the Cartesian proclamation. And since causality constantly reasserts itself as a default mode of thinking throughout history, the Upanishads remain, essentially, oppositional. They can’t occupy the space of established thought, being opposed to that space. Nor can one reduce either the Upanishads or the Gita in sociological terms to being “Brahminical” without losing sight of the fact that their language is critical-poetic – that is, they raise a critique through paradox and metaphor – rather than dogmatic or hieratic. This extraordinary choice of expressive language constitutes a strategy. Poetry is the only tenable form of thought for these two texts, for, as Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita, “Neither Vedas, nor sacrifices, nor studies, nor benefactions, nor rituals, nor fearful austerities can give the vision of my Form Supreme”. If the list I’ve quoted covers the recognized intellectual and practical activities of the Brahmin, we might say that the Upanishads and Gita are alt-Brahminical: they were written by anomalous Brahmins.

The role these texts play (along with Buddhism) as the chief underground, often unacknowledged, resources of modernity and modernism begins with their advent onto the world stage through Latin, English and German translations. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron retranslated fifty-two Upanishads from Persian translations and commentaries into Latin in 1796, and published them in 1801–2. These became key texts for Arthur Schopenhauer (“It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death”), among others, and later for T. S. Eliot. Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), an Orientalist scholar and typographer, began to learn Sanskrit in Banaras in the 1780s from Kalinath, a Brahmin pandit, and to translate the epic, the Mahabharata, into English. The project remained unfinished but a chapter, the Bhagavad Gita, was published in London in 1785 as the Bhagvat-geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon. The Gita then appeared in French in 1787.

The impact of the Upanishads and Gita proved particularly powerful in the domains of the aesthetic and the literary, and in the formation of a particular experience of secular modernity. To the literary imagination, it provided new ways of thinking about the author’s relationship to their work, giving the latter a mysterious independence that’s not reducible to authorial intention or biography. Engaged in a new project that would turn out to be Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote to his friend and lover Louise Colet in 1852: “I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is … No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent”. He adds: “the author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere”. Where does this model of the creator come from – one who’s not an overseer or governor, but both in the work and out of it? Partly Flaubert owes the conceit to Baruch Spinoza, whom he adored. But he was also immersed in Buddhist texts, and it’s inconceivable he wouldn’t have known the Upanishads, where the conceit has its earliest and most succinct expression: “He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all”.

In Calcutta, the creation in the early nineteenth century by Hindus of a reformist-intellectual sect called the Brahmo Samaj also depended on the Upanishads as it distanced itself from traditional Hinduism, turning, instead, to a niraakar creator – a creator, that is, without form or outline (aakar), Flaubertian in character: present everywhere and visible nowhere. The Brahmo Samaj is often seen to embody a move away from polytheistic Hinduism to the monotheistic world view contained in the Upanishads; Charles Wilkins, in his Preface to his translation, had made a similar observation about the Gita, in which he found an echo of Unitarianism. But this account of the turn is slightly facile, I think, and the comparison to monotheism doesn’t really hold. There’s no “god” in the Upanishads in any conventional sense. There’s certainly no single controlling power in it commensurate with God in the Old and New Testaments, or with Allah in the Qur’an. It is, in fact, an interrogation of consciousness. The turn to the Upanishadic comprises not a turn to the monotheistic but to the non-representational, and it’s the non-representational that had an immense impact on Schopenhauer and later Friedrich Nietzsche, though they, as well as G. W. F. Hegel, confused it with nihilism in a way that Flaubert obviously didn’t. The artistic response to the Upanishads is a deeper and truer one in the end than the response of the philosophers. The non-representational, as a secular aesthetic category, became hugely significant to Rabindranath Tagore: as something that’s neither God nor deity, but is sacred. The sense of a sacredness that doesn’t have an obvious connection with a recognizable deity was a profound resource for the experience of secular modernity, both in India and outside it.

From the Gita comes the definition of a peculiar kind of action – at once invested, passionate and detached – that would contribute deeply, I think, to the critical-aesthetic notions of “disinterestedness” and “impersonality”. The Gita is an interruption in the narrative of the Mahabharata. The brothers Pandava, after returning from the thirteen-year exile into which they’d been sent duplicitously by their cousins, the Kauravas, find they won’t be allowed to reclaim their kingdom. The two clans go to war, but, on the eve of battle, Arjun studies the opposite camp in a state of despair, and asks his charioteer Krishna how he can possibly slay cousins and uncles he’s known since childhood. Krishna says many things in this conversation, including odd, counter-intuitive pieces of advice: “Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work. Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires, be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind – a peace that is ever the same”.

To what kind of work might success or failure be redundant? By the time the Gita’s Krishna was first heard in Europe, all judgements were deemed, by the Enlightenment, to be either subjective or objective. What kind of judgement escapes this binary by being at once passionate and detached, made in earnest without mindfulness of outcome? Immanuel Kant addresses this in a shift in his own thinking, in his writings on aesthetics in 1790: he characterizes “beauty” as being “purposeful without a purpose”. Also, he classifies aesthetic judgement as being “disinterested”, or untouched by what we ordinarily understand as desire. In the binary imposed by the Enlightenment, “disinterested” will be seen to be the opposite of “interested”; that is, impartial as opposed to biased, or objective rather than subjective. But “disinterestedness” is a breakdown in the binary; it indicates aesthetic experience’s ability to be simultaneously involved and disengaged – a contradiction that the Enlightenment is deeply reluctant to allow for.

Five years separate the Gita’s appearance in English, and three years its translation into French, from Kant’s intervention in aesthetics. It’s unlikely he’d have been unaware of the work, or made his sui generis departure without it. The second time such “disinterestedness” appears as a concept, when Matthew Arnold redefines what criticism is, the link to the Gita is clear, and doesn’t require speculation. Arnold had read Wilkins’s translation in 1845, and he returned to it constantly. In 1865, he wrote of criticism, radically, not only as the expression of taste or opinion, but as a form of disengaged engagement without obvious consequence, making the connection to the Gita overt: “It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism”. “Disinterestedness”, then, is, in Krishna’s words, a curious “evenness of mind” irrespective of “success and failure”: it’s the dismantling of a pervasive binary which customarily places the word in an Enlightenment tradition of rational objectivity, or even points to the contemporary misuse of the word to mean “uninterested”. The Gita’s practice of “impersonality” points to T. S. Eliot’s attack, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, on the idea that poetry is an “expression of the personality” or of “emotion”. It’s no accident that the final line of The Waste Land is the Upanishadic refrain, “shantih shantih shantih”, the Sanskrit word for spiritual peace or even-mindedness (which, as it happens, was promoted to being the primary aesthetic rasa or experience in Sanskrit poetics by the eleventh-century philosopher Abhinavagupta).

It’s uncertain in what way these conceptual departures would have existed in modernity if these texts hadn’t been put into circulation when they were. Yet a great part of this history of ideas remains unwritten.        

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist and musician. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book of essays is The Origins of Dislike