On hunting birds and God

I just came across Galway Kinnell’s beautiful To Christ Our Lord on this blog post by Alan Jacobs:

The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust

And wolves floated lightfooted on the land

Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen;

Inside snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted

A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.

Snow had sealed the windows; candles lit

The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace chilled

The cooked bird, being long-winded and the room cold.

During the words a boy thought, is it fitting

To eat this creature killed on the wing?

He had killed it himself, climbing out

Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas dawn,

The fallen snow swirling and the snowfall gone,

Heard its throat scream as the gunshot scattered,

Watched it drop, and fished from the snow the dead.

He had not wanted to shoot. The sound

Of wings beating into the hushed air

Had stirred his love, and his fingers

Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,

Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.

Now the grace praised his wicked act. At its end

The bird on the plate

Stared at his stricken appetite.

There had been nothing to do but surrender,

To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.

At night on snowshoes on the drifting field

He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?

The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.

Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,

The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

Reading it on the first clear night after the first real snowfall of this winter, I could not help but think of the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa and of the birth of poetry in Sanskrit. The great seer (and composer of the Rāmāyaṇa) Vālmīki witnesses a hunter killing one of a pair of birds mating. Appalled, and overtaken by grief, he curses the hunter with what forms the first poem in Sanskrit:

mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |

yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam ||

I wrote about this poem and about its ingenious re-reading by the medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator Govindarāja earlier on this blog.

The moral lessons of The Hobbit

After having defended Peter Jackson’s Hobbit from some of its most common critiques, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s Hobbit, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.

The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!

But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. 

A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:

• that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
• that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
• that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book

I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:

• that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
• that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)

My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.

Boredom

When asked to define “boredom” recently, I came up with this ‘masterpiece’:

Boredom: an external symptom of the deeper inability to be at peace with oneself, characterized by restlessness and by discontent at the inability of external stimuli to permanently fill a soul-shaped void in one’s life. 

(Yes, I did tag this wisdom. Tags don’t always mean what they mean; their vācyârtha can be overriden by a lakṣyârtha, and sometimes they suggest a vyaṅgyârtha over and above and/or alongside that.)

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

These lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses are recited by M (played by Dame Judi Dench) in the recent James Bond release, Skyfall. The whole poem, available here, is gloriously recited here by Sir Lewis Casson.

Alfred Lord Tennyson - Ulysses - Lewis Casson by poetictouch

Appayya Dīkṣita on pratīpam (“upstream”)

Continuing our series on arthâlaṅkāras from Appayya Dīkṣita’s Kuvalayānanda, let’s look at the figure called pratīpam. It’s usually called “reversal” or “contradiction” or, perhaps most accurately, “inversion”, but I’ve chosen the etymologically accurate “upstream” instead. “Against the flow”, “against the grain” would all fit in with what the name means. But why is it used here?

[pratīpam]

[1]
pratīpam upamānasyôpameyatva-prakalpanam |
tval-locana-samaṃ padmaṃ tvad-vaktra-sadṛśo vidhuḥ ||

[2]
anyôpameya-lābhena varṇyasyânādaraś ca tat |
alaṃ garveṇa te vaktra kāntyā candro bhavādṛśaḥ ||

[3]
varṇyôpameya-lābhena tathânyasyâpy anādaraḥ |
kaḥ kraurya-darpas te mṛtyo tvat-tulyāḥ santi hi striyaḥ ||

[4]
varṇyenânyasyôpamāyā aniṣpatti-vacaś ca tat |
mithyā-vādo hi mugdhâkṣi tvan-mukhâbhaṃ kilâmbujam ||

[5]
pratīpam upamānasya kaimarthyam api manyate |
dṛṣṭaṃ ced vadanaṃ tanvyāḥ kiṃ padmena kim indunā ||

The figure called pratīpa has five different, but related, definitions:
[1] When the yardstick of comparison is imagined to be the thing being described. Thus: “the lotus is like your eye; the moon like your face.” Here the natural order of things (i.e., the thing being described is compared to the yardstick) is inverted.

[2] When the thing being described is treated with contempt because of another (i.e., the yardstick) being obtained. Thus: “Enough of your arrogance, o Face; the moon is your rival in terms of beauty.”

[3] When the other (i.e., the yardstick) is treated with contempt because of the thing being described. Thus: “What’s is your cruelty, Death? Women are your rivals.”

[4] When the impossibility of the other being a yardstick is established by the thing being described. Thus: “O girl with lovely eyes, it’s totally false that the lotus is like your face.” (This essentially comes down to negating an assertion of the type [1].)

