Leigh: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Session! My name is Leigh Johnson and I am joined by my cohost, Rick Lee. And we don’t have David with us today, but we do have a fantastic special guest who we will tell you about in just a second. And today we’re going to be talking about matter and consciousness in one tradition of Indian philosophy.

So before we do that, let’s get some drink orders and some rants or raves. Rick, what are you drinking?

Rick: I’m going to have a Corpse Reviver No. 2, and today I am ranting about Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. First, let me say that is the correct pronunciation of what many of you probably thought was Brzezinski or something like that.

I’m really pissed , and maybe I’m too late to this party, but after the election, they decided that they’re going to start communicating with Donald Trump, so they flew down, or they live in Florida, so maybe they didn’t fly down and they met with Donald Trump. And they had a meeting where they said well, we didn’t agree on a lot of things, but you know, we decided to open channels of communication. And I’m thinking like, okay, I didn’t agree with a lot of things the fascists said, but it’s important that we talk to them like there’s no way to do this without normalizing this. And these are two people who leading up to the election were every day ranting about his fascism. So yeah, I don’t want to play with fascists. Today we’re joined by Tuhin Bhattacharjee, and he’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. Now, if you’re astute, then you realize that Tuhin and I are colleagues.

Tuhin works in the areas of ancient Greek and Indian philosophy, feminist theory, deconstruction, queer theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. He has a current book project that comparatively engages maternal figures in ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts to try to untangle the metaphysics of gender and the politics of reproduction in antiquity.

In addition to that, he’s the author, most recently, of “The Silence of Necessity: Logos and the Maternal in Plato’s Myth of Er,” published in Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, as well as a book chapter, “Being in the Word: Language, Meaning, and Deferral in Plato and Derrida.” Now, for regular listeners, you might be excited to know that Tuhin studied with former guest and friend of the podcast, Emma Bianchi.

So, Tuhin, I’m excited to talk with you about your work in Indian philosophy, but before we get to that, what are you drinking, and are you ranting or raving?

Tuhin: Thanks for having me here! I’m having a glass of Aperol Spritz today. I have been listening to this podcast for a while now, and some of my favorite people have been here, so it’s an honor, really, to be here.

Thank you. I’m going to be raving today about this translation project that I’m currently working on. So, as Rick you said, I work on comparative philosophy and literature, and especially with ancient Greek and ancient Sanskrit texts. The book I’m translating is actually a relatively recent work, published in 2011 by the late Indian comparatist Sisir Kumar Das.

It’s a collection of 10 imagined or fictional dialogues in Bengali between ancient Greek and ancient Indian characters. So, for instance, it begins with what it frames as this lost dialogue, something that was found in some library that had been destroyed: this dialogue between Aristotle and Kālidāsa—Kālidāsa being the most famous ancient Indian playwright.

During this conversation, they talk about tragedy, drama, and the absence of the tragic genre in ancient India. Then you have several other such conversations, for example, one between Orestes, who had in Greek mythology killed his own mother, and Paraśurāma, who in the ancient Indian epic Mahābhārata, had also beheaded his own mother.

Then you have another conversation called “Three Blind Men,” which is between Oedipus Rex, Tiresias, and Dhṛtarāṣtra, who is an ancient Indian king. So it’s really a fascinating collection, which brings many of my interests together, especially in ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts, also in Bengali, my interest in translation studies and feminist theory.

I’m really excited about this project. I received a generous grant from DePaul, my university, to work on this project, and it’s currently under contract with Jadavpur University Press, India. Jadavpur University is also my alma mater, so I’m very much looking forward to it. And the translation will be paired with an introduction and detailed annotations by me.

Leigh: Wow, that’s exciting.

Rick: Yeah, that sounds like a really interesting text, and it’s great that you’re bringing it to the Anglophone world. Lee, what about you? What are you drinking, and are you ranting or raving?

Leigh: I think I’m just going to have a Yuengling today in memory of my days in Happy Valley. And I am ranting about what I’m going to call the “comedy wars” on social media.

So let me just say right here at the outset that this might be an ill-formed rant and for those of you out there who are professional comedians, please feel free to correct me about this. But I’ve noticed a lot on TikTok and Twitter and even a little bit on Facebook: comedians basically bitching about the fact that other comedians stole their jokes.

And I suppose I get it that if you’ve spent a lot of time crafting a long-orm joke and someone just copies and pastes it and puts it into their act, that there’d be good reason to complain there. But it’s also the case that, I mean, I think that a lot of jokes are things that a lot of us thought of at the same time.

Right. So all the time I see people say funny things on Twitter or on Tik Tok and I think, Oh, I was just thinking that, it’s not your original joke, like ex nihilo that you created. So I’m kind of confused whose side to be on in these comedy wars. I mean, is comedy as common as I think it is, or is it more proprietary as these wars seem to suggest?

I’m just really confused. I’m not a professional comedian, so I really don’t know. So please do let us know, or let me know.

Rick: If we do have a professional comedian out there, hit us up. We’d love to have you on to talk about it.

Leigh: So Rick, we’re both really excited about having Tuhin here today with us, but why don’t you set up the conversation that we’re going to have?

