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Mohanty, perhaps for this reason, departs from the usual
practice that other writers of introductory works follow:
employing a chronology that is part historical and part Vedantic
in its overall assumptions. The schools of Indian philosophy
(usually limited to six) are studied as if their doctrines were
a progression from materialism to idealism, from heterodoxy to
orthodoxy, a progressive move from the Upanishads, through
Samkya and Nyaya to the culminating truths of Advaita Vedanta.
Such an approach, even if not consciously articulated, lies
behind many such readings of the history of Indian philosophy.
There is, however, no easy alternative: if schools are to be
dealt with sequentially, then, even if unintended, there is an
appearance of progression where there are really a series of
texts and commentaries complementing and contradicting each
other. It is the appearance of unity, if anything, that is
illusory.
Mohanty’s
approach is to look across schools at the sorts of debates that
different darsanas engaged in. He divides the broad area
of their philosophical discourse into five subsets:
epistemology, metaphysics, politics, law and morality, religion
and art, and the realm of mysticism which he locates
"beyond the subject object distinction." Within these
regions, none of which is wholly independent of any other,
Mohanty addresses some of the persistent concerns around which
texts were written and debates conducted. Four questions that
Mohanty identifies in the sphere of theory of knowledge, or Pramana
Sastra, for instance, are all about the nature of
consciousness: What is consciousness? Can it cognise itself? Is
it intentional? In 27 pages, Mohanty provides an excellent
introduction to the main theories of knowledge, discussing key
doctrines in an engaging and illuminating way. It is interesting
that the kind of knowledge that philosophers busied themselves
with was knowledge of consciousness, the self, mind, or the
cognition of the act of knowing itself. These of course were not
the only possible objects of knowledge, nor were they always
thought to be identical. Other ‘objects’ of knowledge
included material objects, time, space, the relations between
them, universals, God, all rubbing shoulders in a whole range of
theories.
Many of these
schools were robustly realist, but even they were not averse to
considering the nature of subjective consciousness or selfhood.
To counter their realist assumptions, idealist Buddhist schools
offered an alternative minimalist ontology. Both viewed language
as consistent with their concerns. Thus it would seem that the
appeal to ordinary language was a means of vindicating theory
long before it was thought up at Oxford. Nor were these opposed
doctrines static, and it is to Mohanty’s credit that he gives
us, in so brief an account, some sense of the historical time in
which these complex doctrines evolved.
One of the most
illuminating sections is the one on law, politics and morality:
areas in which the traditional schools have long thought to be
the most deficient. Mohanty here sets the record straight. It is
just not the case that Indian philosophers did not engage in
moral thinking (though it seems to be true that they did not
think of it as a problem), it is just that they did not engage
in the foundational exercise that characterises the thinking of
philosophers such as Kant or Mill.
A short review
like this cannot do justice to the wealth of insight and
information that Mohanty brings to this subject. The best
feature of this book is that it goes straight into the central
questions of philosophy, which it addresses with a rigour that
is rarely found in discussions of the Indian schools.
If there are
lacunae in Mohanty’s presentation they are more likely to be
the result of his aim: to provide an intellectually rich
introduction to the principal (not by any means all) schools of
Indian philosophy, forming a tradition that, we believe,
stretches from at least the sixth century BC to the book here
reviewed.
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