[5] When the pointlessness of any yardstick is indicated. Thus: “when the slender girl’s face is seen, who cares about the lotus? who cares about the moon?”

Auxiliary verbs, a roadmap

Nothing of substance is discussed here. I just want to collect hyperlinks to all of my posts on auxiliary verbs in one place.

We began with auxiliary verbs in English.

We then turned to French, beginning with an overview of the French verbal system, and then turned to compound verbs, and finally concluded with a session on the vagaries of the French passive.

Finally, we moved to German, beginning with an overview of the German verbal system, and then finally getting down to auxiliaries, modal and non-modal, in German.

Fin.

Auxiliary verbs, in German, part two

Too long have I tarried; I shall finish this series ere dawn.

So what are the various forms that a German verb can take? We’re talking here not of specific conjugations but of different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (usually abbreviated tam). Like  English, these are usually listed in infinitive form, but the sequence of infinitives in German is the reverse of the English sequence. In addition to the Präsens and Präteritum, we will see forms generated from (a) the non-modal complex infinitive, (b) the future infinitive, and from it, (c) the future perfect infinitive.

Participial Past Tense

The non-modal complex infinitive takes one of two forms: 
past participle sein, or past participle haben.

Like French, but unlike modern English (if you exclude Tolkien-esque “Out of the Great Sea unto Middle-earth I am come” sentences), German uses both sein and haben as auxiliary verbs to give rise to the non-modal complex infinitive. Verbs strictly take one or the other (more or less—but this being German, less rather than more).

When haben is conjugated in the Präsens, the verbal form so generated is the Perfekt; when it is conjugated in the Präteritum, the verbal form so generated is the Plusquamperfekt. 

The highest reality of all

vaṃśī-vibhūṣita-karān nava-nīradâbhāt

pītâmbarād aruṇa-bimba-phalâdharôṣṭhāt |

pūrṇêndu-sundara-mukhād aravinda-netrāt

kṛṣṇāt paraṃ kim api tattvam ahaṃ na jāne ||

This is an oft-recited verse in praise of Kṛṣṇa, but I stumbled across Pandit Jasraj’s version of it for the first time recently. The verse is quite straightforward, but possesses great beauty in its simplicity. Here is an attempt at a translation.

A hand ornamented by a bamboo-flute,
A complexion like a fresh monsoon rain-cloud,
A yellow garment,
A lower lip, red as the red bimba fruit,
A face, beautiful like the full moon,
A pair of eyes, like lotuses

        ——greater than that Kṛṣṇa,
        there’s simply nothing I know.



I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this verse was by the great Mughal-era Advaita scholar Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. Digging a little deeper, I found this verse to be part of his upasaṃhāra (conclusion) to his Gūḍârtha-dīpikā (“Lamp for Hidden Meanings”), a commentary on Śaṅkarācārya’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. It turns out that Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, in addition to / despite his Advaitic leanings (depending on which way you swing), was a fervent devotee of Kṛṣṇa and held that bhakti to Kṛṣṇa was a path fully equal to, and distinct from, the renunciatory path leading to the Advaitic ideal of kaivalya. 

A dialogue between Man and God

This is another one of the songs from the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack of the movie Bab'Aziz, interleaving verses in Bengali (from a Baul song, according to a friend) and verses in Persian by Muhammad Iqbal. I don’t know any Bengali, but I can translate the Persian here. It’s part of his Payām-i Mashriq, a collection of Persian poems that is among the last works composed by South Asians in Persian that achieved renown in Iran and Afghanistan.




The original actually begins with three verses in the voice of God, after which follow the three verses that are sung in the video by Salar Aghili, in the voice of Man.

خدا:

جهان را ز یک آب و گل آفریدم

تو ایران و تاتار و زنگ آفریدی

من از خاک پولاد ناب آفریدم

تو شمشیر و تیر و تفنگ آفریدی

تبر آفریدی نهال چمن را

قفس ساختی طائر نغمه‌زن را

“The most beautiful verse in Sanskrit”

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, towards its end, cites a verse from Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, accompanied by the Merton & Moussaief translation. The original Sanskrit reads:

ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdān

paryutsuko bhavati yat sukhito ’pi jantuḥ |

tac cetasā smarati nūnam abodha-pūrvam

bhāva-sthirāṇi jananântara-sauhṛdāni ||

In the words of Merton & Moussaief:

Even the man who is happy glimpses something

Or a thread of sound touches him

And his heart overflows with a longing

he does not recognize

Then it must be that he is remembering

a place out of reach people he loved

In a life before this their pattern

Still there in him waiting

I would translate it slightly differently:

    Seeing something beautiful,

    Hearing something sweet,

He begins to yearn for something—

although he was happy before this.

