The Transformative Potential of Asian Philosophies

III

Whatever the case, non-Western philosophies are now being taken more and more seriously, and that is a really good thing. Yet I began this essay with the idea that many of these philosophies have the power to transform academic philosophy and imbue it with new significance. I now want to flesh this out, and will focus on Indian philosophy as it is what I know the most about — a similar case, I’m sure, can be made for other Asian philosophical traditions.5placeholder What I want to outline in a general way is how Indian philosophies might offer radical alternatives to ideas dominant in the Western tradition. But rather than focusing initially on some classical Indian ideas, I want to do this by examining two philosophical books published in England and France in the 60s: Karl Potter’s The Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While the first of these is about Indian philosophies, Deleuze’s book is not; in fact, Deleuze may have been opposed to the very idea that India could have produced philosophy.6placeholder Focusing on these two texts, therefore, may seem like a strange way to make my point. Yet I hope with this analysis to offer a sense not only of how Indian philosophies are deeply radical, but also how these radical ideas can build on currents within the Western philosophical tradition. If we want Indian philosophies to transform contemporary academic philosophy, it is not enough just to demonstrate what they thought; we need instead to understand how they can take themes and projects within the Western tradition further, demonstrating that there is a transformative possibility of synthesis that I think is being overlooked by much contemporary work.

Let me begin by considering one of the pieces of writing that got me really excited about the academic study of Indian philosophy: Karl Potter’s 1963 The Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies. The introduction to this influential yet contentious work, one of the first attempts by a non-Indian philosopher to understand the guiding problems of Indian philosophy as a whole, begins with a reflection on the Western philosophical tradition. “Throughout the history of our tradition,” i.e. the Western tradition, as Potter envisions it, “there has been a regular commitment to some notion of the highest good which is the ultimate desideratum of a human being” (Potter 1963, 1). This highest good, Potter goes on to state, has generally been conceived of as the combination of control of the passions and an exercise of the rational faculty in order to know the world and oneself. Plato is the paradigm example, but Potter also cites Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Russell as all fitting into this basic paradigm: the moral life is the rational life, and both morality and rationality are corrupted by the passions, which must be controlled. Once one has achieved this rational and moral balance, one has achieved the highest good in life — there is nowhere further to go.

A dominant way of thinking, yet not without its dissenters. “One is tempted to forget,” Potter notes, “that — running as an undercurrent throughout the history of Western philosophy — there is a strand of thought which glorifies spontaneity and growth, which looks ahead to man’s eventual success in overcoming the bonds which make him temporarily less than divine, and which sees no exercise of power of which man is not in principle capable” (Potter 1963, 2). As representatives of this minor tradition, Potter points to Meister Eckhart, Nietzsche and an unnamed set of ‘recent’ thinkers. While these thinkers have been treated largely with prejudice in the West, Potter looks to India to find an alternative. Where many have previously avoided discussion of India’s basic values, Potter seeks to be radically honest. The “unpalatable” fact Westerners often seek to deny, is that ‘Indian philosophy does in fact elevate power, control or freedom to a supereminent position above rational morality’. Thus, Potter proclaims, “the ultimate value recognised by classical Hinduism in its most sophisticated sources is not morality but freedom. Not rational self-control in the interests of the community’s welfare but complete control over one’s environment — something which includes self-control but also includes control of others and even control of the physical sources of power in the universe” (Potter 1963, 3).

No doubt the details of this interpretation are at best idiosyncratic and at worst based on a profoundly selective reading of Indian texts. Potter conflates power, freedom, and control in his understanding of moksha or liberation, and seems to ignore obvious places in Indian philosophy that contradict his thesis. The legendary German philologist Paul Hacker responds to Potter by noting that Arjuna’s liberation in the Bhagavad Gita comes not from an escape from the confines of morality but through a total submission of himself to his prescribed duty as a warrior. This is aided by his faith in Kṛṣṇa, the Lord of the universe, who is ultimately in control of all of Arjuna’s actions (Hacker 1965, 215).7placeholder We can add to Hacker’s observations the ideal of the Bodhisattva central to Mahāyāna Buddhism, who is defined as the individual who gives up on escaping from suffering once and for all and instead chooses, out of compassion, to stay in the world of birth and death and suffering until all beings are freed from it. Indeed, Potter’s thesis faces a general problem: for many Indian philosophical systems, liberation can only arise when we realise that our perception of ourselves as an autonomous agent is illusory — can such a state of liberation really be seen as the apex of power or control in the usual sense?

