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Shaj Mohan

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Shaj Mohan is a philosopher and author based in the subcontinent.[2][3][4] His philosophical works are in the areas of metaphysics, reason, philosophy of technology, philosophy of politics, and secrecy.[5][6][7][8] Jean-Luc Nancy, Robert Bernasconi, and Bernard Stiegler have stated that his work creates new possibilities for philosophy beyond the impasse of metaphysics and nihilism.[9][10][11] Mohan's works are based on the principle of anastasis which says that philosophy is an ever present possibility.[12]

Shaj Mohan
Alma materSt. Stephen's College, Delhi
EraContemporary philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy
Deconstruction
Post-metaphysics
Main interests
Ontology
Philosophy of Technology
Philosophy of politics
Reason
Anastasis
Notable ideas
Hypophysics
Anastasis
Functional isolation
Calypsology
Polynomia
Comprehending law[1]

Life

Shaj Mohan was described as "the hermetic philosopher" for avoiding academic and public events. Mohan completed his early education in Thiruvananthapuram and studied philosophy at St. Stephen's College, Delhi where he taught for some time.[12][13] He has academic degrees in economics and philosophy.[2][14] Mohan has written philosophical essays against the rise of Hindu nationalism in The Indian Express, Mediapart, Outlook, The Wire, and Libération.[15][16]

Works

Shaj Mohan works in the areas of metaphysics, reason, secrecy, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of politics.[17][18][19] His work combines the formalism and argumentation of analytic philosophy with the intuitive exegetical style of continental philosophy. Mohan is credited with having "created a new voice in philosophy" but "one can't help hear in it the voice of prophesy".[12] Mohan said that it is possible to practice philosophy without anchoring it to any tradition. He said,

"Philosophy is the act of creating freedom; it takes place through the invention of new conceptual movements and also the creation of systems which give the concepts extra degrees of freedoms and range. It should be possible to create philosophy anew everywhere with a simple question, 'What do you think?'"[4]

According to Mohan the practice of philosophy is seen as dangerous for "the decadent components of the present" and that invites danger to the philosopher. He said "The danger of philosophy comes through the erotic relation with the future, and what can be called ‘the eternal’, which constitutes the being of the philosopher".[12] In a conversation with Barbara Cassin Mohan said that the concept of voice in philosophy is made possible by the fundamental freedom of the question "what do you think?".[20] He argued that reason has an important role in philosophy in spite of the criticisms of it in the 20th century. He opposed Heidegger's conflation of principle of sufficient reason with technological determinism. Reason exceeds mechanical thinking as it has a relation to "the obscure".[21] Mohan wrote that today the task of philosophy is to open a relation between the existential and the ruins of metaphysics,

"Today philosophy can offer a seizure between that which has come to be its own ruins in "metaphysics" and a certain "elsewhere" which is neither occident nor orient, but is the experience of the something again; for philosophy is all we have to negotiate, be it through logos or as the principle of reason, between something and nothing".[22]

Mohan wrote the book Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK[23] with the philosopher Divya Dwivedi. Jean-Luc Nancy wrote the foreword to Gandhi and Philosophy and described the originality this work in terms of the relation shown by it between truth and suffering. Dwivedi and Mohan stated it as "in direct proportion to the exposure [of Truth] there is suffering, and in direct proportion to un-truth there is liveable life".[24] Nancy wrote that this work creates the new beginning for philosophy following the end of metaphysics,

"This is how this book comes to our attention and contributes to orient us, if I may say so, toward a thought, and even a world, neither humanist nor reduced to suffering in the name of Truth. In the terms of this work: neither metaphysics nor hypophysics."[9]

Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics

 
M. K. Gandhi in 1942

According to Jean-Luc Nancy Gandhi and Philosophy leads to a new orientation outside of the theological, metaphysical and nihilistic tendencies in philosophy. Bernard Stiegler said that this work "give us to reconsider the history of nihilism in the eschatological contemporaneity and shows its ultimate limits" and offers a new path.[11][25] Gandhi and Philosophy calls this new beginning the anastasis of philosophy.[26] Robert Bernasconi said that the inventiveness and the constructivism behind the concept of ana-stasis, or the overcoming of stasis, has a relation to the project of re-beginning of philosophy by Heidegger.[27]

Gandhi and Philosophy proposed that parallel to the metaphysical tendency in philosophy there is hypophysics. Hypophysics is defined as "a conception of nature as value". Mohan said "This non-philosophical system, which we call hypophysics, is necessarily interesting for philosophy. "[3] The distance from nature that human beings and natural objects come to have through the effects of technology lessens their value, or brings them closer to evil. Gandhi's concept of passive force or nonviolence is an implication of his hypophysical committment to nature.[28]

The philosophical direction outside of metaphysics and hypophysics is created through the invention of a new conceptual order. It is meant to enable philosophy to step outside the regime of sign, signifier, and text.[26][3] The Book Review said that the philosophical project of Gandhi and Philosophy is to create new evaluative categories, "the authors, in engaging with Gandhi's thought, create their categories, at once descriptive and evaluative" while pointing to the difficulty given by the rigour of a "A seminal if difficult read for those with an appetite for philosophy".[29] Some of these conceptual inventions have been noted to have come from mathematics and biology.