Surely he remembers something,

if only subconsciously:

        Loves from lost lives

        Indelibly imprinted in Being

We may call it nostalgia; the Germans, Sehnsucht; the Portuguese, saudade; the Persians, دلتنگی; Proust, a remembrance of things past that draws you into une recherche du temps perdu.  Kālidāsa sees in this form of recognition (which, not-so-incidentally, is fundamental to the plotline of the Śākuntalam) something deeply and fundamentally part of being human. Our old loves are never really lost; if they were true loves, sauhṛdāni, minglings of hearts, then they transform who we are for eternity. (And for Kālidāsa, it really is eternity!) They are fixed points within the flux of Being—within human beings, and within Being itself, shot through with human experiences.

What Kālidāsa does not say in this one verse is what we should do with this insight. We may choose to cling on to these points of stability, and to thus anchor ourselves in the past. Or we may choose to cast ourselves into the flow of being, while nonetheless retaining our knowledge of these fixed points, using them like stars to help us navigate uncharted waters.

Are tangent vectors contravariant or covariant?

Correct but annoying answer I: Neither! They simply are.

Correct but annoying answer II: Both! It depends on the person you ask.

More to come on this once I find the time to write up stuff in LaTeX.

UPDATE:
No, I haven’t found time to write things up in LaTeX yet. But I did come up with a great analogy to explain why CBAA-II says, “it depends.”

The core idea underlying the difference between the two is that of active transformations versus passive transformations. What that means is something I’ll get into later. For now, just the analogy:

If I’m wearing jeans that are too short for my legs, there are two ways to understand why this might be the case (other than the possibility that I have very poor taste in clothing, of course):

1. I may have had a growth spurt overnight. (This would be the active transformation as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the passive transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)
2. My jeans might have shrunk after going through the washer-dryer. (This would be the passive transformation, as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the active transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)

My legs thus covary with my height (assuming I grow evenly, of course), and contravary with my jeans’ length. Are my legs covariant or contravariant? It depends on whether the transformation is active or passive!

“A Hymn to Śrī”: The Śrī Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika

It is said that Śrī Vedānta Deśika composed his famous Śrī Stuti when a pious but poor young man came to him for help: he wanted to get married, and needed some money to convince his father-in-law-to-be that he was worth it. No sooner had Śrī Vedānta Deśika finished reciting the Śrī Stuti than a shower of gold coins poured down from the heavens, making the young man rich and making Śrī Vedānta Deśika even more famous than he had been.

What follows is a first draft at translating this most beautiful of hymns praising the Goddess Śrī. All that is good in this comes from the beauty of the original; whatever isn’t, stems from my own deficiencies. May I be forgiven my myriad faults!

|| Śrīḥ ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,

        blessed with śrī,

        saffron-maned lion among poets and philosophers,

        teacher of the Vedānta—

may he be enshrined in my heart forever!

|| 1 || 

Magnificent beyond all measure,

Auspicious even to all things auspicious,

Resting on the chest of Madhu’s conqueror

Ornamenting it by Her lustre,

Felicity personified for all people

        who seek material and spiritual prosperity—

        to you, o Śrī, do I,

                who have no other refuge,

        surrender!

Appayya Dīkṣita on śleṣa (“paronomasia”)

We continue with our examination of select arthâlaṅkāras from the Kuvalayānanda of Appayya Dīkṣita. This time, we look at one of the greatest features of Sanskrit: śleṣa.

[XXVI. śleṣa]

nānârtha-saṃśrayaḥ śleṣo varṇyâvarṇyôbhayâspadaḥ |

[XXVI.1. varṇyâspada-śleṣa]
sarvadomādhavaḥ pāyāt sa yogaṃgām adīdharat ||
[XXVI.2. avarṇyâspada-śleṣa]
añjena tvan-mukhaṃ tulyaṃ hariṇāhitasaktinā |
[XXVI.3. ubhayâspada-śleṣa]
uccarad-bhūri-kīlālaḥ śuśubhe vāhinī-patiḥ ||

Appayya Dīkṣita on atiśayokti (“hyperbole”)

Continuing the Kuvalayānanda series: atiśayôkti , usually translated as “hyperbole”.

