Street Metaphysics

Second floor. Rooms: Mahabharata, Sinosophy, and one under a dust sheet.

What is reality? We seem to be unable to address that question directly. We can only engage with reality via scientific, religious and artistic filters.

So what is reality: it is what the scientists discover in their labs, or what my guru says or what that great artist drew in the last phase of his career.

The street doesn’t work that way. You don’t wait to cross the road until a scientist tells you that it’s safe do you? Street metaphysics is reality as it appears to you now.

To do philosophy at street level, I've mostly borrowed from the novelists.

I like philosophical problems. I mostly don't like contemporary academic philosophers' answers to those problems, but I like the problems themselves. The basic questions of philosophy are universal; every human being asks them in their own way and answer them in as many different ways. "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" All philosophical questions, but answered by a painter, not a philosopher.

The approach I prefer is what I call street metaphysics: introduce a philosophical question or puzzle and address it in the language of the street, using images and metaphors that are familiar to everyone. It's surprising how far we can go without introducing technical language or logical and mathematical symbolism. Our goal should be to make concepts transparent enough that even when we have to introduce math, it's clear how one does it and what we might expect as an answer.

A good novel immerses you in its world. The artistry of the writer lies in hiding itself so that you inhabit the novelist's world rather than being impressed by her smarts. I think of street metaphysics in a similar fashion, of philosophy as literature. In this view, the thinker's artistry is in immersing the audience in a conceptual world of her making and to let philosophical answers arise naturally through the act of immersion. The proof of the pudding, as always, lies in the eating. One of my favorite street metaphysicians, Roberto Calasso, bakes a mean cake.

In India the oldest stories are the itihasas, and that's where I went looking.

Stories are more powerful than dissertations. That's the lesson I have learned after spending several years bringing Indian philosophy into the modern world, both in everyday life and in academia. That's why I shifted my focus from analytical texts to the Mahabharata in 2015 and when I started the daily Jayary on January 1st, 2016, I did so with the explicit thought of using my reading to articulate a street metaphysics, i.e., philosophy as a way of life. The itihasm is nothing but a storehouse of street metaphysics.

Of course, one could argue that street metaphysics lies at the heart of philosophy and certainly at its origins both East and West. Socrates accosted his peers on open ground, not in the ivory tower. Pierre Hadot has a wonderful book called (surprise!) "Philosophy as a Way of Life" where he investigates the practice of philosophy in ancient Greece and its lineage holders. You can guess his thesis from the subtitle of the book: "Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault."

I might even be so bold to claim that street metaphysics has a better future than its ivory towered cousin. No one cares about the work of professional philosophers even as we live in a world drenched with - mostly unstated - philosophical assumptions. Isn't itihasm the best place to renew one's connection with a living philosophy?

I'm still reading the epic, and the reason hasn't changed much.

Some years ago, I embarked on a deep reading of the Mahabharata - a daily discipline of reading, digesting, and wrestling with its sprawling verses of the Mahabharata. I was looking for an unadorned philosophy of everyday life, a “street metaphysics” of sorts, dragging Indian philosophy out of the sterile halls of universities and the rigid dogma of fundamentalists. Not unlike the forest communities in which the exiled Pandavas argued about life, the universe and everything else. I wanted a philosophy that could breathe the polluted air of our modern world and help make sense of its dizzying complexities.

Room on this floor: Mahabharata

Old stories have to meet the world we live in now, or they turn into museum pieces.

I believe that the street metaphysics of the Indian traditions have insights that generalize well to our current condition. Just as astronomers make better lenses by rubbing two lenses against each other, my goal is to smoothen two metaphorical lenses - a contemporary account of life at the planetary edge and a classical tradition of empty living by rubbing them off against other. But the contemporary lens has to be crafted first.

Take samsara, a word Indians use all the time for being stuck in the world with no clear exit.

We are a metaphysical culture, where questions of being and existence are debated on the street. I am inclined to take street metaphysics as an asset but it could well be a liability. Depends on whether it's possible to give the term new meanings while drawing energy from the past. Can samsara 2.0 absorb the enormous expansion of scientific knowledge and turn that new library to its advantage? I think so.

Lately I've been walking the same street in China, where a tradition is easier to catch as a mood than as a doctrine.

There’s also an alternative approach to philosophy, which makes it look more like art or poetry. It’s philosophy channeled as a mood or as an atmosphere. And in the last couple of hundred years, that is the way moderners have often experienced non-Western philosophy.

Hypothesis: for traditions that don’t have a clear historical connection to the modern world, it’s better to evoke them as a mood or an atmosphere than as defensible theory. That may be a harder task than arguing for the truth of their doctrines, because, if anything, the atmosphere of the West is even more dominant than its ideologies and doctrines.

All to say that my reading of Chinese thinkers and traditions is going to evoke a mood (a bouquet of ‘ways’) and I will not make truth claims about what those philosophers, writers and texts are saying. I’m not going to read them that way at all. I’m going to read them in the way that an artist would, the way Joyce read Homer [...].

Reading Chuang Tzu creatively isn’t a license to be arbitrary. Joyce was not accountable to Homeric philology, but he was ferociously accountable to something, and that something was the atmosphere of the Odyssey: the shape of a day, the way a wanderer’s mind keeps arriving in rooms he has already left. You can get a mood wrong. A person who lives inside that mood feels the wrongness immediately, even if they can’t point to the line where you went off. Suspension of disbelief is the standard I want to be held to.

Room on this floor: Sinosophy