Soto Rosa Marketplace Philosophy

(Coseino is going on a shopping spree, buying vegetables
and fruits in the Soto Rosa week-end market. Suddenly,
by accident, he knocks over a pile of oranges. The hawker yells
at him, infuriated that he spoils her precious merchandise.
He scoffs back, claiming that, in any case, they are bitter
and cloned. But, to his surprise: Who is the angry peddler?)

Martina: Oh! my God! Professor Coseino, I am sorry, I did not realize that it was you, hidden under that huge Vaquero hat, behind such a forest of vegetables. Can I offer you a cup of coffee, as sort of a recompense?

Coseino: My dear Martina, what a misfortune! The blame is on my side; very often, I behave like an elephant in a china shop. I really did not want to offend you. Anyhow, I had no idea about your week-end pastime.

Martina: Really, it is not fun, it is the struggle for survival, in anticipation of a black and bleak future. This is my part-time job, to help my parents keep flesh and bones together, and to earn some cash to purchase the expensive philosophy books. By the way, Professor, Jeanette and I were reviewing our philosophy seminar, and seeing that at the moment there are very few customers, and that you are surely not in a hurry, you could throw some light on some of our doubts. Would you like to have another coffee, here is a biscuit?

Coseino: Certainly, surely! Especially after this mess which I made, I owe you one.

       (Martina brings a small chair, and offers him another
        cup of coffee, and some biscuits. At this moment Jeanette
        comes back from the neighbour's stall and joins Martina
        and Coseino.)

Martina: Jeanette and I are studying as Minor Subject "Indo-Chinese Literature and Culture", and we were wondering whether there is something like a recognized Eastern Philosophy, and whether the Asian peoples had made any philosophic contribution to World Civilization in general, and to your Philosophy in particular. Until now, concerning this aspect, we did not discuss anything in our philosophy seminar. We studied some ancient theosophical Indian literature, and the contents seem to be highly philosophical. I would like to hear your general opinions about the matter.

(Hand-in-hand, Patricia and Mahatma are approaching the market stall. To their surprise, they see Coseino, Martina and Jeanette having a heated coffee rendezvous.)

Patricia: Hi! Professor! Hi! Martina! Hi Jeanette! What a pleasure to meet you all! We are looking for some nice fresh vegetables. And, look what we encountered!

Martina: The pleasure is ours! Come and join us in my coffee intermezzo and in Professor Coseino's philosophical prolegomena.

Coseino: Not quite so prolegomenous! I think Mahatma could tell us something about Ancient Indian Philosophy. Surely, he is enjoying Indian, Hindu or Muslim culture at home. The fact that he is in my class, indicates that he is not quite so happy with this tradition. Or, am I mistaken?

Mahatma: Sometimes I assist the Oriental Studies lectures, which Jeanette and Martina attend, but I am not an expert in the field. The little I know I will present.

Coseino: Last week, Patricia transformed me into Aristotle, by organizing a Private Peripatetic School; now, if this continues, I will soon feel like Socrates. In future, we should exchange the Aula Magna for the Market Place.

Mahatma: It is such a vast field, I will just introduce Indian Philosophy in general, touching on the aspects which interest us.

Coseino: To begin, you could tell us about Hinduism, the Vedas, their cosmology and the Brahman classes. Also, why you think that Indian philosophy is relevant for Western Philosophy, or even for our Philosophy. To deal with more than that today, especially in this wonderful atmosphere, would certainly not be effective at all.

Jeanette: We agree. But, we have some problems concerning Cosmology, which plays a central role in the early vedas; would you please be so kind to explain to us this concept? We are especially interested, because it concerns Cosmos, a postulate in your Philosophy.

Coseino: Our Unilogic, our Cosmology, we will treat in one of our next philosophy seminars; I will just give you a general idea about the concept "cosmology" within traditional Western Philosophy. It will be very brief, but to the point.

According to the "Cosmo Players", cosmology tries to unite the natural sciences, particularly astronomy and physics, in order to understand the physical universe as a One-And-All, as a Hen Kai Pan, as an "Unomnia At Rest". Patrian scientists distinguish three major "historic periods", ushered in by: Pythagoreism, The Copernican Revolution and Einstein's General and Special Theory of Relativity .

Pythagoras claimed that the world is a sphere, and that the motion of heavenly bodies is governed by harmonious natural relations. Then came the infinite atomist cosmos of Leucippus and Democritus, which postulated countless worlds, sprouting with life. Aristotle introduced the geocentric version of a central Earth, around which translucent spheres revolve, to which the planets and the Sun are fixed; the uttermost sphere supported the fixed stars. All this culminated in the Ptolemaic model (2nd century AD). In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas imported this geocentric Aristotelian universe into Christian Theology .