[XIII. atiśayôkti]

[XIII.1.a rūpakâtiśayôkti]
rūpakâtiśayôktiḥ syān nigīryâdhyavasānataḥ |
paśya nīlôtpala-dvandvān niḥsaranti śitāḥ śarāḥ ||

[XIII.1.b sâpahnuvā rūpakâtiśayôkti]
yady apahnuti-garbhatvaṃ saîva sâpahnavā matā |
tvat-sūktiṣu sudhā rājan bhrāntāḥ paśyanti tāṃ vidhau ||

[XIII.2. bhedakâtiśayôkti]
bhedakâtiśayôktis tu tasyaîvânyatva-varṇanam |
anyad evâsya gāmbhīryam anyad dhairyaṃ mahī-pateḥ ||

[XIII.3. sambandhâtiśayôkti]
sambandhâtiśayôktiḥ syād ayoge yoga-kalpanam |
saudhâgrāṇi purasyâsya spṛśanti vidhu-maṇḍalam ||

[XIII.4. asambandhâtiśayôkti]
yoge ’py ayogo ’sambandhâtiśayôktir itîryate |
tvayi dātari rājêndra svar-drumān nâdriyāmahe ||

[XIII.5. akramâtiśayôkti]
akramâtiśayôktiḥ syāt sahatve hetu-kāryayoḥ |
āliṅganti samaṃ deva jyāṃ śarāś ca parāś ca te ||

[XIII.6. capalâtiśayôkti]
capalâtiśayôktis tu kārye hetu-prasaktije |
yāsyāmîty udite tanvyā valayo ’bhavad ūrmikā ||

[XIII.7. atyantâtiśayôkti]
atyantâtiśayôktis tat-paurvâparya-vyatikrame |
agre māno gataḥ paścād anunītā priyeṇa sā ||

Appayya Dīkṣita on utprekṣā (“poetic fancy”)

More Kuvalayānanda here. (Earlier figures of speech: apahnuti and rūpaka.)

[XII. utprekṣā]

sambhāvanā syād utprekṣā vastu-hetu-phalâtmanā |
uktânuktâspadâdyâtra siddhâsiddhâspade pare ||

[XII.1. vastûtprekṣa / svarūpôtprekṣā]

[XII.1.a. uktâspadā vastûtprekṣā]
dhūma-stomaṃ tamaḥ śaṅke kokī-viraha-śuṣmaṇām |

[XII.1.b. anuktâspadā vastûtprekṣā]
limpatîva tamo’ṅgāni varṣatîvâñjanaṃ nabhaḥ ||

[XII.2. hetûtprekṣā]

[XII.2.a. siddhâspadā hetûtprekṣā]
raktau tavâṅghrī mṛdulau bhuvi vikṣepaṇād dhruvam |

[XII.2.b. asiddhâspadā hetûtprekṣā]
tvan-mukhâbhêcchayā nūnaṃ padmair vairāyate śaśī ||

[XII.3. phalôtprekṣā]

[XII.3.a. siddhâspadā phalôtprekṣā]
madhyaḥ kiṃ kucayor dhṛtyai baddhaḥ kanaka-dāmabhiḥ |

[XII.3.b. asiddhâspadā phalôtprekṣā]
prāyo ’ñjaṃ tvat-padenaîkyaṃ prāptuṃ toye tapasyati ||

Kultur und Kampf

This BBC article by philosopher John Gray begins with an autosummary: “Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony.” It then quotes the character Harry Lime from The Third Man:

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Provocative, but clearly false, as Gray himself admits. It wasn’t the violence of the Borgias that produced great art, but their patronage. (To what extent their patronage of the arts was a consequence of their murderous regime is harder to analyze.) There have been reigns of violence that have produced no art of great consequence—think of Mafia-dominated lands, or of the devastation of Khorasan by the Mongol armies. It’s clear that the link between great cultural products and violence is not as obvious as Lime (or Gray) claims.

But that’s not the most interesting part of this article—after all, Gray himself chooses to back off from Lime’s rhetoric after using it as a hook to draw people in. Rather, what is interesting is Gray’s conclusion: “Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony.”

