Did Indian culture recognise an independent field of study called philosophy?

A recent encounter with a friend led to a chat about philosophy – philosophy being the subject that I taught and wrote about as a profession. As is so often the case, he had a glorified sense of everything Indian, including philosophy – though, from my conversation with him, I gathered that he had no idea of what Indian philosophy is beyond showering eulogies on what he considered to be a pure Indian philosophical tradition.

When I told him that my research was on the philosophy of science from the Western analytic tradition, his immediate response was whether I accept Western philosophy at the cost of rejecting Indian philosophy. This idea of acceptance and rejection, perhaps, presupposes Western philosophy and Indian philosophy as being mutually exclusive and conflicting thought patterns – where one has to be accepted and other rejected on the grounds of truth. It implies that if one carries forward her study in one, the other is automatically rejected.

This, to me, seemed a bit surprising. To think in terms of acceptance and rejection, in such a naïve manner, is untenable and inappropriate as far as philosophy is concerned. I was unable to convince him.

The general distorted understanding is that Indian philosophy is a unified body of knowledge and all the discourses about it are an exploration of a monolithic narrative of an esoteric truth that stands in direct conflict with other philosophies.

Much work on classical Indian thought was produced and documented by Western Orientalists. They referred to these thoughts as systems of Indian philosophy, also known as darshanas.

It is also held as a general opinion, sometimes derived from these Orientalists, that Indian philosophy is a repository of spiritual insights that no other worldview possesses – a view that has gained a more aggressive voice under the present Hindutva political regime.

Some believe that the pinnacle of philosophical excellence was reached in the Vedanta school of philosophy, a view that is contestable.

For precisely this reason, one of the questions that has often come up for discussion in scholarly circles is whether Indian culture and civilisation recognised an independent domain of discourse or a discipline of study called “philosophy” – a discursive analytic tradition that has features that typically characterise it as philosophical.

Frank Thilly, in the introductory chapter of his book A History of Philosophy, claims that oriental thoughts like that of the Hindus do not go beyond faith, mythology and poetry. More precisely, the implication of this contention is the question whether there is some Indian analogue to what the Western civilisation, derived from Greek thought, has called “philosophy”.

This question did arise as a consequence of the Indian encounter with European thought in the 19th and 20th century. Scholars began to debate whether these darshanas or systems of thought actually centred around soteriological matters – that is, on the concerns of salvation and liberation referred to by terms such as moksha and mukti.

What is a darshana?

Darshana refers to the genre of classical literature generally considered to be part of Indian philosophy. Wilhelm Halbfass, a philosopher and Indologist, in an essay in his book, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, notes that darshana has gained “the Neo-Hindu self-understanding and self-definition”.

This idea was later glorified by philosophers such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan as the distinguishing characteristic of Indian philosophy. This led to the idea of spirituality being the intrinsic orientation of Indian philosophy. For Indian philosophers with a strong cultural chauvinist bent of mind, this idea of spirituality is what marks Indian philosophy.

The term darshana, as the Indian term for philosophy, has been analysed by Halbfass in two ways.

Etymologically, it is derived from the root “drsh” in Sanskrit which means “to see” or “to perceive”. In this sense, it means the intuition of the ultimate reality or the truth.

But in the doxographic sense – doxography being a literary work that compiles and summarises various schools of thought in philosophy – it merely means views and doctrines of different schools of Indian thought.

The word darshana conveys the idea that this body of literature has as its aim a profound vision that transcends mere intellectual contemplation. The transcending of intellectual contemplation means that the emphasis is on the direct realisation of truth that leads to liberation or salvation.

This exclusive concern for this soteriological aspect of Indian philosophy is captured by the word darshana, distinguishing it from the purely theoretical and analytic enterprise of Western philosophy.

This gives rise to two questions: Is Indian philosophy circumscribed by concerns about finding salvation? And did this focus preclude Indian philosophers from engaging in philosophical enterprises purely as a theoretical exercise or as “love of wisdom”?

Another term that has also come to mean philosophy in India is “anviskshiki”. The term’s correspondence to philosophy was first drawn by the German scholar Herman Jacobi in his article “A Contribution towards the Early History of Indian Philosophy” in Indian Antiquary in 1918.

The term appeared in the very beginning of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, which Jacobi takes as the basis of his translation. There were others who followed him on this translation. As it turns out, the etymology of anviskshiki also comes close to that of darshana. It also means “seeing”. It is this idea of right vision or realisation, associated with darshana that prevails among most people in India.

How darshanas fail as philosophy

The word philosophy means “love of wisdom”. It is derived from the Greek words philia (love) and Sophia (wisdom). Pythagoras was supposed to have coined this word.