In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus ushered in a new revolution, proposing a heliocentric cosmos; Newton converted it into a mechanistic, infinite cosmos; until the early 1900s this was the accepted cosmological view. Later, Thomas Wright and William Herschel suggested the influential motion of the cosmos composed of numerous galaxies, of which the Earth is a component of the Milky Way Galaxy.

In the early 20th century, Einstein's Relativity Theories shook the very foundations of the Newtonian System. Then, extragalactic nebulae were discovered; Edwin Hubble began to calculate the distances of various galactic systems. Then, Wilhelm de Sitter, Alexander Friedmann, and Georges Lemaître claimed that the cosmos is still expanding; after all, it is still in motion. This the adherents of the "Hen Kai Pan At Rest" did not like at all. Then our erudite cosmologists, applying zigzag and tictac, came to the conclusion that the cosmos is homogeneous in space (on the average all places are alike at any time) and that the officially "discovered" laws of physics are everywhere the same. Without troubling you with more details, the "bottom line" is, that Yahweh created the Cosmos, by causing a divine "big bang" some 10,000,000,000 years ago.

Now, you have an idea what cosmology was all about, across the last three millennia, in the Western World. Mahatma, please do us a favour, kindly introduce us to Indian Philosophy for a change!

Coseino: In rum veritas! On my Birthday! In two days!! Be careful, just now I will sing like Harry Belafonte! A pity that we can't have this in our seminar too.

Mahatma: Across the ages, the "civilizations" of the Indian subcontinent had developed various "systems of thought"; whether this was Philosophy, I really cannot say. However, they are generally divided into orthodox (astika) systems, namely, the Nyaya, Vaishesika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva-mimamsa, and Vedanta schools, and unorthodox (nastika) systems, such as Buddhism and Jainism.

All of them were concerned with the essence of the world (cosmology), the concrete nature of reality, logic, the existence of knowledge (epistemology), ethics, and religion.

Martina: Of what significance is Indian Thought for us today? What can we learn from Ancient Indian Thought?

Mahatma: Surely, I can't reply just like that, but I will highlight some aspects. Firstly, surprisingly, it offers both points of affinity and illuminating differences, in other words, Quidditas a n d Quodditas.

Coseino: Well, Well! Guy! You are pretty fast. But, Cowboy, giddy up! Our "time" is running out.

Mahatma: The differences highlight the essential questions that the Indian philosophers had asked. The similarities indicate that, Indian philosophers were grappling with the same problems as the Ancient Greeks and, that they had suggested "similar" theories, long before the ancient Greek philosophers could advance novel formulations and argumentation. There is even a suspicion, that the Greeks had plagiarized many of their cosmological ideas.

Jeanette: Are you trying to tell us, that ab ovo Western Philosophy is a "History of Plagiarism"?

Mahatma: Worse than that. You cannot imagine, what they all stole from India, China, Africa and America. In contrast to Western Philosophy, from the very beginning, Indian Thought wanted to know the origin (utpatti) and apprehension ( jñapti) of truth (pramanya). It was not so much interested in the "Western Hobby", which ended up in pragmatism, empiricism, structuralism, and "facts", in the question of whether knowledge comes from experience, from the intellect or from reason. Furthermore, they made no distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements or between contingent and necessary truths. I am not saying that this does not pertain to stringent philosophic thought; it all depends what the cui bono behind such reflections is. In the European World it was simply Capital, the Accumulation of Capital.

Mahatma: They date back from the 2nd millennium BC. They are the oldest extant record from India of "human" philosophic thought; of course, I don't doubt, that the "Father of Philosophy" was Thales of Miletus. Here we are still concerned with "Mother India", with "Mother Nature", soon to be attacked by the Brahman upper class.

Patricia: Have some rum, too, Mahatma. As the Caribbean song says: It will elevate your spirit!

(She hands the common bottle to him. He takes a mighty sip, and continues with his exposition.)

Mahatma: High-spirited, I will proceed. They projected their own "Olympic Gods", and ushered in the deep psychological processes, which Freud and Jung would only elaborate millennia later. All these led to profound philosophic reflections about the Cosmos, about Being, long before Thales could keep his head above water.

Mahatma: Very profound ones, indeed. The Upanishads (Hindu philosophical treatises) contain the first conceptions of a universal, cosmic, all-pervading reality, which generated a radical monism, the relation of matter and spirit, or in our terms, the Relation Cosmos a n d Einai, of Essence a n d Existence. The Upanishads also contain the earliest speculations about nature, life, mind, and the human body, not to mention ethics or social philosophy. Of course, all these are clouded with "spiritualism", and "Western" scholars degrade their contents to "theosophy".

Coseino: Yes, it is true. As you were saying, donkey years before Thales, in faraway "Mother India", the Upanishads , the Sanskrit theosophical and philosophic treatises dealt with cosmic materialist doctrines. Five primordial elements were expounded : water, air, fire, time and space. This was long before Thales declared "water" as being aristocratic, or before Anaximenes of Miletus had declared "air" to be the arche.

Also, as early as 2000 B.C., in the slave-owning society of Pharaoniac Egypt, where one of the ancient "Seven Wonders", the pyramids, reflected a strong "this-sided" modus vivendi , atheistic crypto-materialist conceptions were rife. In one of the extant papyrus manuscripts of that remote epoch, we can read : "Man disintegrates and his body changes itself into earth." In the City of Death, "earth" was emphasized as an important archaic element. These ancient Egyptians were very much "down to earth", and for them, "earth" was one of the magical material elements of Quidditas, of "What Is", of Essence.

Mahatma: Translated, Veda simply means "Knowledge", it is a collective term for the holy scriptures of the Hindus. Of interest is the fact, that in the explanation of the origin of the Vedas, the Indian philosophers did not use Formal Logics, or even Dialectics, but Trialogics. Since about the 5th century BC, they considered, that the Vedas have been NEITHER created NOR revealed by NEITHER human NOR god. If I remember correctly, Prof. Coseino, this is one of your basic terms of relation, of Bezug, the Neither-Nor-Relation.

Coseino: A brilliant observation, Mahatma.
This "truth" was simply "heard" or "seen" by inspired and gifted "rishis", who transcribed it into Sanskrit.

Jeffrey: All this reminds me of the "bicameral mind, of the "Oracle of Delphi", only that the latter came into existence much earlier in India. The only problem is that these "vedas", even today, in the Information Age, are still memorized and recited by nearly a billion people as a religious act of great merit.

Coseino: Surely, Jeff, you are making an important observation, but there are other interesting things in these ancient hymns. For example, the Chandogya-Upanishad stated :

"When water evaporates, then it becomes air, truly, air consumes everything."

Hence we find in ancient India an anticipatory transhistoric fata morgana a priori of the Milesian School. Around 700 B.C., when Ancient Greece was still directed from the Oracle of Delphi, the oriental Samkhya School taught, that everything originated from the prakrti , an infinite, eternal, primordial principle. Furthermore, before the dawn of the "Wise Men" in Greece, the Chinese Dschou Jan School also taught about five elements : water, fire, earth, wood and metal. The only philosophic novelty about Thales, in the age towards monotheism, -- towards God, The Father, The Son, and The Male Holy Ghost, The Holy Trinity, All-In-One, - is, that he made Water a Hen-Kai-Pan, an Unomnia, a One-And-All.

Martina: Did the ancient Upanishads mention anything about our concept of Being, or even of the nihilist Gorgias?

Coseino: For sure, for example, in the older Upanishads, among them, Isa, Taittiriya, Svestasvatara, Chandogya, Brhadaranyaka, Kena and Katha. In these Vedas a strong anti-Brahmanism with materialist ideological undertones can be detected. The Rgveda, X, 129 states :

"Who knows from where Being came ?
The Gods only came into Being after It already existed. –
Who can say from where It came ?"

This perpetual materialist-idealist, natural-social contradiction in Indian philosophy can be traced even in the old epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana, also in the "Laws of Manu". From their very inception, Jainism and Buddhism had criticized Brahmanism. Until as late as the 4th Century B.C., these philosophic schools had attacked each other with the same scientific-philosophic stringency that we are accustomed to in Platonism, Aristotelianism and Atomism. Numerous Indian philosophers were hated by the Brahman establishment; they were persecuted and their works destroyed.

Mahatma: Prof. Coseino, were some of the Indian thinkers ancient Marxists, ancient materialists?

Coseino: Definitely. We can read in the Brhadaranyaka-Upanishad that "In the Beginning was Water", not the "Word", simply Water. Hence, Thales was not that original after all! The Upanishads were downgraded to theosophy, and "ariston men hydor" (The Best Is Water) was upgraded to philosophy. According to the above veda, to knowledge: Brahman, the Gods and the World Itself, all originated from Water. Furthermore, the soul originated from water, air, earth and fire, and it returns to these elements. Here we have the complete ancient Greek Philosophy-Chemistry, which formed the material basis of the Carvaka doctrines.

The burning philosophic issue which had given the Ionians headaches, that is the problem of sense-perception and cognitive knowledge, was already debated in Ramayana , by Rama and Jabali, the ancient Indian materialist. Ancient India had its own "Seven Wise Men", one of them, the famous Brhaspati, was a kind of "Thales", a hylozoistic materialist, who stated : "Life originated from Matter" – c’est-a-dire, from prakrti. There was really "nothing new under the philosophic sun" in Ancient Hellas.

(All wish each other good-bye, all very happy that they could learn something new, in such a weird Socratic aula magna.)