[This was presented at the Seminar on Bhartṛhari and
Wittgenstein, Sahitya Akademi, Dec 1994, and published in its proceedings volume. Those of us who root for approaches to ancient Indian writings that are in tune with the dispensation now in power are hereby invited to respond to my intervention as critically as they wish.]
0. Only a sūtra is possible as a starting point. Middleman: a Saussure
who says (roughly) word-signs are unfree (socially given) expressions
that speakers freely combine into sentence-chains, ”free expressions”,
read in the light of K.C. Bhattacharya’s free expression The Subject as
Freedom.
1. For Bhartṛhari, it is in the sentence that words join forces to
sparkle in the vākya-sphoṭa spark. Such sparkling partakes of the nityatā ‘invariance’
of śabda ‘Shabda’. This nityatā is free from the
contingent mortality of this or that concrete embodiment. Partaking of such freedom
sets us free. Only so can we post-Saussureans re-read Bhartṛhari’s
reading of tradition’s Sphoṭa. Wittgenstein helps us unpack such freedom.
2. Wittgenstein facing the sentence (young Wittgenstein facing the
pictorial sentence and mature Wittgenstein facing the active sentence verging
on Austinian and other pragmatics – the young Wittgenstein of semantics and the
mature Wittgenstein of pragmatics, to point to the unregenerate tangential
derivatives of his undivided enterprise) seeks a nonsubjective orientation for
sentencing. He wants Sentence not to stay shackled under Speaker’s
illocutionary Ego. He refuses Ego’s proprietary rights over meaning/ validity.
He states this refusal as “Wittgenstein denies the (relevant kind of) autonomy
of mind”, thus seeking to free meaning from the web of personal desire.
3. As intertextual readers, our project is to steep our Wittgenstein in
our Bhartṛhari. The content of a text, then, is not what it contains; privacy
is proprietary; no essences please, we’re texts. Rather, a text’s content is
that nitya detextual-adtextual flow which brings into play neither
subject-matter or referent, nor speaker, nor speech act/ acts/ drama, but
flowing memorability, availability, producibility. Content is what carries over
in retellings that we visualize in the light of an invariance-maximizing
Translation which we know is counterfactual.
4. It is easiest to steep our Wittgenstein in our Bhartṛhari if we
aesthetically reground both. Start at Wittgenstein’s spiel (as language game,
and as dramatic mature recasting of young Wittgenstein’s bild);
recast play as acting, as theatre; move to the rasa of apprehension of
drama-content via spark as catharsis giving access to the yathārtha ‘real’
(invoked in the “yathārthaṃ jñānaṃ” definition of pramā). These moves
work only if Wittgenstein and Bhartṛhari are both read as raising the question
of content against a background of yathārtha as sustainable reality. They use
varying reality-criteria, which add up. Young Wittgenstein’s criterion stresses
truth. Mature Wittgenstein’s criterion seeks the complete rasa of actual
action (i.e.: What cannot be appropriately said in a visualizable context cannot
signify at all). Even young Wittgenstein’s truth was relative to a larger
living. Bhartṛhari’s criterion for reality, the brahman as āsvādya ‘tastable’
rasa, goes well with all this.
5. Bhartṛhari does, unlike Wittgenstein, assume a Self and the
appearance of essences in Self’s inwardness. But Bhartṛhari’s I is a
non-proprietary I, siddha in its capacity for valid judgment and taste.
Wittgenstein cannot take that route. The mind his times have to offer is a
merely instrumental immature I, eager to own, to annex, to exercise
intellectual property rights, to profit. Hence Wittgenstein’s no-mind path to
public validity, like Buddhism’s no-self path to knowledge/pramā (pramā
is neutral between knowledge-of-truth and apprehension-of-rasa). Can
our period earn its way back to the visualizability of a Bhartṛhari-Self?
6. Proposed formal procedure for a Bhartṛhari-steeped rereading of
Wittgenstein: we postulate a mind in a state of partial power tempered by
active abdication i.e. systematic-but-partial renunciation of power in order to
welcome the truly-now. One opens up completely to the truly-now in the moment
of instinctively moving away from the ways of the dead system, reaching for a
truth committed to the moment and to its dramatis personae, a truth that gives
meaning.