But this etymology, by itself, does not capture what the discipline of philosophy is about unless one has an understanding of what constitutes this wisdom. This is an open question as far as philosophy is concerned because, from the time of the Greeks, philosophy has expanded to accommodate approaches on a diverse range of issues of social, moral and political concern as well as of the natural world.

When deliberating on these concerns, the word philosophy has sometimes been and is used in a most elastic way. In the lucidly written introductory philosophical text Living Issues in Philosophy, the authors introduce the meaning of philosophy by distinguishing its informal and formal sense.

The informal sense of “having” a philosophy, according to the authors, is a “set of views or beliefs about life and the universe, which are often held uncritically” that refers to a certain attitude towards ideas and issues of a very general nature. These ideas include, among others, purpose of life, meaning of life, goals of living and mysteries of life and death and god. Such a broad view, as the authors rightly note, is “vague, confused and superficial”.

To go beyond this broad view of philosophy, one has to understand that the wisdom or Sophia component of philosophy lies in the process of reflecting on and criticising our most deeply held conceptions and beliefs.

A philosophical inquiry begins with problems and questions of a very general nature: questions on the nature of the universe, the problem of knowledge, meaning of freedom and similar concerns. Secondly, it responds to such problems by making clear the key concepts and ideas it deals with. Third, it inquires into the foundations and presuppositions of the subject and examines the defensibility of the assumptions it rests on.

Finally, the discussion proceeds by argument and reasoning. In the course of these arguments, defending its thesis, it raises and responds to possible objections to its thesis. Arguments and counterarguments abound that form the core of a philosophical debate.

To what extent does the enterprise that has been defined as Indian philosophy possess such characteristic features? Some scholars of the history of philosophy maintain that India never had a legacy of philosophy. Even those who concede that India did make significant contributions to philosophy and are more sympathetic to its enterprise admit that the culture never had a term equivalent to “philosophy”.

It may be argued that even if there is no equivalent term for philosophy, the darshanas do take up philosophical problems for discussion. How does darshana or anvikshiki relate to the expositions of Indian schools of thought on the basic philosophical problem?

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, the Indian Marxist philosopher – to be distinguished from the founder/chairman of the Indian Council of Philosophical research of the same name – in his What is Living and What is Dead in Indian Philosophy, identifies a methodology by which one can discern a philosophical problem that these schools have considered significant. That one problem is the reality of the material or physical world or otherwise.

Philosophers of idealist leanings – that is, those who hold the view of the reality of mental ideas as against the reality of the external world of objects – hold the very abstract view that the reality is pure “spirit”. These Indian idealist philosophers reject experience and reason as valid sources of knowledge for knowing reality. For them meditation and contemplation are valid means that lead to a mystical experience.

This experience is the seeing of reality as spirit. Such an idealistic outlook is a very prominent feature of Indian philosophy. It is this aspect of seeing or “right vision”, the concern with liberation and salvation (moksha), that is suggested by the term darshana and anviskhiki .

This goes to indicate that Indian philosophy was essentially soteriological, barring one school of Lokayata whose literature has not come down to us. It is said to have been destroyed by the orthodoxy who considered its exponents to be heretics.

Have darshanas been able to capture the characteristics of philosophy mentioned above? It is doubtful. Most of the discourses of the so-called philosophical schools give an exposition of their schools and the commentaries and sub-commentaries do make an attempt to present an argument but fall short of making one.

For example, in arguing for the special kind of knowledge that brings liberation, they deny perception and reasoning as a means of knowing. In this case, they can never make an argument as they would end up using reason against reason undercutting their whole argument.

To avoid this problem, the orthodox schools claim scriptural authority as testimony and, therefore, a means of knowledge, in such matters. It is here that darshana fails as philosophy. But the educated layman, like my friend mentioned above, claims these discourses as philosophical. The average Indian’s misconception and distorted understanding of philosophy as a discipline also primarily stems from a glorified sense of darshana as sublime and profound pearls of wisdom.

It has been shown in a detailed paper on how the philosophical arguments of the Advaita Vedantic view of Shankara are not substantive. Further, even in the discourses of other systems it is difficult to find rigorous arguments to credit it as a philosophical discourse.

In all these discourses there has been a conflation of the doxographical “mere view” sense and the etymological “right vision” sense of darshana making the discourses “vague, confused and superficial”, a characteristic of the informal sense of philosophy. This conflation, according to Halbfass, is “a symptomatic innovation of Neo-Hinduism”.

SK Arun Murthi taught Philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab.