First of all, I would like to thank Ben as well for finding the time to share his work and his insights with us. Sorry I couldn’t be around for it “live”, but we all know how it is with digital technology: you’re either in, or you’re out.
Contrary to all my expectations, I was able to watch the recording today (and thanks to Marco for making it available to expeditiously). Before getting kicked out of the session, I was only picking up about every second or third word, so it was uplifting to hear complete sentences this time around. It all made much more sense.
Overall, I found the conversation thought-provoking and insightful. I don’t have a whole lot to say, but a couple of questions and thoughts did arise during the listening that I would like to pose and share here. First, a couple of specific questions:
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For Andrea: you said that Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri as a transmission, that he rewrote it (or at least relevant sections thereof) in response to the further development of his own consciousness. What was the original language of the text? Did he write it in English, or is the English we read a translation?
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For Ben: you mentioned that the earliest Vedic tradition reserved Sanskrit for ritualistic texts. Were all such texts sung or intoned? You intoned the verses from Abinavagupta, based primarily on the rhythm of the text itself, but you mentioned that there are other intonation methods. I would be interested in knowing a little more about the foundational relationship between Sanskrit and “song” (to use a general term), if you could say something about that.
And now, a couple of general observations and remarks:
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Your remarks, Ben, on “cosmogenesis” and “phonomatic emission/emanation” were particularly intriguing for me. Even though you were only able to roughly outline the notions, it struck me that there is a potentially significant overlap with the work that Stan Tenen is doing at the Meru Foundation on the Hebrew alphabet. (We have done a couple of CCafés on this; in case you are interested, you can find them here and here. Tenen’s contention, supported by a large body of research and cooperation with rabbinic scholars, is that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are self-defining, self-sounding, and represent, as revealed in the Torah, the basic building blocks of Creation. What is more, the model he discovered relates strongly to both Arabic and Greek, both of which are considered sacred languages by some. The model allows not only for reading and intoning the text, but for gesturing and even dancing it as spiritual exercises (cf. Steiner’s eurhythmy). This is, I suppose, a variation on the Sanskrit tradition you spoke of, but enclothed in a primarily Hebrew metaphor (the Arabic and Greek connections need to be explored by others). The parallels to logocentric approaches (be they Christian, which you mentioned, or more philosophical, cf. Georg Kühlewind who came out of the Steinerian tradition) jump right out at one. The idea that the cosmos was perhaps created by sound/word/speaking/etc. appears to rather universal. This would make for a rich follow-up session, should we ever find the opportunity to chat about it further.
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Generally speaking, I found the overview of your dissertation as engagement with Abinavagupta fascinating as it fits into what I’m detecting as a developing body of rethinking and revaluation that seems to be manifesting. Peter Kingsley suggested we revisit Parmenides and re-think the early Greeks; Henri Bortoft strongly suggested that we revisit and perhaps rethink both Aristotle and Plato (whereby Bergson and Whitehead also made cases for a revaluation of Platonic thought). Your dissertation takes a special look at a relatively unknown thinker, and in this regard, parallels Marc Gafni’s Radical Kabbalah (which I just started leafing through and in whose front matter our InfConv Cosmonauts Heather Fester and Marco Morelli both received honorable mentions) looks at a virtually unknown 19th century Kabbalist R. Mordechai Lanier. Lanier, like Abinavagupta reversed, or perhaps inverted, traditional teachings in a sense, opening thereby heretofore unrecognized revelations toward spiritual realization.
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Finally, I was very much taken by your remarks on the notion that it is “language all the way up”. The intense conception of language as much more than a mere medium of everyday communication reminded me strongly of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics which penetrates the phenomenon much more deeply than the interpretation-centered approaches of, say, Schleiermacher or Dilthey (or even Derrida, for that matter). One of Gadamer’s more well-known but cryptic assertions is “Being that can be understood is language.” (Later in life, he “revised” this to “Being that can be understood begins to speak to us,” but that is a different discussion.) This, too, is a conception that goes far beyond our everyday understanding of language. Also, Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics deals quite specifically with how it is we understand texts and what constitute texts independent of their original authors. This could be an fascinating avenue of conversation around the question that you raised, namely, how is it that a text can accomplish a transmission, even if that might not have been the original intent of the author. Both Gadamer and Ricoeur (along with more recent thinkers, like Richard Kearney and GB Madison) have done some excellent work on how it is that we (humans) can overcome time and space (Ricoeur calls is distancion) and grok something written from “somewhere” that has practically nothing to do with wherever the reader happens to find themself.
And so, those are my initial questions, reactions, and observations. Again, thanks for taking the time to share. Looking forward to more.