Kant, enlightenment & Modern India
These are the few lines from the article on Modern India........best article of the week for me........
Kant defines Enlightenment as
Enlightenment is man’s release from this self-incurred immaturity [which is] his inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another…Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!” that is the motto of the enlightenment.
I believe that the transformation of reason brought about by the scientific revolution that so impressed Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers holds the key to the fulfilment of the programme of disenchantment and secularisation everywhere. Kant’s call of ‘Sapere aude!’ was simultaneously an invocation of a new standard of reason meant to challenge all a priori truths that we accept out of faith, cultural conditioning or overt indoctrination. Once we understand the transformation of reason that the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion, we will be in a better position to understand why modernity in India has this feel of incompleteness, superficiality and even schizophrenia.
Modern India has embraced the end products of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in the west – namely, modern technology and a liberal-secular framework of laws encoded in the Constitution. But it has done so without challenging the cultural authority of the supernatural and mystical world view derived from the idealistic strands of Hinduism. If anything, from its very beginning in the Bengal renaissance, India’s project of modernity has evolved within a uniquely Indian inclusive style of counter-Enlightenment. By counter-Enlightenment I mean only this: in a stark contrast to the Enlightenment project of bringing religion within the limits of scientific reason, the Indian counter-Enlightenment has tended to subsume or co-opt scientific reason within the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of “the Vedas.”1 Since independence, India has created an impressive workforce of scientists and engineers, many of them doing fairly advanced science which meets the standards of excellence in the best laboratories in the rest of the world. But India’s science has not evolved out of a critical engagement with the religious commonsense that still pervades the cultural life outside – and often inside – the labs. Modern ideas and innovations are being incorporated into a traditional Hindu world view, without diminishing many of its starkly irrational, occult and pseudo-scientific tendencies.
Kant defines Enlightenment as
Enlightenment is man’s release from this self-incurred immaturity [which is] his inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another…Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!” that is the motto of the enlightenment.
I believe that the transformation of reason brought about by the scientific revolution that so impressed Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers holds the key to the fulfilment of the programme of disenchantment and secularisation everywhere. Kant’s call of ‘Sapere aude!’ was simultaneously an invocation of a new standard of reason meant to challenge all a priori truths that we accept out of faith, cultural conditioning or overt indoctrination. Once we understand the transformation of reason that the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion, we will be in a better position to understand why modernity in India has this feel of incompleteness, superficiality and even schizophrenia.
Modern India has embraced the end products of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in the west – namely, modern technology and a liberal-secular framework of laws encoded in the Constitution. But it has done so without challenging the cultural authority of the supernatural and mystical world view derived from the idealistic strands of Hinduism. If anything, from its very beginning in the Bengal renaissance, India’s project of modernity has evolved within a uniquely Indian inclusive style of counter-Enlightenment. By counter-Enlightenment I mean only this: in a stark contrast to the Enlightenment project of bringing religion within the limits of scientific reason, the Indian counter-Enlightenment has tended to subsume or co-opt scientific reason within the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of “the Vedas.”1 Since independence, India has created an impressive workforce of scientists and engineers, many of them doing fairly advanced science which meets the standards of excellence in the best laboratories in the rest of the world. But India’s science has not evolved out of a critical engagement with the religious commonsense that still pervades the cultural life outside – and often inside – the labs. Modern ideas and innovations are being incorporated into a traditional Hindu world view, without diminishing many of its starkly irrational, occult and pseudo-scientific tendencies.
posted by Akshay at
11:06 PM
4 Comments
