Interview: Professor James Carey on Indian Philosophy | The New Thinkery Ep. 87

Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. With me as always my good friend Alex Priya. How are you doing Alex?

Doing well. You're looking well as does your handsome son Rowan? I appreciate that. He's really the milkman son, but that's okay.

He looks enough like me that he'll stick around. He didn't sleep last night, so I consequently very tired, but excited for the night's interview. How are you Greg? I know that you rest easy every night.

Usually I do, but like you despite being childless and barren, I also woke up at 3am and have been up since then. So we'll see how this goes. I'm really excited though. I'm hoping that my excitement for our guests and the subject matter carries me through as I was a little bit chocolatey stream right before the show.

I think maybe the sugar rush will help as well, but I'm very excited to be here. So our guest tonight is James Carrey goes by Jim. He's been a tutor at St. John's College since 1979, both in Annapolis and Santa Fe.

He's taught on and off at the Air Force Academy. In fact, he was the acting president in 2000 St. John's College, Santa Fe, and he was also the dean from 86 to 91, 96 to 2000. His most recent book is Natural Reason and Natural Law and Assessment of the Strausian Criticisms of Thomas Aquinas.

That came out 2019 book I have right here, by the way. I understand it. Yes, it does. I can't see, but I'm pointing at it.

There's one interesting note about his bio that I wanted to share. He doesn't like to talk about it too much because of that, the private nature of what he was doing. But in 94, he was at Los Alamos Labs as a quote consultant in ethics. Now, my grandmother used to live in Santa Fe and we all know what happens at Los Alamos.

So I don't know if it was cut short because after book Alpha, the little green men were just getting too wise. But anyway, I'll have to take a look at Roswell. You don't know about Los Alamos, Alex. It's Roswell's a different story.

But how are you doing, Jim? Thanks for coming. I'm doing very well. Thanks for inviting.

Well, I'd like to say this tonight, what we're doing is we're providing our guests with, we're stepping a little bit outside of the comfort zone. I think of the folks at the New Thinkery. We're stepping into Indian philosophy and I came across at the recommendation of some former students of yours, an article you wrote for the St. John's Review, Volume, let's see, X, L, I, X, 10 from 50, 49, Volume 49, number 3, 2007, an article you wrote called the Vedic tradition and the origin of philosophy in ancient India.

So I've always been kind of curious and where philosophy has sprung up at various times and places. Is it a distinctly Greek, European, Western phenomenon or has occurred another times and places? And so I read this article. I loved it.

I shared with Alex and David and we all agreed that we would extend an invitation. You even hope you talk a little bit with us about, I guess, precisely what I just said, whether there is something like, which is a question I think you raised, actually, whether there is something like an Indian philosophy. Yes, well, I mean, I'm trying to answer that there is, according to the most austere conception of philosophy that we might want to come up with. I say something about this earlier, though.

I say that lots of people said that, well, clearly there's philosophy in India because there's serious speculation about important things. But there's a conception of philosophy not in the university, in hell, in the Western, not today. So from one time, that philosophy was a whole way of life, that it calls into question everything and that in particular it's suspicious. At the level of what's true of religious traditions, on the other hand, philosophy realizes that that religious tradition support civic morality without which philosophy itself can't flourish.

So philosophers might not be openly critical in religion, at least in the past. But they tend to think that one can't be both a religious believer on the one in a true philosophy or another. And as I say, I'm not that conception of philosophy might be too narrow. But if I could show, as I said, as rational ladies, but if I could show that it did exist in the East Indian, then I think I could show all the more so did philosophy according to less austere conceptions, existing in India.

And I think I can show that I think it's pretty clear that they're like, rationally, there's also clear that there are interesting conceptions of relationship philosophy to political. Very nice. I've expected. I'd like to read a short passage from your article.

This is on page 51, only because what I found most interesting about your conception is being an amateur, as I mentioned, and not knowing anything about Indian philosophy. I sort of feel like there are two ready made arguments that are a little too easy to accept. One is of course, any thinking about anything is philosophy. But on the other hand, of course, there must have been philosophy for various reasons.

There was philosophy because philosophy is Greek or something like this. And so I guess I was impressed at how seriously you seem to see the question with an open mind. And having, as you mentioned, this very rigorous standard for what qualifies as philosophy, even though you admit that that may not be yours, you were counted in the last analysis. You said this on page 51, it's in the first full paragraph, maybe about four or five lines down.

A number of articulate and well-known Indian thinkers of the last two centuries, apparently construing themselves as something like Goodwill ambassadors to the West have often popularized accounts of Indian speculative thought that exaggerated the affinities between Vedic tradition, including the philosophical tradition, and the revealed religions of the West, particularly Christianity. At the other end, Westerners in search of an alternative religious experience, free from the scrutiny of a judgmental God, have claimed to find in Hinduism a less guilt-ridden spirituality, one that is less dogmatically divisive and more accepting of people for what they are. You go on, but this, those, I mean, you lay out very neatly what I think are the two common interpretations of Indian thought. And I think you lay out a much more persuasive, a much more interesting, at least philosophically interesting, to counter it.

So can you lay this out? You think there was in the philosophy. So can you just give us, I mean, you know, these are all going to be foreign and new terms for a lot of folks. What were some of these folks who did the kind of speculation that you're talking about?

Who were they? Well, as I mentioned, you got the religion of the Vedas. And I can say more about that. But these are, can't exactly call them texts because they weren't written down first, they were memorized.

And the feats of memory, that the people working with this tradition are exhibited in a very remarkable way. But the Vedas were thought to be sort of the original authoritative religious disclosure, a little bit more about the curious nature of that disclosure, and I don't know what we would find in the Bible, in the next. But the religious conceptions seem to have moved even at the popular level, which is filled with all kinds of florid accretions of polytheism, rather rich and variety. But the interesting thing to me is that there was very early on a movement from the polytheism, not just a model of theism, one of theism seems to kind of be able to move through adequately, to add monism.

And the notion that all things are one, and that there's a fundamental reality, the fundamental reality, that appearance is veiled and the access to the access, that's called Brahman. And it looks as though early on that got identified with Ataman, which is a self, which is to say yourself and myself. And then the self is discovered to be distinct from any of its particular acts, these are all acts of a self, and certainly distinct from the objects. And on the basis of those considerations, thought dawned on some of these thinkers that there's only one self, and that one self is the Brahman, so you've got an identity of Atman and Brahman.

This is already happening at the level of religion. Now, as I think I make clear and clear as the article goes on, the Vedas also authorize the caste system. And there's a break with this tradition, and three, not just three, but three quite significant schools emerge, Buddhism, Zionism and the Bokayat, which are the name of the third, and all of these denied, the Vedas and all of these denied, the sanctity of the caste system. But then there's a response on behalf of what we can call those three traditions and religious traditions, but there's also a speculative dimension to them.

If we look at, call them heterodox traditions, we can say that there's an orthodox response in six schools emerge, that all accept the authority of the Vedas, so they're not quite agreeing with each other as a scope of that authority. They all accept the authority of the Vedas and they all accept the caste system. And so already we've got, in these schools, what we have is an attempt to respond to the Buddhists in particular, at the level of reason, an ordinary experience, not just by saying, well, what you say, contradicts the Vedas, because the Buddhist have got it right, but we say, contradicts the Vedas, so what's the problem? So I could say more about that, maybe one thing to consider in this connection would be the distinction just between Indian and religion, the same nothing but the speculative systems, between the distinction and religion, and religion Bible, because there you have the Bible, this is also in Quran, a god who totally transcends the world who creates it, really, and sustains it and then reveals himself to people with his own choosing, the time of his own choosing, and it may be, and it is typically already unexpected disclosure.

When the Muslims went to India, and one of the first things that were astonished by these people have no profits, where do they get their religion from? And I think the response was, we get it from stages from wise people who think hard. Okay, great. Let's dig up.

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Wow. And this is, I mean, I took your paper to be arguing against a common conception of Indian thought that collapses or that says that this distinction seems to be collapsed in Hindu thought between philosophy and religion. You're saying that, and I really like what you said here that somehow, I mean, Islam is not exactly Western, but I suppose it's more like their religions were used to that when they encountered Hinduism, they were confused by it. And so you're, you make a compelling case that somehow they managed to carve out still some space.

Like it's the stages, for example, who articulate these things, not, not prophets strictly speaking. They're not getting revelation from, from God, right? That's right. And I do, I do, I remember mentioned one curious feature, because of the various schools, these four black schools, poor ones, which means they were referring to the earlier parts of the Vedas.

And they want to argue, it's very interesting that the Vedas were heard by the sages of old, we can't hear them anymore, because things get in the way of attended listening. But there's no one doing the reciting back. Golden Monso is explicitly heistic. It's atheistic because it wants to preserve the authority of the Vedas from the posture distortion by God, who might be inclined to exaggerate his and so we have a dispute between the poor women, Monso, who are arch conservative, but atheist, and the neo-logicist who that introduces God to put something in it on the authority of Vedas.

I'm sorry, I just, I laughed out loud or read that part of your paper, that the conception that sort of a certain sect was adamant that they didn't want their account of reality to come from God, out of fear that God would exaggerate what he has accomplished. I just, I found that comical was great. I mean, like, why should we trust them? God to tell us what he's done at the world.

Well, it's just it's a curious turn of thought. And by the way, this is just one school, but of course, the six schools, as I mentioned, is one called Sanki, which is dualistic and it's quite explicitly heistic. The I.O. which focuses on reasoning is theistic, but I just indicated largely so that it can have something that could serve as a check on something that works extravagant forms and formulations of the Vedas, and then paired with them with the I.O.

It's school of atomism. They're normally the estate was not exactly clear why. And then I got a bad unto, but not to, but not to, but not to, but not to, but to, which is the same thing referring to those parts of the drive there. They tend to interpret new punish shots and later works.

And they have, it's hard to call Brahman a God, because it's the same as yourself. Yeah. So, yeah, please. Yeah.

So, so one question I had is so Brahman is ostensibly the God, yeah, there's a denial of miracles. It seems like it's the world, yet it creates the world. So it seems almost like, when I was initially reading that part, I was like, oh, it's almost like a sort of, you know, nature in its sort of cosmology, and its earliest sort of origins. And then later you introduced, I thought this was one of the most interesting parts, these two terms that correspond more or less to the Greek concepts of fususus and on, right, of nature and, you know, we see it.

Yeah. So, the first one, nature, please correct pronunciation, is procrity or something like that. And then that one is bhava or something like that. Now, my, so the question I haven't, I got that, but it seems like roughly an equivalent of nature.

It means something like making fourth, you said. Well, what's the relationship between Brahman's, because this, this struck me as difficult, right? On the one hand, you have Brahman, who's the God creating the world that is itself, in some strange way. So, it seems almost like nature in that perspective.

On the other hand, you have this other word for nature that has to do, I suppose, with the making forth of the things that you experience or something like that. What was the relationship between the concept and this God, because the God seems almost naturalistic to the gamer. Well, sure, that's correct. And first of all, there's Brahman, who is a creator.

That's at the level of popular religion. And then there's also a kind of a recent edition of who's a sustainer and sheba who's a destroyer. Kind of interesting, that that's there, Brahman refers to the inner reality of things. And that could be thought of as a God, but it's not really different in the world.

I would say that's the closest thing I noted that in the Western law, to be something like the distinction Spinoza makes between Natura and Natura, nature, and Natura and Natura and Natura, nature. So the world would be nature, nature, and that would be somehow produced by Brahman, but not as a free act of creation. It's not an assessment, it doesn't happen in the way it doesn't spin, but it's not a free act of love that Brahman engages in to bring out of its own being, not as a creature, but out of its own being, a world. It does that as a display, as for it.

