Abstract
Of the major systems (darśana) of classical Indian philosophy, Sāṃkhya is perhaps the most widely misunderstood. Recent studies have helped to draw attention to this and restore its coherence, especially by drawing attention to scholars’ misplaced presuppositions. Exemplary among these is Mikel Burley’s 2007 argument that Sāṃkhya does not subscribe to an external realism. However, such critiques still allow Sāṃkhya to confound us in ways that are unnecessary. This presentation seeks to ameliorate this in some small way by focusing on one text within the Sāṃkhya Darśana: its canonical text, the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. It further examines a specific theme that, I believe, rests at the heart of struggles to make sense of Sāṃkhya: prakṛti, a term most commonly translated as “nature.”
This begins with a critique of the Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions toward nature that underlie standard readings of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. Among other things, this illustrates how researchers have miscontrued Sāṃkhya dualism in terms of European Enlightenment rubrics, such as a dichotomy of nature (prakṛti) and human person or selfhood (puruṣa). In the Sāṃkhya Kārikā, nature is not a mere object of study for the human being to observe, analyse, and dissociate from—and prakṛti certainly is not to be conceived in terms of the reductive materialism, mechanistic, and atomistic approach of modern science.
This presentation then reorients to Sāṃkhya through the lens of a phenomenology of living nature. This considers two continental European phenomenologies of life as interpretive paradigms for the Sāṃkhya system: Goethe’s phenomenology of biology and Ortega y Gasset’s existential phenomenology of life.
The turn to Goethe’s model is based upon two reasons: (1) Goethe levels a strong critique of the theoretical frame that has been most influential in Sāṃkhya scholarship, namely, the rationality of modern science; and (2) the central theme of Sāṃkhya metaphysics is life as living nature (prakṛti). The aim here is to demonstrate that Sāṃkhya—both historically and in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā itself—does not reduce nature (prakṛti) to materiality (as machine-like, caused from without, and reducible to its parts). Rather than the extension of an underlying, monolithic substance (res extensa), life reveals a constant relation marked by the coming together (saṃyoga) of two polarities: mulaprakṛti (a downward-plunging “root-procreativity,” which is wrongly understood as Cartesian extended substance or the materiality of Newtonian physics) and the puruṣa (an upward-withdrawing, nonintentional witness consciousness that is neither res cognitans nor the detached scientist of Newton’s laboratory). I then formulate the Sāṃkhya system through the lens of Goethe’s organics. This re-envisions Sāṃkhya as a philosophy of life, where life is understood in terms of a phenomenology of the biological organism. Core Sāṃkhya categories are explained accordingly: vyaktaprakṛti is the primal living phenomenon (both a “procreation made manifest” and a processual “procreating made manifest”), mulaprakṛti and the puruṣa are the forces whose tensional polarity generates life, and saṃyoga connotes the archetypal form of life (as a constant relation).
The second reformulation likewise departs from a phenomenology of life in order to reveal features of Sāṃkhya that scholars have overlooked. Moreover, it does so with a view to how life (prakṛti) manifests as the compresence of two categories whose interrelation modern thinkers have struggled to explain: namely, consciousness (puruṣa) and the mind-independent basis of the empirical world (mulaprakṛti). However, this part of the presentation considers post-Goethean developments in 19th and 20th century thinking, such as in modern biology, historical determinism, and philosophy. This highlights the Sāṃkhya Kārikā as an existential inquiry into the meaning of life—a concern that is not explicit in the Goethean reading. An Ortegan interpretation of Sāṃkhya makes available to us a rich philosophy of life as a first-hand lived reality, not just an ongoing process of living nature. This again asserts the dialectical ground of prakṛti (natural life) as a saṃyoga (compresence) that holds together mulaprakṛti and the puruṣa in a fertile friction. However, this Ortegan frame emphasizes the central theme of selfhood in the unfurling of life: from the passive, nonintentional “I” that is the puruṣa, to the active, phenomenologically directed sense of “I” denoted by the ahaṃkāra, literally, the “I-maker” who manifests not just an ego but a self who always already finds itself in a world.
In closing, this presentation explores the possibility of a unified theory of Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of living nature. On the one hand, Sāṃkhya is a phenomenology of the animate living thing as a dynamic, ongoing process marked by its own formative drive (i.e., the vision of Sāṃkhya revealed by Goethean organics). On the other hand, Sāṃkhya is a phenomenology of lived reality as a first-person experience that seeks to explore its self-identity. Concluding remarks take seriously the incongruities between the philosophies of Goethe, Ortega, and the Sāṃkhya Kārikā. However, these comments suggest that the seeming incompatibilities between these philosophies do not signal a dead-end to research on Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of nature, but instead serve as invitations to a more self-reflective and attuned hermeneutic approach to Sāṃkhya. This might reveal new avenues for future Sāṃkhya scholarship, where careful attention is given to foregrounding the philosophical assumptions of the natural sciences and humanities with respect to procreativity, consciousness, and the interrelation between the two.
The philosophy of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā has puzzled scholars largely due to Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions that inform their views of nature, consciousness, and the relation between the two. This paper explores a new reading of Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of life, where life gets construed in terms of a phenomenology of living nature and a phenomenology of human existence. And yet, while this represents a step forward in our understanding of Sāṃkhya doctrine, it nevertheless reveals deep-rooted biases that Sāṃkhya scholars have toward nature, the first-person perspective, and the relation between the two. Notably, these biases persist in the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and Indology, but they are not to be found in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā.