Sankara, Levinas and the Critical Appropriation of Tradition- With Special Reference to Ethics and Apophasis

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With suspicion cast on the modernist confidence that everything meaningful can be clearly and unambiguously expressed in language, a way of speaking about absenting realities that condition presence and meaning has come to light. Post-modernist claim that one need to go beyond humanism and modernism to understand the larger perspective to 'what is' or 'that is'. In the classical Indian philosophy such transcendental attempt was made by Adi Sankaracharya. Emmanuel Levinas in the contemporary times too participated in this revival by speaking about the Other. For Sankara, the end of negative dialectics is silence, but a silence that turns positive by the radically transformative realization that all beings are nothing but the Self and in his commentary on Bhagavad Gita explores this transformation as disinterested, selfless action in compassion for all beings, human and non-human. This book envisages the end of religion as social and ecological egalitarianism, and ethical apophasis as central to the Advaitic vision just as it is for Levinas. The unification of difference in identity consciousness disrobes modernist human-centrism of its pride of place in our thinking and introduces equality and wellbeing of all beings, human and non-human is the aim of the book.

Dr. Sindhu Poudyal is an Alumnus of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay and at present, serving as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central University Tripura. Her areas of expertise are in classical Indian philosophy, Contemporary Western philosophy, Phenomenology, Methods in philosophical inquiry, Ethics and Hermeneutics. Her areas of interest in philosophy are much wider and confined not only to theoretical philosophy but also constantly working to make philosophical inquiry therapeutic for human understanding. Her interest in spirituality, mysticism and human consciousness inspired her to take up research on human situatedness and conflict resolution through the application of philosophical methods.

Continental philosophy has been witnessing a complex revival of negative theology in the twentieth century. With suspicion cast on the modernist confidence that everything meaningful can be clearly and unambiguously expressed in language, a way of speaking about absenting realities that condition presence and meaning has come to light. Emmanuel Levinas participated in this revival by speaking about the Other that conditions subjectivity without appearing and presencing. For Levinas, 'the other in the same' is the unwilled and unfree condition for the possibility of my selfless turning towards the Other in response, which is the constitutive way of being of the human that he names 'ethics'. He considered it impossible to speak positively about God in the secular age, and thus developed an ethical apophasis drawing from the Jewish negative theological tradition that pays homage to the transcendence of God by turning one's gaze away from the divine and towards the Other in ethical responsibility. For Levinas, the Other demands of me my ethical response because she/he stands in the 'trace' of God. Transcendence of God is, thus, unspeakable but Levinas's negative theology turns positive in ethics. Religious experience hence is predominantly ethical.

Apophasis is also the privileged language of the ancient Hindu metaphysical texts, the Upanisads. A systematic approach to negative theology was developed in India by the eighth century metaphysician, Sankara, for whom even the rare positive statements about the One reality of the Upanisads, the Brahman, are negative in implication. In Sankara's writings, however, ethics is secondary. Spiritual pursuit is predominantly the attainment of the most perfect knowledge regarding non-dual reality or Brahman, which is subject-objectless consciousness, and upon which is superimposed subject-object differentiation and plurality through the cosmic play of ignorance. Ethics is instrumental for self-purification, which is one of the necessary conditions for the attainment of non-dual knowledge. Nevertheless, for Sankara, liberation is something attainable in this very embodied life. But once attained, the liberated condition, Brahman Itself, is unutterable. Even apophatic expressions of Brahman, instrumental for orienting the aspirant for liberation, are to be abandoned and silence is to be embraced about the unspeakable Brahman attained.

This book argues that embodied liberation in Sankara Vedanta involves a profound ethical transformation of subjectivity just as the notion of 'the other in the same' in Levinas means ethical subjectivity and a positive transformation of negative theology. For Sankara, the end of negative dialectics is silence, but a silence that turns positive by the radically transformative realization that all beings are nothing but the Self. That this transformation calls for disinterested, selfless action in compassion for all beings, human and non-human, is clear in Sankara's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Selfless ethics of care for all beings is the silent and only distinguishable mark or trace of Brahman in the liberated person who still lives in the world. In this manner, the book envisages the end of religion as social and ecological egalitarianism, and ethical apophasis as central to the Advaitic vision just as it is for Levinas. The unification of difference in identity consciousness disrobes modernist human-centrism of its pride of place in our thinking and introduces equality and wellbeing of all beings, human and non-human.