I don't know if anything like that in the West either. So one could say that in Aristotle's metaphysics, divine being, God of philosophers, understands, does not create either, certainly not its neo-eloc, serves as a final cause, not as an efficient cause. And then neo-pleteness is a necessary human nation output. So the relationship with God in the world is not one of three creation in Greek philosophy, because of it is a God that can freely create a world, since like a God that can freely reveal itself to the world, and then you really need what he could reveal itself to Moses or Muhammad, who would be vastly greater significance in anything that the sage could discover.

So there's no concept of revelation, as a free act on the part of the line in the West, but it's a necessary relationship with God, God doesn't create a hula. In the Bible it's explicitly a free relationship, as it is with Bra, but in the Bible it's God's freedom makes something other than himself, in the midst of that otherness, something that's said to be in his image. It's interesting that's us. In the understanding of Brahman, the sport, the freedom of played engages in is just where it's on the right, but the consequence is an apparent world.

It's a real world, it's not a deep and straight of what we have. That's called my, sometimes gets translated to the solution, it's not an awful sign, unless we think it's just some kind of a ghost or something like that, and then we have real tables and things like that in this world, but beneath it is an underlying principle. So we could say you've got nature, the school that puts motion on property is a sonnetier school, and they've got a dualistic understanding of what's going on in the world. There's intellect, and then there's matter.

There's property, but it's not just gets stuck, exactly, in motion, something like Aristotle, as well as Lexman, as not too much. Yeah, let me ask a follow up question. I want to keep talking about nature because that part, I think it's really fruitful and rich. But one more question about Brahman.

As you presented, and as you presented in the paper, he's far more indifferent to questions of morality. Yeah, it's not his concern. But then I was thinking about it, but he does create everything, right? And so then once again, the word creation is being taken care of, but I want to just be careful.

It's not creation, ex-emotional. He engages in play, it's for what this is not described, it's very horrible. And that sport manifests itself in what we could call the world we're familiar with. It's not as though Brahman says, let us make man in range.

But he says, let there be light. Yeah, so my question was, is what then is the status of karma? If karma is part of the world, and the world emerges, or however we want to put it, out of Brahman, and karma is a very serious matter related to the caste system and everything. Yeah, so is that merely a sort of salient political doctrine you suggest at one time that some of the Brahman actually feel this way?

I think that's correct. Yeah, but so then are we to discount that? And that because that would seem to support, discount that, but now support the playfulness idea. Right, but I want to go to that, but just wondering about the karma first.

So I say at one point that the most immediate evidence we have for the possibility of revealing God would be our own moral nature. So it's not surprising that some philosophers and who are in a few inherits of philosophy try to set out to, they can't disprove the existence of the biblical God outright, but they hope to show that the moral presuppositions of belief in this God is one who rewards and punishes in coherent. Now I think they fail at that. That's not a matter.

But here in the Indian system, you've got reward in punishment, but God has nothing to do with it. That's all managed by karma. That's what's going to be genius about it. So when you criticize karma, you haven't disproved the Hindu, I mean, the Vedic Brahman.

Because he's just not involved in that. That something happens within the world, not as a providential cleanliness just had the war on all the same things played. But the Brahman is the world. This is where you see where he's right.

The line is the world and the karma is part of it and flows. That's right. Brahman him. So indifferent yet, yet it's imminent to him.

Right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it's not as though he makes promises and keep in mind that the ultimate goal is just the liberation, the ultimate goal is not seen, seen God face to face, or reward.

Yeah. We keep referring to Brahman as he is that is that is it masculine in the sense of I don't think so. No, you could refer to it as it. It's actually slipping my mind right now.

That's okay. We'll come back to that later than just that's great. Okay. That was I mean, the way we were talking about it was surprising that we have to use a masculine pronoun.

That's all. Well, I think we're tempted to do that. But say that, of course, underlying principle that engages in the sport. I think it's I think it's I'm pretty sure it's okay.

So it is new. Wow, that's neat. I have a small question before we get on to more serious matters. How much stands great have you studied and how did you become interested in that?

Through the virtue of teaching in the Eastern Program or something like this? Yeah, well, what happened was I was dean and Santa P. Campus for my first term there as dean. I was 86 to 91 and I didn't have much interest in Eastern thought.

But a lot of my friends and the faculty did and I was dean. I thought, well, it's one of the main objections to do in Eastern books of college. And one was that what we already read the great books of the Eastern books. Sure.

That was cute. But it didn't withstand scrutiny since the people said that had read me those Eastern books. So they weren't really in a good negative form of judgment. The other concern was that we would dilute our program if you sort of dropped in the butterfly key to the junior year and the doubt of getting in the senior year where they make a token appearance.

It's not really worthy of them or the college. So the way of dealing with that was to do it with the graduate program devoted to Eastern classes. And then the objectives here, we don't know their languages. We'll learn about that.

So some of us are working on Chinese and some of us are working on Sanskrit. I decided to study the Sanskrit along those eventually in the program. More than I was as a kind of administrators or some worshiped gay movement. And I got more interested.

And so I taught Sanskrit at college on about five or six occasions. You know, there's some good texts out there. It's a very impressive language. And it's old now.

I hope we'll go back to it. Wow, that's fantastic. And that's my main reluctance to get into some of these texts. It's just not knowing what translations to use because I don't know the language.

Don't know this any other way. Let's go back into the text. One of the things we talked about before, and one of the things you lay out neatly in your article is that the great variety of schools and that some seem quite heterodox to others. I was wondering if you speak about this a little bit because on the one hand, I'm Western and I'm most familiar with Protestantism and the varieties of Christianity.

And so on the same very familiar, there's a variety of types of faith, they're different sects. They argue they seem to quibble about if they should eat from the big side of the egg or the small side of the egg. But man, the way you lay it out, the disagreements seem to cut much more deeply. Is there a god?

Is there not a god? Is being one? And so I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the relationship between these heterodox and orthodox schools. You talked about it for a moment, but what are these main schools and are there things they accept in common?

What are the main points of agreement disagreement? Yeah, I've been trying to use the word the word, Aspika is the word, it has translators for the box. It really means is, it is, it's not god. That's what one might think.

There's some people who say it just needs eight years of it. There are people who are in the Oscar camp, like the Golden Monso, some people who simply deny it as a god. Gnostic means is not. And I'm inclined to think what's really going on there is the unstated formulation is that beta, beta, I can put it in the signatures that I mean, either is or is not working.

I think that's what have the divide. And so the heterodox schools are outside the orbit of the betas. And that's Buddhism, Jaines and the Rokai. Look, I, it's the one that's sort of most starting, it's just frame materialism and sensualism.

It's a body syndrome. So it's really quite remarkable. The word itself refers to this world. And this is what all there is, there's no other life.

So you don't need to liberate yourself. And all three, I would say, understand, at least there are proponents of all three of those traditions that understand the deepest truths that are accessible to us, be accessible on the basis of ordinary human experience and intelligence. So the Buddha himself is thought by some people in that tradition to achieve enlightenment. So we buy ordinary human powers because something was revealed to some distributed level of artificial Now the orthodox schools are all orthodox because they accept the authority of the betas, at least in one important respect.

And that's the caste system. But between the orthodox schools, there's, there's exactly the degree of difference that you were indicating. So there's sharp distinctions between them. And so much so that, I think I say in the paper, some people have wondered even people who worked in these traditions very intensely.

Why did these schools accept the authority of the betas? And my suggestion is that, all right, well, some other thought that the truth, that's one reason, just the tradition they've never discovered themselves. Others thought, well, it gives us some privileges we have because our caste system, a meaning prestige of some sort. But I do think it's highly likely that some of them accepted the authority of the betas because the caste system not only allows but it mandates study.

So what you have in the caste system that is forming cast the Brahmins, the shutreons, the vices and the children's. The Brahmins alone can teach the betas. The shutreons and vices can study them, the shutreons can study them. But maybe the most striking thing of all, this is very different from Plato's philosophy.

You have what Luis de Montes voca, Homo Hierarchus, a separation of power status. So the Brahmins have the most prestige, but they don't have any political power at all. The shutreons has all the power that he needs, but he can't tell the Brahmins what to read or what to teach and what not to teach. So you've got something like, if we looked at it from a platonic perspective, philosophy has practiced by the Brahmins as a standard in the law, is protected.

Can I throw out this part? I thought it was really interesting. I was kind of caught in a drone. It seems like we're in a situation, okay?

Either this is, as a political teaching, the most conducive to philosophy, right, in offering them freedom, in which case it seems to be something like the best, practicable regime or something like that, right, on the one hand. Or, and this is kind of where my mind was leading, when you think of philosophy in the classical sense, it's not just simply the discovery of nature. It's the discovery of nature as higher than all authority. And therefore, the way of life by its very essence is opposed to authority and is probably understood, engaged in a kind of self-defense.

Now, obviously, nothing like that occurs, right, because of the situation you just described. In which case, I wonder, there is a kind of contemplation of nature, investigation of nature, and we could call that philosophy. But is it political philosophy, right? Do you get at that socratic root of the challenge to your way of life?

No, I mean, you don't. But I think the Indian, looking at the West, we say, your philosophy consists primarily, at least for some of you folks, in trying to justify the philosophical way of life, without really saying what philosophy is. And we've got to circle, we say philosophy, that always do this, that's totally this much. And as a question of what is philosophy, what is philosophy, what is it political philosophy?

What, when you talk about the tension between city and philosophy, which philosophy, what's philosophy is, what's philosophy is, what's philosophy is, what's the relationship between city and philosophy? The thing I don't know, I see was, you're doing a circular definition. So what the Indians are going to ask, what is philosophy in the West? Surely, these trains of philosophy slowly contemplates its tension with the city.

Is there a place for metaphysics? Or is metaphysics just to hit the hip plate to keep the multitude off tracks of the own person, philosophers? That's just things to be strange, don't you? The Indians really have to do that.

So we say, you know, well, man, the Greek's understood man to be a political animal, what's the animal about it? To that, and the East, the East, the East, the top, the stone. That's the reason man is the cast down. The only one.

Right. I guess my concern is, I understand what you're saying about the circularity, but I think a Western philosopher could respond and say, well, your freedom is merely by the grace of convention, right? You're dependent upon convention. And you feel to see that there is this deeper challenge to where you're what now does that mean philosophy is engaged primarily in something like a justification or a self-defense?

I mean, some people think that, I'm aware of that, but it does seem like one has to examine the relationship between, you know, with the law or with the conventions demand of you and what philosophy is the way of life is. And it strikes me that at least as the cast system is presented, certainly for the people in the highest cast, I shudder to think what happens to potential philosophers in the lower cast. But they don't. Yeah, they're done for it.

In that situation, I don't know, is there any commentary by any of these higher brahmins about this difficulty of lower cast, you know, potential philosophers who have no hope whatsoever? Even if they didn't do it, if it's the case, I think you pointed this direction in the article that some of them would recognize the conventional status of the caste system. Couldn't that lead to a similar kind of reflection? Alex, like once they see the caste system for what it is, couldn't they therefore come to recognize the tenuous status of their classes of distinct group of people to get to reflect on things?

I mean, just and therefore also become aware of the sort of fortuitous character of the position they hold in society and therefore kind of recognize it doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, no, I'm certain there could be awareness of it, but you don't want to see it spell down. Well, I mean, yeah, I think that's the difficulty. I mean, one point you have a footnote on the decisive treatise, which I think I find to be one of the most philosophic works because the most interesting works of political philosophy, which is because it's trying to cart out that space for itself.

And you can see really profoundly the relationship between thought and our sort of political or communal lives. It's much more general level, but it seems to be an end. That to me is amazing. Whereas, when the conception I got a philosophy here, it was, I'm going to go, you know, I have without an appreciation of the or a sort of articulation, I shouldn't say appreciation, because, you know, who knows what they're thinking.

But as at least in the presentation that I got, I didn't get a sense that they were troubled at all by this. Well, not, I think they only were Socrates troubled by the fact that there were probably potential philosophers and the saltines that happened to be captured in the war. In the war, I mean, in antiquity, there are, the philosopher has a very high tolerance for injustice. It's not his great passion.

Now, the Bible, that's another matter. So another place where I think Indian tradition is closer to the Greek tradition, and it's the biblical tradition that I have a book, and I have a book, a paper which I say, what's most unique about the West is not the lost of the biblical God. Yeah. And there's a hyper-concern with justice.

But while we're on the issue of what the last years, and since we talked about the political class, Leo Strauss says, the natural right history on page 75, my memory is serving correctly, the philosopher finds his bliss in articulating the riddle of being. He doesn't say the philosopher finds his bliss in articulating the tension between the last in the city. I think Strauss's interest is his express concern, is with the vulnerability of the philosophy, that's a legitimate issue, it's a serious question point. But I don't think he thought that's all the last he wants, you know, once I asked his friend, Jacob Klein, when I was in St.

John's, this is because I was taking some classes that Strauss was teaching me every time, this is a Strauss had English embedded in some clients that absolutely we've been interested in that business was too much more, but we talked about it all the time, this doesn't weigh this. Yeah, that's something. Yeah, please. On this note, I was just wondering, actually, a friend of the show, Pablo's Papa Dopoulos asks on this question, caste system, do you have any sense that Plato would have known anything about Indian philosophy and specifically the beta caste system?

I mean, is there any, is there any indicate, because I mean, like Alex, you know, first time I thought, man, this sounds just like the, this sounds just like the metals and sulfur in the Republic? Yeah, I think that, um, I think in eroticist, maybe some reference to the Jim, those office, right, might be the case that they knew there's something out there, and probably didn't know very much about it. I think I read somewhere that, you know, not Plato, but it's that some Indian speculative think was baffled at the attention that the West gave to human problems, to man as man, they're much more interested in the self and what's at the bottom of things. Yeah, one might say also, if you press the question, what is man too hard, you're going to be led to this question of convention, the whole thing gets wrong.

So what we've got here is, I would say it's the equivalent with what I think is going on and what I cannot prove, but I certainly suggest of what I think is going on with the thinking of at least some of the problems is an analog to the noble line. Wow. Yeah. Which is connected, I think that's connected to, and you make the persuasive case and you just mentioned this to Alex, that these Indian thinkers were less concerned with, or more tolerant of injustice in the world, maybe it's the best way to put it.

And you make a pretty compelling case, we in the West, we especially in the modern West can forget how great technology has aided diminishing, which is of course, of course, of contributing to injustice in a number of ways, but it's greatly aided to at least any quality of human beings. It seems to have made possible greater human equality. And so what we might find repulsive, even Aristotle talked about this, right, was we're going to have to have slaves and tell their robots. And so I found that compelling because I think you're right that a lot of amateur, like me, is one of these things and like, how can anybody find something like the caste system, anything like just?

And I think your answer is pretty persuasive. On the one hand, first, they look at the world and think, well, this is just kind of the way things are. I mean, absent technology, there's got to be something like this. But then the second point, and maybe you've never identified this, because this is something you just mentioned a moment ago, that, and maybe this is to Alex's point, the human things don't seem to be the central concern of Indian, what you're calling Indian speculative traditions of philosophy.

They're much more interested in that. I was like, so I don't know if you want to speak either of those things. Alex wants to jump in and piggyback on my question. Yeah.

Yeah. And on that, there's, I don't mean to identify the two by any means, but there's something slightly stoic about this concern with the self and sort of understanding how what you are, Asman is also brought, that attempt to understand that and this removal or distancing yourself from your actions or your illusory or because that's not a good transition, right? Your appearance as my or something like that. And I just wonder, I wonder to what extent that's related to the fact that they have this caste system, right?

The caste system is absolutely decisive. And so much so that, that they know that there are borders to India. And they know that outside those borders are people that don't have caste, which they didn't go to barbaric. They just can't understand.

Oh, well, that's why when I said that, man, it's the caste animal. I think that's that's the ancient Indian view of what it means to be human. And that has political consequences. But it's very significant sort.

You've got a ruler and you've got the rule and the rule can do a lot of the rule, you can do all kinds of things, but you can't impede on your life or free inquiry that the Brahmins enjoy. So I think you were right, Alex, to say that one possible interpretation is that from a philosophical perspective, you couldn't get any better than that. Yeah, though my other thought is perhaps the questions they're concerned with have a kind of regime dependence. That was what I meant by the relationship, the relationship of the distance between the self and one's actions, right?

And the concern with the identity of the self with the whole of things, right? There's a kind of like a little other self from your place or an identification of yourself with something bigger than your place in the caste system, which would appeal to somebody who might be stuck in the caste system, right? Yeah, well, of course, and you know this, that the karma is inherited in Congress that came from how you lived your life before. There's this astonishing formulation in the bottom of here.

This will allow me to just wait and you're concerned that better ones own caste duties done poorly than others' caste duties done well. You really have to stay in your lane. So it's quite limiting in that respect, but it's freeing as well. Again, from a philosophical perspective, for those perspective of someone who wants to preserve freedom of inquiry from undue pressure from the sphere of the political in the narrow sense.

But in terms of their themes, I may not have understood your question, but I don't think their themes are prescribed to them by the things they take up to philosophical consideration or prescribed to them by the latest because they get six orthodox schools, as I've tried to show in the paper, different from each other and according to different degrees of weight in the data support of them, the answers and the latest are absolutely regarded, but primarily for how you act and the speculative assertions, the metaphors, or requires some interpretations. But I'd buy it a bit on to this looking primarily at this relationship between self and brought. The Sankia School is intrigued in relationship between intellect and matter, intellect and nature. The Niaya School develops a system of syllogistic reasoning by Sankia School is concerned with atomism and catarization things.

It's an ontology. And the last one I mentioned here, yoga, is they have a identity, but the identity seems to be, I mean, they really are theistic, but the identity seems to be there to serve as a kind of ideal to which one will aspire. So these things, as far as I can see, particularly the relationship of intellect to nature, catarization types of things, and understanding the reasoning of what we call a logical day, the investigation of nature. All of that, I think, is so it's unimpeded.

