Saturday 29 March 2014

Matilal's War


It is disappointing when a person that has been educated in the traditional Sanskritic pandit way seems to have internalised what has been termed orientalism. In its crudest form it is more or less - you chaps do the mysticism and the religious stuff, leave the rational and the logical to sahib. Professor Matilal may have been perfectly sincere in his desire to keep out the ‘mad mystics’ but his principles of exclusion seem to follow an orientalist Western rule. Professor Stephen Phillips mentions his editorial policy which is consciously exclusionist:
Countering MatilarI noticed a certain reluctance in the Basil Fawlty manner to ‘mention the war’ but then going on to mention it:
don't mention the war

We need no concern ourselves too much this metaphysical thesis which is an integral part or a necessary consequence of the scriptural (and perhaps experiential in the mystical sense) assertion about the Brahman awareness. But this thesis need not be called (as it often is by some modern exponents) ‘illusionism’ in the ordinary sense of illusion. Rather, the model of sensory illusion is used as an argument to show that the world of experience is neither categorisable as real or existent nor as unreal or non-existent. The world does not strictly conform to the way we intuitively understand these terms, ‘real-unreal’ or ‘existent-non-existent’.

As I wrote before in my post on Perception:
perception
his treatment of the central topic of error seems slack and his unwillingness to ‘mention the war’ goes a long way in explaining it.

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