Non-Western Worldview

R Vaidya · Post by **R Vaidya** » 23 Sep 2008 19:15

India should re-joice at the Decline of US institutions

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1192432

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 23 Sep 2008 21:29

R. Vaidya's article posted in full

India should re-joice at the Decline of US institutions

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1192432

Failure of American financial institutions is a reason to rejoice
R Vaidyanathan
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 03:16 IST

The decline of the West is a pre-requisite for the emergence of India as a global power.

I have been closely watching the reaction of our press, particularly the business papers and TV channels, to the implosion that has taken place in the Western financial markets and institutions.

Lehman Brothers, the original cotton trading company of the mid-nineteenth century fame from Alabama, is no more.

US government is acting like the erstwhile Soviet Union in nationalising institutions and bailing out market mayhem.

Our experts and analysts are pathetic in responding to this. Some of them are whining and the rest ad nauseam repeating about globalisation and impact on India, etc. It proves once again that the colonial gene is embedded in all of us and it refuses to recognise opportunities and turns advantageous as disasters.

First thing first. The decline of these institutions — many more to come — is the best thing that has happened to countries such as India, which are poised to play a larger role in global financial affairs.

Let us have some facts. India had 25% of global income in 1500 through 1700; by 1820, this was down to 17% and by 1951 to 5%; in 1998, the country’s share stood at 5.5% (according to Angus Maddison in The World Economy: A millennial Perspective, OECD Development Centre Studies -2007; Table-B-20 Appendix B; pp263).

We need to reclaim our position in the world — it is just returning to where we were. By 2025, we should have at least 25% of global GDP.

This requires strategic thinking and a new mindset. We are not going to be easily accepted as a global power. There is going to be a tussle between existing powers, declining powers and emerging powers.

Nobody is going to offer the seat in the top table to us by request or by supplication. We need to earn it and be in a position to demand it. We need national purpose and a single minded devotion to achieve it.

The decline of the global financial institutions provides great opportunities since our growth is primarily due to our domestic savings.

Foreign direct investment and foreign institutional investment put together is not more than 8% in relation to our gross savings in any one of the past several years.

Also, nearly 80% of our domestic savings of 35% comes from household savings. In comparison, the USA has meagre or negative household savings.

It has been running a consumption economy for too long, sustained by the savings of other countries, particularly Asian. It has also taken financial convergence to the extreme — anybody can do anything.

Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain a good old traditional insurance company such as AIG having such significant exposures in derivative products.

It is important to recognise that Europe is past, USA is the present and countries like India are the future. USA is slowly getting into a situation of the UK, which started declining after the Second World War.

What should India have done?

Immediately after the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the crisis in many investment banks, our finance ministry should have called a meeting of major banks, industrialists and some — shall I say obscenely rich — NRIs and announced the readiness of some Indian groups to acquire some of these institutions after due diligence.

This is just to put the cat among pigeons and announce to the world that we have arrived. It is not required that we should acquire these sick entities.

It is just to express our readiness and also to tell the world that we want orderly transition as a responsible global power. It is not late even now, since many more commercial banks of US origin are in the queue.

However, India was silent and generally mumbling that we are not affected, etc. It was behaving like a small sidekick country.

The country should call for an alternative global financial architecture, which is built on the real economy and not on the paper economy.

The disconnect between stock markets and the real economy was accentuated by the derivative markets where the tail had begun to wag the dog.

This fact has been told many a time by many from countries such as India.
India and China should play an important role in evolving the alternative global financial architecture and for which we should start working.

The existing institutions have failed and the existing market mantra has been exposed in the most compromising position wherein the market and government are caught in the act.

Unless we internalise the fundamental truth that the decline of the West is a pre-requisite for the emergence of India as a global power, we are not going anywhere.

To do that, we need to be pro-active and not supplicant. After all these acts of thievery, thuggery and market manipulations and mis-sales, it is interesting that no one categorically and unambiguously and unequivocally proclaims that the US financial system is a big sham and the regulations are totally ineffective and the marauders and vandals have been running major institutions from smoke-filled pubs .

That is the fact.

To build a new architecture, India should take the lead. Unfortunately, we have the US lobby, Chinese lobby, Pakistan lobby and all sorts of lobbies in the Capital, but no India lobby yet.

Until we do, we cannot but be mouthing inanities and discussing inconsequential things.

The author is professor of finance, Indian Institute of Management — Bangalore, and can be reached at vaidya@iimb.ernet.in.

The views are personal and do not reflect that of his organisation.

I fully agree. I was shocked that no move was made to acquire the distressed properties. And no one understood the opportunity that was being presented. The impact of this meltdown is that, the India related milestones forecast in RAND reports/Goldman Sachs reports were all being advanced in India's favor and yet there is no understanding.
Thanks R Vaidya.

Rony · Post by **Rony** » 25 Sep 2008 08:54

In 19th century, the Germans tinkled into every one's History starting from the stealing of the concepts of Aryan and Swastika from India .

Johann Gustav Droysen, creator of Greece's Fake History

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 02 Oct 2008 09:06

Persian Fire-Tom Holland

by Tom Holland
418pp, Little, Brown, £20

The Persian invasions of mainland Greece in the early fifth century BC are the beginning of history as we understand that word. Seeking "to preserve the memory of the past" and also to understand how Greeks and Asiatics came into conflict, the ancient writer Herodotus deployed a technique he called historia: knowledge obtained through diligent inquiry.

Herodotus, a native of Ionian Greece or what is now western Turkey, travelled the known world asking people what had occurred in the 490s and 480s and why. The result was a story of pride, heroism and intrigue that gave first the Greeks, and then Europeans in general, a sense of special destiny. Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae were inspirations in the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and, less creditably, for European domination of the near orient.

For the Iranians, national myth and Islamic history had submerged all memory of the achievements of Cyrus the Great, Cambyses and Darius until European archaeologists and translations of Herodotus arrived at the turn of the 20th century. The Pahlavi monarchy that came to power in the 1920s sought to revive ancient Persian glory as the Greek historians had known it. Patriotic Iranians named their sons Kourosh, Kambiz and Daryush.

Tom Holland showed in Rubicon, his book on Julius Caeasar and his age, that he could master a complex and fast-moving narrative from ancient history and make it a pleasure for both general readers and the learned. There is not nearly the same body of evidence for the Persian wars as there is for the breakdown of the Roman republic, but what there is is to die for.

Beside the nine books of Herodotus, there is Aeschylus's tragedy of 472BC, The Persians. The playwright had fought at the decisive sea-battle of Salamis and the high point of the drama is a report of the battle from the Persian point of view. There are also Plutarch's lives of the chief Athenian statesmen, and his account of the Spartan system of government, written much later under the Roman empire. From Iran, there are rock inscriptions of royal conquests above all at Bisitun in Kurdistan.

The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC with a mission, part bureaucratic, part religious, to bring good order and good government to creation. Cyrus's successors extended the empire into Central Asia and Africa and beyond the Danube. That left the eastern Mediterranean as a field for expansion. There, the Phoenicians, allies of the Persians, had been for some time in competition with the traders and colonies of the Greeks.

The immediate cause of the war was a revolt in the Greek cities of the Ionian coast in 499BC. With the help of reinforcements from the mainland, the Greek rebels ejected their autocratic rulers and burned the Persian provincial capital of Sardis. The revolt was put down, but in 490 the Persians launched a punitive expedition that resulted in defeat at Marathon. Ten years later Xerxes, the Persian king, launched a coordinated invasion by land and sea. The Greeks deployed their army and fleet at linked positions at Thermopylae and Artemisium. Storms and battle inflicted heavy losses on the Persian fleet, but the force at Thermopylae was outflanked. After three days of intense fighting, the rearguard of 300 Spartans under their king, Leonidas, was wiped out. Under the strategic direction of Themistocles, Athens was deliberately abandoned to the Persians. Instead, the Athenians and their allies provoked a sea-fight in the narrows at Salamis where the immense Persian and Phoenician fleet could not exploit its numbers. Xerxes withdrew to Asia and the following year his army was routed by the Spartans. Having expelled the Persians from the mainland, the Greeks counter-attacked and eventually, under Alexander the Great in the next century, captured the Persian empire in a piece.

All the ancient sources are partial, with a bias towards Athens even in Herodotus, but Holland succeeds in writing an account that is clear and uncluttered. His technique is to present his narrative as an uncontested succession of events, and leave the evaluation of sources and the scholarly reservations to notes.

He likes to cut and splice Herodotus's account when the chronology doesn't suit his narrative purposes, but he explains what he is doing and the effect is often fresh and interesting. (The exception is at Salamis, which is a very hard battle to understand, and even harder when Holland introduces a complex Persian night manoeuvre that doesn't appear to be in any ancient source at all.) Similarly, the evacuation of Athens is full of anachronistic detail. But some of the set pieces, such as the charge of the Athenian heavy infantry at Marathon and the Persian army crossing the bridge of boats strung across the Dardanelles, are thrilling.

There is one disreputable passage. The constitution of Sparta, with its severe military communism, has been a source of fascination right up to the 18th century and was encrusted with myths. Holland claims that unmarried Spartan women were routinely sodomised. In the notes, he admits ("only fair") that the earliest source for this unlikely claim dates from some six centuries after the Persian wars. Then he repeats the allegation in the text as fact.

Holland pays his dues to the clash-of-civilisations claptrap but is more inclined, like Herodotus, to "record the astonishing achievements of both our own and the Asiatic peoples". All the chief sources show that Persia was not some alien entity at moral war with Greece but deeply intertwined in the politics of the mainland cities. Even Themistocles ended his days a servant of Persia. For the Spartan subject races, known as helots, Persian rule would have felt like the sweetest liberty.

What happened is that the victories gave the ancient Greeks a sense of superiority over easterners which their modern epigones in Europe and America, who did not carry a shield at Marathon, nevertheless seek to enjoy.

· James Buchan's Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World is published by John Murray

Philip · Post by **Philip** » 03 Oct 2008 17:09

I think that 'rejoicing' at someone else's misfortune is often wrong,unless it happens to be that of an evildoer,a terrorist,fall of a dictator,etc.having said that "hubris" certainly has an American flavour to the word right now! I've received quite a bit of mail rejoicing at the US economic collapse and the demise of many fat cats of Wall St.,now being called "Fall St." I also see some journo friends also commenting about the same fact and feeling.The fall of crony capitalism is heaven sent,even if we have to take some punishment too.The trick of the US for decades has been at times of economic crisis to spread the loss around the world,profits to the "US" and losses to "us".Kissinger raised oil prices in a conspiracy with the Shah of Iran in the '70s.We've seen how the oil prices have been manipulated just months ago to "fuel" the Us with windfall from its "war profiteering" that has cost over 3 $trillion according to experts.The most shameful experience to watch however has been that of our grovelling PM carrying India's "love" ( he never asked for an Indian referendum on the subject) for the war criminal of the White House and the architect of the US economic collapse.

Here is Vladimir Putin on US "irresponsibility",with agreement from Europe too.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 48577.html

Putin turns on US 'irresponsibility'

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Thursday, 2 October 2008

Putin accused the United States of "irresponsibility" as he criticised its primary role in the economic and financial turmoil that has undermined the foundations of global capitalism across the world.

The Russian Prime Minister's remarks yesterday came after several European leaders, including the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the spiralling crisis started by toxic housing debts in the US raised questions about the "Anglo-Saxon" way of doing business.

"Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the US," Mr Putin told a government meeting in Moscow. "This is a real crisis that all of us are facing. And what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know, had pretensions to [global] leadership."

The Russian stock market has collapsed by 50 per cent from its peak last May as a result of the global uncertainty, coupled with investor nervousness following the Georgian crisis.

M. Sarkozy, speaking in Toulon a week ago, said: "A certain idea of globalisation is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that had imposed its logic on the whole economy and contributed to perverting it. The idea of the absolute power of the markets that should not be constrained by any rule, by any political intervention, was a mad idea. The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea." The German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said "the US will lose its superpower status in the world financial system". He hesitated to predict the long-term consequences of the upheaval, which he described as "above all a US problem" but said: "The world financial system is becoming multipolar."

Leaders of developing countries have also lashed out at the US over what Gordon Brown called the first crisis of globalisation, in the light of the Bush administration's failure to swiftly put an end to the bloodletting in the financial markets. "The managers of big business took huge risks out of greed," said the Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, whose economy is highly dependent on US trade. "What happens in the United States will affect the entire world and, above all, small countries like ours."

Another ally of Mr Bush, the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, criticised Washington's failure to deal with the uncontrolled financial speculation. "The whole world has financed the United States, and I believe that they have a reciprocal debt with the planet," he said.

France and Germany are calling for greater EU intervention to regulate the markets, while Britain is wary of such a move. But Mr Brown used his UN speech last Friday to press for international regulators to set up "colleges" overseeing the megabanks with branches across the world.

abhischekcc · Post by **abhischekcc** » 03 Oct 2008 18:19

Philip wrote:I think that 'rejoicing' at someone else's misfortune is often wrong,unless it happens to be that of an evildoer,a terrorist,fall of a dictator,etc.having said that "hubris" certainly has an American flavour to the word right now!

That's precisely the reason why people are rejoicing at the fall of the Great Satan which is "an evildoer,a terrorist, a dictator"

I've received quite a bit of mail rejoicing at the US economic collapse

Can you share some here?

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 04 Oct 2008 06:18

I have always wondered as to why the Persians never invaded India....Even Nadir Shah was a Turkomen carpet dealer who usurped power of persia.

The persian expansion has been to the west and stake control over the mediterranian regions. Consequently their rivals have been the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, or the Central asian turkics (who preyed upon tem the way the did on india).

We have fought with them over the buffer territories like Kandahar but never invaded each other's heartlands. I have not read of the achaemids, sassanids, or safavids crossing the bolan pass to take over the indian plains.

G Subramaniam · Post by **G Subramaniam** » 04 Oct 2008 06:35

Paul wrote:I have always wondered as to why the Persians never invaded India....Even Nadir Shah was a Turkomen carpet dealer who usurped power of persia.

The persian expansion has been to the west and stake control over the mediterranian regions. Consequently their rivals have been the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, or the Central asian turkics (who preyed upon tem the way the did on india).

We have fought with them over the buffer territories like Kandahar but never invaded each other's heartlands. I have not read of the achaemids, sassanids, or safavids crossing the bolan pass to take over the indian plains.

Andre Wink in Al-Hind, writes that the Zorastrians were good neighbors

Parts of punjab seem to have come under the rule of Darius

The persians repeatedly invaded Afghanistan

Between the fall of the Mauryas and the rise of the Guptas several Persian kingdoms seem to have come up in India

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 04 Oct 2008 06:56

Paul, Check the Nat Geo issue on Cyrus. Apparently his empire included parts of India west of Indus. ~ 550 BC. And Herodotus writes of Indian soldiers in the Persian armies. And Caroe in his book on Pashtuns writes of the Persian connection in that area.

So they were there before Alexander and after Mauryas in the near abroad of India till the Kushans displaced them.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 04 Oct 2008 21:22

GS and Ramana: Thank you for replying. As civilizational monoliths, these account for not even skirmirshes. No persian monarch has led a expedition into India to confront the Indian kingdoms the way they did against the greeks or the mediterranean regions.

The indic and Persian civilizations have never come into conflict from the days of the asuras/devas.

This has lessons from India-China POV as well: Mao may succeeded in intimidating our macaulaized dhmmified elites but his slight to the indic civilization will be etched in the memories of indians forever. This will lead to retaliation by future generations of indians for which the chinese pop could well pay the price. Relations between India and China are damaged permanently to satisfy the ego of one maniac.

lesson for India: While I do believe it is not in India's interests to see nuclear weapons in the Middle east, India should not be party to any attack on Iran. Even if logistical facilities for any attack are provided by India, this could lead to poisoned perceptions towards Indian for which future generations will pay the price.

Pulikeshi · Post by **Pulikeshi** » 05 Oct 2008 20:22

Paul wrote: The indic and Persian civilizations have never come into conflict from the days of the asuras/devas.

Are you saying there was no conflict during the Mauryan times (approx 3 BCE to 1 BCE)?
AFAIK - the Mauryas conquered all the way Persia.
Also the Greek/Persian war and antipathy is rather blown out of proportion.

Where I would agree is that post "Deva/Asura" wars, we did not have an occasion to see
each other as enemies.

lesson for India: While I do believe it is not in India's interests to see nuclear weapons in the Middle east, India should not be party to any attack on Iran. Even if logistical facilities for any attack are provided by India, this could lead to poisoned perceptions towards Indian for which future generations will pay the price.

You are probably correct in this particular case, but such arguments by previous generations are what got us here in the first place.
If India is to determine who does what in her neighborhood, she better be prepared to take initiative and not just wait for them to
show up - by which time it is too late!

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 05 Oct 2008 20:31

I think he means that the clashes were limited and at the periphery. The core never clashed.

Another karz is the civilizing influence that Persianized Islam had on the Mughals which reduced their ferocity.

Persian had similar inputs to Judaism and by extension to Christianity.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 05 Oct 2008 22:35

That is what I was basically getting at. Ramana…you have a good handle on my thoughts.