Rick: There are a lot of themes that we here in the Hotel Bar return to over and over again, like gender, sexuality, queerness, matter, materiality. And we’ve also talked about the ways that all of these are combined, forcibly separated, often intertwined. But because we’re experts each in our own fields and we worry about wading into what is uncharted territory for us without an expert, we’ve discussed these issues primarily from the perspective of Western—and I might add, also, Northern—philosophy.

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, a number of thinkers have actually engaged with Indian philosophy, taken up some of its main themes, and praised Indian thinkers for their inventiveness and their insight. And yet, at some point, the tradition of Indian philosophy was left aside by the so-called West, and we don’t often, or often enough, show the ways in which Western philosophy has borrowed, begged, or stolen from Indian philosophy. So today in the Hotel Bar, we’re going to take up that occluded history of philosophy and allow it to speak to some of the most central issues of philosophy in the West today.

Leigh: So Tuhin, as Rick mentioned, neither of us are experts in Indian philosophy. As a matter of fact, I’m below the level of novice even! I’ve had no training in Indian philosophy, I’ve read very few texts in Indian philosophy, and that is at least part of the reason why I’m so excited to have you here today to talk to us about it.

So for people out there, listeners like me, could you give us a broader framework for understanding the tradition of Indian philosophy?

Tuhin: Yes, of course. I’m very thrilled to be talking about Indian philosophy with you all today. So, the language in which the majority, though not all, of ancient Indian religious and philosophical texts were composed was, of course, Sanskrit.

The oldest text in this tradition is the Ṛgveda, composed over a period of time in the second millennium BCE, somewhere in the northwestern region of modern India, because that is where the Indo-Aryan tribes coming from the west had settled. This is a few centuries after the decline of what we know as the Indus Valley civilization that flourished 5,000 years ago around the same area along the river Indus.

The Ṛgveda is the oldest of the four Vedas and is a collection of more than a thousand hymns dedicated to numerous gods and goddesses, but also deeply grounded in a ritual context, especially the ritual of the fire sacrifice. And the Ṛgveda also contains several hymns that try to make sense of the cosmos at large.

So you have several cosmogonic hymns describing the birth of the universe. Perhaps the most fascinating among them is a hymn called the Nāsadīya Sūkta, which begins by saying, “Neither non-existence nor existence was then.” And then it goes on to speculate on various possibilities about this beginning, the beginnings of the universe.

And then ends with this profound question that kind of gives me goosebumps every time I think about it. It asks, who really knows what was there at that point? Who was there to witness it? The gods, it says, were created after the beginning. So even the gods can’t truly know because they were also created after the beginning.

And then it says, perhaps the universe formed itself, perhaps it did not. Maybe, it then says, the One—possibly referring to a supreme deity—maybe that one who looks at us from the highest heavens, maybe only He knows. Or perhaps, even He doesn’t know. It’s fascinating to me, you know, that the Ṛgveda, which in many ways is the foundational text of Hinduism, also inaugurates this rational, even skeptical, thinking about the gods and the knowledge of the gods.

And perhaps this moment, this powerful questioning, also marks the beginnings of Indian philosophy. This is then carried forward in the texts we know as the Upaniṣads. There are several Upaniṣads, the oldest among them being composed sometime around the 8^th-century BCE. In the Upaniṣads, we find a movement away from the deeply ritualistic context of the Vedas to a more well-defined philosophical contemplation about the nature of the world, the nature of the self, the relationship between the self and the cosmos at large. Therefore, we see a rigorous development of metaphysical systems to grapple with that relationship.

The Upanishads are in many ways the go-to texts of ancient Indian philosophy. In fact, I teach a class on comparative ancient philosophy here at DePaul, where I pair Greek philosophy with sections from the Upaniṣads, and students are always fascinated by it, especially by the remarkable stylistic complexity of these texts.  It’s nothing like they have encountered before, whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students.

Leigh: Especially in philosophy.

Tuhin: Yeah. So it’s a great experience just reading those texts with them. The other curious thing about ancient Indian texts is that they’re in a way authorless, by which I mean that there is usually no signature of an individual author.

And so authorship and dating of these texts is a very difficult task. In fact, Leigh, you were just talking about comedy wars and the question of plagiarism. In ancient India, actually, you have a problem that is the opposite of plagiarism. Most of these authors, instead of attributing a text to themselves, would often name someone else as the author of the text.

And that makes authorship very difficult to determine. Like they would write something, but they would claim someone else has written it, usually like maybe an ancient ṛṣi—an ancient sage—that is the name that they would give it, perhaps to grant more legitimacy to the text that they’re writing. So I think this concept of the individual author arises much later in the tradition.

Rick: You find that also in the Western tradition. So you have like Pseudo Dionysius, who’s claiming to be a figure that is much older than he actually is,

Tuhin: That’s right. We do have some of that in Greek, but I think in ancient India, it’s more pervasive, like you will rarely find an author whose name you can take at face value to have written that text.

So today I’m particularly talking about one tradition of Indian philosophy, which is the Sāṃkhya tradition, which is a philosophical system that has roots in the Upaniṣads, but it developed most fully in the post Upaniṣadic era—so the last few centuries BCE and then the early centuries of the Common Era.

We find the development of Sāṃkhya ideas in the ancient Indian epics, for instance, especially the Mahābhārata, including in the Bhagavadgitā, which is a small but important part of the Mahābhārata. But the first text in the tradition to systematize the different theories within the Sāṃkhya tradition is the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Ῑśvarakṛṣṇa, which was composed sometime in the 4th to 6th centuries of the Common Era.

Rick: And is that legitimate authorship, or that’s who it’s ascribed to?

Tuhin: It is ascribed to, but that’s who the tradition believes had composed the text. We never really know for sure with these texts, because we don’t have any historical detail, any biographical detail about any of these authors.

Leigh: One of the things you elaborated in the essay that you sent Rick and I was that Sāṃkhya is a dualist system that posits basically two eternal principles.

I was wondering if, before we get started with your argument, if you could just

Tuhin: Yes, absolutely.

So Sāṃkhya, first of all, is only one of the nine major schools or thought-systems in classical Indian philosophy. So you have six āstika or orthodox schools and three nāstika or heterodox schools.

Orthodox here refers to those schools that claim to accept the authority of the Vedas, while the heterodox schools are those that deny the authority and infallibility of the Vedas. The heterodox philosophical schools are Buddhist, Jain, and Cārvāka—the Cārvāka or Lokāyata. The Cārvāka were the materialists who denied the existence of god, the existence of soul, and understood life and consciousness as emergent properties of matter.

And then you have the Buddhists and the Jains who reacted against the Vedic traditions in many ways. The six orthodox schools, on the other hand, accept the authority of the Vedas, at least nominally, but they have different metaphysical and logical systems. Nyāya philosophy, for instance, is the school consisting of threadbare logical arguments about perception, substances, the constituents of the world, the existence of god, and so on.

Then there is Vedānta philosophy, which at least in the most influential interpretation of it, is an Advaita or non-dualist school that regards brahman or Absolute Consciousness as the only reality. Sāṃkhya, on the other hand, is also an orthodox school, but it is a decidedly dualist school that posits both consciousness—Puruṣa is the word that it uses—and matter or Prakṛti as two essentially independent but interacting and entangled realities. Puruṣa and Prakṛti are gendered principles as well. So Puruṣa or consciousness is seen as masculine, while Prakṛti or matter is feminine. Sāṃkhya posits them as the two eternal, uncaused, independent metaphysical realities that unite to produce the phenomenal world.

Now, in much of Western philosophy, there is a fundamental dichotomy between matter as that which passively undergoes transformation, and an active principle, which is called by different names—logos, reason, soul, mind, thought, spirit, history, and so on—that is the agent of that transformation. So matter is understood as fundamentally passive and is often associated with the feminine.

We find this, for example, in Aristotle’s biological writings on reproduction, where hyle or matter is material stuff, totally passive and formless, that is supplied by the female in reproduction, while the male of the species provides form and shape to that materiality. And Emma Bianchi, my advisor at NYU, who was on this podcast not too long ago, has done some brilliant work on how this gendered biological thinking underpins Aristotle’s metaphysics, which in turn influenced Western philosophy at large.

What’s interesting about Sāṃkhya is that while, like the Greeks, it associates matter with the feminine. It is here fundamentally, ontologically, defined by its activity. So, very different from the Western tradition, in Sāṃkhya, matter is never at rest and its motion is intrinsic to itself. It’s the masculine Puruṣa, the principle of consciousness that in the system is entirely passive, immobile, and incapable of generation or regeneration, while the feminine Prakṛti or matter is active, mobile and fecund, but importantly, non-conscious. Puruṣa is passive, immobile, but conscious. In fact, Puruṣa is consciousness (consciousness is not a property of Puruṣa), while Prakṛti or matter is active and fecund but not at all conscious.

Rick: When we talk about feminine and masculine. It seems to me we need to be clear about two uses of that: one use might be a purely grammatical use, in that in many languages (English is not one of them) but in many languages, nouns have a grammatical gender. Some have just masculine and feminine, some have a masculine, feminine, and neuter. In Sanskrit, it’s not simply that these two words that are used have grammatical gender, but the identification of one with the female and the other with the male go beyond just that grammatical point, or maybe there isn’t even grammatical gender.

Tuhin: So there is grammatical gender—grammatically, Puruṣa is male and Prakṛti is feminine, but it’s not just grammatical. In fact, the word Puruṣa literally means man. So even today, for example, in Bengali or Hindi, the word for man is Puruṣa. So, it’s certainly not simply a grammatical concern. It’s very much about masculine and feminine principles that we are talking here.

So Puruṣa is a masculine principle that is consciousness, while Prakṛti is a feminine principle that is everything that is other than consciousness. Everything—not just the body but also mind and thought and so on. So all of those are in the Sāṃkhya system squarely on the side of matter—feminine matter at that.