However, this “conclusion” is not warranted by Gray’s arguments. What looks like a careful argument is in fact a reinforcement of an old myth. Gray’s vision of culture as the cream bubbling atop a writhing, churning, chaotic conflict parallels the stereotypical picture of a lonely artist whose whole œuvre is a cri de cœur that pierces society’s carefully constructed façade. Both of these ideas are Romantic myths. And like all powerful myths they possess a kernel of truth and have deep roots extending into Greek culture: the Promethean myth of a man stealing primordial technology from the gods, and the notion of the agon, the contest in which two men struggled with each other, physically and mentally, for victory. The Greek conception of debate as agonistic and the Greek idea of (technological?) progress as something achieved by an act of violence have survived down to this day in myths such as the one Gray sketches out here. (I realized I’m treating the Greeks superficially here, and know that Greek culture was more complex than this.)

The reason I call this a myth is because Indic and Chinese civilizations (at least what little I know of the latter) take very different approaches to the question of whether culture emerges from conflict or harmony. Again, the point is not that culture can or cannot arise out of conflict—it is clear that it does sometimes, and it doesn’t on other occasions—but rather that “civilizations” have different attitudes towards the relationship between culture and conflict, and hold different myths dear to themselves that influence their perceptions of the world.

The Chinese case is rather interesting. The Hundred Schools of Thought flowered during the Warring States period when the political scene was a bloody mess, and it may in fact be possible to argue that at least some intellectual developments were in direct response to the chaos. Nevertheless, it is my limited understanding that Chinese philosophers have not normally followed a confrontational model of debate. Furthermore, the Tang and Song courts witnessed the flowering of Chinese art, literature, and philosophy (well, at least of the Neo-Confucian persuasion), and these were largely in response to sustained courtly patronage of these pursuits. But regardless of what the political scene was like, the story told is one of harmony, both within the individual and at the social level.

The Indic case also differs from the Western one. While Indic philosophy does parallel the Greek in largely following an agonistic model, the worldviews of the literati typically sought out harmony and resolution. The rasa theorists saw artistic appreciation as evoking stable emotional states in an appropriately receptive audience, and at least some theorists (Abhinavagupta? I’m rusty on this) thought that the different rasas were all underpinned by the śānta-rasa, a state of calm or repose. Again, I’m not claiming that the conflict model is invalid here, only that the ultimate emphasis of the Indic system is rather different. 

The same is also true of those works of Indic authors that may have had political messages that we may not be receptive to today (such as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa), where too an ultimately harmonious relationship between ruler and universe, between text and context, is envisioned and enacted. To the extent that generalizations can be valid, it can be generally stated that Indic authors largely saw themselves as working in harmony with their tradition, and saw the purpose of their works not as critiques of their societies but rather as representations of it that would harmonize it with the vision of the ideal society that Indic intellectuals held. (At some point in the future, I shall try to stretch this point into a discussion of Bollywood.)

Ultimately, the point is not that Gray is right or wrong: it is that he remains within the bounds of a particular myth that is not universally accepted or acceptable. Other civilizations have looked at similar events and processes and drawn very different lessons from them, which have shaped their attitudes towards the world and their cultural products in very different ways. Vive la différence!

“Albion’s Seed”: Notions of liberty in the US

The eminent American historian David Hackett Fischer has written colossal tomes that are daunting to even look at. His classic Albion’s Seed makes the argument at great length that modern American culture has been fundamentally shaped by four successive waves of migrations from different parts of the British Isles. These migrations brought with them their own distinct “folkways”, which took root in particular parts of the (eastern) United States and in particular strata of society. The book is vast, but this excerpt from the book contains short summaries of the ways in which the four folkways differed on the notion of liberty. I shall summarize the four summaries here so as not to overtax my poor brain.

In Fischer’s own words:

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World. 

The first of the migrations was that of the Puritans, from eastern England to Massachusetts in the early 17th century. Their folkway was marked by what Fischer calls “ordered liberty”, and indeed used the word “liberty” to refer to four different ideas:

• collective liberty: the ability of a community to make its own decisions
• individual liberties: particular rights granted to individuals or groups that liberated them from otherwise binding constraints
• “soul liberty”: the “freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other”.
• “freedom from the tyranny of circumstance”: guaranteeing everybody some level of protection from the worst that life could throw at them

The second migration, almost contemporaneous with the first, was that of a Royalist élite from southern  England to Virginia, who were accompanied by a large group of indentured servants. The most common notion of liberty here was a sort of “hegemonic liberty” that was available only to free-born Englishmen, which gave them not just dominion over themselves but also over others. It was thus possible to reconcile ideas of liberty with the practice of slavery in such parts.

The third was that of the Quakers from the northern Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic, particularly around the Philadelphia area. This was a later migration than that of the Puritans, and thus exhibited a very different understanding of liberty. For the Quakers, what mattered most was “reciprocal liberty” that rested on their deep faith in “liberty of conscience”. As the Quakers had suffered greatly in England for their faith, they were willing to use the power of government to establish religious liberties in their communities in the Americas so as to prevent such tyranny from arising again. Their principle of reciprocity—fundamentally different from the Virginian Royalists’ hierarchical, hegemonic liberty—drew inspiration from the Christian Golden Rule. 

The fourth migration was that of the Scots-Irish (which seems a little bit too much of a catch-all to me, but then again I know nothing of this stuff), who came from different borderlands of Great Britain: the border between England and Scotland, the border between Northern Ireland and what is today the Republic of Ireland, and so on. These regions of the British Isles did not have strong centralized institutions, and the people living there were accustomed to “anarchic violence”. It was thus “natural” for them to bring to the Americas an abiding love of “natural liberty” accompanied by a deep mistrust of cultural outsiders. 

Kṛṣṇa and the “field of vision”

cetaś cañcalatāṃ tyaja priya-sakhi vrīḍe na māṃ pīḍaya
bhrātar muñca dṛśau nimeṣa bhagavan kāma kṣaṇaṃ kṣamyatām |
barhaṃ mūrdhani karṇayoḥ kuvalayaṃ vaṃśaṃ dadhānaḥ kare
so ’yaṃ locana-gocaro bhavati me dāmodaraḥ sundaraḥ ||

Heart, stop fluttering;
Dear friend, stop torturing me!
Brother, let me see, just for a moment;
Cupid, spare me, just for a second:

        A peacock’s feather in His hair,
        water-lilies in His ears,
        bamboo flute in His hands—

He’s all I can see,
        Dāmodara the handsome.

This gorgeous verse, from the Rasamañjarī of Bhānudatta, has also been translated by Sheldon Pollock, although I cannot find my copy of the book right now.  What I love most about this verse—and what I find impossible to translate—is the compound locana-gocara. 

In terms of pure sound: its two halves are almost exactly identical prosodically, differing only in the third and sixth syllables (and that too only because the sixth must bear the added weight of the -sU case ending). Furthermore, the repetition of the -oca- sounds makes it delightfully delicate to recite. (Think “cellar door”.)

And in terms of meaning too, the two halves of the word work beautifully. The first, locana, can mean either the seeing organ, “eye”, or the sense itself, “eyesight”. It is also connected with such meanings as “illumination” and “lighting up”. The second, gocara, is even more fascinating. Etymologically, it is in fact a compound, go-cara, literally meaning “cow-pasture”. Through some considerable semantic drift, it comes to mean “field”, first literally and then metaphorically, encompassing such meanings as “scope”, “range”, sometimes even “topic”. A smart translation for locana-gocara would therefore be something like “range of vision” (taking into account the associations of “range” with cattle rearing).

But in the particular context of this verse, I really wanted something simpler. Kṛṣṇa isn’t just in the nāyikā’s range of vision, He becomes it. He is the pasture in which the cows that are her eyes roam, coming to rest at a few particularly succulent grazing spots—His peacock-feather, His ornaments, His flute. He is, simply put, all she can see.

“Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”

Michael Polanyi: chemist and philosopher, brother to Karl Polanyi, historian and sociologist. One of Michael Polanyi’s important shorter pieces is this one, called “Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”, published in 1970.

Some of the interesting bits that emerge (no pun intended) from this work:

I introduce the concept of hierarchical levels. A machine, for example, cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Machines can go wrong and break down—something that does not happen to laws of physics and chemistry. 

In fact, a machine can be smashed and the laws of physics and chemistry will go on operating unfailingly in the parts remaining after the machine ceases to exist. Engineering principles create the structure of the machine which harnesses the laws of physics and chemistry for the purposes the machine is designed to serve. Physics and chemistry cannot reveal the practical principles of design or co-ordination which are the structure of the machine.

And:

The more intangible the matter in the range of these hierarchies, the more meaningful it is. This is my criticism of all redactionist, mechanistic programs founded on the Laplacean ideal which identifies ultimate knowledge with an atomic topography, the lowest level of the universe.

Most provocative:

I have elaborated in schematic fashion a multiple hierarchy which leads on to ever more meaningful levels. Each higher level is more intangible than the one below it and also enriched in subtlety. And as these more intangible levels are understood a steadily deeper understanding of life and man is gained. These understandings constitute transcendence in the world. 

Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception—our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence.

