A blog dedicated to philosophy, history, politics, literature
Thursday, 24 December 2020
Plato’s Demiurge, Aristotle’s Prime Mover
The silent architects of Stone Age: How prehistoric actions shaped modern thought
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
From Objectivity to Subjectivity: The Cognitive Genesis of Civilization
Objectivity, in its primal form, is the natural condition of all sentient life on this planet. It is the default epistemic stance of the creature immersed in the immediacy of the world — of the animal reacting to the environment, of the pre-civilizational human responding to stimulus without reflective interference. Early man lived in such a world: unburdened by the labyrinth of introspection, tethered solely to the external. He saw, he heard, he touched — but he did not yet wonder why he saw, or who was seeing. He existed as part of nature, not yet apart from it.
In that early phase, man was purely objective — not by virtue of philosophical discipline, but through the absence of self-awareness. The world appeared as it was; reality, undistorted by symbols, beliefs, or metaphysical longings, was experienced directly, as a brute fact. But somewhere along the evolutionary arc, a rupture occurred: the emergence of myth.
It is not known when or how the first mythological narratives arose — whether from dreams, deliriums, or the collective anxiety of facing the inscrutable. But these stories marked the dawn of man’s symbolic consciousness. They were not idle fables; they were, in essence, the first philosophical frameworks, primitive attempts to structure meaning where none was apparent. These narratives gave rise to cults, and from cults emerged rituals, norms, and hierarchies — the scaffolding of tribal life. What followed was the slow coagulation of human settlements into city-states, bound not only by geography or need, but by shared imaginaries.
Within these nascent societies, the first stirrings of philosophy began. No longer merely reacting to the world, man now turned inward. He began to ask questions — of the gods, of the stars, of himself. The mind became a site of tension: torn between the empirical and the metaphysical, between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Subjectivity had been born.
This birth was not a clean transition but a dialectical process — a conflict between objectivity and subjectivity. Man, once a mere node in nature’s machinery, now stood doubly exiled: from the animal world that had birthed him, and from the divine realm he aspired to comprehend. He could now doubt what his senses told him. He could interrogate truth. He could imagine the unreal, and in doing so, transform it into reality — art, religion, ethics, and science were all children of this newfound interiority.
It is through this internal division — between the outer world of phenomena and the inner world of thought — that the human mind evolved. Over millennia, this tension refined itself into reason, inquiry, and introspection. What began as myth became philosophy; what began as ritual became law; what began as subjective yearning became the architecture of civilization.
Modernity, then, is not the abandonment of objectivity, but its reconciliation with subjectivity. Civilization is the edifice built upon this dynamic tension — the ceaseless oscillation between what we see and what we believe, between the real and the imagined, the known and the unknowable.
Thus, the story of man is the story of an awakening — not from sleep, but into complexity. From the raw immediacy of objective being to the layered, ambivalent consciousness of modern life, we are the inheritors of a paradox: creatures rooted in the real, yet forever haunted by the possible.
The Dating of the Ancient Hindu Texts
Tuesday, 22 December 2020
On Derrida’s Reading
Monday, 21 December 2020
Machiavelli on Savonarola, the Unarmed Prophet
Sunday, 20 December 2020
The Search for the God of Atheists
Saturday, 19 December 2020
The Nature of Philosophy
Friday, 18 December 2020
The Subtle Coup d’état of 21st Century
Wisdom is Wiser than Technical Philosophy
Thursday, 17 December 2020
Krishna’s First Line in the Mahabharata
Wednesday, 16 December 2020
The Divine is Compassionless
Tuesday, 15 December 2020
The Fall of Modernity (Umberto Eco’s Words)
Monday, 14 December 2020
Definition of a Philosopher
Sunday, 13 December 2020
Veda Vyasa and the Writing of the Mahabharata
Saturday, 12 December 2020
The Fearsome Mainstream Media
Friday, 11 December 2020
Vampires and the Political Cabal
The vampires feed on human blood but they get vaporized in sunlight. They can hunt and thrive only in the darkness. The counterpart of the vampires in the real world is the cabal of corrupt politicians, crony capitalists, and nihilist intellectuals—they too feed on human blood; they too thrive in the darkness, when there is lack of transparency. Sunlight is the mortal enemy of the vampires, and transparency is the mortal enemy of the cabal. The vampires cannot stop the sun from rising. During daytime, they hide indoors, in caves, forests, or their castles. But if the members of the cabal win in the elections, they gain the power to destroy transparency by subverting the freedom of the people and corrupting the legal and administrative systems. The vampires are not real; the cabal is a reality in every nation.