What I think one would need to argue is that the cat system precludes understanding something about man that would be the fundamental key to articulating the riddle of being. And I know some students are strousing that might be faced. I've already said in this interpretation, Strauss, that nature consists of that nature is the eternal and the eternal appears to be in the way of the recurring fundamental question. They don't go away.

That strikes me as a little bit then, understanding of nature, in comparison to understanding of nature. So there's some thought that this Strauss's distinction, his formulation, no heterogeneity. And he may be even the distinction between philosophers and non-plasters might afford one access to the whole of things. I don't see that in Strauss, but any suggestion that that extreme, but people who entertain it are not stupid, they're given some thought to it.

So if you could show that, let's look at extreme example of the Hider, that the access to being is through that being whose own being is an issue for himself, and that's dasian. And so to understand how we are in the world is the way to understanding what's most fundamental about being. And he's finally led to the idea that mood of all things is more disclosing of being at its deepest level than any reasoning. How can we choose?

So it would be possible to build an entourage on a thoroughgoing investigation of the human ass such. One might think Socrates would do something like that, then he'd plus jump. You know, I was reading about the cast stuff. I was reminded of a passage in about morality as breeding and he just swallowed a value.

Where he makes clear that actually probably the greatest philosophic potential under a caste system would be the lowest caste members, the ones that are, I forget that the Kondala or the, I forget the me, but the ones who are born of mixing between cast and he argues that, well, you know, obviously he's coming with a lot of his own views about physiosychology and all that sort of stuff, but his claim seems to be something like this. You know, morality of breeding, of trying to breed the best sounds wonderful until you realize that it's people who contain a kind of physiological, psychological contradiction within themselves, who have the sort of most ripe souls for trying to grasp, you know, bits of questions about being, that's not a strong city, it's a very niche, you know, right? I was reminded of that. Yeah, by the way, I'm not trying to defend the caste system, but what I'm trying to explain, that there's anything wrong with it, just trying to explain why, well, why endured for so long, right?

And I think that a lot of people don't get beyond saying what caused the problems, like the privilege that they had, but what I mean, the most significant privilege they had is the very privilege that the philosophers of the West have long been. Yeah, by the way, it's an amazing point. I think it should be understood for our listeners that this notion of trusting me as I do my administrative duties and I'm going through the appointment right now. I mean, caste system don't sound so bad, I'm not a comparison.

Sorry. I was going to read your passage from Beyond But In Evil, this is actually my footnote 78, I thought you might enjoy it. This is Nietzsche with the help of a religious organization, the brahmins, that's the high class cast with the help of religious organizations, the brahmins appropriated the power of naming kings for the people while they held themselves and felt themselves apart and outside as men of higher and super oil tests. I came up on that late working on this as well.

Nietzsche saw what they worked. Can I pivot to a topic? Maybe this will touch on some of the themes we've been talking about and screwing around. I'm sure I'll butcher the name of this thinker in the text, but we're interested in political philosophy among other things.

And you mentioned the text is that the Arthasastra? Arthasastra? Yeah, Arthasastra by Clotilia? Oh good.

To what extent? I mean, this is clearly a political text and I've heard people say he sort of would make Machia Valli blush with his account of political things. To what extent can this thinker or can this text be thought of as rising to the level of political philosophy? I mean, I realize it's taking us a little farfield, but given our interest here on the show.

Well, it's an interesting that the text is quite big actually. Yes, yes. It's one value, but it's a great observation by men in Congo, which is ahead of it, which is three volumes in that sense, but English translation is a lot of commentary. So what was your question?

Again, yes, he is. He's very often prepared to Machia Valli. And he's the one who argues that the vaters are beneficial because they authorize the different forms of life. I think I think Clotilia is criticizing the locator school, which is totally materialist.

We're not appreciating that even their speculations, they use the word FAPA, which means don't be, that even their speculations are not somewhat sociable. Yeah. I don't know if you read this because it's not in the body of the text, but you might find this interesting on page 62. Oh, yes.

On page 64. Or this is a quotation. According to all Indian traditions, this is an text called the wonder that was India, which is really quite good. According to all Indian traditions, Emperor Chandragupta, both centuries, he was much aided in his conquest by a very able and unscrupulous Roman advisor called Clotilia.

And he goes on say, the ruler is told by Clotifu to go to the mate who had in the secret agents disguised as gods, allowing himself to be seen in their company in order to disinterceptively believe that he mixes with the consonating terms. So again, he's right up there. Yeah, for sure. But was your question?

I guess my question was not a little thought necessarily rises to the level of velocity. We can not argue what that is, but I was just trying to infer. Does it rise to the level of velocity, this text? What does Matthew go?

Are you asking me as much of Ellie? I'm a sheepish on this, but yeah, I think so. Yeah. Does Matthew go to the little D?

I mean, obviously the answer to that. No, but in chapter 24 to 26, I think he does talk about it in the indicate self-aware that he probably does think about these things. I forget what the first lines of chapter 25 are. So there's something of the, gosh, I have a here, Andy.

He aims to discuss the, he's going to discuss the worldly things, which sounds innocuous, but it could mean actually something deeper, right? I don't move it out. Yeah. One would want to do comfortably close reading on Calutia.

I see. But I mean, I'm persuaded that Matthew goes to France and that he's founding new modes and orders in the whole world. I just taught that today in class. I didn't look like I was a madman.

What I've, what I've less persuaded by is the notion that he's a philosopher in the sense that someone who's particularly really weak, right, instilled that whole time. Now, Calutia, he's at least a political thinker, yeah. But I would take as my example of political philosopher, not Matthew, but Socrates. Socrates, it looks as if the political is an avenue out beyond, beyond the spirit of England, but there's something higher.

You mentioned with Strauss that Strauss, you mentioned the clients of the Pian Strauss talked about metaphysics all the time. You just didn't publish that. That's my, it's nothing but a suspicion, but that's my suspicion about Machiavelli as well. Yeah, it could be.

Could be. I think it could be. Why not? Why not?

Calutia? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I simply ignorant. Yeah.

I mean, that's why you're here, Jim, to persuade us to read these things. I am intrigued. I am intrigued. No, I was going to defend Machiavelli as a philosopher, but I think that's too far for you.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not attacking this philosopher. I'm just saying that the text don't bear it out. You're right.

Sure. If we look at someone like Calutia and the lack of speed, velocity, and all the deceitfuls involved in his advice, it's clear that he has a hard guard to the fact that Romans have freedom. Right. So I think I'm trying to think that someone who sees that enjoys intellectual freedom, not just so he can be really colorful, this advice to people.

Right. One would say, I mean, unless one's simply a gangster, I suppose it takes a kind of, I wonder if that kind of Machiavellian advice to Princess doesn't presuppose some account of the universe, that there's no cosmic support for these sort of moral considerations or something like this. Yeah, that's an interesting, what is political philosophy? Straus refers to the cosmological basis of Machiavellis.

Political philosophy is a kind of decayed Aristotenism. Yeah. Most people would have thought, I think, from other things that Straus says, there wasn't a cosmological basis. Right.

The basis was the observation of things human. So that passage is always puzzled by myself. I think you can't say that man is by nature, a political animal without some conception of nature to return to what we're talking about earlier. So political philosophy can't be, if it's going to be philosophical, I don't think political thought requires one having a conception of nature at all to speak of.

But even though this political philosophy has to have a conception of nature, it'll be able to say with authority that that's what man is. That's what nature is. There's one other, Alex, the passage in the Prince where he talks about the Prince having to examine the nature of planes and rivers and these kinds of things. Oh, it's about nature of sites.

Yeah, right. It comes up also. I mean, since we were going down this road a bit, I mean, in Machiavelli, you do get the sense that he sometimes heightened the degree to which necessity can be understood. And there's a suggestion, I think, beneath that, in the way some of his rules break down upon Teiber inspection, I think there is a suggestion, sort of some epistemologically, lots of logical reflections in that kind of mode of giving advice that seems sound but on further inspection, sort of doesn't really maybe obtain the way that you'd like it to.

I also think there is, in conjunction with that, therefore, reflections on their theological political problem. And so, I would push it off. Obviously, his outward disposition is one of a Prince. He has a princely aspect to him that seems very, very new.

But still, I do think he's at the same time, digging deeper. I don't know about it. I could tell you. Yeah, can I ask?

Sorry, I don't want if you had a response to that, but my question was, you had to bring us back just Indian philosophy, generally, or Indian speculative thought. You know, when I was trying to, as an amateur with no one to guide me, I sort of turned to the bakavad Gita and there's a penguin in a bridge, I think it may be the entire thing. I'm not sure. I read that with sort of mediocre profit to myself, just because it's so foreign to me.

But so no slide against the text itself, just my limitations. What advice would you have to somebody who wanted to read these things? First off, I'd probably send them to your article. But what's the first work that you would send them to of Indian speculative thought?

Would it be the Vedas? Would it be the, do we have any of them actually? I just realized I don't know the answer that. We have the red Veda right?

Right. That's the fourth. Right. Before that, the one that has the most speculative material in it.

If you were to do a sustained study, I would begin with the Vedas and read around it and get to the name of what's going on there. That's why I mentioned it, you know, even the Vedas. This is the earliest trail. You've got formulations that are quite surprising.

This is the earliest trail in the region. I mentioned a couple. This is just a quote from the, this is in 1500 of 2000 BC, a line for the Australian for strength, bring forth a law to Indra, a true one. If he truly exists, one another say there is no Indra, who has beheld him.

Shall we honor? Yeah. You've got a religious tradition, call him into question, one of the gods. Yeah, that's amazing.

And there's another one. He about whom they ask, where is he? Say of him, the terrible one. He does not exist.

He who didn't actually suffer, she welcome him. His gamut does believe in him. He might people isn't. But some people say, well, I don't see him yet.

That's right. Who cares? If your authority doesn't really come from God putting a crowd on your head, and you know, or Danny, who is just like, go ahead. You know, I mean, yeah, well, I need to cast this.

That's all I need. And the philosophers are like, yeah, I need it too. Well, what I'm saying is that is that the most authoritative source that tries all the other schools together, that the full of the monster defend was great for us, to extend the benign that there is a God revealing all these things. Even that takes calls into question, the popular gods of the tradition.

Wow. So that is where you would direct someone who was one of the approaches to first. Hey, I would if you could approach it. I mean, if you're just going to, I don't know what, what it's so easy to be turned off by just trying to talk about it.

Some people turned on to it, but my guess is that most people who approach that text from studying Western philosophy find it interesting. But I'm not a mixture of things they've heard about from the UH. Okay. Well, at this point, we're at this point.

Or that. The bottom of my teeth is really quite wonderful. I do. I do.

I think it's the best place to start. Okay. I think the best place to start is my going to St. John's Eastern classes.

Well, then I would put it in a picture. That is a good program. It is a good program. So I would never friends go there.

I'd love it. Right. The word problem isn't it? It isn't.

Okay. Good. Fantastic. We should have all along.

We should have. Obviously. I just got some questions for you. I don't know if you know, but we actually, we use the Twitter and social media account and we put out that we were doing this interview with you.

And so there's some questions from some listeners. Some just read a few questions. Answer them as you see fit. Don't answer them as you.

And if you're like, I have no idea or whatever. Or if I have a mission on something, feel free to push me aside. But the first question I'll ask is from Antonio Sosa, who just shared a panel with you at the ASPSA. ASPSA.

I apologize. I was supposed to be there, but I just wasn't able to help. I'm sorry. I was sorry.

I was sorry. I was going to meet you. He says very high praise for you, which by the way was common. A lot of the folks commented on this.

He asks us to ask you what book was Strauss reading or what author was reading during the last week of his life? According to Father Ford. Okay. I student of Father Ford told me in the conversation that Ford told him that in the last week of his life he Ford and visited Strauss and somewhat too surprised to discover that Strauss was reading Augustine.

Now, it is surprising. I don't think that means that Strauss was about to convert or anything like that. He asked his mind was an extraordinarily open mind. Yeah.

Thinking about things to the very end. And I do think that Strauss, when he writes to the show on his friend, may my soul die to death of the philosophers. Strauss never called himself a philosopher to my knowledge. And I don't think that was false modesty.

I think he thought it was a dimension to the thought that was a dimension to the theological problem, particularly concerning the possibility of revelation that he had not adequately understood. And so he was always thinking. That's pretty impressive. May my soul die to death of philosophers.

I might not be a philosopher. I'm dying. Good company. I think that's what that means.

I have a question from an undergraduate at American University named Perita Gobble, but I think we already asked. No, no, it's a new question. How does the ultimate goal of attaining Moksha, if I'm pronouncing that properly, relates a Plato's allegory of the cave and the Republic to the extent that both can be understood as liberation from illusion and from ignorance? I think that's the right way to understand Moksha.

And by the way, there are some thinkers who thought it could occur without dying. It could occur in a life. So liberation is primarily liberation of from illusion. We can turn that around and say liberation is being the presence of the truth.

So to that extent, I don't see any fundamental difference between leading the cave and seeing things for what they are, even maybe catching a glimpse of the sun, but it'll be a difference in kind between that and Moksha, liberation, and delusion as the goal of thoughtful inquiry. Very nice. Bruce Hunt Jr, longtime listener asks that the first ending philosopher you point to believe in reincarnation or any other spiritual beliefs. And does this fit with your definition of the philosopher as an atheist and rational cosmologist?

Well, they're different thoughts versus the other kinds of things. They're very striking on that. Even the poor, the monsters say this world is pretty much the world. But things are what appear to be.

But there's an argument. The argument is that the self can be distinguished from everything that the self considers. It's a little bit like Kant's transcendental beauty of that perception. There's an eye doing to think.

Now, can the Indian thinkers, I'm not going to say, saying the thing one might get a clear view of the eye as it is to continue the current language in itself. And that eye, they seem to think would not differ from you and me, who would differ amongst us. And it would be the ultimate truth of things, the real unity. So I think that at least the notion of reincarnation is tied up to the immortality of the soul, because the immortality of the self, I should say, because it's not a composite.

By the way, this is kind of a problem issue. It occurs in the high and middle ages. The way the scholastics understand this, entertained the problem, is that only something that is made up of parts can undergo a natural dissolution. And if the active intellect or something else is not made up of parts, then it cannot undergo dissolution and it is naturally immortal.

But it could be destroyed by an act of annihilation, as opposed to dissolution, by an omelet of God, just as he brought it into being, out of nothing without any act of composition. Wow. That's beginning of an answer to that question. Yeah.

Well, we don't have a whole lot of other questions, a couple we actually addressed or raised as we spoke this evening. I'll just point out that Nick Almer says in a video about Thomas sometime, Emmet Penny says, pumped, Mr. Carey was my favorite tutor at St. John's.

Long time fan of the show, Thomas Cleveland, T Cleveland, at T Cleveland for real, says awesome. So there's a lot of love for you out here on Twitter. That's very nice to hear. That is very nice.

I guess one last topic maybe before we call it an evening is we like to do this with a lot of our guests and we find that our listeners are really interested to hear about this. I just, we'd like to hear about your own intellectual biography. How did you come, not necessarily how did you come to be interested in Indian philosophy, but how did you come to be interested in philosophical or speculative matters at all? Who were some of your great teachers?

What were some of the jokes that turned you, etc. Well, I went to St. John's for two years. I actually got a lot of stuff to use.

While I was there, I got to know rather well, a St. John's tutor, Thomas McDonald, who never published anything. That he wrote back to you. He published a short memorial on a young friend of his who died and then Richard King who died.

They were close. He wrote a very nice trinity to click in and who was in the review of metaphysics. But he had the most impressive mind. Think of any one of them being the same, under the same roof with his thinking was deep, comprehensive, quick.

He had a marvelous literature as well as for Waspy. That got me taking learning seriously and nothing else had. But fine was St. John's and I, when I came back in 1968, St.

John's Strauss had arrived and a lot of Strauss's students were coming to his seminars, really reading groups and I attended those. I went to a new school and studied with John and Aaron Gurbitsch, who was an on-nologist and another on-nologist, Doreen Karrins, and there were other people there who were good as well. So I had to benefit of studying with some very fine teachers. Did you just go upon St.

John's by chance then? Are you from North Carolina, Virginia? I'm from North Carolina. I knew I went to a school in Virginia, perhaps school.

I was right. And there was someone there, a couple years ahead of me, applied to St. John's. He was an impressive student and I wondered what school would have drawn him, in particular, going elsewhere.

So I looked at St. John's and then I began to get very interested. Right. Very cool.

Well, Mr. Carey, it's been a deep pleasure. I've learned a lot. I really enjoyed reading this article.

I thank you for your time. Let me play one thing just a little bit. Of course. I find this topic itself that has amusing dimensions to it and surprises it.

I'm not a proponent of Indian philosophy. I'm sure, sure, sure, sure. I try to articulate and understand it because I think if we do understand it, it'll give us a perspective on what philosophy itself is. Right.

I took your objectivity to be one of the reasons I found it so interesting, your article things were. And I think it's a testament to the critical step that you give it. That one can be a testament. Right.

That's a very good surprise. And I'll just reiterate that line that Greg read about, I think it's a testament to it. Really, look, I walked down the street and bolder their stories with like Buddha's for sale and alongside who goes and stuff like that. And the popular sort of vulgarization of all this stuff is just lamentable because obviously this is a tradition and one that had quite a powerful sort of whole on people for a very, very long time.

And so there has to be something there, right? There's something worthy of understanding not necessarily a regency. I think you do a good job for people who are educating the history of Western philosophy of kind of getting down to the real brass tax of what's the basic crease opposition and what are the basic exceptions, which is very helpful. I appreciate that.