I must confess that these fragments of his essay, pulled out of context, do not convey its full meaning. The whole thing is worth reading.

Annambhaṭṭa on svârtha- and parârthânumāna

The Naiyāyikas, like every other philosophical “school” in India with the notable exception of the Cārvākas, accept that anumāna, the method of inference, is capable of giving rise to jñāna, an episode of knowledge—specifically, anumiti-jñāna, an inferential knowledge-episode. (Loosely translating jñāna as “knowledge” misrepresents the Naiyāyika position.) Interestingly, the Naiyāyikas hold that there are two kinds of anumāna: svârthânumāna (inferring for oneself) and parârthânumāna (literally, “inferring for another”). The latter makes no sense in English—how can one infer something for somebody else? It may make more sense to think of parârthânumāna as “proof” or “demonstration”.

Here is what Annambhaṭṭa has to say on the matter.

anumānaṃ dvividham — (1) svârthaṃ (2) parârthaṃ ca ||


(1) svârthaṃ svânumiti-hetuḥ, tathā hi svayam eva bhūyo darśanena “yatra yatra dhūmas tatra tatrâgnir” iti mahānasâdau vyāptiṃ gṛhītvā parvata-samīpaṃ tad-gate câgnau sandihānaḥ parvate dhūmaṃ paśyan vyāptiṃ smarati — “yatra yatra dhūmas tatra tatra vahnir” iti  | tad-anantaraṃ “vahni-vyāpya-dhūmavān ayaṃ parvataḥ” iti jñānam utpadyate | ayam eva liṅga-parāmarśa ity ucyate | tasmāt “parvato vahnimān” iti jñānânumitir utpadyate, tad etat svârthânumānam ||

(2) yat tu svayaṃ dhūmād agnim anumāya paraṃ prati bodhayituṃ pañcâvayava-vākyaṃ prayujyate tat parârthânumānam | yathā — 
(a) parvato vahnimān [pratijñā]
(b) dhūmavattvād [hetu]
(c) yo yo dhūmavān sa vahnimān yathā mahānasam [udāharaṇa]
(d) tathā câyaṃ [upanaya]
(e) tasmāt tathêti [nigamana] | 
anena pratipāditāl liṅgāt paro ’py agniṃ pratipadyate || 

Annambhaṭṭa on the types of perception

nidhāya hṛdi viśvêśaṃ vidhāya guru-vandanam |

bālānāṃ sukha-bodhāya kriyate tarka-saṅgrahaḥ ||

How do we perceive the world around us? What sort of semantic structure does the content of these perceptions possess? The Tarkasaṅgraha or Bālagādādharī of Annambhaṭṭa, a 17th century introduction to the school of logic known as Navya Nyāya, attempts to answer these questions, among many others, at a level suitable to “children”. (Looks like they used to have smart kids back in those days.) Annambhaṭṭa presents six kinds of relations between the senses of perception and objects of perception to account for the various features of our perceptual experiences. This sextet is a tradition that extends over a millennium before him to Udayana. (For what it’s worth, this sextet was criticized by some very prominent Naiyāyikas like Gaṅgeśa and Raghunātha Śiromaṇi.)

If that makes no sense, fear not. Navya Nyāya is regarded as impenetrably technical hair-splitting by most Sanskrit paṇḍits, who are themselves usually regarded by others as engaging in impenetrably technical hair-splitting. As a result, English translations of Navya Nyāya texts flourish in a special circle of Indological hell where even furiously sleeping colorless green ideas fear to tread.

Nevertheless, I shall try to translate this short excerpt from the Tarkasaṅgraha into English, fully aware that I resemble the man who wishes to speak in an assembly without knowledge of grammar, who in turn resembles the man who wishes to restrain a rutting elephant with a rope made from a lotus-stalk (śabda-śāstram anadhītya yaḥ pumān vaktum icchati vacaḥ sabhântare / bandhum icchati vane madôtkaṭaṃ kuñjaraṃ kamala-nāla-tantunā). If nothing else, my translation will show how wordy an English translation of Navya Nyāya will be if it wants to resemble idiomatic English. I make no claims of correctness or accuracy of translation. This is what I understand of Navya Nyāya for now.

