Essential Questions
Decolonial Perspective on Contemplative Studies: What Does a Contemporary Indian Poet Have to Say?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nuño Aguirre de Cárcer
Contemplative Studies brings together different contemplative practices from major religions, to create a discipline in which first-, second- and third-person perspective are integrated. Contemplative Studies can be conceived as a dialogue between science, particularly with neuroscience, humanities and religious studies, to analyze the nature of contemplative practices. This emerging field is a very promising new direction in the Humanities; it is interdisciplinary by definition, global and diverse by the nature of the object studied. However, there is a serious risk that Contemplative Studies might fall into the trap of repeating and reinforcing ongoing forms of coloniality, creating a gap between present-day Science and old, long-gone traditions from India and the East. For this reason, it is essential to introduce a critical perspective in the discussion. In my view, decoloniality can be an adequate theoretical framework to approach contemplative texts and practices, helping the field develop into a more inclusive one. In this paper, I will use the work of poet and essayist Ranjit Hoskote (Bombay, 1969) as an example of what could be a decolonial perspective on Contemplative Studies. I will analyze how he brings forth his own multi-faceted contemplative tradition into the present: through poetry and translation. This analysis is intended as a contribution to the future syllabi of Contemplative Studies, currently lacking contemporary authors, particularly from the Global South.
Weak Science: Humanities and the Sciences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shai Frogel
The great technological achievements of natural science bring to see empirical method as the only scientific method and causes human sciences to adopt this view. Yet, since this method fits the material objects of natural sciences it de-humanizes human reality and thus blazes the way for materializing human existence. From this perspective, humanities are not a science at all or mostly a very weak science. The paper claims that only a resistance to this tendency could rehabilitate the humanities. The resistance should emphasize the essential difference between investigating a meaningless being, the material world, and a being of meaning, the human spirit and its products. By emphasizing this difference, one can explains why the humanities are a different science and not a weak science; a science which could not and should not be based on empirical method but on interpretation and human understanding. The paper uses Husserl's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics for advancing its claim. Husserl explains the failure of positivist sciences to distinguish between method and reality and thus opens the way to existential reflection on the significance of what he names "lifeworld" (Weltleben). Gadamer explains why truth is a result of understanding or interpretation and not of a method for pointing on the educational role of the humanities. Both Husserl and Gadamer argue that what is at stake is not only epistemological question but, and more importantly, an ethical issue. Actually, they bring us back to the fundamental question of the humanities: What is a human being or what is a flourishing human existence (Eudaimonia)?
D. H. Lawrence's Postcolonial Modernism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Doo-Sun Ryu
Since the beginning of this century the issues of modernism and postcolonialism have begun to be addressed together, resulting in the term “postcolonial modernism.” Lawrence has benefited from this trend, as opposed to in the past, when the issues were discussed separately. Even so, a kind of extremism seems to characterize general assessments of Lawrence nowadays. On the one hand, Lawrence is regarded as a modernist who shared colonialist assumptions about the colonized, a complicity branded by Edward Said’s term “orientalism.” On the other, modernist Lawrence is said to have turned to the colonized’s culture for the regeneration of “finished” Western traditions. Therefore, this paper proposes to address the question, “How can these two seemingly incompatible assessments be attended to?” It will draw on insights Lawrence gave in his last work, "Apocalpyse," in which he doubts the ethnological notion of “Urdummheit” (translated by Lawrence as “primal stupidity”), which he thinks might have been invented for an “offset.” Thus thinking of this “primal stupidity” as a “theoretical fiction,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s words, the paper compares the Lawrentian version of postcolonial modernism with versions forwarded by other modernist writers.