The Quest for Mathematical Philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant
Thursday, 10 December 2020
Heidegger’s Fundamental Question
Wednesday, 9 December 2020
The Philosophers and Their Methods of Philosophizing
Kant’s Notion of Transcendental Apperception
Tuesday, 8 December 2020
The Pitfalls of Total Freedom
On Vedic and Upanishadic Philosophy
Monday, 7 December 2020
On The Anu-Gita
Sunday, 6 December 2020
The Story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala
The Banana Peel Republics
Saturday, 5 December 2020
Victory Often Comes to the Lying Side
Draupadi’s Rejection of Karna: from Ramesh Chandra Dutt’s Mahabharata
Friday, 4 December 2020
The First Verse of the Mahabharata
Thursday, 3 December 2020
Theism and Liberty
The Concept of Svayambhu
Wednesday, 2 December 2020
The Concept of “Sat-cid-ananda”
Tuesday, 1 December 2020
The Metaphysics of Shankara and Kant
The Philosophical Mind Versus the Non-philosophical Mind
Monday, 30 November 2020
Gaudapada and Buddhism
Sunday, 29 November 2020
Echoes of eternity: Krishna, Vivasvan, and the philosophical kinship of the Gita and the Īśa Upaniṣad
Saturday, 28 November 2020
Rousseau, Napoleon, and the Politics of Religion
On Solzhenitsyn’s View Of Communism
Friday, 27 November 2020
On the Navya-Nyaya Theory of Language
Thursday, 26 November 2020
The Dialectical Method of Hindu Philosophy
Wednesday, 25 November 2020
The Carvaka View of the Four Purusarthas
Tuesday, 24 November 2020
Machiavelli: Unarmed are Despised
Metaphysics is Rationalistic
Monday, 23 November 2020
The Importance of Philosophical Skepticism
Purusharthas in balance: Rethinking the aims of human life in the Mahabharata
Sunday, 22 November 2020
Performance of Duty is the Fulfillment
“Karmanyeva adhikaraste, ma phaleshu kada chana; Ma karma phala hetur bhurh, ma te sangostva akarmani,” Krishna says to Arjuna in the verse 2.47 of the Bhagavad Gita. While a man is free to choose the actions which he will perform, he lacks the power to determine the fruits of those actions. He is the cause of his actions, but the consequences are not in his control. It is not necessary that his actions will lead to the consequences that he desires. A moral man will not be paralyzed by the thoughts of the consequences of his actions.. He will not be deterred from the performance of his duties. The action, or the performance of the duty, is a source of fulfillment for him.
Saturday, 21 November 2020
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
The Fable of the Bees: The Importance of Vices
Thursday, 19 November 2020
Bhagavad Gita: On the Striving for Perfection
Wednesday, 18 November 2020
Hindu Philosophy of Moksa
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
A Brief History of History
Monday, 16 November 2020
The Wisdom of Somerset Maugham
Saturday, 14 November 2020
The River Sarasvati
Alexander and the Indian Philosophers
Friday, 13 November 2020
The Riddle of the Rig Veda and the Sphinx
Vajasaneyi Samhita: Metaphysical and Theological Riddles
Thursday, 12 November 2020
The Vedic Prayers for Power
Wednesday, 11 November 2020
The Anti-Communism of Ralph Ellison
Tuesday, 10 November 2020
Chandogya Upaniṣad On Mind and Will
Monday, 9 November 2020
Four Qualities of the Seekers of Brahman
Saturday, 31 October 2020
On Hegel’s Philosophy of History
The Upaniṣads On Human Senses
Friday, 30 October 2020
Personal Freedom and God
A Perfect Man is an Impossibility
Thursday, 29 October 2020
The Words of Krishna and Yama
History is Collectivist
Wednesday, 28 October 2020
Reason Does Not Inspire Morality
The Upaniṣads on Kantian Moral Autonomy
Tuesday, 27 October 2020
Plato and the Roman Stoics
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad on the Noumenal Universe
The earliest Veda, the Rigveda, presents a metaphysics that in our time we will understand as naive realism or commonsense realism. But the metaphysics of the Upaniṣads is much more diversified. Along with naive realism, idealism, and skepticism, the Upaniṣads have verses that make references to concepts similar to the Platonic Forms and the Kantian noumena. For instance, there are verses in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad which reject any attempt to investigate the noumenal universe through characteristics of the phenomenal universe. It is theorized in three verses (verse 2. 3. 6, verse 3.9. 26, and verse 4.2.4) that the noumenal nature of the universe cannot be defined by any characteristic of the phenomenal universe and that the noumena can be recognized only in terms of negative definition: “Neti, neti” (Not thus! not so!).