[For those who actually want to know what objects of perception are in Navya Nyāya, I recommend Daniel H. H. Ingalls’ classic Materials for the Study of Navya Nyāya Logic, as well as Sibajiban Bhattacharya’s critical review of this book. I should add that I haven’t really read Ingalls as closely as I ought to, but am relying on āpta-vacana in recommending this book.]

pratyakṣa-jñāna-hetur indriyârtha-sannikarṣaḥ ṣaḍ-vidhaḥ (1a) saṃyogaḥ (1b) saṃyukta-samavāyaḥ (1c) saṃyukta-samaveta-samavāyaḥ (2a) samavāyaḥ (2b) samaveta-samavāyaḥ (3) viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣya-bhāvaś cêti ||

1. 
   
1. cakṣuṣā ghaṭa-pratyakṣa-janane, saṃyogaḥ sannikarṣaḥ ||
2. ghaṭa-rūpa-pratyakṣa-janane, saṃyukta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: cakṣuḥ-saṃyukte ghaṭe rūpasya samavāyāt ||
3. rūpatva-sāmānya-pratyakṣe, saṃyukta-samaveta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: cakṣuḥ-saṃyukte ghaṭe rūpaṃ samavetaṃ, tatra rūpatvasya samavāyāt ||
2. 
   
1. śrotreṇa śabda-sākṣāt-kāre, samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: karṇa-vivara-varty-ākāśasya śrotratvāc, chabdasyâ ’’kāśa-guṇatvād, guṇa-guṇinoś ca samavāyāt ||
2. śabdatva-sākṣāt-kāre, samaveta-samavāyaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: śrotra-samavete śabde śabdatvasya samavāyāt ||
3. abhāva-pratyakṣe, viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣya-bhāvaḥ sannikarṣaḥ: “ghaṭâbhāvavad bhū-talam” ity atra cakṣuḥ-samyukte bhū-tale ghaṭâbhāvasya viśeṣaṇatvāt ||

evaṃ sannikarṣa-ṣaṭka-janyaṃ jñānaṃ tat-karaṇam indriyaṃ tasmād indriyaṃ pratyakṣa-pramāṇam iti siddham ||

Should conservatives conserve the environment?

The title of this post is obviously a leading question—conserving the environment is a good thing ceteris paribus, although there can (and should) be reasonable debates on where to draw the line. For a variety of reasons, the words “conservative” and “liberal” mean things in the US today that they have historically almost never meant—signifying membership of one tribe or the other. Call them Team C and Team L, if you will. It is thus entirely possible for a self-identified American “conservative” to call for the shutting down of the Environmental Protection Agency and for increased oil prospecting in national parks. Although there may be good reasons for these two positions, neither of them seem to be in resonance with the attitudes of old-school conservatives like Sir Edmund Burke. Indeed, there seems to be a near-total alignment of the American environmental movement with Team L, which makes it almost impossible for a supporter of Team C to express any conservationist attitudes at all.

This is why I found the article “A Righter Shade of Green” by Roger Scruton interesting. Some of it is sanctimonious, much of it is written from within the tribalist mindset, but some of its arguments are worth pondering over.

Political solutions represent agreements among the living, but our real problems are transgenerational. At present, we are externalizing our costs not to people who can complain but to unborn people who can’t. Democratic politics, Burke and Chesterton pointed out, has an inbuilt tendency to disenfranchise the unborn and the dead. 

So what is to stop us from externalizing our costs onto future generations? Within our own families, we recoil from doing such a thing. I don’t want to dump the costs of my life on my son, even though I shall be dead when he feels them. Nor would I wish my grandchildren to pay the price of my selfishness. 

It is here that I think we Anglophone conservatives can show our relevance. The common law of England developed, through the branch known as equity, a concept that has no real equivalent in Napoleonic or Roman legal systems: the concept of the trust. Trusteeship is a form of property in which the legal owner has only duties, and all rights are transferred to, and “held in trust for,” the beneficiary … This form of ownership, and the moral idea contained in it, ought to be regarded as defining the conservative approach. We don’t solve environmental problems by abandoning our attachment to private property or free enterprise, but we can make sure that these notions are shaped by the spirit of trusteeship.

Scruton makes the point that, since modern societies are “societies of strangers”, erosion of trust and of social capital in general makes it very hard for people to adopt attitudes other than self-oriented individualism. The cultivation of an attitude (and of the institution) of trust offers the sort of motivation that human beings are naturally responsive to.

Scruton’s perspective seems close to Wendell Berry’s, at least insofar as both see the structure of our society as the fundamental problem, and think that the pre-moderns got it right to the extent that their communities were structured around trust and a natural sense of belonging. Thought-provoking though Scruton’s piece is, it is unclear to me how he envisions society re-cultivating the attitude of trust. But что делать?