Even though we need to also, I think, clarify that Puruṣa and Prakṛti do not embody the male and the female of a species, respectively—because all species, all male and female species, again, are entirely on the side of Prakṛti, because all creation, everything that is material, is on the side of Prakṛti.

And yet Puruṣa and Prakṛti are two distinct, almost pre-ontological principles. Creation takes place when Puruṣa and Prakṛti come together, in a kind of metaphysical scene of sexual reproduction, where they come together and creation takes place. And it’s only with creation that you have differentiation and therefore in a way sexual differentiations.

And yet, even before creation, there is a kind of pre-ontological sexual differentiation where Puruṣa and Prakṛti are always already differentiated into the masculine and the feminine. That is something I’m really interested in. Sexual differentiation that precedes all other differentiation.

Leigh: I’m wondering if you could maybe explain a little bit more the interplay between Puruṣa and Prakṛti, because am I wrong to say that these two principles in Sāṃkhya are what create the world?

That the interplay between Puruṣa and Prakṛti creates the world. What I’m confused about is what exactly is that interplay? I mean, is Puruṣa simply a observational force, you know, whereas Prakṛti is the actual phenomenal universe, or am I missing something here?

Tuhin: No, you’re totally right. The question of creation is a very important aspect of Sāṃkhya metaphysics.

And in the text that I’m talking about today, which is the classical text, Ῑśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā, it’s not always clear whether it’s talking about the creation of the universe or the creation of the subject, of the individual subject. And I think it kind of keeps sliding between these two scales, these two registers.

In classical Sāṃkhya, usually the way it’s understood is that there are a multiplicity of Puruṣas. while Prakṛti is one continuous being. So each individual Puruṣa, when it gets in contact with Prakṛti, gives rise to the individual subject. The idea is that when Puruṣa, the principle of pure consciousness, gets entangled in Prakṛti’s allure—so it’s like Prakṛti seduces Puruṣa.

So when Puruṣa, the principle of pure consciousness, when he is entangled in Prakṛti’s allure and forgets his independence—because originally both Puruṣa and Prakṛti are independent realities, they do not really depend on each other. But for some reason, and it’s not very clear how, Puruṣa and Prakṛti come in contact with each other.

Then Puruṣa is seduced by Prakṛti, and when that happens, that is when Prakṛti transforms itself from its unmanifest to its manifest state, thereby creating the universe, the larger cosmic scale, and the individual subject at a smaller scale. Prakṛti’s task is to provide enjoyment to Puruṣa through creation.

But since dukkha or suffering is in the very nature of the created world, Prakṛti enables Puruṣa to discover his true independent identity and ultimately liberate himself from her confinement. It’s almost like we don’t really know if Puruṣa is aware of itself prior to getting entangled in Prakṛti.

So Puruṣa must get entangled in Prakṛti only to then realize that it is not Prakṛti through a negative discernment. By realizing, oh, I am not Prakṛti. I am just consciousness. I am this absolute pure consciousness. And it’s the task of the feminine Prakṛti to make Puruṣa realize that. So the actions of the non-conscious, feminine Prakṛti are entirely for the sake of the masculine, conscious Puruṣa.

And once he attains liberation, Prakṛti withdraws into her unmanifest form.

Rick: In everything you have said about Puruṣa, the question that keeps coming to my mind is: what does this principle do? Because it seems incredibly empty. You said earlier, Puruṣa is passive. I’m wondering, in this partnership—and Prakṛti might not be the first female to wonder this—but like, what the hell does the man bring to this relationship?

Tuhin: Yes, no, that’s a very good question, Rick.

So, the argument, according to Sāṃkhya, is that Puruṣa is the name of this bare fact of consciousness. So, in a way, it’s actually quite different from the dualism that we have in the Western tradition. You know, the traditional Western dualisms of body and soul or body and mind, because, as I said, mind, thoughts, feelings are all decidedly on the side of Prakṛti and therefore material in the Sāṃkhya system, even though there are various gradations of materiality. You have a kind of hierarchy from subtler forms of matter to grosser forms of matter, right? So mind and intelligence, these are very subtle forms of matter, while everyday objects and even our bodies are grosser forms of matter.

But Puruṣa is the name of this bare fact of consciousness, which is absolutely contentless, non-intentional, non-teleological and inactive. The argument that the Sāṃkhya Karika gives is that the experience of the objective world, even in its subtle dimensions—which include thoughts and feelings—requires the presence of an absolute consciousness that is apart from that world.

For without someone to experience it, the existence of an ostensibly rational and ordered cosmos would be ultimately meaningless. So Puruṣa, you’re right, is the observer. It is this absolute witness. It is the very condition of possibility, which is not itself material, but it enables not only matter to materialize out of its concealment, but also fundamentally grants it meaning and purpose.

So it’s the absolute subject that, in a way, gives the otherwise objective material world meaning and purpose.

Rick: You teased, pun intended, that there is a kind of sexuality to this coming together of these two principles. And you seem to indicate that it might be an interesting story. So could you go into a little bit of detail about that?

Tuhin: Yes, sure. So let me start by talking about a strange analogy that Ῑśvarakṛṣṇa uses in the Sāṃkhyakārikā to describe Puruṣa and Prakṛti.

