Book Blogs Back!: Responses to Malcolm Keating – Introduction and Chapter One

My friend and colleague Malcolm Keating (who teaches at Yale-NUS in Singapore) was recently kind enough to read and blog about my book, Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa, which was published by Lexington Books in September 2018.  Malcolm's posts were in preparation for an event held in Singapore on March 7, 2019 sponsored by Bras Basah Open School of Theory and the Yale-NUS Philosophy Society.  I Skyped in for part of the event and really enjoyed talking to organizers Farhan Idris and Malcolm, as well as several other participants.  Hopefully one day I will visit Singapore in person rather than merely via Skype.

I recommend reading Malcolm's blog, Śābda-bodhaḥ: Musings on Philosophy and Sanskrit.  He wrote a total of six posts on my book over there, starting with one on the introduction of my book and another on chapter one.  I'll start by responding to both of those posts.  More will be coming soon!

Before diving in, I want to sincerely thank Malcolm for taking the time to read and seriously engage with my book.  He provided valuable clarifications (I occasionally thought, "Oh, that's how I should have put that!") and even more valuable than that, he provided incisive criticisms.  It may come as a shock (maybe more to non-philosophers than philosophers), but I'm neither terribly surprised nor terribly troubled that Malcolm disagrees with me.  More on that later.




Introduction

I want to reiterate that I am responding directly to Malcolm's post on my book.  The present post will make little sense without reading that first.

Malcolm's point on defining “philosophy” has been one of the hardest points to communicate with a philosophical audience since I first started thinking about Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi in these sorts of terms over a decade ago. Sometimes I despair of ever successfully communicating what I'm talking about, but let me try, anyway.

“Philosophy” really is defined for these figures purely dialectically. The whole point is that they don’t want anything like an overarching conceptual definition of darśana or ānvīkṣikī any more than Sextus gave a definition of philosophia. If they acquiesced to the demand to offer a definition of philosophy they’d be engaging in the activity they’re trying to overcome. But, while Sextus makes an offhand comment about what the Stoics think philosophy is, generally the three pillars get right work. Yet, like Sextus, their targets can be identified as they go, e.g., Nyāya or Abhidharma for Nāgārjuna, everybody for Jayarāśi, mainly realists for Śrī Harṣa. Hopefully this becomes clearer throughout the book. But to reiterate: they have no interest in providing an overarching definition of philosophy of their own, although I understand why modern scholars (especially philosophers) expect or desire such a thing. 

 A lot of this problem comes from the simple fact that philosophers are trained to engage with philosophical views (where one would reasonably expect such a definition), but this type of skepticism is more properly thought of as an attitude rather than a view. Harald Thorsrud’s example with regard to Pyrrhonism is apropos here: Pyrrhonism is an activity like riding a bicycle; it makes no sense to apply philosophical tests for coherence, etc. to riding a bicycle or to the knack of Pyrrhonism. Likewise, skepticism about philosophy doesn’t require its own definition of philosphy any more than one must provide the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept of balance in order to ride a bicycle. It’s an attitude or activity that is cultivated through practice, not a view or system that is constructed or supported with reasons and definitions. The demand for a definition of “philosophy,” while entirely understandable, is I think a category mistake in this case.  (I do, however, say a bit about what I think philosophy is in the conclusion of the book).

Chapter One

Most of my responses from now on are presented as bulleted lists.  Again, this is a specific response to Malcolm's post on chapter one, so be sure to read that first.

• Very helpful way to split apart my two-part thesis in chapter one! I aim to be clear in my writing. I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world, and all that.  Thanks! 

• And I don’t expect to convince many people.  My friend Stephen Harris once quipped about me that I would be the person people cite to say I’m wrong – a perfectly good career path, I think. I would have been shocked if Malcolm had agreed with much in this book to be perfectly honest.

• Love the anumāna version of my argument. 

• On “tradition” I mean to upset the darśana model more broadly, not just the false imputation of the six darśanas. How can you understand Yogācāra without understanding Nyāya, etc.? It’s the connections and debates across the school lines that have always interested me the most, even if this was not always how the classical philosophers themselves understood what they were doing. I look at the English etymology as an excuse to move beyond a sort of constricting idea of “tradition.” Maybe there is a better Sanskrit word, and it would be cool to find it! What I’m thinking of is something more like lines of influence that are taken up by later philosophers (the most explicit evidence for this is in Śrī Harṣa, but I find it hard to believe that Jayarāśi wasn’t familiar with Madhyamaka – see his and Candrakīrti’s arguments against Dignāga). So, this sense of “tradition” is not a formal lineage or school, but more like Empiricism in early modern Europe (and much like that, it is admittedly to some extent a later imposition on a diverse group of texts more than a self-understanding or institutional structure or literal lineage). Full disclosure: a lot of this is inspired by Daya Krishna, who has influenced how I look at this for over 20 years now (maybe I’m part of a Daya Krishna tradition?).

• Again, on defining “philosophy.” I’m afraid Malcolm and others are going to be disappointed. I know respectable contemporary philosophers would require such a thing. The three pillars simply are not interested in such a thing (being neither respectable nor contemporary). But also: can anyone give a succinct, easy definition of “philosophy”? I think it’s an inherently slippery, vague term. As an interpreter, I’m never going to give more than stipulative definitions when talking about the pillars, although I may give vague, imprecise definitions of what I think philosophy is in other contexts (for instance, in the conclusion of the book).

• Re: Ṛg Veda 10.129: My point is not that the Vedic poets had any conception of philosophy or skepticism as it later developed, but that they are showing how a certain type of reflective thinking can turn back on itself – maybe. The Vedas are tricky, of course. My interpretation is more a suggestion than a textual argument, but the Vedas are really impressionistic in themselves, at least this passage has been taken in a variety of ways by both classical and contemporary scholars.

• My point with the early texts is more to show that there were inklings of skepticism early on, but they are no more properly skeptical than say, comments from Heraclitus are representative of Sextus Empiricus (even though Sextus was partly inspired by Heraclitus). Likewise, in later chapters I draw out how each of the three pillars was inspired by or taking up some ideas or attitudes that were present in inchoate form earlier on (hence, a tradition in the sense of inspiration and taking up ideas and developing them).

• Bronkhorst: Not sure how his bit on early Buddhism would impact anything. I’m not saying the tradition was a direct lineage from Ṛg Veda to Upaniṣads to Early Buddhism. More like intertwining threads that were later picked up by the three pillars (whether early Buddhism is a reaction to the Upaniṣads or vice versa makes little difference; both strands developed roughly simultaneously, if by “roughly” I can mean in a huge variety of texts over several hundred years, but in any case in the ancient or early period before sūtra systematization of the classical period).

• On the relation between the two parts: Good point. Maybe they are conceptually independent (I could have written a book just on either one). But I think they are historically intertwined in that a fuller historical understanding of the three pillars and the Indian tradition more broadly requires both. I’m trying to tell a historical story about how skepticism developed in the Indian tradition. My story is not the only story (someday I will try to tell a similar story about epistemological skepticism in India, a project that I predict might convince a couple more people than this one). The story in this book is probably not the most interesting story to everyone, certainly not to most contemporary philosophers who are generally mystified by this whole skepticism about philosophy business – mainly because of the cultural and historical myopia I discussed in the introduction as well as the anachronism of thinking “skepticism” can only mean epistemological skepticism of the types analytic philosophers engage with. 

• I try to warn readers several times throughout the book that readers unwilling (for whatever reason) to allow some elasticity with regard to terms like "skepticism," "tradition," or "philosophy" are not going to understand what I'm up to.  Indeed, if we subjected Sextus Empiricus to modern, Western conceptions of skepticism, even one of the most recognized skeptics in the Western tradition would not turn out to be a skeptic!  I'm tempted to say that spending some time with the contemporary literature on Hellenistic skepticism is the key to understanding what I'm up to, but that may be overstating my case even if it's part of how I got here.  Also, I am in no way saying that the three pillars are identical to Hellenistic skepticism even if they are a lot closer to that than modern skepticism.

So, that's enough for now.  Next up: chapters 2-5!  Thanks, Malcolm!