Potter’s thesis deserves a more thorough criticism, and indeed many scholars have not been shy about throwing their punches. Yet beyond the specific details of his argument, Potter’s broader approach — attempting to identify fundamental differences between Western and Indian philosophy — has also fallen out of favour. I think this is a shame. Although it may sometimes seem overly bold and generalising to make broad judgements about Indian and Western philosophy, without any such judgements, Indian philosophy cannot truly transform how we do philosophy. It may provide us with new ideas, but unless we acknowledge basic divergences in what philosophy was about, what truth is, and how it is to be attained, we risk assuming that both traditions were essentially engaged in the same enterprise, merely with different content. This, in some very important respects, was not the case, and not acknowledging this obstructs the deeper, transformative potential of taking Indian ideas seriously. So, can we return to Potter’s approach? Although he does not say so explicitly, might we detect in Potter’s Presuppositions one of his own unspoken presuppositions: that he was not merely reflecting Indian philosophy neutrally, but was seeking ways to enrich his own philosophical tradition?

If we read Potter in this light, then rather than dismissing his approach outright, we might ask how we can improve upon his particular conclusions. To this end, it is worth considering another attempt from the 1960s to re-envision Western philosophy — this time by a thinker with perhaps a more profound analysis of the basic presuppositions of his own tradition.

IV

With this, let me introduce Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most underrated of the Parisian post-structuralists.8placeholder Deleuze differentiated himself from the other French intellectual heavyweights of his day: folks such as Foucault and Derrida, who would go on to become incredibly influential across the humanities. Deleuze saw himself as a totally ‘naive’ philosopher, unafraid to take on classical philosophical questions and unburdened by the need to go “beyond metaphysics” which pushed many of his contemporaries into the realms of history, linguistics and psychoanalysis (Deleuze et al. 1995, 88-9). Yet Deleuze’s project, which he saw as ‘pure metaphysics’, was nonetheless revolutionary and in the spirit of his time. He wanted to offer a “theory of thought,” a new way of thinking about thinking, which mirrors “the revolution which took art from representation to abstraction” (DR 276).9placeholder Deleuze wanted a philosophy in which thought could move, in which the concepts discovered were not simple and static but were dynamic and internally complex. In this, he saw himself as breaking from a major tradition in Western philosophy beginning with Plato, in which the goal of philosophy is to discover laws, ideas and principles that were timeless and determinate.

The great locus of these reflections is in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, five years after Potter’s Presuppositions. This rich philosophical text is seen today as Deleuze’s magnum opus, yet in his preface to the English translation, Deleuze writes that it is “the third chapter which now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete” (DR xvii). Taking chapter three, “The Image of Thought,” as our jumping off point, I will give a brief account of Deleuze’s analysis of and response to a basic problem in Western philosophy before examining potential links to Indian thought.

Deleuze begins “The Image of Thought” with the problem of presuppositions in philosophy. While philosophy has always sought to eliminate all unwanted presuppositions at the outset, this faces a problem: “whereas in science one is confronted by objective presuppositions which axiomatic rigour can eliminate, presuppositions in philosophy are as much subjective as objective.” Subjective presuppositions are “implicit presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts” (DR 129). Not specific ideas, but assumptions about what it means to think; not specific truths but assumptions about what truth means and its relation to thought in general.

For Deleuze, the Western philosophical tradition has been stuck unwittingly in the grip of a set of these presuppositions which he calls the “Image of thought,” and although this image has had “variant forms” (131), a dominant pattern can be recognised, like a repeated motif in a symphony — “a single Image in general” (132).

The body of the chapter seeks to unearth this unacknowledged Image. Deleuze says that the Image presupposes “a natural capacity for thought endowed with a talent for truth or an affinity with the true” (DR 131). We ask the question ‘what is x?’ and apply ourselves, using reason as our guide, to the task of finding an answer. We assume that as long as we do not make any unwarranted assumptions, if we do not slip up in the application of logic, rational thought will naturally lead us to truth by its very nature. The possibility of making a mistake comes from outside of thought. We may be misled by our passions, by our body or by our poor education, but not by reason itself. Thus, the enemy of thought is “error, nothing but error” (DR xvi), which, in Deleuze’s conception, is what happens when thought is attacked by something outside itself. In this conception, reason as such is eternally good-natured and innocent, a totally trustworthy guide across the landscape of knowledge.

The Image of thought also assumes what Deleuze calls the “process of recognition,” which he defines as the “harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object” (DR 134). Taking the tradition of transcendental idealism as his model here, Deleuze sees the Image of thought as presupposing a basic structure or framework in which thinking and knowledge happen. Specifically, philosophy assumes that a subject uses its faculties of knowing (e.g. perception, understanding, etc.) to understand an object. While the specific subject and specific object are different in every case, the basic form is left unquestioned, meaning that experience and knowledge are deemed to always take this structure.

Finally, the Image of thought dictates that once the process of logical analysis by a subject of its object is undertaken, then the result will be a proposition that serves as a solution to an initial philosophical problem. For example, the problem: ‘Is this laptop in front of me real?’ after the process of analysis return the solution: ‘The laptop in front of me is real’. This proposition is a true statement that neutralises the problem. “We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution… We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions, that both of these concern only solutions” (DR 158). Problems, therefore, are uncomfortable for philosophy. They cannot be lived with and must be tamed by providing solutions that are intelligible, easy to understand, and make the scary problem leave us alone.

These presuppositions: the affinity of thought with the truth, the potential for error, the process of recognition, and the primacy of solutions over problems, are the primary building blocks of the image of thought.10placeholder

For Deleuze, this image of thought has dominated Western philosophy. Although he references many thinkers in this chapter, he focuses primarily on Plato, Descartes, and Kant as its chief proponents. It is Kant, however, whom he holds in particular contempt. In discovering “the prodigious domain of the transcendental”—the realm of the forces and principles that condition the exercise of thought—Kant opened the possibility for a radical critique of the assumed nature of thinking itself. As Deleuze writes, “He is the analogue of the great explorer — not of another world, but of the upper and lower reaches of this one” (DR 135). Yet, frightened by the implications of his discovery, Kant retreats in fear, fashioning the transcendental in the image of common sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he introduces the idea that empirical subjectivity is constructed, and that reason harbours internal problems that give rise to false solutions (the transcendental illusions). But rather than pursuing these radical insights, Kant ultimately sacralises the Image of thought by grounding the empirical subject in a new transcendental subject and asserting that reason can reflect upon itself to avoid its own illusions. In Deleuze’s words, Kant “rediscovers the church” and “rediscovers the state” in the face of what could have been a dramatic revolution in philosophy (DR 136).

But where would this revolution have taken him if Kant had dared to follow it through? Deleuze points to the possibility of “a thought without Image,” which would come at “the cost of the greatest destructions and the greatest demoralisations, and a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox, one which would have to renounce both the form of representation and the element of common sense” (DR 132). Deleuze develops this new theory of thought in later chapters of Difference and Repetition, and I will not lay it out in full here. Suffice it to say that Deleuze envisions a philosopher who does not simply think by naturally extending his common sense, but is instead forced to think by a violent “encounter” with something totally outside of his reason, which forces him to create a new concept. This new concept disrupts prior consensus by distinguishing what was previously considered the same and identifying connections between things once thought different, much like how the discovery of a disease such as polio required a creative doctor to isolate a common thread across the chaos of seemingly unrelated cases.11placeholder The philosopher, then, must be creative, responding to the encounter with an act of sense-making, rather than calmly working her way to truth from first principles.

V

We now have an image of Deleuze’s ‘Image of thought’, but what does this have to do with Indian philosophy? Well, as is often the case with revolutionaries — even so, it seems, in the realm of metaphysics — it is their critique that is of greater interest than their solutions. Combining this critique with Potter’s approach to Indian philosophy, we can construct a better version of the latter’s thesis: a fuller sense of the alternative that Indian philosophy might provide, i.e. a mode of philosophical thinking unburdened by the Image of thought.

This alternative, it must be acknowledged, doesn’t look much like Deleuze’s ‘thought without Image’, which is a kind of new philosophy, exemplified in the raucous and genre-defying philosophical books he goes on to write with Félix Guattari, in which new concepts proliferate.12placeholder Rather, turning to India, we find alternative routes out of the Image of thought. Let me note here a few important examples.

In philosophical traditions such as Advaita Vedānta, we find a worldview in which error is intrinsic to thought as such. While the rigour of rational thought is prized as indispensable in worldly life and philosophical debate, ultimately, the basic structures of language and the basic structures of subject and object that a rational analysis of experience presupposes, obscures rather than reveals the true nature of reality. Reality is pure consciousness that precedes the distinction between subject and object and thus, in Deleuzian terms, is not available to the process of recognition. In fact, for Advaita Vedānta, the appearance of the world and the structures of our thought are like optical illusions which can be compared, to take two classical examples, to mistaking a shell on a beach for silver, or leaping in fear when one mistakes a rope for a venomous snake. Such “minor distortions” can start us “on the path toward becoming aware of a more general kind of distortion that is built into experience” (Doniger 1984).

On the Buddhist side, we find similarly radical positions. The Madhyamaka school, founded by Nāgārjuna in the 2nd century, attempts to systematically deconstruct the very notion of a real object and a real subject. Yet rather than the Advaita vision of a transcendent reality beyond these two, for Madhyamaka, subjects and objects are co-constructed in a web of mutual dependence, like illusions built on top of other illusions. From this, we get a philosophical picture in which metaphysical reductionism never bottoms out, and we end up in a world in which the word ‘reality’ as we usually understand it cannot be applied to anything. The other great philosophical school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Yogācāra, argues that the world is constructed by mental processes in ways that have stark parallels to contemporary theories within cognitive science (cf. Waldron 2023). Yet taking this in a radical and self-referential direction, some early versions of Yogācāra argue that even the notion of the mind itself is ultimately a product of mental processes of construction, meaning that the mind is as illusory as the apparently external world (Chaturvedi 2024).

The intellectual landscape of ancient India was rich, and philosophical schools debated with each other over their profoundly different conceptions of reality, the path to understanding reality, and the role and limits of conceptual knowledge. Yet the three schools I have just cited, along with some others, mostly agree on something: that the true nature of reality is totally independent of conceptual knowledge in general, and that our basic, pre-theoretical sense of ourselves as a subject facing a world of objects is mistaken. The great error we make that prevents our contact with the truth is not on the level of theory but on the level of theorising as such.

This radical move has implications not just for our systematic metaphysics, but also for the nature of philosophical practice, for the role philosophy plays in the human desire for truth. Indeed, I would argue that Indian philosophy contains an understanding of the role and nature of philosophical problems that has been largely unacknowledged in the Western tradition. In this understanding, philosophical problems are neither simply to be resolved in determinate solutions (as presupposed by the Image of thought), nor do they lead to a proliferation of new problems, solutions, and frameworks as they do in Deleuze’s vision. Problems, if engaged with the right attitude, can lead to a transformation of consciousness.

As an example of this, take the practice of neti neti (“not this, not this”), which is a classical and central form of philosophical-meditative practice in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. One is invited to ask the question “who am I?” and to any response that arises in the mind, to reply “not this, not this.” Since pure consciousness is beyond all conceptions, even conceptions such as “pure consciousness,” the practice can be applied to any and all conceptions of identity. Once these are all cleared away, non-conceptual pure consciousness will be the only thing that remains.

As I see it, the practice works because of what we can call the problematic nature of identity itself. Every mental phenomenon has a subject, which invites the question of what that subject is. Yet any determinate conception of the identity of this subject implies a subject of this very conception. Put more simply: the subject, as soon as it is identified, becomes an object. Because of this, our sense of ourselves is always slipping away from us as soon as we try to pin it down — like a slippery bar of soap. Deleuze describes this aspect of self-identity, the self’s inescapable distance from itself, as the “fractured self,” which he expresses through Rimbaud’s famous proclamation: “I is an other” (DR 86). For Deleuze, this gap within the self is a problem that is fundamentally productive, and thus should be responded to through constantly critiquing old identities and creating ever-new ones. Advaita Vedānta, however, takes a different route. This Indian schools claims that if we stick with the problem and with the practice of continuous negation, without resorting to any determinate sense of identity whatsoever, we can be led into a transformation of consciousness whereby we do understand ourselves, we do get a grasp of our true identity, but a grasp that is fundamentally non-conceptual and thus distinct from any ‘identity’ in the usual sense, no matter how philosophically refined. In this mode of doing philosophy, the problem is not solved but is transcended.

It needs to be said that the approaches I have highlighted here do not characterise Indian philosophy in toto. There are many schools within the larger tradition that take far more realist positions and thus might be interesting to contemporary philosophers for very different reasons. There is a lot of contemporary interest, for example, in Nyāya philosophy, which was robustly realist and developed forms of epistemic reliabilism that can be brought into analytic philosophical debates. Yet a couple of swallows do not make a summer — by and large, Indian intellectual traditions have given a far more central role to philosophies that would seem radical, nihilistic, and antinomian through most of the history of Western philosophy. Indeed, the few subversive European thinkers who took steps in a similar direction were often cast in this light, such as Spinoza and Nietzsche.

Thus, Indian philosophies have the potential to offer new inspiration for contemporary philosophy when we acknowledge how thoroughly different they have often been from the theories that have been popular in the West and even from the assumed sense of what ‘philosophy’ itself is. And because they are so different, they can help us rethink the role of philosophy in a cultural moment when such revision is deeply important. Beyond their radical theories, they offer a different attitude to philosophical problems themselves. Rather than a solution-focused approach and rather than perpetual critique — beyond Effective Altruism and identity politics — Indian philosophies suggest that the practice of philosophy can be transformative on a completely different level. While acknowledging we need not turn philosophy departments into monastic ashrams, it is worth considering what further significance and life contemporary philosophy could take on if it were to take a hint from Indian ideas.

VI

So, the possibilities are profound. I began this article, however, with a suggestion that not everyone working in the field shares my precise vision for this revolution. To end this essay, let me now circle back to this point by looking briefly at an article by one of the most celebrated and brilliant contemporary philosophers in the field of Indian Philosophy: Jonardon Ganeri. The aim here is not to single him out, nor to disparage his work in general, which I do not want to do, nor would it mean much coming from myself. One of his articles, however, serves as an interesting microcosm for my general fear that the transformative potential of Indian philosophy is being tamed in the interests of current philosophical norms.

In the article “Mental Time Travel and Attention,” Ganeri uses aspects of Buddhist philosophy — specifically Buddhaghosa’s account of memory — to create a naturalistic theory of self-consciousness. He brilliantly combines the thought of this classical Buddhist thinker with findings in empirical science to construct a theory in which the self is a phenomenological item in the stream of experiences itself, not something outside the stream that possesses or witnesses it. More precisely he uses these Indian Buddhist thinkers to argue that the self is a mere “sense of ownership” that appears within experience, that is brought about by a “discrete cognitive system, one whose function is to implicate the self in the content of memory… it is the mental machinery responsible for inserting an I-tag and injecting a sense of personal ownership” (Ganeri 2017, 363). In this view, the self is neither a witness, nor a specific material object, nor a clearly bounded experiential quale.

Ingenious and important work to be sure, but the scholar John Taber’s review of the book contains an interesting observation. He notes that Ganeri “does not take on what might be called the really hard problem about the self that Indian philosophical literature raises, namely, that the experiencing self is not really who or what you are, or as the Buddhists would prefer, is not a self at all.” As Taber wisely points out, the possibility of transcending the self entirely is a “challenge… that Indian philosophical literature on the self confronts us with, like it or not,” and that from an Indian philosophical perspective, beyond the complex theories of the nature of the illusory self, this radical transformation in consciousness “is the most important thing to know” (Taber 2017, 399).

So, while Ganeri uses Buddhist material to construct a new vision for what the self is, he does so in a spirit antithetical to what the Buddhist philosophers he cites would have advocated. For them, the whole project of philosophising about the self is not to create a new naturalistic theory, but to facilitate the realisation, intellectually and experientially, that the self is an illusion, thus moving us along the path toward a transformation of consciousness. It seems to me that in his use of Asian philosophy for his own philosophical ends, Ganeri is culpable for something similar to what Deleuze sees in Kant: in the face of discovering something unfamiliar and radically different beneath the everyday world we take for granted, a world of vertigo and incredible strangeness that our common sense sits upon like a boat atop unfathomable depths, Ganeri chooses to rediscover the state and rediscover the church, seeking a new way to naturalistically ground the thinking subject. A potentially radical Indian philosophical tradition thus becomes a vehicle for our common-sense assumptions.

To close this essay, let me ask a Deleuzian question to those interested in the contemporary study of Indian philosophy: “What is a thought which harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else?” (DR 135-6). To let Indian and Asian philosophies be themselves would be to let them be harmful to our assumptions about what philosophy is and what it is for. Yet the sick patient of contemporary philosophy may need to be harmed in an operation that ultimately leads to new health. While the other responses to the question of philosophy’s relevance ought to be heard, the answers offered by Asian traditions may help expand the range of philosophical approaches that feel genuinely significant and transformative. These traditions can join the countercultural momentum that began in the 1960s and continues to shape the humanities, but they also chart a distinct course. In many of the philosophical frameworks that are travelling westward out of the classical worlds of Asia, we find the possibility of synthesising relativistic and revisionary strands of contemporary philosophy with a renewed quest for truth and a confidence that this quest has a final destination. Rather than simply a water-tight and inoffensive theory of metaphysics, for many Asian philosophies, this ultimate goal of philosophy lies in a transformation of consciousness beyond philosophy itself. Therefore, when the terrain of what is possible for consciousness is expanded, so too is our understanding of philosophy’s role in the pursuit of the good life. And what happens when these possibilities are taken on by our institutions and then ripple outward into wider society? We cannot say yet, but in a world facing a crisis in its guiding ideas and which desperately needs new sources of meaning, it is surely worth trying to find out.