The text compares Prakṛti to a nartakī, that is a female dancer, who dances for the pleasure of Puruṣa. So, all of creation is a dance for Puruṣa to witness. The Puruṣa remains enamored by that dance and forgets himself for a while. But once Puruṣa realizes his true self through, as I said, a negative discernment—that is by realizing that he is not Prakṛti, not material. Once Puruṣa realizes that, Prakṛti’s dance ceases.

The dance comes to an end. She says, “dṛṣṭāsmi” (meaning, “I have been seen”) and then withdraws back into her unmanifest form because her job is done and Puruṣa is liberated. It’s, I think, a fascinating scene because there is, of course, this very clear hierarchy here where Prakṛti is working, is dancing for the gaze of the Puruṣa.

But what’s interesting to me here is that in the Sāṃkhyan tradition, generally in Indian philosophy, seeing is also associated with knowing and with consciousness. My argument is that the fact that Prakṛti can see that she’s being seen perhaps illustrates that there is a kind of consciousness, there is this ability to know and understand that is also there in Prakṛti, which the text must then cover over.

Because otherwise it would dismantle the very system, the very dualism that the system is founded on.

Leigh: I find that a really compelling contribution, but if I could just maybe take one step back because I’m still a little bit confused about Puruṣa’s ability to, I don’t know, see Prakṛti, right? I mean, you earlier described Puruṣa as pure consciousness, pure subjectivity, not intentional, purely passive and observant, but what is it observant of?

Like, how does it ever recognize, may not be the right word, but how does Prakṛti’s seduction ever register with Puruṣa, if Puruṣa is not already an intentional consciousness?

Tuhin: Yes. So the tradition says that when Puruṣa and Prakṛti come together and the process of creation begins, the first thing to emerge is buddhi or the intellect.

So when the two come together, they give rise or they give birth to a series of things or substances or principles. And the first principle to emerge is buddhi or the intellect. And because the intellect is the first principle to emerge, it is also the subtlest form of materiality and therefore the most transparent.

It is in this transparency of the intellect that Puruṣa, you could say, sees its own reflection and misidentifies itself as this material reflection. This is actually quite similar to the theorization of the mirror stage by Jacques Lacan, you know, the psychoanalyst. You know, where the child sees its reflection in the mirror and misidentifies its ego, its identity with that of the reflection.

And I think there is something similar happening here, where Puruṣa sees its reflection in intellect and thinks that it is that reflection, it is that material body. Thus it gets entangled in Prakṛti and begins to think of itself as a material entity instead of independent consciousness. And this misidentification leads to the birth of the ego, the first person I, that emerges as a result of this miscognition.

But this ego emerges not in consciousness, not in Puruṣa, but in its reflection in the intellect, and therefore in Prakṛti, because intellect is the subtlest form of Prakṛti. And so all of this, the intellect, the ego, and then everything that flows from that, are all material manifestations of Prakṛti.

Leigh: That’s helpful. And I’m wondering if then the agency of Prakṛti is not just this activity of appearing and concealing and withdrawing and seducing, but actually more creative. As you say, creating the ego, creating the intellect.

Tuhin: Absolutely. Prakṛti is creating the ego, the intellect, and then, you know, the entire world.

Puruṣa cannot do any of this. Puruṣa’s task is bare witnessing. It’s just a witness.

Rick: But can Prakṛti do this without Puruṣa?

Tuhin: It’s only when the two come together that this happens. So Puruṣa is kind of this catalyst, which itself does not change through this process, but enables Prakṛti to change and to manifest as this universe.

Rick: There are other philosophers in the Western tradition: I have Hobbes here in mind, who, when he comes to talk about how it is that things appear—the Latin word is something close to manifestation, right, how do things manifest themselves, and he uses the reflexive there—he says this is the most difficult thing to talk about because we have to somehow get behind language and sensation and all of these things that are, one might say, post manifestation, in order to figure out how manifestation happens. This text is staging the scene of manifestation and finds that it needs a principle which is not manifest, a principle which is that for which manifestation happens.

And when these two come together, the technical term we would use in philosophy is the phenomenal world, the world that appears to us emerges for the first time. And intellect would be one manifestation.

Leigh: Yeah, and I think that your explanation of this transition from subtle to gross manifestations is really helpful. I mean, that progression of Prakṛti from subtle to gross elements almost sounds proto-phenomenological in a way. It reminds me of the way that philosophers like Merleau Ponty describe perception, right, with layers of the sensible world unfolding into awareness. Do you see any of these connections here or am I making this up?

Tuhin: Oh, yes. No, no, I absolutely do. Because I think there’s a lot of conversation going on with what we in the West know as phenomenology, because, in many ways, Sāṃkhya is also therefore a theory of the emergence of the subject, with the intellect coming first, followed by the ego, and strangely enough, the ego is then followed by what we call the mind. The Sanskrit word is manas, so mind, suggesting, you know, our thoughts and feelings that all comes after the ego. And then the mind gives birth to other principles—for example, our internal sense organs or the sense capacities, which, you know, help us perceive the world. And these internal sense capacities then give rise to the sense organs. And then the sense organs in turn give rise to the objects of those sense organs, i.e., the world at large. So it’s really a theory of the subject and how the subject in a way is creating the rest of the universe.

Rick: And it’s here that I see the import of what you said earlier in relation to this notion that Prakṛti sees that she is being seen. You came very close, or maybe even exactly said, it seems at this moment that the text is not in control of itself. It finds itself forced to admit something it seems to have been denying all along. And so it seems like this is a moment ripe for what the Western tradition refers to as deconstruction.

Tuhin: Yes, absolutely. I think my reading is a deconstructionist reading of the tradition, and this is certainly not how the text is traditionally read. I think I bring my interest in deconstruction, in feminist philosophy to my reading of this text, because I think a lot of interesting things are happening here.

One is that, of course, in order for Prakṛti to realize that she has been seen, she must be able to see. And therefore, because seeing in the tradition is a metaphor for being conscious, there is a tacit admission of Prakṛti’s consciousness as well. But in the tradition generally, a lot of commentators usually insist on playing down the sexual difference that is mobilized in this interaction. But I think it’s impossible to overlook the strongly gendered semantics of the Sāṃkhyan system. The fact that the line between a metaphysical masculine principle and the biological male is not always so clearly defined is evident, first of all, from the fact that many of the words that Sāṃkhya uses to refer to this principle including, of course, Puruṣa, but also pumān and puṃsaḥ, are all words that are used to denote the biological male.

While on the other hand, the Sāṃkhyakārikā describes Prakṛti as prasavadharmi, meaning one whose dharma or nature is to give birth, clearly identifying Prakṛti with the maternal. It’s true that the Sāṃkhyakārikā, this classical text, plays down the references to biological gender. But at the same time, these references to biological gender are pervasive in the pre-classical Sāṃkhya tradition.

For example, many of these texts that we find in the epics, for instance. Ῑśvarakṛṣṇa mostly elides the messy and convoluted semantics of biological generation, but I think one, nevertheless, always finds biology already inscribed in his metaphysical system.

Leigh: Just as an aside, can I ask you how heterodox readings like yours are taken up in Indian philosophy?

Tuhin: To be honest, I don’t think they have been taken up at all. I haven’t seen a lot of readings which are like this. Recently, I came across a very good reading of the Sāṃkhya system. Again, it’s work that is taking place here in the West, in the US, not by an Indian even.

I think traditional scholars would not be okay with my reading of the Sāṃkhyan system in a kind of deconstructionist fashion, because I think they would insist that it is a strongly dualist system, which cannot admit of Prakṛti as being conscious.

Leigh: That’s not actually the question I was asking. I was actually wondering at a much more petty level how this would be taken up, not, not, you know, how it would be seriously taken up by other scholars, but whether or not when you’re providing a reading that is heterodox like your own or deconstructive like your own, whether other scholars are going to look at you and say, Oh, he just doesn’t understand it or whether they’re going to be offended.

Tuhin: Oh, I’m not sure exactly, because I have a lot of people in India, some of my professors in India, who are very happy with the kind of work that I’m doing, very encouraging of the kind of work that I’m doing. But I know, especially in Sanskrit studies, there might be philosophers who might be a little bit offended as well.

Leigh: Okay.

Rick: One result of a deconstructive approach is that you’re gonna have to confront, on the one hand, the gender roles of these two characters, let me say, these two principles, while also at the same time confronting the fact that the text comes to points where it seems to elide those gender roles, or they slip into one another, or they’re more contiguous than one might otherwise think.

This deconstructive reading has to confront the queerness of the fact that Prakṛti sees that she is being seen, which should be a male thing. with the fact that the rest of the gendered context of this text is pretty run-of-the-mill, you know, this is what women do, this is what men do.

Tuhin: Yeah, absolutely.

So let me talk a little bit then about the run-of-the-mill gender roles and then talk about how I think, at least in my reading, the text is playing with those conventions. So in pre-classical Sāṃkhya, two of the major terms that are used as synonyms for Prakṛti and Puruṣa respectively are kṣetra, meaning field, and kṣetrajña or field-knower.

So this language is originally drawn from an agrarian vocabulary. And these two words are regularly used in Sanskrit literature to refer to the scene of sex, to the scene of copulation, right? Since the act of sowing in the literature is called ‘knowing the field’—when you’re sowing a seed, you’re also like knowing the field—the act of sex is often described as the man ‘knowing the woman.’ So the man engaging in reproductive sex is a kṣetrajña, the field-knower, one who intimately knows the field or woman he is sowing. The act of knowing therefore involves prodding, digging, ploughing, and penetration of the female body in an act that is potentially generative.

And in this agrarian context, it also implies owning and surveying, manipulating the field, administering the field, reaping the fruits of the field. Now, while Sāṃkhyakārikā does away with the terms kṣetra and kṣetrajña, it cannot quite shake off this genealogy. It’s still playing with those concepts and with the conception of the Puruṣa as someone who knows, while Prakṛti as something that is known.

So the observer and the observed, knower and the known is very much at work. But what I want to ask is why this asymmetry between Puruṣa and Prakṛti is given the sign of irreducibility in the tradition. Despite the fact that the only mode in which Puruṣa can appear—because Puruṣa cannot appear as anything other than as Prakṛti, it’s a kind of misidentification or a misappearance, if you want, but that’s the only way in which Puruṣa can appear.

Even though that’s the only mode in which Puruṣa can appear, why does Sāṃkhya take such pains to preserve this differentially established identity?

Leigh: Yeah.

Tuhin: Where Puruṣa is only consciousness and can never be material. Prakṛti is only material and can never be conscious. Why is this dichotomy given the irreducible mark of sexual difference?

Why can Puruṣa not partake in the material except for a misidentification with the material?

Leigh: But isn’t that irreducibility just rule number one of any dualist system?

Tuhin: Yes, it is a rule number one. But my interest is how this also then becomes gendered. The gendering of it also becomes totally irreducible.

Because, according to the text, Puruṣa must become what he’s not in order to be what he always has been. Because we don’t really know of Puruṣa’s self-consciousness before creation. It is only when creation takes place that Puruṣa misidentifies himself, and this misidentification then allows him to identify himself truly by this negative discernment.

So Puruṣa must become what he is not in order to be what he always has been.

Rick: But here’s the moment where the irreducibility gets a little murky, right? Because Puruṣa can only come to know himself because of Prakṛti, and it’s only in a negation that wouldn’t be possible without Prakṛti doing the work that Prakṛti does that Puruṣa can come to know Puruṣa.

The twoness here is either incredibly intimate, and then we’re back to the scene of sexual intimacy, or the two are actually maybe two sides of one and the same thing.

Tuhin: Yes, so that is what I’m really interested in, because, as you rightly point out, Puruṣa can become what he is only by interacting with Prakṛti, and not simply by interacting with Prakṛti, but in a way by becoming Prakṛti, by at least misidentifying himself as Prakṛti.

But in the system, this becoming other, this becoming material is defined as the exclusive cause of dukkha or suffering from which Puruṣa must be freed. So there is a hierarchical gendered opposition, not only between masculine and feminine, but between being and becoming, essence and appearance that is established—you know, a dichotomy between what Puruṣa is and what he merely appears as. And what I’m trying to argue is that in limiting Puruṣa’s appearance as Prakṛti merely to the realm of semblance, this opposition also signals an anxiety over drag, over the necessary yet delusional gender-crossing between the masculine and the feminine.

Leigh: It occurs to me now that in addition to really troubling gender politics in a very interesting way, your reading also might point to a really interesting environmentalist argument. So to go back to the agrarian language that you were explaining earlier, if it’s the case that Puruṣa only comes to know himself by knowing the field, the problem here is that he doesn’t follow that logic all the way through.

He doesn’t follow it through to say, oh, actually I am the field. It’s not as if I am this subject who, as you said, like plows and digs and knows the earth, but I am also the earth. I am only me because of the earth. I hope I’m not contorting your argument too much, but I think that that would be a really productive implication to come out of your argument as well.

Tuhin: That’s a great point, Leigh. I had not really thought about this in environmentalist terms, but that is very true. I think this idea or this recognition that I might also be Prakṛti or partake in Prakṛti becomes visible for a moment, this knowledge becomes visible for a moment, but then it must be immediately disavowed.

Disavowed because otherwise it would undermine the dualism of the system, but also, you know, as Rick you said, the gender politics that a lot of this is grounded in. If the feminine, the feminine principle, is also understood as conscious, as capable of knowing, as capable of penetrating and plowing, right? I think that knowledge must immediately be disavowed.

And the dancer must then immediately withdraw and go back before too much comes out.

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: And I think related both to the environmental reading and let me just call it the queer reading—and I think this is what you meant when you referred to the scene of drag here—is if Puruṣa can mistake the appearance that is Prakṛti as himself, then this calls into question the ability to distinguish what merely appears from its reality.

And I think you talked about this in relation to the distinction between appearance and essence. And it becomes no longer a simple matter than to understand, oh no, this is just the mere appearance of something, it really is something else. And you could imagine that this becomes a matter of concern, even in the 21st century in the United States, that something that appears to be a woman, what if it’s not a woman?

And it’s very difficult to disentangle this. And a similar thing would go also for the environment, that what appears to be merely passive, to use up and dispose of, what if it’s actually us, we can’t even tell if it’s our mere appearance, and to disentangle those two things becomes problematic, and so best take it as if it is me, best take it as if it is Puruṣa, the natural world itself.

Tuhin: Yeah.

Leigh: I think this also opens up a lot of windows for expanding our notion of what we might consider agential activity in non-human actors. I mean, I can imagine that in an age like ours, where AI and algorithms are being anthropomorphized and endowed with agency, your essay really makes me wonder, could Prakṛti’s non-conscious yet agential activity serve as a metaphor for how we understand non-human actors?

Tuhin: That’s right. In fact, I was thinking of AI yesterday, you know, while preparing for this podcast, because it’s also a question of what is consciousness and what is reason. Is AI rational? Does AI work with reason? Everyone seems to kind of agree that AI is not conscious or at least not conscious yet, but can there be a rational way of thinking without consciousness?

Yeah, I think these are all great questions, and I think ancient philosophy, as always, has, you know, a lot to say there.

Leigh: You’re correct that most people say that AI is not conscious or not conscious yet. But a lot of times when we say that, we’re justifying that claim by more or less moving the goalposts of what consciousness is.

And that is exactly, exactly, really, what Puruṣa does, right? And Puruṣa is always moving the goalpost.

Tuhin: Right. Yeah.

Rick: Lee came out with me for my smoke-break and she said she wished we could have this conversation go on for a few more hours. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. This is a bit unfair, but I’m wondering, how this tradition is taken up by other traditions, you know, you mentioned, for example, the Buddhist tradition, the Jain tradition, how this tradition is taken up in relation to all of these other eight traditions that you mentioned.

Tuhin: Yeah, so there were a lot of debates among these different schools all the time. And so you actually have, not so much from the Buddhist tradition, but definitely from the Vedānta or Advaita tradition, the non-dualist tradition, a very strong critique of Sāṃkhyan dualism because the argument of the non-dualists, the Advaitins, is that consciousness is the only reality.

Consciousness is the only reality, and everything that we see appears in consciousness and is therefore not real to the same degree. And this consciousness is then understood in a way as divine and God, but it’s not God, certainly not in the Semitic sense of the word. Because once you realize what this brahman truly is, or what even this God truly is, you realize that it is who you truly are.

You are that reality. You are that ultimate reality because you are that ultimate, absolute consciousness.

Rick: And in this tradition, are the same gendered categories and terms used? So if consciousness is the only principle, is it still labeled masculine or coded masculine? And is, what appears to consciousness, is it coded feminine or labeled feminine?

Tuhin: So yes, you will find sometimes, you know, māyā … everything that appears in consciousness is māyā or illusion that is sometimes represented in feminine terms. So you do have some of it, but not so much, because the argument again is that this ultimate reality, the word becomes brahman—which in a way is a synonym for Puruṣa, but again not used as much—which is this absolute bare fact of consciousness that is the only reality, but it’s contentless, sexless, genderless, formless, all of that. I think the gender of brahman becomes less and less significant in that tradition. So you have like a strong critique of the Sāṃkhyan system from that tradition, and then you have, you know, counter-critiques.

So there is certainly a very long tradition there. So Buddhism arose sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE, and it posed a very significant challenge to Vedic and Upaniṣadic philosophy of the time, especially the Vedic culture of the time, especially the Vedic emphasis on ritualism as well as the caste system.

Buddhism and Jainism began as social movements against the entrenched caste and ritualistic practices of the Vedic tradition. You could see a lot of Indian philosophy after that as a story of this conflict between all these traditions, especially between Vedic culture and Buddhism. In fact, for a time, India was—I don’t know if we can technically use the word India because of course it was not a modern nation-state like it is today—but we could understand the history of ancient Indian philosophy in a way as a conflict between Vedic and Buddhist traditions.

And for a long time, a lot of these ancient Indian empires and kingdoms were Buddhists. In fact, the greatest challenge posed by Buddhism was in the third century BCE when the emperor Aśoka converted to Buddhism, kind of similar to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

Leigh: Yeah, I was just thinking that.

Yeah. So for quite some time, India was very much Buddhist until the Hindu kings fought back, which resulted in a lot of Buddhists then moving towards East Asia. And that’s how Buddhism spread to East Asia. And many of the concepts that we associate both with Hinduism and Buddhism, such as dharma, ahiṃsā or non-violence, reincarnation, all of these ideas emerged as a result of this rivalry/conflict between the two.

In fact, the Bhagavadgitā in the Mahābhārata has often been read by scholars as a response or as a counter-argument to the Buddhist philosophy of non-violence or ahiṃsā, because in the Bhagavadgitā, you know, Krishna is, in a way, justifying war, right? Giving a justification for war and violence.

A lot of the arguments he uses there is to counter the Buddhist argument for nonviolence.

Leigh: Well, unfortunately, our bartender is giving us a last call and we don’t want to push her to violence. So we’re going to have to get out of here. But Tuhin, I wanted to ask you, is there a place that listeners should look for this essay that you shared with us to be coming out in the future?

Tuhin: So in the future, certainly, but I think not very soon. So this is something that I still need to work on this a little more. But I can share maybe some links with you of my other work.

Leigh: That would be great. And we will definitely put them in the show-notes to this episode. Again, I want to thank you so much. This has been so educational for me. And, because we had you here, and you are the student of Emma Bianchi, we’re going to go ahead and invite your student, your best student, to come at some point in the future to be a guest on this podcast.

Tuhin: Absolutely. That would be amazing. Yeah. Thank you, I mean this has been wonderful for me as well. You know, as I said, I’ve been a fan of this podcast and now to actually be here is an absolute honor. So thank you for hosting me.

Rick: Thank you so much, Tuhin.

Leigh: All right. Bye guys.

Rick: Bye.

Tuhin: Bye.