Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (review)

The subject of this extraordinary, demanding, and often moving book is being human. What it means to be such a being is here explored by means of scrupulous attention to ways in which "bodily being"--the author's term for how subjectivity may be expressed through contextually specific modes of embodiment--are drawn on, expressed, and transformed in what one might call different epistemic and experiential contexts found in premodern Indian thought in Sanskrit and Pāli.

One of the most attractive things in this book is that, within its pages, Indian philosophy is found in a number of genres: in medical texts (as in the chapter on "The Ordinary Person" from the Caraka-Saṃhitā, discussed in chapter one), in epic (in the dialogue of Sulabhā and King Janaka from the Mahābhārata, discussed in chapter two), in contemplative manuals (in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga), and in poetry (Śrī Harṣa's twelfth-century masterpiece, the Naiṣadhacarita). Each chapter explores a particular set of issues--respectively, health and illness; gender, power, and subjectivity; the fungibility of experience through imaginative practice; and the reformation of experiential boundaries through erotic encounter. Each chapter takes these up within a distinctive genre of knowing and feeling, thereby offering case studies in the appreciation of distinctive conceptions of (the) body, and in distinctive ways of framing the contexts for (and thus the meanings and possibilities of) subjectivity.

It is through such contextually articulated attention to different ways that subjectivity can be brought into view--given different theoretical lexicons in different genres--that the book offers its lessons of general significance. Its rigorous contextualism constitutes a principled response to a methodological problem intimated by the book's subject. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi (as quoted by Ram-Prasad), humanity is "indivisible" (p. 185). This might indicate that "what humans are should be communicable, interpretable, and understandable conceptually" (p. 185) across different cultural and epistemic communities. But the trouble is that the indivisibility of humanity has too often been conflated with the unearned confidence in general ways of thinking, which, it turns out, were only ever very particular ways of thinking. How may we do better?

For one thing, we might eschew all orientations, such as Cartesianism, that occlude the context-rich nature of subjectivity. In this book, Cartesianism is an orientation to the human involved whenever we (a) take to heart the possibility of treating mind and body as ontological categories (the meanings of which track the way the world is anyhow) that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of experience; (b) treat mind as (what we today call) the sphere of "subjectivity" while treating the body paradigmatically as "an object," and therefore (c) treat the human as "a mind and a body that must be either related ingeniously, or else reduced one to the other" (p. 11).

Our unthinking reliance on Cartesianism is the principal antagonist in the book. For Cartesianism as an orientation can influence one's positions even while one claims to disavow them, shaping philosophers' instruments and intuitions (p. 10). Getting away from Cartesianism within the confines of European philosophy, Ram-Prasad argues, has proved decidedly non-trivial. For a sense of what freedom from Cartesian hangovers could look like, it helps to look elsewhere altogether. This is what the book sets out to do: it instructs us in the mode of sensitivity to human experience and subjectivity which it enacts. Developed by Ram-Prasad (in collaboration with the philosopher Maria Heim), the method is called "ecological phenomenology." It is not intended as a unique (or uniquely contemporary) mode of attention: Ram-Prasad (and Maria Heim) intend their use of it to illuminate non-Cartesian orientations to experience in the work of other philosophers and traditions which are innocent of Cartesianism, such as those found in premodern India.

Ram-Prasad is scrupulous in maintaining a distinction between the use of "Phenomenology...