7. The Popper cycle of falsification and theory revision, though in its
neatness it exemplarily instantiates active abdication and may be useful as a
pedagogic aid to readers who otherwise find this concept obscure, is too neat
to be a seriously usable prototype. What we can retain from it is the idea that
the continual enlarging of the inductive base forces revisions and that to
revise is to accept at least some measure of defeat. One non-neat prototype for
active abdication is chatting, as in exchanging news. What’s New? Only a new
item can be perceived as knowledge. Only in the context of new-activation of
knowledge as learning-teaching can cognition continue to be available to its
locus and thus recharge itself as yathārtha, real cognition. The teacher in
such a prototypical example clearly does not own the teaching. Nor does the
teacher’s or parent’s generation own the learner’s or child’s generation. The
basic learning scene is that new people learn from the total context, which
includes teachers quite saliently, but obviously they do not learn from humans
(or animate beings) alone. This is how real learning takes place. Now, it is
only what real learning shall reassemble that counts as a structure that is
sustainable through transmission, i.e. valid. To teach is to show what is valid
(recall the special resonances of “show” in Wittgenstein on saying vs showing).
The context of learning is also the context of re-seeing. Every valid seeing
has to also re-see; hence active abdication as an essential feature of a
publicly accountable, non-proprietary mind. This is where the mind learns how
to suspend its ego-quality of the thirst for victory, for power, for scoring
points.
8. Bhartṛhari and Wittgenstein both want a language whose meanings as
validities are independent of intention-as-desire at a personal level. Their
sphoṭa responds to the call of the active impulse (praiti). The
intention (abhiprāya) is static. The praiti is dynamic in that it seeks a
dṛṣṭi/vision which simultaneously appeals to kāma (primary fun), to
artha (secondary dealings at one conscious remove from fun), to dharma
(tertiary rules of games and other rule-domains at two conscious removes
from fun), and, circularly and cyclically, to dṛṣṭi (called mokṣa insofar
as vision sees itself as a zeroary freedom to do an Escher between removes of
consciousness/ perception). Thus praiti alone is truly niṣkāma, non-lusting.
To seek vision is to overcome property-lust and to be independent of the
proprietary mind Wittgenstein distrusts. Wittgenstein smells a rat; only if you
get rid of that smell does the Self become Bhartṛhari-available for rasa-tasting
right up the point of the brahman-taste, a simple point of cuisine.
9. To return to the last part of 3, freedom as in
vision/dṛṣṭi characterizes a true, undistorted flow of content from texts
(detextual) and into texts (adtextual). Such freedom transmits, in that it
reproduces faithfully, the way creatures breed true, but without reference to
any arbitrary cloning faith in contingent devas ‘gods’ or vedas ‘scriptures’
whose haloes wax and wane. The brahman one wants to taste is the invariance of
authentic self-transmitting life, textually manifested as handing-down/
transmission/ tradition through the full ambience of performing arts holding up
the mere word; the brahman has nothing to do with a clutching fundamentalism.
Only when you taste such a brahman do you perceive its reality. Those who lack
the taste have the equivalent option, Buddhist mode, of a rigorous switching
off of (denial of serious reality to) certain contingent personal desires which
oversituate content and thus restrict the flow. But on neither reading should
one hypostasize the Flow. The point is not to turn the Star Wars egoic
cliché “May the Force be with you!” into a pseudo-philosophical greeting that
takes the form “May the Flow be with you” and pretends to symbolize the
overcoming of ego. Those who seek meaning gradually learn the art of renouncing
the specificity of worship.
[21.viii.1994 text, revised
11.x.1994, presented December 1994,
Published in Sibajiban
Bhattacharya (ed.) 2002, Word and Sentence: Two Perspectives: Bhartṛhari
and Wittgenstein. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 63-66, on the whole superbly
proofread, but the sentence “But on neither
reading should one hypostasize the Flow.” went missing in that version.]
