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Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism
By: Swami Medhananda
430 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9780197624463
- Published By: Oxford University Press
- Published: March 2022
$99.00
The 130th anniversary of the Parliament of World’s Religions is accompanied by the recent publication of two monographs about Swami Vivekananda, the star speaker of the first modern interfaith assembly. Ruth Harris’ Guru to the World (Harvard, 2022) is a respectful biography that lovingly focuses on the interpersonal relationships of Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Sister Nivedita. Swami Medhananda’s Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism, meanwhile, is an erudite analytic study of philosophy that is comprehensive in its scope but unlikely to appeal to a devotee and could be challenging even to advanced graduate students of religious studies. However, those with deep familiarity with the Hindu traditions and transmission into the West, and various commentaries and critiques associated with this intellectual history, will be richly rewarded by this ambitious work.
Medhananda eloquently argues that the dominant scholarly paradigm of “Neo-Vedanta” is problematic and dismissive of the cross-cultural significance and contemporary relevance of Swami Vivekananda’s unique philosophical positions. He suggests an alternative hermeneutic of “immersive cosmopolitanism” that critically revises traditional ideals with scrutinized perspectives assimilated from an open and dynamic engagement with the global intellectual community. The author counters the prevailing appraisal of Vivekananda, as an esoterically-inspired superficial parrot of Sankaracarya, with a contrasting characterization of an original and sophisticated thinker whose radically innovative views contribute much to current academic debates about metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology.Throughout the book, Medhananada meticulously reconstructs Vivekananda’s non-sectarian system with contextual reference to the diversity of classical Indian culture (i.e., Patanjali, Uddyotakara, Madhva, Ramanuja), the Bengali renaissance (i.e., Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, the Brahmo Samaj), colonial education influences (i.e., René Descartes, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer), and most especially, the teachings of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna. This is a challenging task, because Vivekananda was not a systematic thinker whose lessons remained static throughout his public career, and because the early editors of his lectures made numerous silent changes, including modifying his language and organizing his collected works in a way that is counterintuitive, confusing, and chronologically scrambled (3).
The first section of the book traces Vivekananda’s formation of the fundamental tenets of Integral Advaita, or holistic non-dualism, under tutelage by Sri Ramakrishna, who encouraged Vivekananda to go beyond mere jnana (apophatic theology) and become a compassionate vijnani (kataphatic mystic) who regards the world as an emanation of God, conceived of as both insentient matter and living beings, which also inspires an ethic of social service. This concept has a parallel in Aldous Huxley’s 1945 book Perennial Philosophy (366-368). Medhananda then describes Vivekananda’s development of a doctrine of a Universal Religion with three phases in the evolution of the concept of God and degrees of salvific efficacy from hierarchical exclusivism to progressive inclusivism and then finally to pluralism of religious truth-claims.
The second section justifies the experiential basis of religion with a critique of scientism and a compelling logical argument for the verification of supersensuous perception. An excessively reverential bias toward sensuous materialist empiricism has generally discredited subjective experience, but Medhananda suggests that an expanded evidentialism of perceptual proof (pratyaksa) and credible testimony of competent witnesses (aptavakya) is sufficient for cross-checking procedures. He precisely presents premises and addresses challenges across two chapters. Medhananda continues with this theme of the experiential basis of religion in the third section with a discussion of the power of reason, especially in theology. He evaluates agnosticism with especial reference to design theory and W.K. Clifford, T.H. Huxley, and William James, and he concludes that Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda supported the use of the rational intellect in spiritual life so long as it humbly reflects on its own inherent limits and opens itself to possibilities beyond itself. He also cites Ramakrishna and Vivekananda in an answer to the problem of evil, which the author suggests exists “to create saints” in a “moral gymnasium” (259).Medhananda then expounds on a three-rung ladder of faith. The first is learned ignorance, or intellectual assent, which is a mere agreement with a conventional proposition that God exists but without feeling or acting with an involuntary aspiration to see God. According to Vivekananda, many people on the first rung of faith are not sufficiently sincere and honest to admit that they do not yet believe that God exists and thus delude themselves in selfish desires. On the second rung, a seeker strives through the long and arduous practice of various disciplines with an intense longing to overcome worldly attachments to reach the third rung of God-realization, a vision beyond doubt, either as the personal form of a chosen ideal or the impersonal formless Absolute Existence experienced in nirvakalpa samadhi (undivided pure consciousness without space-time superimposition).
Finally, Medhananda surveys the literature on the hard problem of consciousness and offers a Samkhyan solution. “According to Vivekananda, the emergentist view that conscious intelligence arose from non-conscious matter at a certain point in our evolutionary history is ‘absurd’ because it is tantamount to holding that something can come from nothing” (337). The physical motion of molecular groupings does not solve the problem. Instead, Medhananda articulates a mystically grounded panentheistic cosmopsychism, which transcends the body-mind complex and mind-consciousness dualism. The unitary Absolute Existence manifests everything in the universe by a playful self-limitation. All the names and forms in this universe are real, similar to how waves upon the ocean are real, but they are impermanent appearances of the eternal and omnipotent God who remains beyond all limitations. Unenlightened people are unaware of their own true nature and live absorbed in a false identification with evanescent perspectives until they master their minds in raja yoga (meditation).
Swami Medhananda’s vigorous interpretations represent a new era in the academic study of Vedanta and appraisal of Vivekananda’s legacy. Though Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order founded by Vivekananda, the book is neither hagiographic nor polemical. Medhananda’s critical scrutiny moves the distorted and denigrating assumptions that have prevailed in the field into more profound and nuanced categories. The insights he extracts from the persuasive examination of a wide range of topics and sources have far-reaching implications beyond the religious studies department. His rigorous and unbiased approach invites interdisciplinary dialogue across various fields and society.Patrick Horn is a public scholar.
Patrick HornDate Of Review:August 30, 2023
Swami Medhananda (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education in Mysore, India. He is the author of Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta (2020). He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and studied at Oxford University and Humboldt University in Berlin.