28.09.08
Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe
The posts on Samkhya are also an indirect commentary on the writings of J.G. Bennett, and I have been looking over his The Dramatic Universe again, a book I read many years ago at the same time Star Wars appeared, and the effect of the book was a similar transient enthusiasm. On the one hand a critical examination of the claims of Gurdjieffianity are important, on the other a blanket rejection of the traditions cited in this ‘religion’ is not responsible history, just because one is critical of Gurdjieff.
Bennett’s work, as noted, reflects the legacy of Samkhya and his rendition is open to a lot of questions. But there aren’t many exemplars of that ancient genre, which could, potentially, become a lingua franca of religious questions (always a failed hope), and the attempt of ‘the next lunatic who wants to try’ has a morbid interest. Bennett was a man of very high intelligence in many areas, and the audacity of his project requires a kind of chase plane approach just to keep up with him. This man figured in the twenties or thirties the Kaluza-Klein wing of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and wanted to adapt it to his, or Ouspensky’s, system. A foolish idea, or brilliant, it makes one sit up and take notice.
But his systematics isn’t rigorous enough for this kind of grafting. Things pop out of the woodwork with a kind of facile logic that can leave you paralyzed at what seem to be valid, often cogent, insights, but which conceal the outrageous premises of the whole operation. To do this at all requires an endrun around a basic Kantian challenge to metaphysics, and, wouldn’t ya know, the first pages of the first volume show Bennett, either with a guilty conscience or else at the stage of crossing the threshold of delusion, claiming he is going to replace Kant’s categories with his own. That’s a foolish beginning for such a smart endeavor, and I fear that if you are wondering about the details of the result, you may not succeed, because they are a labyrinth that began with shaky starting assumptions.”We aren’t going to be stopped by Kant” seems to be the shadow motive here.
So you can pull the plug there if you want. The other alternative is to be strapped to the mast like Odysseus as you go past the land of the lotus eaters, and keep a list in your mind of the assumptions being bought on cheap credit as this remarkcagle systematics starts to fill with hot air.
The basic assumption, which long predates Bennett, is that there is a basic cosmic triad of three impulses, a view that is as persistent as it is undemonstrable, or even explicable. Unless that question can be gotten straight the whole Samkhya enterprise remains a mysterious puzzle. Theological renditions are completely worthless, and litter the landscape of Hinduism and Christianity. Bennett’s attempt to rationalize that legacy of hopeless confusion is not without value, but he changes gears and accepts stray dogs in the middle of his serious section, because he is too humbly prone to look the other way when the distortions of Samkhya in other religions are under examination. We have to suspect that the doctrine of the Trinity is a garbled version of a Samkhya idea, and, boy, what a garble.
Perhaps the whole mess of pottage is beyond rescue. Modernity made a good attempt to escape from the past here, but, with Hegel and his dialectic, the whole question resurfaced like the White Whale in the middle of that modernity, and has been in the Marxist version the source of some considerable chaos. So the subject won’t stay buried. The reason for my continuing interest.
One reason the issue is important is that any use of the Samkhya, so clear on the surface in many ways, requires a strategy to deal with its basic framework which is that of the ‘gunas’ or basic triads, whose character between everything from the non-dual of Vedanta to Gurdjieff’s law of three to the dialectic of Hegel/Marx. Getting that straight is perhaps impossible, and one has to ask, where did the original Samkhya come from. Gurdjieff, in fact, noted that the human mind can’t handle this kind of logic. Period. So what to do with it, if you can’t handle it? Bennett does a series of compromises and lays down what might be a flatland version that is at least consistent with itself, leaving a mysterious result hard to evaluate, the more so as it does produce suggestive solutions to some of the obscure puzzles of self, will, and mechanism. But always the result is not something you can finaly bank on.
A further problem is the way Bennett got hijacked by some kind of Christian path of his own (it is visible in his autobiography) and his effort to adapt Samkhya to his Christian theology, at the seams, in many ways discredits the whole work. We discussed the issue of ‘pandit-knapping’, or the kidnapping of potential propandists of high intelligence, at Darwinian blog, and maybe we should repost some of that here. I think Christians should stop this pilfering from the Samkhya cookie jar. Its legacy was not theistic.
There is a lot to consider here, maybe a series like the /gmancon series on Bennett’s DU might be in order, but the labor required is considerable, and the logistics impossible (I don’t even own copies of the books, obtained from a distant library to get the original first edition version of Vol I, and always due for return before I get any work done), so we shall see.
Darwiniana » Science, religion, and the archaeology of Samkhya said,
01.10.08 at 2:24 pm
[...] J.G.Bennett and Samkhya Much of the science/religion debate is fundamentally impoverished, and beside the point. Scientists have a flawed critique of religion, and religionists, that is, Occidental monotheists at least, are in a state that can only be called, ‘metaphysical basket case’. It wasn’t always like that! The link above is to a discussion of a little known writer, J.G. Bennett, whose ‘The Dramatic Universe’ contained, among other things, an attempt to reconstruct the classic Samkhya legacy. I am entirely critical of that effort, for various reasons, and am a known ‘dog at the heels’ for Mr. Bennett. But his gesture remains significant, in a classic pilfering of something of substance to try and beef up the vacuous dementia of Christian theology. Between shaking my fist, “you won’t get away with it”, and a number of severe reservations about his methodology, the fact remains that I have sneaking admiration for the sheer audacity of what he attempted to do, stretching between General Relativity and the long lost triadic evolutionism of the mysterious Samkhya. This system, as it boots up into its complex set of triadic levels, shows at a glance where most psychologies, spiritual or not, are completely lacking in the core insights needed for an understanding of human evolutionary psychology. Read down the material at the link to the series of levels: three, six, twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight, etc…, go a long way to unifying the fragments western thought has been dealt. These diagrams, understood, might scare the daylights out of naive scientists determined to reduce man to mechanical explanation, and explain why religionists will never submit to a reductionist substitute. But religion as we know it knows nothing of this, and secularists, armed with Samkhya, might be better equipped to challenge the infelicities of their theological laggards. [...]