What Zarathus basically did was to elevate the main asura deity – Varuna to the head of their pantheon. Varuna is Ahura Mazda as we know of now. The devas who were held in some reverence by the pre- Zoroasterian Iranians (as they were cousins) were removed from the pantheon to cast out - never to be worshipped again.

In essence - It is basically a realignment of the gods which is misconstrued as first Generation monotheism by the western intelligentsia/orientalists.

+++++++++++++

Subhash Kak has done some relevant research. His article on this subject appeared in asia times some years ago.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 05 Oct 2008 22:55

http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/zoro.pdf

SK Mody · Post by **SK Mody** » 05 Oct 2008 23:01

Has anyone seen this site before? They are looking for authors.
Freepedia - the Indian encyclopedia

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 05 Oct 2008 23:08

Quite some time I had said that the Zoroasterian religion needs to be take it's rightful place amongst the indic religions along with the Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh thoughts. It is in their interests to join forces with the indic faiths.

The orientalists and the Brits have instilled in our (and the Zoroasterian worshippers) that their religion is a monotheistic faith closer to the abrahmic thought. The reality is very different.

Are there any Parsis on this forum to share their thoughts on this subject.....TIA

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 08 Oct 2008 00:18

X-posted...

parsuram wrote:RajeshA:

The Americans and the Europeans are facing a crisis in the very core of their civilization, their financial institutions. That is their priority. The World comes later.
No, Rajesh, the current financial tempest in a tea cup is just that, a minor blip. For starters, check comprables from the 1930s. "The very core of their civilization" (Western Judeo-Christian Helenist rationalism) is still to be found in Genesis Chapter I [....& God created man to hold dominon over birds of the air, beasts of the land & creatures of the deep....] This continues to drive western civilization, being its rationale for being [the struggle to hold dominion (over nature)]. And that means resources. And that means the middle east, Afghanistan, central Asia, Africa, & so on & so on....So there we are.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 21 Oct 2008 03:06

Jan 26 2007, 03:02 PM
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_web ... and_i.html

Exclusion of India Philosophy by Europeans

Heidegger and Indian Philosophy

I: IS THE QUESTION OF BEING UNIQUE TO THE WEST?

Inspired by Heidegger's ontological questioning of Western tradition, Wilhelm Halbfass attempts to retrieve comparable ontological dimensions of Indian thought, which have been neglected by other scholars. He sees “no good rsason to adopt Heidegger's own exclusion of his ideas from the interpretation of non-Western traditions" (On Being and What There Is, SUNY Press, 1992, p. 25). If for Heidegger, the being-question is present in a latent or repressed way in Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and the early Husserl, although they do not formally discuss being qua being, why should it not be equally present in Indian thought?

Using Heideggerian phenomenology to apprehend what is afoot in Indian tradition in a discreet, suggestive and nondogmatic way, Halbfass shows a sophisticated awareness of the problematic aspects of Heidegger's enterprise. The "history of being" which Heidegger distilled out of a selective focus on the ontological implications of past philosophical debates tends, though powerfully illuminating, to a determinism or fatalism which is implausible and paralyzing. Halbfass calls this construction into question by insisting that being is a universal concern, not a distinctively Western one, and that "being is one of the central and pervasive themes of Indian thought' (OB, p. 21).

If my comments here take the form of doubts and misgivings – most of which have surely occurred to Halbfass himself - , the reason is not only my hesitancy to make positive statements about Indian philosophy, of which I know so little, but also a sense that, given the promise of Halbfass's approach for the mutual clarification of Indian and Western thought, such misgivings need to be aired as fully as possible lest the process be short-circuited by hasty identifications. This merely dubitative posture may not save me from mistakes, but I am happy to think that Professor Halbfass's corrections will provide the surest of safety-nets.

My principal misgiving concerns Halbfass's scepticism about the Heideggerian question of being, a scepticism which facilitates his claim that ontology is a universal enterprise, but at the same time risks robbing this enterprise of any major philosophical interest. Certainly, Heidegger's view of Western thought needs to be demystified to some extent. In part, his construal of the meaning of being is a modern, idiosyncratic reflection, and this may relativize his claim to retrieve the buried truth of the entire philosophical tradition. The word "being" itself may be incapable of sustaining the edifices of systematic metaphysics or even a unitary reflection on the meaning of being pursued in phenomenological style.

Heidegger's attempt to gather things together in the Ereignis may be incompatible with the intrinsic pluralism of language, and the Ereignis may reflect a Greco-Germanic sense of being which is but one historical possibility among others, even within Western culture. His effort to step back from Western philosophical tradition to uncover its fundamental bearings, by a phenomenological bringing into view of matters that this tradition occludes, may suffer from a narrow purism in its focus on the being-question. Perhaps the Heideggerian path of questioning has no future unless opened out fully to historical pluralism and relativity. Just as one may take over Hegel's dialectical negativity without adopting his system, so one may best do justice to the Heideggerian path of thinking by giving it such a pluralist inflection. Just as orthodox Hegelians have been an almost insignificant strand in the Wirkungsgeschichte of Hegel in comparison with heretics such as Marx or Kierkegaard, so the future impact of Heidegger may have little to do with orthodox Heideggerians, perhaps already an anachronistic species.

The being-question may not be as monolithic or as absolutely centralas Heidegger supposes. Yet if one sees his concern with it as misguided, and surrenders to 'growing doubts concerning the meaning and relevance of the topic itself' (OB, p. vii), the evident richness of Heidegger's thought is left untapped. If the language of being turns out to be an inadequate vehicle for this richness, then a better one needs to be constructed. Despite my doubts about particular features of Heidegger's construction of the "history of Being," I consider that the basic thrust of his thought - the step back from rationalism to the phenomenality ofbeing - opens the most fundamental perspective now available for the assessment of Western philosophy. As sunlight falling on old stone carvings brings out their forms with a startling warmth of presence, so Heidegger's reading lights up the most intimate concern of Western philosophy. His analysis of metaphysics as onto-theology applies squarely to the definition of that science in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Suarez, but it also sheds light on the ontological depth of German idealism, as the Erkenntnistheorie of Heidegger's academic elders had failed to do (see GA 42:156-163). The Western philosophers _respond_ to Heidegger's reading as the pages of Beethoven or Chopin do to the fingers of a great if sometimes eccentric pianist, and his reading of the history of philosophy will retain its authority until those who query it come up with a more illuminating story. However, - and this is my second misgiving about Halbfass's enterprise - it seems that Indian philosophy does not respond comparably to Heideggerian readings; the question of being has no thrilling resonance for it; its harmonies are not fully awakened by the Western touch.

(a) The Question of Being

The title “On Being and What There Is” sounds as Greek as Greek can be. Is it appropriate for a work on Indian ontology? The legitimacy of this transference becomes doubtful if we recall how rare and strange the question of being is, even in Greece:
“The problem of being - in the sense of the question ‘What is being?’ - is the least natural of all problems, one which common sense never poses, one which neither pre-Aristotelian philosophy nor the immediately posterior tradition posed as such, one which is never sensed or glimpsed in non-Western traditions” (P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, PUF, 1991, pp. 13-14). It may be excessive to say that the question of being is not even glimpsed in non-Western traditions. Yet unless it is brought into sustained, explicit focus, it is a question that tends to evaporate. Indian reflection on the logic of being-words seems not to have attained this focus, not being firmly anchored in Parmenidean wonder at the fact that beings _are_.

[2006: To counter the misinterpretation that I am claiming in colonialist style that Indians are incapable of thinking of being, let me quote Arvind Mandair’s recent essay, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology”. JAAR 74, 2006, pp. 646-73. He argues that confidence in the universality of metaphysics has led to the imposition of Western notions of ethical monotheism on Sikh tradition, leading to an “eclipse of nonduality”. Heidegger is cited as an anti-colonial resource: “far from being a term that can be applied without prejudice to all cultures, metaphysics is rooted in a specific religio-cultural tradition whose contours reveal themselves through the combination and continuity of the Greek (_onto_), Christian-scholastic (-_theo_) and secular-humanist (-_logical_) traditions” (649). I would stress, however, that the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics is there in essence in Aristotle, against the tendency of French Catholic philosophers to date it to Duns Scotus or later, which would undercut the use of Heidegger for a critical interrogation of patristic and scholastic ontotheology.]

For Heidegger, this wonder is the founding event of Western thought: "Esti gar einai – ‘For there is being’ – in this saying lies hidden the initial mystery for all thinking" (GA 9:334). As early as 1922 he found here "the historical paradigm for the immediacy of the encounter with Being":

“Whatever is encountered _is_. Dasein is the basic trait of its look [eidos]. The overriding experience here, which has a way of obtruding upon what a being is, is _that_ it is. It is in this sense that any being in its look of be-ing is simply one. Parmenides' thesis is the expression of an original encounter with being itself. The force, simplicity, directness, and so the underivability of this encounter of an entity for itself and from itself correspond to the latent difficulty of illuminating and exposing such a Being”. (T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, University of California Press, 1993, 245-6)

Aristotle, unlike Parmenides, is a thinker of form, but as Heidegger shows in Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis (GA 9:239-301) form is not mere stuff or shape, but the concentrated actuality of being. Dismissing Antiphon's conception of nature as underlying matter (e.g. wood as the nature of the bed), Aristotle defined physis as "the shape or form of things which have in themselves the source of their motion” (Physics 193b). Only when physis is grasped in terms of form is it "adequately grasped as ousia, as a species of coming to presence" (GA 9:274). Aristotelian form (morphe, eidos) is not a mere attribute but a mode of being. Form and matter are in a relation of actuality and potency, and each of these terms is defined ontologically. When being is interpreted phenomenologically as coming to presence, form or entelecheia is grasped as the event of the coming to presence of an entity. Form as an ontological idea (in Plato) answers the question, “How does the entity qua entity look? As what does the entity itself show itself, when I contemplate it not in view of a given quality but only as an entity?” (GA 22:252). To grasp forms in a merely logical, objectifying way is to be blind to what is nearest to hand: “Corresponding to the colour-blind there are also people who are blind to physis. And when we consider that physis is qualified as a mode of ousia (beingness), then the physis-blind are but a variety of the blind to being” (GA 9:264). Banal conceptions of stuff and shape, matter and form, are the “Allerweltstrasse" of Western thinking (GA 9:214); Heidegger presents these as a decline from originary Greek insight, but they may well belong to the ordinary stock of notions latent in the grammar of Indo-European languages. The question "ti to on?" (Metaphysics 1028b) - "what is a being qua being in its being?" - invites two sorts of reply. The first reply, a rational, speculative one, analyses the characteristics of being as such, and founds being in its ultimate cause, the supreme being. This reply constitutes onto-theo-logy, the distinguishing structure of Western metaphysics, fully explicit in Descartes and Leibniz (GA 40:88). What is wrong with onto-theo-logy is that, as onto-logy, it flattens out the phenomenological apprehension of the being of beings, eventually reducing it to an abstract and colourless ens commune. Concomitantly, as theo-logy, in grounding being in a supreme first cause it subjects being to the principle of sufficient reason; beings are now explained, in a rationalistic way, and are not allowed to flourish "without why" like the rose of Angelus Silesius (see Der Satz vom Grund, GA 14). Just as Voltaire's Pangloss, caught up in the Lisbon earthquake, has only one question: “What could be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?”, so one might imagine a caricatural ontotheologist examining a rose: "Aha! A being! And its ground? Why, being as such, being in general, ens commune (onto-logy). But is this sufficient? Must we not pose a supreme being which is the source of its being and the unifying ground of beings-as-a-whole? And this we call God (theo-logy)." in this construction is lost not only the fragrance of the rose, but the phenomenality of being and the authentic otherness of God [as revealed in Scripture].

Heidegger overcomes onto-theology by his retrieval of the Aristotelian question as a hermeneutical and phenomenological interrogation of the coming to presence of beings. He himself interrogates the experience of being (our everyday understanding of isness; our search for authentic existence; our wonder at the fact that there are beings rather than nothing) and the language of being (the everyday uses of "is"; the languages of philosophical and poetic tradition) in order to discover the meaning of being or the truth of being, which he ultimately names the Ereignis - the "event' which grants the being of beings, which enables "the worlding of world" and "the thinging of things." This is not a metaphysical foundation but the phenomenological essence of the givenness of beings. The vocabulary of being is inadequate, a culture-bound Western product, to what is emerging here, so that Heidegger has to develop his own style of quasi-metaphorical saying.

The basic step in ontology is to distinguish "being" from "beings" so as to clarify their relationship. Halbfass accepts Quine's question "what is there?' as "the fundamental ontological question" (70), thus reducing ontology to a merely ontic "inventory of what exists' (49). Such an inventory will, to be sure, carry an implicit ontological commitment (a notion of what being is). But if this commitment is not thematized, or if its thematization is seen as impossible, then we do not have ontology in Aristotle's or Heidegger's sense. Crude thematizations – e.g. "what exist are just physical things" - lack a sense of the question of being. Even loftier thematizations - e.g., 'all that exists is Brahman"- may not have glimpsed the question of being. The issue may have been decided in an ontic contest between different descriptions of what there is, rather than in an ontological clarification of what it means to be. Even if, with Nietzsche, one dismisses inquiry into being as a mist, it does seem to be a distinctively Western mist.

Analytical philosophers may deplore Heidegger's "use and misuse of'systematically misleading expressions'” (Halbfass, 11), yet have they produced critical studies of Heidegger's language and thought-patterns that could measure the strength and limits of his revival of the being-question? That would require some basic sympathy with his concern for the authentic phenomenality of beings.
Full-blooded positivists dismiss the entire ontological tradition as based on systematically misleading expressions. They could be answered by a logical clarification which retrieves and justifies the discourse on being or, in Heideggerian style, by a study of the phenomenological content of being-language. It can happen that a philosophical classic reveals weaknesses when approached in the logical way, while retaining its power in the phenomenological perspective. Thus Parmenides confuses different senses of the word "is," and the logical reading shows him at best as forming the notion of a pure existence without qualities, which replaces Thales's water or Heraclitus's fire in the role of ultimate explanatory principle. The phenomenological approach on the other hand retrieves coherence and depth in his thought by reading him as a thinker of the event or phenomenon of being.

Heidegger is aware that the term "being" is a tricky one. He envisages its multivocity as a weave or skein, a Geflecht, translating the Aristotelian "to on legetai pollachos" (Met. 1003a. 1028a) in phenomenological terms as "The coming to manifestation of being is manifold" (Was ist das – die Philosphie?, 1956, p. 46). His own use of the vocabulary of being acquires its coherence from its rigorously phenomenological character. The precise bearing of his explorations can be measured only in terms of the matter with which they are concerned - not the logic or conceptuality of "being" but the concrete modes of the presence or givenness of beings in their being. However, it is misleading to say that the later Heidegger withdrew "into poetry, myth, and capricious etymologies" and "does not even attempt that kind of historical and systematic clarification that we find in Heidegger's earlier statements" (Halbfass, 10). The critiques of Leibniz and Hegel in the mid-fifties show that he kept up his quest for a clear overview of the history of the being-question.

(b) A Distinctively Greek Question

The Greek question of being is foreign even to Western ears. It points to what is nearest at hand yet farthest from our reflective grasp. The question is doubly foreign to Indian ears. The Parmenidean wonder at being was not a foundational event in Indian thought, and so the subsequent Aristotelian question "What is being?" was never posed in the same sense, nor did India produce a metaphysics in the sense of a science of being qua being. There is a fit between the being-question and the history of Western metaphysics which makes its illumination central and foundational; the light it can shed on Indian thought may introduce distorting emphases. To ask what destiny of being lies behind Indian thought, as J. L. Mehta does, is to risk forcing it into shapes suggested by the Western story (while drawing on questionable reaches of Heidegger's thought).

Heidegger would probably agree that blindness to being is universal- and not only because of the Westernization of the earth through technology. Attention to being must then be equally universal. But it is only in the West that such attention has been thematized as a central concern, by a rare handful of powerful thinkers. The other traditions have different languages for awakening to the reality of the things themselves. As a distinctive thematization of a universally latent problematic - a thematization which in its concrete elaboration has of course many parochial, non-universal features - Western philosophy has an irreducible identity. Thus Heidegger writes, as early as 1939: “Philosophy is _Western_ philosophy; there is no other, for the essence of the West and Western history has been determined through what is called philosophy. Ignoring all academic notions and historical accounts of philosophy as a cultural phenomenon, we should understand it as: reflection on what there is as such as a whole; in short - though this too is indeterminate because polyvalent - _asking the question of being_. "Being" is the _ground-word_ of philosophy” ((GA 68:9). It could not be said that "being" is the Grundwort of any Indian philosophy. Some of Heidegger's strongest pronouncements on the specificity of metaphysics date from the mid-fifties: “The style of all Western/European philosophy - there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian - is determined from the twofold, "beings-being." Its dealings with this twofold take their normative shape from the Platonic account of this twofold” (Was heisst Denken?, 1954, p. 136). The word "style" here suggests that there is a contingency to the development of philosophical and religious traditions comparable to that of artistic styles, so that what seems normative and natural within one culture may remain unthought of in another. The concept of being is a cultural construction just as much as is that of moksa or karman. Our present insight into cultural pluralism (as Dilthey understood) forces us to renounce the illusion that these great words are transparent namings of the real.

Metaphysics, for Heidegger, is not a system but "that knowing in which Western historical humanity preserves the truth of the relation to beings-as-a-whole and the truth about beings-as-a-whole" (GA 9: 241). Western philosophy is "einzigartig" and "eindeutig" (Was ist das – die Philosophie?, p. 14) because of the unusual question that guides it, the question of the being of beings: "Philosophy is underway to the being of the entity, that is, to the entity in regard to being" (ib., 25). This very simple, but also quite confusing question about beings in their being is one that occurred to the Greeks and that only they pursued in depth: “Just this, that the entity remains gathered in being, that in the manifesting of being the entity appears, this plunged the Greeks, and them first and only, in amazement” (ib., 22). It is in this sense that the question, "What is that?" is "an originally Greek question" (p.17), for it is pushed back to its ontological basis: 'What is this being qua being?"

If Heidegger had embarked on a dialogue with India, he might have been as unwilling to talk about being as he was when in dialogue with theology, or with Japan. This is perhaps less an "exclusion" (Halbfass, 25) than a sense that, however fruitful inquiry into the ontological aspect of Indian thought may be, we need to go beyond this if the Indian "great beginning" is to put us in question in light of its own foremost concerns. Even in the case of Western sources which use the Greek language of being correlations with Greek ontology can be treacherous. I am thinking of the Johannine vocabulary of Logos, einai, aletheia, pneuma and how entirely it would be falsified if one tried to bring it into direct connection with metaphysical or Heideggerian concerns. Via Philo of Alexandria, John inherited Platonic vocabulary, yet the remarkable thing is how he frees this vocabulary of any associations with the demiurge of the Timaeus or any other theme of philosophical ontology.

The claim that the question of being is uniquely Greek does not imply ignorance of the fact that there have been Indian debates about "being," with logical procedures similar to those of the West. "His assertion that the 'question of being' is the one and only question of philosophy seems as excessive as his stubborn insistence that not only ontology, but philosophy in general, is a uniquely Greek-European phenomenon" (Halbfass, 11). But in Heidegger's defence it should be noted that he is reducing Western philosophy to a local, historical tradition with a specific question, the question of being; there is no suggestion that India lacked logical analysis and speculative penetration. While Greek thought, at its most distinctive, bathes in the light of being, in other traditions it is not under the aegis of the being-question that logic, ethics, causally based cosmology, theories of truth and of beauty are developed, but in light of some other distinctive opening for thought, such as the question of spiritual liberation. Though much of Indian thought is oblivious of spiritual liberation just as much of Western thought is oblivious of the being-question, the topic of liberation exerted on some of India's greatest thinkers a magnetic attraction comparable to that which being has had at high points of Western philosophy. It is not on the question "what is being qua being?" that Indian philosophical radicality converges, and India has largely been spared the intellectual headaches this question has always caused.

Heidegger is the opposite of a Eurocentric imperialist, for his awareness of the historical contingency of Western ontology clears the path to a radical pluralism of what he calls the "great beginnings,” though to be sure there is a certain essentialism in the way he tries to cleanly differentiate these traditions (notably the Hellenic and Semitic traditions in the West). His discovery that Greek ontology is but a province of thought makes him a pluralistic thinker in principle, not a provincial one. To stress the commonalities between India and Europe to the point where these differentiations are flattened out is to regress from this dialogal openness. J. N. Mohanty, whose criticism of Heidegger's view of history resembles Halbfass's, seems to court this danger: “To hold that, since the specific question about the meaning of Being (raised by Heidegger) was not asked in the Indian tradition that tradition's concern with Being cannot yield ontology, would be misleading, for not all those who thought about metaphysics and ontology in the Western tradition asked the Heideggerian question about the meaning of Being… Metaphysical or ontological thinking is not Greek in origin: a certain variety of it is” (Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought, OUP, 1992, p. 152). But it is precisely the generic similarity between Indian and Greek philosophy that Heidegger wants to get beyond. The Greek "variety" is not one among others. It is a grasp of being (subjective and objective genitive) which did not come to pass in this insistent, determining way in other traditions, despite their random and tentative broodings on the sense of the word 'being.'

Mohanty (289) thinks that the importance of the subject-object distinction in Indian thought confutes Heidegger's view that it belongs to the Western destiny of being; but Heidegger sights Cartesian subjectivity and objectivity in terms of their ontological upshot within Western thought; he does not deny that analogous distinctions may have been made in other traditions, but there they do not play a role in the unfolding of the question of being. How little Mohanty appreciates the strength of Heidegger's reading of the Western metaphysical adventure can be gauged from his misunderstanding of the term "onto-theology”: “Heidegger continued to look upon the Kantian Transcendental unity of apperception, the Hegelian Geist, the Fichtean Ego as but secularized versions of deeply theological notions. Not surprisingly, Heidegger characterized Western metaphysics as onto-theological" (297).

II: ONTOLOGICAL THEMES IN INDIAN THROUGH

(a) The Analysis of "Being" is not Central

The intense logico-linguistic discussion about the words “as/asti (corresponding to the Latin est, Greek esti, English is, etc.) and bhuu/bhavati (which has an intriguing etymological kinship with Greek phuo/phusis)"(Halbfass, 22) does not necessarily amount to focussing the question of being as a basic one, in the manner of metaphysics. Still less does it amount to attending to the phenomenon of being, as the Greeks did in their "wonder" at the enigma of being and as Heidegger attempts to do more explicitly by means of phenomenological hermeneutics or poetic thinking. (Poetic thinking could be seen as a more refined and rigorous version of phenomenological hermeneutics, in that it is less encumbered with metaphysical conceptuality and more attuned to the thing itself.) Even if the darsanas intensively discuss being and substance (bhâva,sattâ, astitva, dravya), this may be no more than a scholastic clarification of abstract concepts, of which "being" may be just one among others. The distinction between sattâ (being) and the second order concept of astitva - "is-ness," “irreducible identity, identifiability” (Halbfass, 144), which can apply even to non-existence - is a lucid clarification of ideas, but does it reflect an experience of being? Has the notion of being sufficient valency in Indian thought to be invoked as a solution to the problem of evil, as in the Augustinian teaching that evil is nothing substantial, but a mere defect of being? Never more than a pallid universal - whether conceived as an abstraction or as a primal stuff -,it cannot serve to name the concrete actuality of entities in their analogous diversity.

The verbs for "to be" in Sanskrit are "commonly treated as verbs expressing a peculiar kind of process or action" (Halbfass, 22). So is the verb _sein_ in Heidegger. But the process or action in question is exclusively the presencing of beings in their being, and confusion with any other kind of process or action is scrupulously avoided; hence the diffrculty of Heidegger's language, which is at the service of a basic simplicity. Does the Indian discussion of "to be" bring into view the phenomenon of being in a comparable way? Such topics as occurrence, durable presence, genesis, change, manifestation, actuality/potentiality are ontic rather than ontological unless their specifically ontological import is isolated. Heidegger's exegeses of Aristotle go one step further, descrying the phenomenological core of the ontological statements. Similarly, the logic and semantics of nonbeing and-negation do not necessarily amount to a metaphysical question ("why are there beings rather than nothing?") or, still less, to a thoughtful grasp of the phenomenon of nothingness.

The "horizon concepts' or "mythical projections under which being itself is subsumed" (Halbfass, 23) suggest that the question of being never acquired autonomy and primacy in Indian thought. It could easily be treated lightly and subordinated to other concerns. When Erich Frauwallner finds parallels between the movement in India from myth, to home-made "scientific' explanations of natural phenomena, to the introduction of a doctrine of categories, and the Greek progress from myth, to Pre-Socratic "science," to Platonic-Aristotelian categoriology, these parallels throw into relief what is missing at every stage: the ontological interest which prevails in the greatest Greek thinkers. As cosmologists, logicians, category-analysts, the Indians are close to the Greeks; but the elusive question of being remains the distinctive trait of the latter. Moreover, the proto-scientific dimension of Indian thought never flourished, for lack of empirical observation; "in this domain Indian philosophy doesn't even come near the attainments of Greek philosophy" (Frauwallner, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, II, 1956, p. 7). Could there be a connection between the non-emergence of the question of being and this lack of empirical curiosity about bodily substances? The Greek wonder at being inspired the interrogation of beings; the Indian readiness to treat the external as secondary or illusory leads to a volatilization of the being-question in favour of issues of spiritual release.

No doubt Sanskrit, just as much as Greek, lends itself to a speculative development and precise analysis of being-language. But isn’t there an extra twist in the Greek fascination with being that has no equivalent in the Indian world? Systems of thinking of different cultures may freely intermingle at their lower reaches - in logical or ethical discussion – but when one traces them back to their fundamental motives their difference appears. As the Seinsfrage loses its specifically Greek contours it can blend with a more general commonsense puzzling about the logic of "to be" found also in Indian tradition.

Greece is more worthy of question than India on the topic of being: “As Indo-European, Sanskrit also is in some measure ‘metaphysical,’ as distinct from the languages of the Far East, with the notions of Being embedded in it grammatically and conceptually. It is metaphysical in being representational, concept-generating, and in being productive of ontological speculation about Being as the ground of all that is… Since _this_ possibility of thinking has been fulfilled in its amplest and purest form in the Greek tradition, Heidegger is not interested in how Sanskrit speaks.” (J. L. Mehta. “Heidegger and Vedanta”, in G. Parkes, ed. Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu, 1987, p. 27).

On other topics, however, India may be the privileged dialogue-partner. Sanskrit shares with Greek "a common stock of philosophical problems, insights, and confusions" (Halbfass, 129) in the discussion of universals. Such logical topics were perhaps only imperfectly integrated with the ontological question in the West, and ontological presuppositions may have been a barrier to the development of logic.

Again, Indian epistemological discussions were often in advance of the West, perhaps because they were not clogged by Western commitments to substantial being. In the West, it is only with Kant that epistemology and logic are foregrounded to supplant ontology in the manner of Udiyana's (11th century) definition of astitva as "being the object of affirmative awareness” or "ascertainability without reference to a counter-entity" (Halbfass, 156-157), or his definition of dravya as "what is not the locus of the utter absence of qualities" or “the substrate of three layers of inherence” (93). The Vaisesika thinkers know that “objectivity and cognizability as such cannot establish the distinction between being and nonbeing" (157), but this again sights the reality of being only in a logical perspective and offers no distinct positive conception of its nature.

In the treatment of perception, the rival claims of phenomenalism, representationalism and direct realism could be discussed all the more lucidly in that the ontology of substance was not hovering over them as a daunting enigma. Heidegger is a direct realist; he would say: "I see the tree in the garden, not the representation of the tree,” but with an ontological, Aristotelian twist, quite absent in India - "I apprehend the tree in its being, either letting it be in poetic, meditative thinking, or cramping its being in technological, calculative objectifications." Merely epistemological clarification of perception cannot fulfil the Western philosopher's thirst for being, to which Heidegger recalls the tradition, and which he retrieves beneath the epistemological burrowings of Descartes and Kant. A parallel argument that Indian epistemology is led by the tacit question of being would be less persuasive.

Again, many themes in the philosophy of mind as developed in the West seem to have been explored more radically in India, so that here one cannot afford to neglect "how Sanskrit speaks." Conversely, it would be hard to discuss Yogacara, for example, without drawing on the resources of a Hegelian or Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness. Yet the "selective affinities" (G. Larson and R. Bhattacharya, Classical Samkhaya, Delhi, 1987, p. 641) between parts of both traditions do not amount to identical problematics. In any case they do not concern Heidegger's question; he uses the term "consciousness" only for the modern medium of the apprehension of being, which, since Descartes, entails an occlusion of the authentic phenomenality of being. On the theme of consciousness, India may challenge Europe, whereas on the theme of being, it is Europe's force that challenges India.

Reference to India certainly introduces a broader horizon, bringing our own puzzling ontological legacy into a fuller perspective. But it may be instructive above all as showing how a great intellectual tradition can get on without the question of being. Analogously, what makes Buddhism instructive to Christianity is the way it gets on without the question of God. The "relativistic detachment" (Halbfass, 12) such comparison induces may weaken our commitment to the frameworks of our own tradition, but it is likely also to confirm that our tradition is local and idiosyncratic- that monotheism is characteristically Jewish and that ontology is characteristically Greek, even if one does find notions of God and of being in other traditions.

(b) Being as Stuff and as Abstraction

The Indian notion of being wavers between reification and conceptualism, both of which occlude at base the phenomenon of being. There is no higher understanding of being whereby a critique of these notions could be carried out, though they may be transcended towards an absolute beyond being. Some Samkhya statements look like universal ontological theses, e.g.: "There is no origination for what is not, nor destruction for what is" (Halbfass, 59). But these may amount to no more than a principle of conservation of the material universe. Thinkers who see _sat_, pure being, as “the universal substrate" (ib.) may likewise think of being only as a stuff; the Chandogya Upanisad's teaching that "In the beginning my dear, this world was just Being" (Halbfass, 26) glides swiftly into an evolutional unfolding, of which being is no more than the undifferentiated point of departure.

Prabhâkara (Mimamsa) rejected the general concept of existence on the ground that "we do not in fact perceive things as merely existing. The true sense of existence is merely the individuality of things (svaruupa-satâ; it is not a true class character" (A. B. Keith, The Karma-Mimamsa, Delhi, 1978, p. 58; see Halbfass, 156). The apperception of being qua being, in its transcendental, analogous character - which is neither an empirical datum nor an abstract concept - is again missed here.

In Vaisesika, ontological thought was arrested by a fundamental option for ontological realism (Frauwallner, 119) and especially by the treatment of sattâ as a "reified universal" (Halbfass, 150). For Halbfass, the notion of inherence (samavâya) has ontological status as "the one pervasive structure of our universe that constitutes the condition of the possibility of concrete, qualified entities and of contingent existence" (148). A faint suspicion: do the refinements sighted here depend on a Kantian lens? Others view this notion of inherence as another reified abstraction. But if we see inherence as a pervasive ontological structure, comparable to Buddhist dependent origination or Vedantic mâyâ, we may still ask whether these structures which govern the emergence and relations of beings ever bring into focus their being qua being. A causal and logical ordering of things may trace their origins without interrogating their being, as happens in the sciences for example. The extra step which raises the question of being may be a step back or away from sensible logical or causal thinking. It is doubtful if Western discourse on being is a harmonious continuation of logical and causal investigation; it seems rather to introduce a troubling cloudiness; and even when being is finally tamed to logic and grounds it seems unhappy in its onto-theological abode, as if itching to break out again. In India the analysis of being never clouds over in this way. Buddhism and Vedanta also take a step into realms irreducible to logic or common sense, but led by other issues than the question of being. The energy of fundamental questioning is captured by these issues, and being as such is not what becomes problematic.

Again, defences of stable identity against Buddhist doctrines of universal momentariness and flux are not properly ontological. The concept of "practical efficiency" (arthakriyâ) as a criterion of being focusses on the problem of distinguishing reality from appearance (Halbfass, 152) rather than on the question of what being as such is. If the Buddhists used it to give a reductive account of being-language, this again is not ontology but a discrediting of ontology. On the Buddhist side, being had only conventional reality, and did not become a subject of contemplation for its own sake; on the other side, the defence of robust ontological realism against Buddhist subversion left little leisure for disinterested musing on the enigmatic character of being. Such musing remains a peculiarly Greek pastime and to pursue it today one has to think as a Greek rather than as an Indian.

"Being is one, because of the uniformity of its mark ‘is,’ and because of the absence of any mark of differentiation"; “Being is not a substance, because it possesses one substance. It is neither a motion nor a quality, because it exists in qualities and motions. Also because of the absence of genus and species in it, Being is known to be different from substance, quality, and motion. For the same reasons, substanceness, qualityhood, and motionhood are known to be different from substance, quality, and motion” (Potter, 213-14). Being here is a pure abstraction, comparable to substanceness or motionhood. Aristotle, in contrast, rejects the interpretation of being as supreme genus (Halbfass. 2, 140); only in doing so can he keep open the question of being in its multivocity, and glimpse the irreducibility of being as the _transcendens schlechthin_ (GA 2:51; 9:336-7), in its qualitative difference from entities (the ontological difference). Phenomenologically, existence is not a universal, a predicate universally applied, but in each case the distinctive act or event of existing - energeia. Here Vaisesika finds nothing worthy of thought. The readiness to identify bhâva as the supreme genus cuts off the question of being at its roots. In the West, when being is thought of in this abstract way it represents a forgetfulness of the question; in India it represents a failure of the question to emerge. We have at best an undetermined sense that "as the supreme universal it is also something over and above, and different from, the particular and perishable entities in which it occurs" and "imperishable and permanent" (Halbfass, 140)

© Shared Themes
1. Form. There is a wonder at form in Indian thought. But again it is not clear that this carried the charge of a wonder at being. Is there any Indian notion of form that plays the specifically ontological role that eidos has in Plato and Aristotle? Even the "form itself is emptiness" of the Heart Sutra grasps phenomena in their phenomenality, not specifically in their being. A phenomenology of the empirical world in view of emptiness is quite a different matter from one in view of being. Though one might find in Plotinus, Spinoza, Berkeley, Bradley, or Bergson some rough analogies to Madhyamaka and Advaita notions that the objective world with its differentiations has a merely conventional reality, or that all empirical objects are merely superimpositions on the pure undifferentiated ultimate reality, nonetheles such ideas are still, after two centuries of Western exposure to Vedânta, experienced as foreign and unsettling. The Western concern with being and form seems to have worked against a radicalization of the question of appearance and reality. This concern was reinforced by the Christian metaphysics of creation which stressed the distinct existence of finite created substance, and by the doctrine of Chalcedon (451 CE) which, by insisting on the integrity of Christ's human nature, formed a bulwark against emanationist or absorptionist accounts of the relation of human and divine (see H. U. von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, Einsiedeln, 1988, pp. 35-41; he refers sweepingly to “asiatische Aufloesung”, p. 122). To Western thinkers, Indian reflection on maayaa and emptiness initially seems but an inchoate groping toward their own mastery of logical determinations. But if these Indian worlds of thought could be tucked neatly away in the folds of Hegel's Logic, they would not be worth our study. Their cultural and historical roots make them more than mere intellectual contructions. As living paths of thought they elude our mastery and summon us to open dialogue.

2. Causality. In Indian thought a fascination with causality has given rise to theories at least as subtle as those of the West. However, this causal reasoning was not applied to being qua being, but only to entities - cosmic or psychological - in their arising and passing away. Cause, in India, is not the Aristotelian aition, namely “that which is responsible for the fact that a being is _that_ which it is”(GA 9:246). We do not find in India "Parmenides's persistence. in holding fast to the purity and simplicity of the experience contained in the single Greek word _Esti_ (‘it is’), by the sharp repulsion of the obtrusive tendency to address being in terms of _doxa_, as coming to be and passing away" (Kisiel, 246). Descending from the Eleatic acropolis one may indeed retrieve the world of coming to be and passing away as a worthy theme of specifically ontological thought; but this was not the Indian experience.

In the West, causal arguments for the existence of God quickly become ontological. The arguments from motion or design can be reduced to the argument that finite or participated being requires to be grounded in Being itself. The arguments of Udayana in the Nyâkakusumânjali sometimes have a familiar feel to Western readers, for instance the temporal argument against self-causation: “Nor can things be self-caused, since a thing cannot both originate at a certain time and yet exist prior to that time, and the causal relation involves temporal succession” (Potter, 559); compare Aquinas: “nihil est causa semetipsius; esset enim prius seipso, quod est impossibile" (Contra Gentiles I 18). Yet as he develops his causal reasoning, it is striking how rarely he alights on the ontological notions that would immediately suggest themselves to the Western mind. "Causation just means regular connection between something prior to the effect and the appearance of that effect” (ib., 560). There is a touch of Humean refinement to this, but no sense of the production of an effect as an ontological (rather than merely ontic) event - no glimpse of the cause as bringing the effect from potency to act in virtue of its own actuality. This might give Udayana a modern cast, prompting comparison of his arguments with Western discussions of causality since Leibniz. Most of his arguments are epistemological: "we need the hypothesis of God to justify the initial acceptance of the Vedas by reasonable men” (Potter, 574). Epistemological acuity seems to crowd out talk of being. Again, when Udayana plays with the notions of "latent causality, potentiality, and manifestation" (Halbfass, 58) in his dialectical refutation of the sheer actualism of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, it does not appear that these acquire any properly ontological consistency for him.

Earlier, Vyomasiva had defined the production of objects as "connection with their own causes and reality" rather than merely "(coming into) existence after prior nonexistence" (ib., 193); this had some ontological bite. Udayana regresses to the view that "'Being an effect' is simply the state of being of something that did not exist before” (ib.). His disregard of the earlier stress on sattâdsambandha, "connection with reality," may reflect a major ontological reorientation as Halbfass suggests. But sattâdsambandha, as originally used by Prasastapâda (6thcentury), 'does not answer or even address the question what being, reality, or existence is." It has the merely logical, classificatory sense of "having reality as a predicate" (ib., 170, 174). It seems that discussion of causality never made the breakthrough to a radically ontological treatment.

3. Act and potency. Halbfass claims that the debate between Sankhya satkâryavâda and Vaisesika asatkâryavâda - between "actualization of the nonactual" and "production of new actualities out of preexisting underlying actualities" (186) - is not merely about causation but is "a genuinely ontological debate," albeit marked by "a certain refusal to address each other's basic premises concerning the nature of being and the different meanings in which the words _sat_ and _asat_ are used" (58). The "being" from which things originate in Samkhya is a kind of being that Vaisesika does not recognize at all, characterized by "potency, potentiality, latency, indefiniteness, and subtleness” (185). There is a contrast in ontology here, but if the two darsanas did not join battle on this topic, then the specifically ontological question was eluded.

In Yoga, "Transition from potentiality (sakti) to actuality (abhivyakti) in the mental sphere means change from an unconscious, 'unnoticed' (aparidrsta) state to a conscious, 'noticed' (paridrsta) one" (60-1): here there is no reference to being. "Present phenomena are manifest, that is, actual; past and future phenomena are subtle, that is, potential… The concepts of actuality and potentiality are thus used in an attempt to clarify the nature of time" (61). Again, the contrast between subtle and manifest is not the equivalent of the Aristotelian focus on being in potency and in act. It seems misleading to see here an insight into "the enigmatic relationship between being and time" (62). Nor do Bhartrhari's questions - "How does the verb be (bhuu), how does the noun _reality_ (sattâ) refer to time?... How can ‘being' itself in its verbal sense, as an act or process, be there?" (207) - rise from the logico-ontic to the ontological level. Again, Bhartrhari's thesis that time (conceived as a substance) activates "those powers and potentialities (sakti) that constitute the condition of the possibility of all actual, particularized existence," or that "reality itself (sattâ), the highest universal, is unleashed and manifested in those lower universals (jâti) which are the eternal prototypes and potentialities of all particulars" (205-6), is a speculative construction that does not entail a phenomenological meditation on the interplay of being and time.

4. Time. The closest one comes to such a phenomenology in India is in the Buddhist tendency to "an increasingly radical and explicit fusion of being and time or temporality" (221). But even here Nâgârjuna uses the mutual dependence of past, present and future to prove that none of them has real existence; this demonstration of emptiness shows little puzzling over the phenomenon of time for its own sake. For Advaita,"time appears as fundamentally incompatible with reality in the true sense" (22I), whereas Western thought, even in Neo-Platonism, has dwelt attentively on the being, or half-being, of time. The Greek way of posing the question "What is time?" or any other "What is" question is honed by a focus on essence or being. Indian definition, in contrast “has no relation with what we would call the essence of a thing… Because I read the universal in the concrete, at the very level of the concrete, I am dispensed from thinking that universal, from conceptualizing it, from defining its essence”(M. Biardeau, Journal Asiatique 257, 1957, pp. 373,375). Indian analysis was not answerable to a strict, authoritative regime of essence (as even Christian theology has been); its starting points and its goals were of varied religious or speculative kinds, each determining a style of analysis only rarely coincident with the "scientific" and "philosophical' attitudes central in the West. Heidegger is the heir of Aristotle (and Augustine) whose aporetic interrogation of the most salient phenomenological features of time set the agenda for Western thought on the subject. Rather than dissolve time in true Being he focusses more sharply the phenomenon of being by bringing into view the inevitable temporality of its play of presence and absence.

'Kanâda's six categories do not include "isness"; neither do Aristotle's ten, but _ousia_ is related to _einai_, whereas dravya (substance) is not related to _sat_ or astitva. To be sure, among the six, substance, quality, and activity are singled out as connected to being (sattâ). In the list of ten we find sakti and asakti, potentiality and nonpotentiality. There is confusion as to whether the universal, sattâ, applies to all positive categories or to the first three only. In any case since the three following categories (universal, particularity, inherence) inhere in the first three, and snce quality and activity inhere in substance as their substrate, there is a strong identification of substance with being, as in Aristotle. So in this sense "explicit conceptualization of being" does indeed "emerge out of the enumeration and classification of what there is" (Halbfass, 139). But does it emerge as just a formal abstraction? Is it an especially thought-provoking concept, a source of wonder - or is it merely an occasion for logical clarifications? "Is the Vaisesika ontology an epiphenomenon of its categoriology? Is there an understanding of being which is prior to, and the condition of, its project of categorial analysis and enumeration?"(ib.). “A sense of 'being' that implies, above all, enumerability and identifiability" (220) is a very undeveloped notion of the meaning of being - and one that is "internally inconsistent, theoretically unfeasible" and "soteriologically irrelevant or counterproductive" (70). Even if other Indian thinkers formulated such negative evaluationsof the ontological upshot of enumerability, they did not necessarily do so from an ontological concern of the sort that we are likely to import into the Indian framework. Neither the positive nor the negative implications of Vaisesika ontology bring it into the neighbourhood of the highest Western thematization of being.

Even if Indian thought lends itself to Heideggerian exegesis in a way that biblical thought, for example, does not, what the exegesis yields is much less rich than in the case of Western sources and also much less illuminating as regards the internal dynamic of Indian thought. In Western thinking led by the question of being the categoriology is a fleshing out of the prior understanding of being (even in philosophers such as Hegel who have "forgotten" being as the Greeks saw it). The tendency to enumeration, so tiresome in Abhidharma, Samkhya and Vaisesika, never took hold among the Greeks, because their overriding philosophical interest was not the multiplicity of beings but their unity in being. Vaisesika enumeration aims to be an exhaustive catalogue of the many; some Vedantin critics insisted that "an understanding of Being cannot be gained through an enumeration and classification of different entities. True, absolute being transcends and precedes all distinctions, including the distinction between being and nonbeing" (Halbfass, 159). But do even the Vedantins linger in meditation on the _hen panta_ in terms of the being of beings? Does their quest for unity get beyond an ontic totalization? Having identified the principle of cosmic unity, do they go on to interrogate it, and to dwell on the enigmatic interplay of the one universal reality of being and the many distinct individual entities? Their monism is the obverse of Vaisesika enumeration, and equally suggests a forgetfulness of being: they “argue against the very possibility of defining entities, of establishing them in their individual identity, and of defining and establishing being itself in its distinction from nonbeing" (232). The failure to focus being as being is in both cases due to an overriding concern with spiritual liberation. Multiplicity, for the Abhidharma or Vaisesika, is of interest primarily as a map of the obstacles or aids to liberation, while the Vedantins' stress on unity also has a primarily soteriological purpose; whether controlled by categorization or totalized and dissolved in some form of monism the many ceases to obstruct liberation.

When Western metaphysics declines into representational thinking, used as a means of technological mastery of the earth, an expression of the will to power, this should not be equiparated with vaguely similar features in Indian thought:

“’Representational,’ ‘objectifying’ thought is fully present in the Vaisesika system of categories, in its enterprise of enumerating and classifying whatever there is, and above all, in its conceptualizations of being. To be sure, it is not a Cartesian attempt to establish man &s the master and owner of nature; but it is an attempt to put the world at our intellectual and conceptual disposal, to explain it once and for all through a process of comprehensive enumeration and classification. Being itself is either objectified and appears as an entity among entities or it accompanies the process of enumeration as its receding horizon or expanding shadow.” (Halbfass, 231)

Here a Heideggerian lens allows one to find a phenomenon of rationalistic decadence in Indian scholasticism, and at the same time this casts doubt on Heidegger's claim to explain such phenomena in the West exclusively in terms of the destiny of the thinking of being. But what also emerges is that the Indian phenomenon lacks the distinctive ontological import that it has in Western rationalism; it even appears to suffer a certain aimlessness in comparison with the intense determination of the Western rational project. The fixational character of Vaisesika categorizations, criticized by Sankara (Halbfass, 231), contrasts with the dynamic thrust of Western rationalism precisely in this: that the West is haunted by the quest for Being (however narrowly conceived) whereas Vaisesika is trapped in the enumeration of beings. In short, Vaisesika thinking is ontic, not ontological. Or if it has an ontological upshot, this is clarified by reference to the Greek tradition, just as the relevancy of Western philosophy to the attainment of moksa could be clarified only by reference to the Indian tradition.

(e) The Absence of the Question of Being in Nâgârjuna and Sankara

The Indian style of thought which effects a "simultaneous de-objectification of the objectified” may make Indian philosophy "a treasure house of direct promise to the Heideggerian quest" (Mehta 44). But to conflate it with the Heideggerian tension between calculative and meditative thinking is to slur over the basic difference between the thought of being and the nondual apprehension of Brahman or sunyatâ. Nâgârjuna and Sarikara, in their overcoming of the conventional in the name of a different kind of thinking or apperception which reaches highest truth, recall Heidegger's overcoming of metaphysical and technological reason in the name of the thinking of being. In both cases what is to be overcome is allowed validity in its proper sphere; though in both cases there is a certain ambivalence toward the realm of the conventional that is never quite resolved. But the ultimate truth aimed at in the Indian thinkers is of a loftier order than the contemplative apprehension of beings in their being, and they do not have any time to linger on the latter occupation. Advaita overshoots the thought of being to affirm instead "the nondual state of âtmanlbrahman that is prior to, and the condition of, all apparent dichotomies and alternatives, including those between being and nonbeing" (233), and the same may be said of the Madhyamaka affirmation of emptiness. The contemplative nonduality both cultivate cannot be equated with Heidegger's goal, the togetherness of being and thinking in the Ereignis.

Halbfass claims that in addition to the negative ontology - "beyond being and non-being" - Indian thought also apprehends the character of being in a positive way in a kind of "soteriontology." Sankara's concept of liberation and Nâgârjuna's emptiness have "an undeniably ontological dimension" (39).

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 22 Oct 2008 01:31

The key to understanding Middle Eastern history in the ancient period is decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt and the Behistun inscription (of Darius I) in Persia even though they are separated by atleast a few centuries. These enable the decipehring of ancient languages and lay bare the treasures of historical inscriptions. the first decipherment was by a French officer of Napoleon and the latter was by Sir henry Rawlinson.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 22 Oct 2008 07:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7447100/The-A ... an-History

The Aryan Invasion Theory - European History
Description

Why does AIT model still persist? Why do indologists not reconsider the fundamental premise of their theory? Though they have retracted the Aryan Invasion and have been forced to give up large scale migrations (to the point where, at present, one must imagine tiny bands of Aryan entrants to have silently crept into India, wiped out all records of their presence and interactions there, and then disappeared or died out without passing on their genes), they refuse to reformulate or even re-evaluate their basic assumption.
Why? What are the reason(s) governing indology's non-self-critical approach when dealing with counter-evidence from other sciences?
As we have seen, linguistics has historically been, and continues to be, motivated by concerns that are not always scientific. What motivations are driving IE linguistics and indology research today?
• Is it inertia? Are they unwilling to sift through the material that laid the foundations of IE research in the last 150 years of the field? Or are they, unlike real scientists [48], so sure of the inerrancy of their framework that they are unwilling to re-evaluate it, its assumptions and central premise?
• Has the IE world-view come to define the very identity of the west? Has their view of their past and their origins become so intimately tied up with the Indo-European framework? (See also [49])
• Are there other motivations propping up the IE framework today, just like there was during the period of British imperialism when the AIT served its purpose? [50]
Indians today need to reconsider whether they should so whole-heartedly base their entire world-view upon a model whose very premise remains unverified and unverifiable. [51]

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/396/ ... oryld5.gif

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 22 Oct 2008 07:12

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Philosophy/ ... e%201.html

History of Indian philosophy

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legends of babylon and egypt
legends of the gods
myths of babylonia and assyria
religion of babylonia and assyria

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fall of the moghul empire
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indian ghost stories
on the indian sect of the jainas
religions of india

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three frenchmen in bengal

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 23 Oct 2008 09:06

ramana wrote:Pope Benendict was right- The history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized. However that was not true of the Mediterranean Europe comprising of Greece and Rome or Italy.

Ancient Greece was a collection of city states that could not come to terms with each other and led to conquest by a Macedonian(Philip and his son Alexander) who was at the outer limits of Greek civilization. Within a hundred years after Alexander's death in Persia, Greece was conquered by Rome and we do not hear of Ancient Greece as an independent area. It is a Roman province and yet its thought was adopted by Romans and assimilated. From there on the Romans conquered Asiatic Middle East and setup an empire. They persecuted the Jews and viewed their not acknowledging the Emperor as a God to be sedition. Many Jews were killed and their revolts suppressed.

It is interesting that two of Jesus's disciples who were brothers- St Andrew and St Peter went to spread the message to Greece and to Rome respectively. It is the doctrine taught by these two brothers that leads us to the current Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. St Paul comes later on to spread the message to Gentiles(ie is non Jews)

While the Roman Catholic Church under went splits from Protestants and others, and went through Reformation, the orthodox church did not go through any such events even during Soviet Communist rule. I do not know why and am searching for it.

Was there a difference in the message from the two brothers? This has a direct bearing on the history of Europe as we see it.

X-posted...

Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
by Peter S. Wells (Author)

# Hardcover: 256 pages
# Publisher: W. W. Norton (July 14, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0393060756
# ISBN-13: 978-0393060751

Starred Review. As archeology professor and author Wells (The Battle That Stopped Rome) points out, the only texts available on the cultures of "Dark Age" Europe (roughly A.D. 400-600) were written by those educated in the Roman tradition. The only unbiased evidence, therefore, is the material evidence. Covering five decades of excavation in western Europe (including London, Copenhagen, the outskirts of Stockholm, Cologne and Trier), Wells chronicles a revolution in the understanding of Europe after the Western Roman Empire's collapse, ostensibly at the hands of "barbarian hordes." Evidence accounts for vast trade networks that ranged from Byzantium and the Black Sea through the Baltic to Ireland, and across the Alps and Pyrenees; artifacts from as far away as India have been uncovered in Scandinavia. Buildings, metalworking and gem-cutting sites, and evidence for continuous occupation of many modern European cities, also provide rich proof that, contrary to the Roman-centric collapse-of-civilization narrative, the post-Roman world pulsed with robust, vital activity. Wells's aim is obviously a wide audience of armchair historians and archeologists; they won't be disappointed, and they'll have a fine reading list in Wells's sources and suggestions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
A surprising look at the least-appreciated yet profoundly important period of European history: the so-called Dark Ages.

The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter S. Wells, one of the world's leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known, European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts. This recently recognized culture achieved heights in artistry, technology, craft production, commerce, and learning. Future assessments of the period between Rome and Charlemagne will need to incorporate this fresh new picture. 24 illustrations.

There are so many lengthy difficult books about the Early Middle Ages, written for and by specialists, what a delight to find a short and easy to read summary of the latest scholarship of this rapidly changing multi-disciplinary field, written for a general audience by a medieval scholar with an up to date and useful bibliography.

The term "Dark Ages" has a long and complicated history ever since its invention by Italian Humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries. Modern medieval historians try to avoid the term Dark Ages with its pejorative implications. However some will still justify its use because the period was "dark to us", because of the lack of written record. However even this is no longer the case, a wealth of archaeological information has surfaced to enlighten the period. The old prejudices of a violent, backwards and stagnant time are falling away. Was it different from Rome? Yes, but to apply a value judgment of a "Dark Age" is inappropriate, this powerful metaphor has sadly shaped many peoples vision of the period.

Peter Wells examines some of the enduring myths and shows, through new archaeological findings, rather than a sudden break with the past, a continuity of history. For example there is a myth that urban centers declined or were abandoned, Wells shows substantial evidence this was not the case, using a case example of London. There is a myth of continuous violence and warfare, however Wells suggests this could not have been the case because of freedom of movement and trade that was occurring. There is a myth that technology halted or went backwards, when in fact it was a period of innovation, including the deep plow, horse harness and 3-field system which created a surplus in food, population and specialization. There is a myth that Roman roads deteriorated, which is true, but the original Roman roads were built on ancient roadways and were mainly only meant for military purposes anyway. Artwork flourished in this period finding new and original expressions.

Barbarians to Angels is a quick read for a general audience that summarizes a lot of recent and difficult scholarship. For more specialized works, to understand how we know what we know, the "proof", there is an excellent Bibliography.

Like another reviewer, I remain unconvinced of the author's thesis about post-Roman Europe. He rejects the term "barbarians" for the people who followed the Romans, but because they lacked a written language, their level of "civilization" cannot be demonstrated. The fact that they made and imported decorative objects is not proof of either moral enlightenment or intelligence. I read this book with much interest, and admire its succinct coverage of a complex subject, accessible to the nonspecialist. However, I sense an apologia for our Enlightenment viewpoint, an attempt not to judge, to give "Dark Ages" Europeans too much of the benefit of the doubt. His philosophy is much like Jared Diamond's in his two best-selling books which try to downplay the "superiority" of the West and explain the lack of development in the Third World totally in terms of geographical happenstance and environmental negligence. I would put credence in the written evidence of contemporary Roman writers. The quality of the human beings involved to me is always paramount. And given the paltry evidence for Dark Ages civilization (except for the monasteries), I read this book with yes, skepticism.

There is an intellectual fight going on in Europe to find their next thing. The fight is between the Catholic Church historians and those who seek to secularize their civilization. first they had the Reformation and then the whole series of intellectual 'isms'. On the way they came up with Proto-Indo -European (PIE) to deHebrewize their religious book and along with the Aryan Invasion Theory. So Europe is struggling to find and redefine itself.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 23 Oct 2008 20:31

Singha wrote:these euros are pathetic, treats blacks and browns badly, claim to be the superior
and artistic tfta culture, claim to be hotspots of every intl trend and squeal and line
up with begging bowls when the music of free credit stops.

Johann · Post by **Johann** » 25 Oct 2008 22:05

Singha's post was in response to the economic crisis in eastern Europe.

There were very clear predictions of the crisis 3 months ago - Businesses need capital to grow, and the market that supplied that capital to these countries was Western Europe. Once the banking crisis hit Western Europe, the financing started to dry up, and they were hit particularly hard. All markets heavily dependent on European capital have been hit hard, including Russia. In addition, new EU members like Hungary are only due to join the Euro in 2012, and their currencies are very vulnerable in these kinds of volatile periods. All in all it's very similar to South East Asia in 1998, except this time the crisis started spread from the financial sectors of the investor countries to the emerging markets. The global economy will recover, and the eastern european economies will bounce back, and sooner rather than later they will have additional security of monetary union.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 29 Oct 2008 00:02

Sri Rama Jois' book in Google Books:

Legal and Constitutional History of India

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 30 Oct 2008 01:13

Book review Pioneer, 30 Oct., 2008

British Empire’s incredible objective: Welfare of the Conquered

If there was a single moving spirit consistently behind British Imperialism, it was pioneering enterprise, business through discovery. KR Phanda and Prafull Goradia look at Piers Brendon’s story of the decline and fall of the Empire

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
Author: Piers Brendon
Publisher: Vintage (Random House Group)
Price: Rs 695

Piers Brendon has written an exceptionally interesting account of the largest empire in history. Its title, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is, however, a misnomer. Evidently, the author is a Gibbonphile. Or else, there is no reason to use this name for his book. If anything, the volume covers the beginning to the end of the empire, from the 17th century when America began to be colonized to 1997 when the Hong Kong lease expired. A photograph of the Union Jack being lowered on the island is a part of the book. Incidentally, the Falkland Islands still celebrate the continuing flicker of the empire. This epical saga has been covered in the course of some 650 pages; too short a length for so long a story. It is therefore not a history but a racy narrative of selected, engaging episodes.

In the words of the author, “This is my aim, for a shorter period, in the following pages. I endeavour to give the big picture vitality through abundance of detail, telling the imperial story in terms of people, places and events; through brief lives, significant vistas and key episodes. I trace the warp and weft of imperial existence. And some strands come under particularly close scrutiny: the food and drink empire-builders consumed, the clothes they wore, the homes they built, the clubs they joined, the struggles they endured, the loot they acquired, the jubilees, durbars and exhibitions they attended. Also observed are their trimmed moustaches and clipped foreskins, their addiction to games and work, their low-brow ideas and high-minded attitudes, their curious blend of honesty and hypocrisy, their preoccupation with protocol and prestige, their racial prejudices and the extent to which they lived in symbiosis with their charges. I lack the space, not to mention the knowledge, to treat all aspects of the history of the British Empire.”

In the Introduction to his work, Brendon quotes Edward Gibbon as having taught that chronology is the logic of history. But he himself does not follow this teaching in this book under review. He is choosy; apparently his criterion is how interesting an episode and how few readers are likely to be familiar with it. For example, the first chapter consists of 29 pages on The American Revolution or the War of Independence. Yet 14 of the 29 pages are devoted to the Slave Trade mainly with Jamaica and its sugar plantations. The details are lurid and unlikely to be known to many. To quote a paragraph, after the cruel rigours of their abduction in West Africa, their sale to the white traders and the voyage to the New World, “Africans who reached the West Indies looked more like shadows than men. Most were skeletal, many were ill and a few had gone mad. So they were prepared for market, fed, washed, rubbed with palm oil until they gleamed, calmed with drams and pipes. Grey hair was shaved or dyed. To conceal signs of the ‘bloody flux’ some ships’ doctors plugged the anuses of slaves with oakum, causing excruciating pain. They also used a mixture of iron rust, lime juice and gun powder to remove the external symptoms of yaws. Slaves were then subjected to further humiliating scrutiny and sold once again, sometimes individually, sometimes by auction, sometimes in a ‘scramble’. The last was a ferocious melee in which purchasers seized what slaves they could, all at a fixed price.”

The author then scoffs at the slave owners, traders, shippers and British leaders like Edmund Burke who said that colonial government was for those who were unable to rule themselves. They need a trust to be exercised by the rulers for their benefit; an imperial trusteeship for the betterment of native societies. The fact that many a liberated slave, after slavery was abolished, were unwilling to go to Sierra Leone or Liberia showed that they had to be forced to be free. So as Jean Jacques Rousseau said liberty could be compulsory. The author adds, Britain would subjugate many lands in its name, i.e. liberty.

As one reads on, one often comes across an apologetic attitude of the author to the empire. It is difficult to say whether Brendon sincerely feels that way. Or is it to give a balance to his narrative; so that it does not sound like a boast about Britain’s imperial success? Or is it a touch of inverted snobbery whereby it sounds right to be self derogatory? At one stage, he refers to British hypocrisy which claimed that liberty was its governing principle. On the other hand, the author of capitalism, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, did write that trade was cost effective, humane, immune to rebellion compared with empire. Britain should restrict itself to commercial dominance. The author goes on to quote how Smith contended that colonies were a cause of weakness rather than of strength to Britain. On the other hand, Brendon could not help referring to Sir George Macartney who talked about the empire on which the sun never set. In the ultimate analysis, the British could not be free from the ego !

In the course of his treatment of America, Brendon shows repeated concern for the fact that it was Lord Cornwallis who finally surrendered to George Washington and ended the War of Independence in 1776. He appears to feel that the quality of Cornwallis was vindicated by defeating Tipu Sultan at the second battle of Seringapatam in 1799. Britannia’s Indian Empire is a 31 page chapter in which three pages are devoted to Tipu only. His qualities make absorbing reading although in a historical perspective they might not have deserved so much space. To quote, “Moral censure of Tipu Sultan did not come well from a nation which treated convicts and slaves so brutally and, in any case, it rather missed the mark. Seen in the context of South Indian kingship, the Tiger of Mysore was, if hardly tame, not altogether wild. Tipu was intelligent, cultured and witty. He possessed a library of two thousand volumes (carefully wrapped and placed in chests to protect them from white ants) which doubtless nurtured his passion for innovation. He was as fascinated by western technology as by eastern astrology, wearing on his person a gold fob watch and a magical silver amulet. His French-trained army was in some respects superior to that of the British. Tipu’s artillery was ‘both larger and longer than ours’, wrote an English officer, his ‘Rocket Boys are daring, especially when intoxicated by Bang.’ The Sultan was altogether ‘a respectable and formidable enemy’. He was also notably fastidious. His chin was cleanly shaved in oil of almonds, and his muscular body, tending to corpulence but distinguished by delicate wrists and ankles, was regularly ‘shampooed’ (i.e. massaged). A fine white handkerchief, a black enamel vase of flowers and a silver spit-box were placed close to his musnud, which faced Mecca. Although the court elephants were trained to make obeisance to him, Tipu dressed plainly, ate; with restraint (for breakfast ‘an electuary composed of the brains of male tame sparrows’), and spent little time in his zenana. A keen hunter, ‘an incomparable horseman, a gallant soldier, an excellent marksman’, he was admired as well as feared.”

Although Pitts India Act of 1784 prohibited further conquest in India, Cornwallis’ successor Richard Wellesley, aimed to establish one paramount power in India. He kept his aim and, in a matter of eight years, he ensured the rise of “an insignificant trading settlement to a mighty empire” as Lord Valentine wrote. He built the palatial Government House for himself against the wishes of the East India Company Directors. They could do nothing; the moral of these stories was how little was the control of London over self willed Governor Generals 7000 miles away. And how uncoordinated was the growth of the empire.

In the course of a total of 22 chapters, the author deals with the entire empire from the white colonies like Australia to the conquest of Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Gold Coast to East Asia, Malaya et al. If there was a single moving spirit consistently behind the empire building, it was a pioneering enterprise, business through discovery. Most other motives were paradoxical. Trade versus empire. Liberty versus helping those who did not know how to rule themselves. Then there were the evangelists for whom it was a white man’s burden to civilize the coloured people.

Regardless, the British empire was the most sophisticated of all empires in history. It exploited its colonies but as businessmen would. Develop their economies, create their productivity and then cream their surpluses by exporting manufactured goods to them expensive and importing their commodities cheap. What Dadabhai Naoroji had called adverse terms of trade. Otherwise, the accounts of each colony were separate and often Britain owed money to some colonies. For example, at the end of World War II, New Delhi was London’s creditor. All in all, Britain enabled a number of its colonies to undergo an industrial revolution; India was one example. True, it meant more profit for the British. But for India, it meant the building of infrastructure like the railways, the ports, the electricity to enable the profits. Above all, an excellent administration guided by the rule of law backed by a modern jurisprudence.

Although Brendon, in his modesty, has not made the point, its merit would standout clearly if a comparison was attempted with the other contemporary imperialists. The Dutch did little in their colonies but loot. The Portuguese priority was to destroy temples and convert the people to Catholicism. The French busied themselves with civilizing the people; making them pseudo-French; did not lend their excellence of governance. Belgium and its Congo need no mention.

The British empire did not decline and fall in the manner of say the Roman or the Ottoman. The rulers in London and elsewhere did not degenerate as did the Romans and the Turks. The nation, that fought World War II, could not possibly be decrepit. Soon after the war, the Atlee government decided on a spontaneous, largely graceful, withdrawal. Beginning with India in 1947, the end of the empire was completed in 1997 at Hong kong.

Whitehall must have been motivated by several factors, some conscious others implicit, but certainly differing from colony to colony. In the case of India, London might have felt that, after the rebellion led by Netaji Subhas’ Indian National Army whose soldiers violated their oath of loyalty to the crown, a lakh of expatriates can no longer control the enormous colony. Perhaps, it was the British aversion to dealing with the Hindu-Muslim conflict after the war. And so on.

Nevertheless, one was a universal consideration applicable to all colonies. Territory or land was about the only source of big wealth until the Industrial Revolution. Fishing, farming and mining were the main economic activities. With the progress of the Revolution, the growth of manufacture and marketing, territory began to be discounted; with that the economic value of colonies.

This last one was the arguement advanced by US experts for dismantling the empire.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 31 Oct 2008 01:57

op-ed Pioneer, 31 oct., 2008

Art of looking the other way

Francois Gautier

Those who select the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize suffer from selective amnesia about India and its ancient knowledge and traditions. Hence the winner is not an Indian

In a remarkable book, L'oubli de l'Inde (Amnesia of India), French philosopher and journalist Roger-Pol Droit recounts how till the 19th century Europe's admiration for Indian philosophy and spirituality was boundless, particularly in France and Germany, both terra franca of philosophical thought. He explains how, for instance, French philosopher Pierre Sonnerat had written in the 18th century: "Ancient India gave to the world its religions and philosophies: Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened of human beings."

Or how German philosophers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, have said: "There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit." Nietzsche had read the Vedas, which he admired profoundly and thought that "Buddhism and Brahmanism are a hundred times deeper and more objective than Christianity".

It was not only in the realm of philosophy that Europe admired India. American mathematician A Seindenberg wrote: "Arithmetic equations were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians and the theory of contraries and of inexactitude in arithmetic methods, discovered by Hindus inspired Pythagorean mathematics".

Seventeenth century French astronomer Jean-Claude Bailly had already noticed that "the Hindu astronomic systems were much more ancient than those of the Greeks or even the Egyptians and the movement of stars which was calculated by the Hindus 4,500 years ago, does not differ from those used today by even one minute".

When Nietzsche died in January 1889, the India of philosophy, of the Vedas and spirituality seemed to have disappeared with him from the consciousness of Europeans. Since then, Europe (and the United States) believe in what Droit calls "Helleno-Centrism", that all philosophical systems started with Greece and there was nothing worth the name before the Greeks. The two main culprits for this amnesia of India in Europe, thinks Pol Droit, are the British colonisers and the Christian missionaries. How could the English, they who had come to civilise the 'heathens', admit that their culture was derived from these very savages? And how could the missionaries, they who had come to bring the 'true god' to the Pagans, acknowledge that their own religion may have been influenced by the latter, as Jesus Christ is supposed to have come to India to study Hinduism and Buddhism?

What has this got to do with the Nobel Peace Prize, you may ask? Well, first, one has to understand the minds of the Nobel Peace Prize committee members: When they award prizes, they are necessarily influenced by a Christian vision of the world. For, as most Europeans, they have been brought-up in the belief that democracy and philosophy started with Greece and that a humane civilisation began with Jesus Christ. And, of course, they have a covert -- or at best unconscious -- suspicion, if not of India at least of Hindus, who for them remain Pagans, which the missionaries of yesteryears, and unfortunately those of today too, have created in the minds of many Westerners. How can they then give Peace Prize to a Hindu?

Among those Indians most nominated in the last few years is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living. Sri Sri is not only involved with charity in India's villages, he also promotes pesticide and fertiliser-free farming, takes orphans from Jammu & Kashmir and the North-East into his ashram, and his volunteers do relief work, both at the physical and psychological level -- whether in Bihar during the floods, in Iraq or in the US during the recent cyclone. Sri Sri is also trying to revive the ancient Vedic tradition by training young priests in a gurukul, which blends ancient knowledge with modern thought, while promoting ayurveda as the medicine of the 21st century.

There is only one problem: Sri Sri is a Hindu. In the same way the Nobel judges ignored Sri Aurobindo, India's extraordinary yogi, poet, revolutionary, and philosopher and France is yet to acknowledge that one of the great figures of the 20th century was his spiritual companion, Mira Alfassa, the 'Mother'.

Will Sri Sri ever get the Nobel then? Maybe his manifold work confuses the judges. For, if you analyse all recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, you will see that they were crowned for their work which carries only one label.

Sri Sri is not bothered and goes on with his work. As he gains fame in the West, he helps erase the amnesia about India and revive admiration and thirst for Sri Sri's knowledge.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 31 Oct 2008 21:42

fanne wrote:Sugriva Sir,
I would not worry about the slow economic growth of the earlier decades. Among all the big economics, we have the highest amount of organic growth, full 80-90% of our economy is about us. For China, they have 30-40% economy tied to the well being of the global economy. We are the original and real businessman. Of the 5000 years of recorded history, we were the richest nation for almost 4700 hundred years, last 200 years have been bad (last 60 the worst, at independence we accounted for 5% of world trade, now not even 1%). There was some 100 years in 1600 AD that China took us momentarily. The last 60 years were like putting shackles around Indians. We will thrive and do great, we always have. The Islamic invasion could not slow us down, neither the looting of the British (they built the largest train network for that!!). The so called shinning sectors will be hit, like people who are mousers to foreigners, or like write codes for them. But for many Indians, who choose to serve 1.2 billion Indians, sky is the limit. We would be OK, just that we do not go back to that mai baap system where everything is decided by Rajmata and Rajkumar.

If you look back in history these trading routes were both sea and land based. What colonialism did was to take over the Indian mercantile system and enrich itself. The Portugese and then the Brits took over the seas around India and the land route aka Silk Route got cut off with modernization and creation of nation states. The rise of US after 1965 starts because of taking over the rupee trade area in the Gulf countries. KSA starts using dollar for its tradeinstead of rupee.

SK Mody · Post by **SK Mody** » 31 Oct 2008 22:53

Acharya wrote:http://www.scribd.com/doc/7447100/The-A ... an-History

The Aryan Invasion Theory - European History
Description
Why does AIT model still persist? Why do indologists not reconsider the fundamental premise of their theory? Though they have retracted the Aryan Invasion and have been forced to give up large scale migrations (to the point where, at present, one must imagine tiny bands of Aryan entrants to have silently crept into India, wiped out all records of their presence and interactions there, and then disappeared or died out without passing on their genes), they refuse to reformulate or even re-evaluate their basic assumption.
Why? What are the reason(s) governing indology's non-self-critical approach when dealing with counter-evidence from other sciences?
...
[51]

Is it that the high level of genetic diversity found in India is a psychological barrier to rejecting the AIT?

There seems to be an unspoken premise that diversity is a result of purely environmental and migratory factors. The assumption seems to be that an isolated population must be homogeneous - and environmental and migratory factors are the reason for diversity. I would like to invert this logic. Why can't it be true that diversity is _greatest_ at the source? Then as sub-populations migrate outwards they tend to form more homogeneous clusters. To take an analogy from complex analysis - in any neighborhood of an "essential singularity" of a complex function, the function takes on every possible value. The Indian subcontinent is that kind of neighborhood - genetic expression is the greatest in this neighborhood.

As sub-populations from the India migrated outward they formed the more homogeneous populations that we see today outside India. Now one can ask - Why should these migrated populations be more homogeneous? One answer would be that they need to adapt to their new environment - ie: the environment molds the migrated population and homogenizes them. This also means that after a substantial period of time, after the populations have adjusted to their new environment, they will begin to differentiate and diversify again. Applying this to present day Europe for example, one could speculate that Europeans will eventually start "naturally" becoming more diverse in the genetic makeup, as they have survived the period of adapting to the environment. The idea is that populations _naturally_ tend to differentiate unless _constrained_ by a new/hostile environment. As you can see this inverts the generally accepted logic.

There is also the Banyan tree analogy. While the Banyan tree is nourished by the branches that dig in to the soil from above, these branches don't come from the sky but from the tree itself. The analogy with India is obvious.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 01 Nov 2008 01:22

SK Mody wrote:

Is it that the high level of genetic diversity found in India is a psychological barrier to rejecting the AIT?

This explains why there is high genetic diversity in India. Earliest human evolution was in the sub continent. Other regions got their DNA diversity from India. High diversity implies it is origin of those groups.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/ilectures/

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 01 Nov 2008 10:22

From another forum

India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says
.
The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages
NOT. That "may" is English for a probability of 0.0% by the way. Where the 0 after the decimal repeats infinitely.

It is the Aryan-Mind-Invasion Theory now. Their minds invaded us Indians, who were incapable of speech and agriculture, until they kindly civilised us like the swell British did millennia later. How grateful we are! No, really. Where did the invading chariots go of some barbaric tribe bringing down the Harappans who were the "Dravidians" who fled south? Ooh, wait, Underhill and Witzel probably still believe in their ancestors invading our lands. Because there's still Aishwarya Rai to account for.

The AIT continues. Except now they are happier than ever: they never wanted to be connected genetically with us, but they always wanted to claim the root of the IE languages. What next? I can see the Global Christian Movement (aka Global Christian Menace) is going to say: "you are all one people living under a religion that is not yours. Let it go." No thanks.

How can they make a claim on our language when they have no older IE language anywhere living among them or written down anywhere?
From the "West"? Where in the west do they mean?
"agricultural techniques and languages" - no, because they got agriculture (farming) from the ME. Samskrt and all the languages derived from it in India are ours. If they want it, they should prove otherwise, without resorting to their laughable and desperate PIE.
Since they can't prove an invasion into India, and our genes are splattered all over their ancestors, they still want to claim our culture. Language is culture. It's what our ancestors used to compose and write our knowledge like the Rg Veda. We've got Pannini who detailed the grammar exquisitely. What next, they'll claim the Dravidian languages once they discover how cultured the South Indians are?

How did the West invent PIE again? Where do they speak PIE again?
Not giving us the credit of our own language is the same as saying we were uncivilised (in western terms). The AIT lives.

Our culture and our languages and our genes are our own. I'm sorry that they can't accept that. I'm sorry they find it hard to swallow and can no longer play ubermenschen. But that's just tough luck. There are no ubermenschen. They need to get off the pedestal and everyone else needs to kick the pedestal so it never comes up again.

This paper has effectively stated that the A(Mind)IT will in future not be affected by genetics whatever the outcome. (Unless of course some study shows a massive European genetic invasion of N-India. In which case the AIT will make a massive comeback, like it had never gone away.)
However, no genetics study that makes us the genetic ancestors is going to credit us with the IE languages. They've made their minds up: it's a one-way street, a rigged game where we lose no matter what.

They're such liars. At night they'll lie awake and know their ancestors did not accomplish what they now claim them to have. Anyway, Karma will bite them in the ... foot.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 15 Nov 2008 04:23

Interesting article

How Muslims made Europe

How Muslims Made Europe
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215
by David Levering Lewis
Norton, 473 pp., $29.95

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

Charlemagne's rule included at its high point most of France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, the west of Germany, Italy as far south as Rome, a strip in the north of Spain, and parts of Hungary and the Balkans. At nearly three and a half million square miles, it was larger than the continental United States. Charlemagne imposed Catholic orthodoxy on the pagan Saxons in the east at the point of a very sharp sword, massacring thousands of those who resisted, and suppressed heresy within Frankland with equal vigor. He created monastic centers of learning, drawing scholars from across his empire and beyond; and after the centuries of ignorance that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Gaul and Germania, the works of men like the Northumbrian Alcuin (poet, theologian, and restorer of the classical curriculum) created a Carolingian Renaissance.

These achievements perhaps entitled Charlemagne to his self-conception as Rome's heir in the West, author of a Renovatio Romani Imperii, an imperial restoration. When he traveled to Rome in December 800, some thirty years into his reign, he went to defend the authority of Leo III as pope; and His Holiness returned the favor by crowning him Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800 (much to the annoyance of the Byzantine regent Irene, who called herself Emperor, rather than Empress, and thought the title was hers).

Charlemagne was a great soldier, a devoted Catholic, an ambitious administrator, and a patron of learning. He had reason to take pride in what would prove a brilliant Carolingian legacy; we need think only of the magnificent carved ivory plaques in the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum or the elegance of manuscripts in Carolingian minuscule or Alcuin's Latin verse history of York. But the empire he created was, as Lewis puts it trenchantly, "religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive," ruled by a "warrior caste and its clerical enforcers." Despite the new currency, the economy was dominated by barter; there were few cities of any size; and wealth was measured in land, peasants, and slaves.

Charlemagne had no national system of taxation. He lived off plunder and the product of his own estates. What his lords owed him was military service. They were obliged to show up annually in the late spring, armed for a military campaign, in case he thought it necessary. (Very often, he did.) The Franks had once been a relatively free agrarian people; now they were largely a nation of serfs, working alongside slaves—many of them Slavs from Bohemia and the southern shores of the Baltic.

Charlemagne's royal hall, in his new capital at Aachen, was built on a fifty-acre complex of buildings, secular and religious, and was the largest stone structure north of the Alps. But it paled in comparison to the architectural majesty of Byzantium or Rome. The King endowed libraries with hundreds of manuscripts, impressive by comparison with anything that had been seen hitherto by the Franks, but pitiful (as Gibbon observed) beside the thousands of documents in the libraries of Italy or Spain. He created a new bureaucratic structure, sending royal officials to each of the 350 counties of his realm to deliver his commands, hear cases, and, when necessary, to summon his people to war. But as Lewis says, much of this royal centralizing had scarcely more than a parchment reality in a world of near-universal illiteracy, deep suspicion and resentment on the part of the nobility, and a crippling disparity between resources and objectives.

The fact is that Charlemagne's empire, impressive as it was, lacked many of the marks of what we think of as civilization: cities, commerce, great libraries, a literate elite. This is especially clear if we compare the world he made with the cultivated society of his new Muslim neighbors.

Like Charlemagne's empire, al- Andalus was very much the product of a war machine. Islam burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity in every direction. After the Prophet's death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere thirty years to defeat the two great empires to their north, Rome's Christian residue in Byzantium and the Zoroastrian Persian empire that reached through Central Asia as far as India. The dynasty of the Umayyad clan, which took control of Islam in 661, pushed on west into North Africa and east into Central Asia. In early 711, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, acting for the sixth Umayyad caliph in Damascus, led a Berber army across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain.[1] There he attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries. A year later, a new army of 18,000 men, mostly Yemeni Arabs, joined in the assault. Within seven years, most of the Iberian peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly eight hundred years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.

After the early Muslim triumphs, the Christians of northern Iberia fought back, consolidating the Kingdom of Asturias in the 720s, and recovering Galicia from Muslim rule by the end of the next decade. In the mountainous northwest of the peninsula, on the storm-buffeted southern coast of the Bay of Biscay, the Christian tribes were largely able to resist Muslim encroachment. Nor was Muslim rule ever secure in the Basque region on the southern side of the Pyrenees. The Upper, Middle, and Lower Marches (or borderlands) lay between the core of al-Andalus, the region around Córdoba, and these Christian kingdoms in the northwest, on the one hand, and the Franks over the mountains to the northeast, on the other. As borderlands—whether with the Asturians or with the Franks—the Marches were always at risk of attack.

The Umayyads did not, however, intend to stop at the Pyrenees. Their first attempt to take Aquitaine, the southern Frankish duchy, was frustrated in 721, when Duke Odo charged his heavy horses through a Muslim army encamped outside his capital at Toulouse. But a little more than a decade later, 'Abd al-Rahman, the new emir of al-Andalus, returned to take up the task, with a vast, disciplined, experienced Moorish army. He sent Odo scuttling off from a defeat near Bordeaux and marched on northward toward Poitiers, almost halfway from the Pyrenees to Paris.

Near Poitiers, however, the Muslims met their match. In October 732, Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, who had force-marched his troops from the faraway Danube, joined Duke Odo in decimating the emir's troops. A Christian scribe in a Latin chronicle written in 754 calls the victors at Poitiers Europenses : it is the first recorded use of a Latin word for the people of Europe. And it was written in al-Andalus.

Later Christian historians assigned to the Battle of Poitiers an epochal significance. Gibbon remarked that if the Moors had covered again the distance they had traveled from Gibraltar, they could have reached Poland or the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps, he thought, if 'Abd al-Rahman had won, "the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet." For him, the fate of Christian Europe hung in the balance. After a week of battle, he wrote, "the Orientals were oppressed by the strength and stature of the Germans, who...asserted the civil and religious freedom of their posterity."[2]

At the time, though, it would have been odd to regard Charles Martel's victory as guaranteeing religious freedom. The small but influential Jewish community in Iberia had been tolerated in Spain when their Visigothic overlords were still Arian heretics ruling Catholic and Jewish subjects; but Jews began to be persecuted in 589, when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism. For the Jews, then, the Muslim Conquest, bringing rulers who practiced toleration toward them as well as toward Christians and Zoroastrians, was not unwelcome. During the first period of Muslim domination, Christians, too, discovered that they would have religious freedom, so long as they (like the Jews) did not seek to convert Muslims or criticize Islam. The contrast with Frankish rule could hardly have been more striking. The obsession of Catholic rulers with religious orthodoxy was one of the things that made the Dark Ages—as Petrarch was to dub the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries—so dark.

Nor was it evident at the time that the Battle of Poitiers had put an end to the dreams of a Muslim conquest in the land of the Franks. For nearly thirty years the Arabs maintained control of Septimania—modern-day Languedoc in southern France—ruling from their capital at Narbonne. In the ensuing decade there were constant sallies and retreats as a succession of emirs sought to go deeper into Frankish territory. In all this back-and-forth, it makes little sense (as Lewis shows) to pick Poitiers as the turning point.

Indeed, the greatest obstacle to Muslim expansion proved to be the divisions among the Muslims, which led to almost constant conflict in al-Andalus. Discord in the world of Islam began in the tribal society that was the religion's first home. The Prophet came from the Meccan Quraysh tribe, whose members were regarded with special favor by the faithful. Among the Quraysh, Muhammad's clan was particularly exalted. The first caliphs were all Qurayshi, but the first dynasty came not from Muhammad's kinsmen but from the Umayya clan. When the fourth caliph, Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, was assassinated and succeeded by an Umayyad caliph, a long rivalry between the clans was launched.[3] In 750, revolts in the new Muslim empire unraveled the Umayyad dynasty; and the new caliph of the Abbasid clan set out to massacre anyone who could resurrect the Umayyad line. Not for nothing was he called as-Saffah, the Shedder of Blood.

Unfortunately for Abbasid claims to control of the empire, the bloodletting was not completed. 'Abd al-Rahman, nineteen-year-old grandson of the Umayyad caliph Hisham I, evaded capture, and managed to get to Morocco. Across the narrow straits between Morocco and al-Andalus, 'Abd al-Rahman planned to conquer a Muslim society whose rulers owed their place to the patronage of his ancestors. In 755 he landed in Granada with over a thousand Berber cavalry. He was twenty-five years old. Within a year, he had installed himself in Córdoba, as emir of al-Andalus. But his hold on power was tenuous. He lost his foothold north of the Pyrenees in 759 to Pippin the Short, Charlemagne's father, in part because he was facing a revolt in the west of his own empire. And he spent most of his time in the saddle, fighting resistance to his claims as emir.

When 'Abd al-Rahman defeated the Abbasid emir in 763, he commanded that all prisoners of war be executed, and himself presided as the emir's hands and feet and then head were cut off. "Labeled and pickled in brine, the leaders' heads were dispatched to Mecca," Lewis writes. "When Caliph al-Mansur received the gory details, he is said to have expostulated, 'God be praised for placing a sea between us!'"

Despite, or perhaps because of, these sanguinary beginnings, the reign of 'Abd al-Rahman and his descendants in al-Andalus introduced a period of relative stability. An emir had to be ready at any moment to defend his territory from without and his authority within. But alongside the disciplines of war, he could practice the arts of peace.

The original core of the Great Mosque at Córdoba, which stands to this day, was built for 'Abd al-Rahman in an astonishing burst of architectural fervor, apparently between 785 and 786. With 152 columns, arranged in eleven aisles, it consisted of two parts: a large prayer hall, some two thirds of an acre in area, and an adjoining piazza of the same size, filled with rows of orange trees, which together made up a square whose sides measured about 240 feet. The results, added onto over the centuries, still amaze. Lewis writes:

Its builders devised the art and science of transmuting matter into light and form that medieval Christendom was the poorer for its general inability to comprehend.... The unprecedented innovation of the Great Mosque's master builder was to loft the coffered ceiling to a height of forty feet by means of an upper tier of semicircular arches that appeared to be clamped to the bottom tier of horseshoe arches supported by columns.... Structurally ingenious, the visual effect of the double arches has been from the moment of completion one of the world's distinctively edifying aesthetic experiences.

If the Great Mosque was the most evident material embodiment of the civilization of the Arabs in Spain, their intellectual achievements were even more astonishing. Starting in 'Abd al-Rahman's time, the Umayyads sought to compete with their Abbasid rivals in Baghdad for cultural bravura. Over the next few centuries, Córdoba alone acquired hundreds of mosques, thousands of palaces, scores of libraries. By the tenth century, those libraries had hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, dwarfing the largest libraries of Christian Europe. The university of Córdoba predated Bologna, the first European university, by more than a century. And al-Andalus was a world of cities, not, like Europe, a world of country estates and small towns. By the end of the millennium, Córdoba's population was 90,000, more than three times the size of any town in the territory once occupied by Charlemagne. In those cities, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs, and countless others created the kind of cultural goulash—a spicy mixture of a variety of distinct components—that would generate a genuine cosmopolitanism.

There were no recognized rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Córdoba's ambassador to Constantinople and Aachen. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Córdoba's Jewish community in the middle of the tenth century, was not only a great medical scholar but was also the chairman of the caliph's medical council; and when the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII sent the caliph a copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, the caliph sent for a Greek monk to help translate it into Arabic. The knowledge that the caliph's doctors acquired made Córdoba one of the great centers of medical expertise in Europe. By the time of 'Abd al-Rahman's successor and namesake, 'Abd al-Rahman III, in the tenth century, the emir of al-Andalus had the confidence to declare himself caliph, successor or representative of the Prophet and, implicitly, leader of the Muslim world.

Like Charlemagne's, the emir's position was partly religious; he was supposed to be (and often was) pious. But piety for the emirs did not mean—as it did for the Holy Roman Emperor—imposing one's religion on others. From the earliest times, the emirs of al-Andalus accepted conversion but did not demand it. There were, naturally, some pressures to convert: non-Muslim subjects—the so-called dhimmi—were required to pay special taxes; and non-Muslims could be enslaved while, at least in theory, Muslims could not. Still, it probably took about two centuries after 'Abd al-Rahman's death in 788 for Muslims to become a majority in al-Andalus.[4] In the cities of al-Andalus, scholars of all three faiths, with access to the learning of the classical world that the Arabs had inherited and brought to the West, gathered and transmitted the learning whose recovery in Europe created the Renaissance.

By 777, 'Abd al-Rahman, now in his mid-forties, and still a vigorous warrior, had established control over some two thirds of the peninsula. Not all his co-religionists were pleased. Evidently hoping to contain him, the emir of Barcelona and the Muslim governors of Saragossa and Huesca rode the nearly one thousand miles to Saxony to conspire with Charlemagne. It was at a time when the King had gathered his nobles and his leading clergy for the Diet of Paderborn to receive the submission of the Saxon tribes and witness the baptism of many of their leaders. The coincidence seemed providential. Here were three Muslim princes offering fealty to the king of the Franks and the Lombards, who had recently become ruler of the Saxons as well. "To Charlemagne's vaulting ambitions," Lewis writes, "the symmetry of a Frankland flanked by two conquered peninsulas proved irresistible—rex Hispanicum added to the title rex Francorum et Langobardum." In 778, Charlemagne assembled an army of Franks, Bavarians, Burgundians, Lombards, Septimanians, and others—perhaps as many as 25,000 men at arms—to begin his assault on Hispania. For the first time in history, a Christian army set out to conquer the world of Islam; but it did so at the invitation of and in alliance with Muslims.

'Abd al-Rahman prepared his own army but he did not have to use it. Accounts of Charlemagne's great muster gave the governor of Saragossa second thoughts, and so when the Frankish armies arrived there, expecting to be welcomed, its gates remained barred. Worse news came from the far north; the Saxons whose defeat he had celebrated at Paderborn had risen in revolt. When Charlemagne sought refuge in the old Basque city of Pamplona, his fellow Catholics spurned him. Infuriated, he destroyed Pamplona. In the end, a Christian city was the major victim of his planned assault on the Muslim emirate.

As Charlemagne retreated through the Pyrenees, he was harried by Basques, who had no love for the Frankish king who had devastated their city; and in a mountain pass at Roncesvalles the Frankish rear guard was destroyed. Einhard, Charlemagne's first biographer, lists among the dead "Roland, Lord of the Breton Marches." This appalling Christian loss to fellow Christians—Catholic Franks slaughtered by Catholic Basques—was transmuted three centuries later in the Chanson de Roland into a fatal conflict between Christianity and Islam.

In the epic, Charlemagne sees the carnage of the flower of Frankish chivalry, and destroys an army sent from the other end of the Muslim world. In reality, Charlemagne now turned his wrath on the Saxon apostates. By the summer of 779, he had amassed a great army aimed at the final conversion of the Saxons from paganism. At Verden in 782, according to Einhard, Charlemagne supervised the slaughter of 4,500 Saxon prisoners. The armies of the Saxons were defeated in 785. Charlemagne threatened those who refused baptism with capital punishment. As late as 804, Charlemagne uprooted 10,000 recalcitrant Saxons, settling them in the west of his kingdom.

After four and half decades in power, Charlemagne died in 814. His rule overlapped the last twenty years of 'Abd al-Rahman's emirate, encompassed the twelve-year reign of al-Rahman's son, Hisham I, and also part of the twenty-eight-year reign of the grandson who consolidated Umayyad rule. The limitations of Charlemagne's state-building were evident at his death. He had made plans, following Frankish tradition, to divide the kingdom among his three legitimate sons, but only Louis the Pious was still alive by the time he died. Louis's attempts to divide the empire among his own sons led to a series of civil wars, out of which emerged a partition of Charlemagne's empire, laid out at the Treaty of Verdun of 843. The Frankish empire was split into East, Middle, and West Francia. The eastern kingdom became the (new) Holy Roman Empire, including much of present-day Germany; the western one is the core of modern France; and the middle kingdom included Burgundy, Italy, and the Low Countries. Verdun effectively ended the Frankish empire that had united Western Europe for the first time since the Romans.

'Abd al-Rahman's heirs as emirs of Córdoba held al-Andalus together with a little more success. But by the 880s, under his ineffective great-great-grandson, the emirate was so weakened by rebellion and demands for regional autonomy that his writ barely ran beyond Córdoba. It took that emir's son, 'Abd al-Rahman III, to consolidate Umayyad authority in the peninsula and extend it into North Africa. For nearly half a century, from 912 to 961, he built Córdoba into a center of power, creating a palace complex, the Madinat al-Zahra, that awed all who visited it, from the governors of the towns of the Marches to the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire.

After the debacle at Roncesvalles, Charlemagne never returned to Spain. In 798, the governor of Barcelona sought Frankish help in achieving independence from 'Abd al-Rahman's grandson, and Charlemagne authorized a campaign led by his son Louis. Barcelona was reconquered in 801 after a two-year siege. By 812, after a series of Frankish campaigns, the emir in Córdoba had accepted that his border was at the river Ebro, which runs through Saragossa in the northeastern part of the peninsula.

The Umayyad caliphate collapsed in the eleventh century and Muslim Spain descended into a chaos of little kingdoms, the Ta'ifa, some ruled by Arabs, some by Berbers, some by Slavs. In 1085, Alfonso VI, Christian king of Leon and Castile, captured Toledo; unlike the Franks, he knew better than to impose Catholicism on the people at the point of a sword. He called himself "king of the two religions"—meaning Islam and Christianity—but tolerated Jews as well: his doctor, Joseph Nasi Ferruziel, was Jewish. The spirit of cohabitation that the Arabs had created survived their departure. It took nearly four more centuries to get from the king of the two religions to the rigorous intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Berber dynasts—Almoravids and Almohads—who eventually took control of Córdoba and Seville, re- establishing a single Muslim state in the southern third of the peninsula from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, were very different from their Arab predecessors; they were driven by an intolerant orthodoxy that made it impossible to sustain the centuries-old intellectual openness that had made Umayyad Spain a place of scientific and philosophical learning. True, the philosopher Ibn Rushd—known to the Christian world as Averroës—had the first Almohad emir as his patron; but three years before his death, he was exiled to a village near Córdoba in 1195, his philosophical speculations condemned by the conservative Mus-lim scholars who now dominated the society.

As for Maimonides, the greatest of the Jewish scholars of al-Andalus, his family had to leave Córdoba around 1148, escaping Spain for Alexandria, by way of Morocco and Palestine. Without Ibn Rushd, whom Aquinas called simply the Commentator (on Aristotle, it was understood), as without Maimonides, there is no doubt, as Lewis insists, that the intellectual history of Europe would have been radically different. And without the Umayyad centuries, both Maimonides and Ibn Rushd would have been inconceivable.

The conquest of Spain by an alliance of Catholic princes was now proceeding apace. They called it a reconquest, because they saw it as the return to power of Catholicism in the peninsula, long centuries after the Visigoths had lost control. In the thirteenth century, the Almohads abandoned Granada to the last Muslim dynasty in Spain. Within a decade it was a tributary state of Catholic Castile. The end of al- Andalus came with the submission, in 1492, of the last emir to los Reyes Católicos, Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. By then the crusades had for nearly three centuries been redefining the contrast between Christians and Muslims, shifting the focus of the conflict to the east. The toleration that Alfonso VI, Isabella's ancestor, had shown to the two religions that had shared Spain with the Catholics for so many centuries was formally ended: expulsion or conversion was required of all the Muslims and Jews of Iberia. The pattern that Charlemagne had set in Saxony was carried forward, once more with a pope's blessing, in Spain.

There were Europeans before there were Frenchmen or Germans or Italians or Spaniards because there was a world of kingdoms in the western residue of the Roman Empire bound by Catholicism to Rome. The histories that made France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—not to mention Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, or the Netherlands—all pass through one or both of the empires Charlemagne and 'Abd al-Rahman made. God's Crucible reveals how much the world we have inherited is the product of identities created long ages ago in rivers of blood, proceeding from a slaughter that was as often within Christendom or Islam as it was at their frontiers.

But there is also a more uplifting message here. Though Christians and Jews were clearly subordinated to Muslims in al-Andalus, they were nevertheless able to share in its manifold intellectual and material treasures. Had the three religions not worked together, borrowing from the pagan traditions of Greece and Rome, what we call the West would have been utterly different. In an age where some claim a struggle between the heirs of Christendom and of the Caliphate is the defining conflict, it is good to be reminded of this history of fruitful cohabitation.

Earlier this year, I visited the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barce-lona, housed in an old seminary. In the entrance archway, a group of people dressed informally in North African clothes, the men in long djellabas, the women with their heads covered in silk scarves, chatted cheerfully. Their presence was a reminder that the project of Charlemagne and los Reyes Católicos—the creation of a totally Catholic Europe—has failed; a failure that began, of course, from within, in the Reformation and took hold in the Enlightenment, both of which, though they have many other ancestors, are heirs to the philosophical traditions transmitted through al-Andalus. As the Muslim children ran around their parents on a warm, spring evening, it occurred to me that in a different history, without the Reconquest, I might still have seen people much like them in that archway—or, at any rate, one much like it; and, since I had read God's Crucible, I decided that in that other history the Christian Catalans who wandered by would also not have seemed out of place.

Notes
[1]Which is where Gibraltar gets its name: Jabal Tariq in Arabic is Tariq's Mountain.

[2]Edmund Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (P.F. Collier & Son, 1899), p. 288.

[3]The division between Sunni and Shia Islam originates here. The Shia are the followers of Ali, believing that the household of the Prophet should provide the leaders of Islam.

[4]Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion To Islam In The Medieval Period: An Essay In Quantitative History (Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 124.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 15 Nov 2008 04:45

The West and the Rest
By Charles Murray
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003

ARTICLES
The Public Interest
Publication Date: June 1, 2003

Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left's fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school are likely to know more about Mayan culture than French culture, and why liberal arts students at elite universities can graduate without taking a course that discusses the Renaissance. The assumption that Eurocentrism is a real problem accounts for the reluctance of many to celebrate Western culture-or even defend it.

Part of the Eurocentric critique is based on an open hostility to Western culture. Other cultures, it is claimed, were more in tune with the earth, fostered more nurturing personal relationships, or were more cooperative than the despoiling, competitive Europeans. These are not positions to be refuted by logic and evidence-the West's arbitrary allegiance to "logic" and "evidence" is one of its supposed evils. Another rationale for increasing attention to non-Western cultures is simple historical accuracy and balance. This is the "Eurocentric hypothesis," which might be put as follows: When Westerners set out to survey history, they conveniently find that most of it was made by people like themselves. Sometimes this parochialism is fostered by a prescribed canon of fine art, music, and literature that marginalizes non-Western traditions. Other times it is a function of ignorance, which leads Western historians to slight the scientific and technological achievements of other parts of the world. In either case, the result is a skewed vision that does not reflect real European preeminence, but rather Eurocentric bias.

This argument is plausible. It is easy to mock today's New Age deference to the Mayans, but the great civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world left splendid legacies in the arts and sciences. The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?

Measuring Excellence

The data I collected for a book on human accomplishment left me with a way to explore that question. The data consist of inventories of people and events assembled from major histories and encyclopedic sources, covering the period from 800 BC to 1950. Each inventory was based on a dozen or more sources widely regarded as authoritative, drawn from a mix of countries. For example, the Western visual-arts inventory used 14 sources from the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, ranging in length from single-volume histories such as Janson's History of Art to the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. The methods are described fully in my forthcoming book. Here, I limit myself to a few basics.

The science inventories (subdivided into astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology) were worldwide-that is, Chinese and Arab scientists were part of the same inventory that contained Copernicus and Newton. My working assumption was that historians of science are able to identify important scientific achievements independently of the culture in which they occur.

The arts inventories (subdivided into the visual arts, music, and literature) and the philosophy inventory could not be worldwide. Even though some sources for these topics purported to cover the entire world, the weight given to different artistic traditions involves judgments and preferences in ways that accounts of scientific accomplishment do not. It could not be assumed, for example, that a history of the visual arts written by a German would use the same standards for Chinese or French art as for German art. To avoid the problem of cultural chauvinism within the Western world, I selected sources balanced among the major Western countries (along with other precautions discussed in the book). For non-Western countries, the most direct way to sidestep this problem was to prepare independent inventories. For philosophy, I prepared separate inventories for the West, China, and India. For the visual arts, I made use of distinct inventories for the West, China, and Japan. For literature, I used separate inventories for the West, the Arab world, China, India, and Japan. Music was restricted to the West. Altogether, 4,002 people qualified as "significant figures," defined as those who were mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources, in one or another of the inventories.

As the entry point for exploring the Eurocentric hypothesis, consider the simplest of all questions: If the 4,002 significant figures are divided into three groups consisting of European peoples, people from the rest of the West (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and non-Western peoples, how are they distributed over the period from 800 BC to 1950? Figure 1 below shows the results.

The story line implied by the graph is that little happened from 800 BC until the middle of the fifteenth century, that really intense levels of accomplishment didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all the significant figures make their appearance after 1800), and that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost everything came from Europe. As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entering significant figures were European. Thirteen of the remaining 19 percent were from North America. But if this is the most direct story line, it is also one that leaves open many reasons to suspect that various factors are misleading us. The rest of the discussion works through the major possibilities.

Populations and Prejudices

The bulge in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries shown in figure 1 will prompt many readers to ask whether we are seeing the effects of "epochcentrism" (paying excessive attention to people in the recent past) and a growing population. A detailed answer to these questions consumes the better part of two chapters in my book. The short answer is that these phenomena do have a limited influence on the data, but do not bear importantly on the Eurocentric hypothesis.

The problem of epochcentrism is concentrated in the recent past. Cutting off the inventories at 1950 eliminates most of it, and the rest is concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case, epochcentrism applies equally to the Western and non-Western worlds. You may visualize figure 1 stopping at 1900, or visualize it with the totals for all three groupings somewhat reduced. Neither alternative changes the overall shape of graph.

In the case of population change, it is true that a country of 100 million people tends to produce more significant figures than a country of 10 million people, and the growth in Western significant figures is related to the increase in Western population. But the non-West has always had a larger population than the West, and in raw numbers, population growth in the last three centuries was greater outside the West than within the West. A revised graph that takes population into account would make Western dominance since 1400 greater, not smaller.

Geniuses and Giants

The most obvious objection to the story told by figure 1 is that a head count of significant figures is the wrong way to think about the distribution of accomplishment. The reason for teaching ancient Greek philosophy is not that 32 significant figures in Western philosophy come from ancient Greece, but that 2 of those 32 were Plato and Aristotle. The reason for teaching nineteenth-century European literature is not that it produced 293 significant figures, but that the 293 include writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Hugo, Keats, and Heine.

True enough. But as history has worked out, the ages rich in giants have also been rich in near-giants and the rest of the significant figures who make up the inventory. This point can be made more fully by examining the actual rosters of significant figures, but for the sake of brevity consider what happens when the raw numbers are weighted by the eminence of the people in question. The "eminence scores" I calculated for the significant figures used techniques for measuring eminence-essentially, by measuring the amount of attention given to people-that were originated by polymath Francis Galton in the 1860s and have been refined by succeeding generations of scholars. The specific method I employed produced scores ranging from 1 to 100.

These scores have the potential to shift the pattern shown in figure 1 substantially-one Aristotle, with his eminence score of one hundred, counts the same as a hundred Antiphons, and one Shakespeare counts the same as a hundred Dubose Heywards. Because I prepared separate inventories for the non-Western traditions, Eurocentrism cannot deflate the scores of the non-Western giants in the arts-Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Du Fu both have scores of one hundred, for example. However, as one can see in figure 2 below, employing eminence scores in place of a head count does not change the main outlines of the distribution of accomplishment shown in figure 1, either across time or geography.

The second graph shows an increased visibility of non-Western cultures after about 500 AD. However, the main point of Western dominance after 1400 persists, with West meaning Europe until the late nineteenth century.

The effects differ across inventories, but only in the case of the Western philosophy inventory, where the eminence scores drastically raise the importance of ancient Greece, does the balance between pre- and post-1400 visibly shift. Take Western literature as an example. Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are giants of Western literature-but the post-1400 era has its own giants (Shakespeare, Goethe, and Moliere, for example) plus dozens of other near-giants who merit attention, compared with only a handful of near-giants from ancient times. In the end, a student with unlimited time to study Western literature has as much great literature post-1400 as pre-1400 (more, by most estimates), and a vastly larger number of works that are worthy of study. Taking eminence into account does not (again, with the exception of Western philosophy) radically elevate the importance of pre-Renaissance accomplishment.

An examination of significant figures in the sciences shows the same profile, but with even fewer people coming from outside the West. One might object that the role of the non-West is underestimated because of anonymous scientific discoveries, which might be more numerous in China, India, or the Arab world than in the West. Another possibility is that the number of significant figures after the mid-1800s is inflated because, as scientific teams have become more common, more scientists are identified with a single invention or discovery. Both possibilities may be checked by turning to the inventory of "significant events" in the sciences, compiled in the same way as the inventories of significant figures. (Specifically, a significant event refers to one mentioned in at least 50 percent of a large set of chronologies of scientific events.) An inventory of significant events shows the same Western dominance as the inventory of significant figures. Europe and North America together account for 97 percent of both the significant figures and significant events.

The Record in the Sciences

Are these "Eurocentric" numbers? In science as in the arts, we have grown accustomed to hearing the claim that the European contribution is overrated. In his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes quotes a historian of Chinese science, Nathan Sivin, to represent the essence of the new historical perspective:

The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects-from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man's relation to it-existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.

Landes then gives the essence of the countervailing view in his response:

This [sivin's view] is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.

In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making... Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew) but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.

This may seem to be one of those conflicts between experts that a layman is unable to assess, but it is not. On the contrary, it is easy to reach an independent judgment about allegations of Eurocentrism if one subjects the allegations to close scrutiny. Reread Sivin's passage, and note how effectively his language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is in fact exaggerated. This is standard practice. Two other examples demonstrate how the evocation differs from the evidence actually presented. The first is taken from the publicity copy of the 1998 edition of Arnold Pacey's Technology in World Civilization:

Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view ... portray[ing] the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.

The other is from the publicity copy of the 1999 edition of an introductory college history text, Science and Technology in World History by James McClellan and Harold Dorn:

Without neglecting important figures of Western science such as Newton and Einstein, the authors demonstrate the great achievements of non-Western cultures. They remind us that scientific traditions took root in China, India, and Central and South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires.

Lest we fail to get the point, the publisher adds a blurb from a professor at Stanford, who tells us that

Professors McClellan and Dorn have written a survey that does not present the historical development of science simply as a Western phenomenon but as the result of wide-ranging human curiosity about nature and attempts to harness its powers in order to serve human needs.

But do these two books in fact challenge my assertion that 97 percent of both significant figures and events in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America? Pacey's Technology in World Civilization is a wide-ranging account of the ways in which the recipients of new technology do not apply it passively, but adapt it to their particular situation. With this interaction between technology and culture as his topic, Pacey does indeed spend more time on non-Western civilizations than would a historian describing who invented what, where, and when. For example, he has a chapter on railroad empires, with 18 pages of material on how railroads developed in Russia, Japan, China, and India. But who invented the railroad engine, tracks, trains, and the infrastructure of complex railroads? All this occurred in England.

Similarly, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History presents material on non-Western societies. But McClellan and Dorn, unlike Pacey, are writing a history of science. The 10 scientists with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes-a wholly conventional roster of stars. Of all the scientific figures mentioned in McClellan and Dorn's index, 97 percent come from Europe and the United States-precisely the same percentage yielded by the inventories I compiled.

There is nothing wrong with the historiography of either of these books. Both are consistent with the sources used to compile my science inventories. The contrast between the packaging for the books and the facts within them is emblematic of our times. The packaging illustrates how intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts contained therein reflect the way things really are.

The reason that any responsible history of science and technology will end up with these numbers is that historians of science and technology are all working with the same data which are, for the period we are exploring, reasonably complete. Gaps still exist, but none of them is large enough to do more than tweak the details of the general portrait of historical achievements.

Herein lies a difference between the layman and the specialist. Is the average European or American often unaware of the technological sophistication achieved by non-Western cultures? No doubt about it, and in this sense the charge of Eurocentrism is often appropriate. But what is really at issue is whether historians of science and technology in the last half-century are aware of the non-Western record-and it is clear that they are. Europeans used the works of the great Arab scholar-scientists of a millennium ago as the foundations for European science (which is why so many Arab scholars are known by their Latinized names). The great works of Indian mathematicians have long since been translated and incorporated into the history of mathematics, just as the works of Chinese naturalists and astronomers have been translated and incorporated into the narratives of those fields.

In recognizing how thoroughly non-Western science and technology have been explored, let's also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arab scholars, fighting for recognition against Western indifference, who were responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-Western cultures, but Westerners themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the byproducts of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and American scholars who, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham's seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point. Another is George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, five large volumes published from 1927 to 1948, all of which are devoted to science before the end of the fourteenth century-including meticulous accounts of scientific accomplishment in the Arab world, India, and China.

Of the remaining ways in which one could attenuate the 97-percent proportion I assign to both significant figures and significant events in the sciences, my proposition is that none work. I attach two provisos to that claim: First, attempts to add new events to the non-Western roster must consist of discoveries, inventions, and other forms of "firsts." No fair adding the first Indian suspension bridge to a catalog of Indian technology if suspension bridges were already in use elsewhere.

The other proviso is that the rules for inclusion of a person or event must be applied evenly. If one augments the inventory of non-Western accomplishment by going to Joseph Needham's seven-volume account of Chinese science and technology, one must also augment the inventory of Western accomplishment by going to comparably detailed histories dealing with German science (for example)-in other words, no fair using the naked eye to search for Western accomplishments and a microscope to search for non-Western ones.

If one observes these two constraints, the Western dominance of people and events cannot be reduced more than fractionally. For every new non-Western person or event that is added to the list, dozens of new entries qualify for the Western list, and the relative proportions assigned to the West and the non-West do not change. The differential may become even more extreme, because the reservoir of Western scientific accomplishment that did not qualify for the inventories is so immense.

The Record in the Arts

In compiling the inventories for the arts, I assumed that my method precluded direct comparisons of artistic activity in the West and non-West. It did indeed prevent comparisons that would assign specific percentages to the West and non-West of the type presented for the sciences. But nevertheless a few observations are possible.

The Western arts inventories are much larger in total numbers than their non-Western counterparts. In the visual arts, the West produced 479 significant figures, compared to just 111 and 81 for China and Japan respectively. In literature, the West has 834 significant figures, compared to 82, 83, 43, and 85 for the Arab world, China, India, and Japan respectively. Is this a function of different levels of detail in the sources? Not in any readily apparent way. Encyclopedic sources specific to each inventory were used to establish the universe of potential significant figures. The mix of sources for each inventory-encyclopedic sources versus major histories, for example-was comparable across inventories. For whatever reason, references of comparable scope-encyclopedic sources compared with encyclopedic sources, histories compared with histories-of art and literature in non-Western cultures do not contain nearly as many people as sources dealing with the West. As far as I was able to determine, the pattern applies equally to sources written by the native-born of a given culture and sources written by foreigners.

How might the differences in numbers falsely underestimate the contribution of the non-West? No important parts of the world have been left out-the inventories include all of the countries with long-standing traditions of named writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Any alternative conclusion requires that we assume that the distribution of artistic excellence among the significant figures is utterly different in Western versus non-Western cultures, and that the quality of artists in the non-Western traditions is so much higher than in the West that even though their numbers are far fewer, virtually all of them are worthy of extended study, whereas only a small proportion of the significant figures of the West are worthy of study. But this line of argument has neither a rationale nor evidence.

What if we were to discard artists as the unit of analysis, and substitute artistic works for assessing relative contributions? If we limit ourselves to attributed works, the substitution of works for artists will have no effect, or will be in the West's favor. The authors, composers, painters, and sculptors of the post-1400 West were, as a rule, prodigiously productive. Compare the body of work by Shakespeare or Goethe with that of Li Bo or Murasaki; that of Michelangelo or Picasso with that of Sesshu or Zhao Mengfu; and so on down the list from the giants to the merely excellent. At every level, the aggregate number of major works is at least as large for Western as for non-Western artists.

Shall we consider lost works? Some of the most highly regarded Chinese artists have no surviving works at all. But the West similarly has painters such as Zeuxis, Polygnotos, and Apelles, considered by their contemporaries as artistic equals to the sculptor Phidias. None of their paintings survive, nor does any work of their lesser contemporaries. Even in literature, the masterpieces the West retains from ancient days are probably outnumbered by the ones we have lost. We know that Euripides wrote at least 90 plays, for example, and only 18 of them survive. One of the greatest of the surviving Greek dramas, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that took first place. Inserting a correction for lost works will not redress the imbalance between West and non-West.

Adding anonymous works also won't alter the picture. In literature, many non-Western cultures have traditions of authorless folklore, but so does Europe, with separate and rich traditions ranging from ancient Greece through the Norse Sagas and into the Renaissance, with contributions from every European language. In the visual arts, countries such as India and Persia have important bodies of unattributed painting and sculpture, but so do the countries of Europe, embracing virtually all the sculpture, paintings, and mosaics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages.

Expanding the definition of artistic accomplishment to include other forms of art that existed in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America runs into the same problem. Shall we add architecture, a category omitted from the visual-arts inventory? Certain structures in Asia and Central America belong on any list of great architectural accomplishment. But the entire roster of such architectural landmarks from outside Europe will be exceeded by comparable landmarks in medieval and Renaissance Europe alone, before we even look at European architectural accomplishment since then. Shall we introduce the decorative arts and crafts into the inventory of art works? Whatever gems of fine artisanship are introduced from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are going to be matched in quality and outnumbered by orders of magnitude by those originating in Europe. Consider the sheer volume of fine artisanship in stone masonry, stained glass, tapestry, and painted decoration from European churches and cathedrals alone.

Just as in the sciences, whatever mechanism one uses to try to augment the non-Western contribution in the arts will backfire if the same selection rules are applied to the West. It is impossible to be as precise about the relative contributions of West and non-West in the arts as in the sciences, but the generalization seems as valid: A balanced presentation of human accomplishment in the arts will naturally devote the large bulk of its attention to the West, and a large portion of this to Europe from the Renaissance onward.

The End of European Dominance?

I have gone to considerable lengths to document facts about the geographic and chronological distributions of human accomplishment that are controversial mainly because of intellectual fashions, not because the facts themselves can be disputed. Now is the time to introduce some cautions about the interpretation of those distributions.

The first caution is directed to those of us in the United States. Many Americans combine our civilization with that of Europe under the broad banner of "the West," but this is presumptuous. In his landmark Configurations of Culture Growth, written during the 1930s, anthropologist A.L. Kroeber observed that "it is curious how little science of highest quality America has produced"-a startling claim to Americans who have become accustomed to American scientific dominance since 1950. But Kroeber was right. Compared to Europe, the American contribution was still small then. In the arts as well, a large dose of American humility is in order. Much as we may love Twain, Whitman, Whistler, and Gershwin, they are easily lost in the ocean of the European oeuvre. What we Americans are pleased to call Western civilization was overwhelmingly European civilization through 1950.

The second caution is not to place too much weight on the numbers. The number of lost works and forgotten artists in the period before 1400 would, if taken into account, increase the pre-1400 proportion somewhat. Not a lot-even very generous estimates of the bias created by lost works only modify the dominance of modern Europe-but some. It is also important to remember that the period prior to 1400 may have had comparatively few significant figures, but it was rich in giants.

Furthermore, much of that genius came from outside Europe. Aristotle had different insights into the human condition than Confucius and Buddha, but not necessarily more profound ones. Those who are in a position to make such judgments describe the greatest poetry from China as among the greatest poetry ever written. A fine Japanese rock garden or ceremonial tea bowl expresses an aesthetic sensibility as subtle as humans have ever known.

The third caution is to remember that many civilizations arose independently of Europe, and rose to similar technological levels-developing tools and techniques that enabled them to build large structures and road networks, develop complex agricultural practices and distribution mechanisms, conduct commerce, and build thriving cities. Evidence scattered from Angkor Wat to Machu Picchu attests to the ability of human beings throughout the world to achieve amazing technological feats.

And yet the underlying reality is that Europe since 1400 has overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in both the arts and sciences. The estimates of the European contribution are robust. I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist by the end of this century. Perhaps this is an especially appropriate time to stand back in admiration. What the human species can claim to its credit in the arts and sciences is owed in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just a half-dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.

Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI.

Source Notes: This essay is adapted from the author's forthcoming book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.

AEI Print Index No. 15487

Paul · Post by **Paul** » 15 Nov 2008 05:45

Charlemagne's role model was the abbasid caliph - Harun Rashid.

In his quest to replicate the Abbasid glory, he even had a harem and inducted his sister into it.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 15 Nov 2008 21:40

We should not be surprised that India is now producing its own spokesman on the order of Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn and Augustine. Colonialism is half-a-century behind us; it is now possible for an Indian scholar to appreciate the spiritual dynamics of Western civilization without feeling unpatriotic…. Having read most of Mangalwadi’s works, I believe he combines Tocqueville’s profound insights into American spirituality with the passion of a Solzhenitsyn to reform his own nation.

Professor Prabhu Guptara
Union Bank of Switzerland

http://www.vishalmangalwadi.com/vkmWebSite/index.php

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 17 Nov 2008 09:17

Are there any refs to Persians or any Eastern states in Homer's Illiad?

Philip · Post by **Philip** » 17 Nov 2008 16:34

Even Blair's govt. had its secret Cold War warriors,batting for the other side!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... r-spy.html

Labour Party activist was 'Cold War spy'
A Labour Party activist linked to two members of Tony Blair's Cabinet was a secret Cold War spy, it has been claimed.

By Ben Leach
Last Updated: 9:37PM GMT 16 Nov 2008

Cynthia Roberts, 72, who stood as a Labour Parliamentary candidate, allegedly spied for the Czech Government when the country was controlled by the Soviet Union.

Documents obrained by the Mail on Sunday purport to show that she worked for the Communists under the codename Agent Hammer.

The files, held by the Czech security service, claim that she wrote secret dossiers for the communist regime on Tory politicians including Margaret Thatcher and ex-Cabinet Minister David Mellor after moving to Prague in 1985.

Mrs Roberts moved to the Czech capital from London, where she used a House of Commons office to run the controversial Labour Action for Peace (LAP) group, which opposed nuclear weapons, and had links to Soviet Moscow.

Labour MPs involved in the group, which still exists today, included two politicians who went on to serve in Mr Blair's Cabinet, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Transport Minister Gavin Strang.

Other prominent Labour MPs linked to LAP include Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and Jeremy Corbyn.

Current LAP president Jeremy Corbyn MP said: "I don't know Cynthia Roberts at all. Of course I'm surprised. I didn't know her and this was long before I was involved in the organisation. I'm not going to be able to comment on people like Cynthia Roberts. The issue of the Cold War is one that has long passed."

A spokesman for the Czech Embassy in London said: "We are not aware of the details of this particular case. The Czech Embassy is not in a position to comment."

A Czech government source added: "This sort of espionage relates to the previous communist regime. It is a thing of the past and not something our country would engage in now."

Roberts is now living in a communist-era block of flats on the outskirts of Prague. She denies being a spy.

The name plate on her letterbox in the entrance hall reads 'Robertsovi’ and bears the message 'Please do not post advertising fliers in this mailbox’.

Asked if she considered herself a traitor, Roberts said: 'I have nothing to say. I was not a spy.’

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 20 Nov 2008 05:02

This book was written in 1922

DECLINE OF THE WEST
Decline of the West: Volume II, Perspectives of World by Oswald Spengler
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4654389/Decli ... d-Spengler

Description

Decline of the West Perspectives of World by Oswald Spengler

Philip · Post by **Philip** » 20 Nov 2008 18:23

Deleted.

surinder · Post by **surinder** » 26 Nov 2008 21:13

There was an interesting program on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela on PBS TV last night.

Chavez has a weekly TV show on which journalists come too. A British journalist asked him why Chavez has tried to get the governers elected, but increase his tem limit. Chavez took him to town. Mocked him and cynically mocked the Europe's contempt for those "barbaric Indians, Blacks of S. America". He asked the journalist you have a queen, is she elected?

The journalists just looked crushed. All he said was he was Irish and a republican. Which still did not answer why The Guardian (he was from this newspaper) would ask a Venezualan why his term is longer than that of governers, but why not ask the Queen why she is never elected?