Reality, Religion, and Passion: Indian and Western Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami | Date: 28 April 2011, 08:34
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Reality, Religion, and Passion: Indian and Western Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami (Studies in Comparative Philosophy)
By Jessica Frazier
* Publisher: Lexington Books
* Number Of Pages: 290
* Publication Date: 2008-11-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0739124404
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780739124406
Product Description:
Radical doubt about the truths that govern life has posed a problem for thinkers in many different cultures and periods. This study uncovers the solutions offered by a post-modern Western thinker, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and an early modern Indian thinker, Rupa Gosvami, each of whom offers a renewed post-sceptical vision of a revitalized life that is firmly rooted in the transcendental truths of reality.
Introduction:
The word for belief, which has become so technical a word, is etymologically
linked to the language of desire, love, and libido.1 Yet we are increasingly
coming to see it once again in terms not only of rational assertion,
like a scientific theory waiting to be verified, but also of the life lived in the
reality that the assertion describes, a rich web of relations and values woven
into the fabric of truth. This book aims to contribute to the contemporary
reformulation of “reality” and “belief” in ways that alter the very landscape
of the lives that we lead, linking them to ontologies that acknowledge the
place of the passions. The goal is to suggest ways to safeguard meaningfulness
in the face of scepticism, applying a heightened self-critical awareness
to the foundations of our beliefs so that we can—as Badiou puts it—discover
“a figure of our destiny in relation to the destiny of being itself.”2
In the first of the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke poetically portrays the
ideal human situation as that of the bereaved lover whose desire is most
fully actualised where there is no hope of fulfilment: when the beloved has
died. “[T]hose forsaken . . . ,” he writes, “. . . you found/so far beyond the
requited in loving. Begin/anew their never-attainable praise.”3 Here the very
hope of fulfilment is denied, and Rilke advocates the perpetuated, unsatisfiable
desire of which the world, after all, appears to consist.4
In the G??tagovinda, Jayadeva tells the story of how the amorous Goddess
Ra?dha?, tormented by her fickle lover’s absence, weeps deliriously for his return.
However, when her anxious friends do indeed deliver him to her side,
she continues to cry for him in a fever of longing even as he embraces her.
She cannot be comforted by his presence. Krishna, her divine lover, is sadly
led away and Ra?dha? is worshipped and exalted; the intensity of her love has
transcended its object.
Each of these stories, the first an inspirational text for Hans-Georg Gadamer,
and the second a canonical text in the religious tradition to which
Ru?pa Gosva?mi belonged, describes a kind of “belief in” or “desire for” that
does not follow the conventional economies of absence, presence, and
fulfilment. In each the absence of the desired object inversely correlates
with a heightened passion for it, such that the fulfilment of the original
desire gradually becomes subsumed to this flourishing of passion. Desire
becomes a gift, disassociated from its fulfilment, and the truest love for the
object becomes allied with a philosophy of infinite deferral. Thus each also
implies something about the relation of religious beliefs to the reality of
their objects; these are stories with implications at every level (commonsensical,
linguistic, ontological, religious) for the relation of our selves, our
thoughts, and our hopes to whatever is our touchstone for “truth.”.................................................
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