"The authors invent new formal concepts out of the sciences and mathematics. They engage closely and argumentatively with important thinkers including the biologist Jacques Monod, philosopher Foucault, mathematician Hermann Weyl, anthropologist Pierre Clastres and the burlesque artist Dita Von Teese."[26]

The Indian Express found that one of these inventions is Scalology. Scalology is the practice of using a scale, such as speed or size, to measure the moral state of a political or social system. Gandhi used the scale of speed to measure moral values because for him transporting oneself by foot would be more virtuous compared to taking a train which is effectively treating "slow" as good and "quick" as evil.[30]

The constructionist tendency of Gandhi and Philosophy places it between the dominant philosophical styles of continental philosophy and analytical philosophy.[26] The conclusion of Gandhi and Philosophy emphasizes the construction of a new dimension in philosophy.

"Anastasis is the obscure beginning which would gather the occidental and the oriental to make of them a chrysalis and set off the imagos born with their own spans and skies; these skies and the imagos set against them will refuse to trade in orientations; and these skies will be invisible to the departed souls of Hegel who sought mercury in the darkest nights."[31]

 
A Strandbeest of Theo Jansen

The cover image of Gandhi and Philosophy is a photograph of the kinetic art work by the Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Jansen's moving sculptures are autonomous systems that are able to maintain minimum homeostasis. The work on the cover is called Animaris Percipiere Rectus.[32][33] Gandhi and Philosophy acknowledges the conceptual influence of Jansen's work as "his 'Beach Animals', which hover over Gandhi in the following pages".[34]

Criticism of M. K. Gandhi

Gandhi and Philosophy identifies racism with caste practices and a reviewer wrote, "In the book, Mohan and Dwivedi argue that Gandhi not only upheld caste, but also viewed it as India's unique contribution to the world!".[30] When The Indian Express pointed to the developing controversies on Gandhi's racism Dwivedi said in response that Gandhi was a specific type of racist. She pointed out that the ongoing debates on the topic of Gandhi's racism are misleading which are conducted superficially by selectively quoting Gandhi for convenience,

"It misleads us into thinking that Gandhi is a garden variety racist who wanted to preserve traditional discriminations and segregation mainly because of the prestige of the past or to conserve existing social mores. In fact, Gandhi invented a new basis for racism, which is based on moral superiority".[3]

Tridip Suhrud, the political scientist and the translator of M. K. Gandhi, said that the critical approach taken by Dwivedi and Mohan towards Gandhi is not exactly criticism because criticism is merely about "expressing disagreement and disenchantment". Suhrud wrote in The Hindu that Gandhi and Philosophy "is a remarkably adventurous book [...] and subversive of the established Gandhi. Subversive but deeply affectionate".[35]

Truth can be recognized from its implications, and that power reduces the implications of truth, "Truth is that which has consequences, and with great power comes least consequence".[36] She said that Gandhi's abuses of his power were often interpreted as truthfulness. According to Gandhi and Philosophy Gandhi's ideal state and the absolute security state are virtually indistinguishable. Since Gandhi was not committed to liberal left politics his political programs have the risk of getting appropriated by the far right.[37]

"That is, the attempts in India which still continue to hold Gandhi as the fakir of peace between the ethnic groupings are still playing, often unwittingly, a game to bring about "Hindu Raj" interpreted as secularism."[38]

Mohan and Dwivedi wrote that M. K. Gandhi shares the responsibility for inventing Hindu religion and Hindi language. They said that Gandhi contributed to creating a political culture based on religion and for giving a Hindu character for India as a new country.[16] Gandhi and Philosophy argues that M. K. Gandhi's insensitivity towards the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi state follows from his theory of truth. Gandhi suggested to the Jewish people "to expose oneself to annihilation so that one is conjoined to absolute truth. In their own annihilation the Jewish people were to have the non-experience of Absolute Truth – 'a joyful sleep'."[24]

Philosophy and Technology

 
Kazimir Malevich's Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions

Shaj Mohan opposes Heidegger's standpoint regarding technology. He wrote that Heidegger conflates reason, logos, and technology. Instead Mohan argued for a new role for reason in philosophy. Technology is interested in rule based state transitions. Reason investigates the ground for each system which allows for rule based transitions.[21] He wrote that ignoring the task and work of reason has created the superstition that technology is the same as ontology. The result is "Information metaphysics". Following from this belief we have now created something like "technological will" which is allowed to determine every event in the world.

Mohan said that secrets produce the effect of "truthness". When something that is held in secret is revealed it creates the feeling that it must be true, although it need not be the case.[39] He said that today secrets and their revelations are the games through which politics is played. This is due to both the encryption capabilities available to everyone and also because all secrets can be potentially revealed. In 2011 he argued with the technologist Anish Mohammed that we are entering a new epoch characterized by leaks of secrets, private life, and power,

"Unlike societies in the 1970s, our social body is defined by leaks; everything leaks, from surveillance tapes, wire taps, nudity on a remote beach, books, music, medicinal drugs and lives. Secrets and leaks are no longer governed by the state; there is an egalitarianism of secrets. It is in this social milieu, and within a system where truths of varying intensities are produced by the mode of leak effected, that WikiLeaks appears."[40]

According to Mohan politics is not possible anymore on the basis of the categories of truth, secrecy, and exposure. These categories belong to the epistemological group of clear and distinct ideas. Instead politics should follow the lead of art as artists aim to create confused and obscure objects.

"Encryption has displaced privacy and publicity; surveillance has been made redundant by the amorous denudation of the sheath between the two; the distinction between stimulus and response is confused since the delay between the two in the realms of eroticism and stock market is shorter than we can think. Here, the philosophical exigency would be to invent a necessity for the obscure-politics"[19]

Shaj Mohan noted Kazimir Malevich's Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions as a particular example of the creation of "the obscure" in art for that moment. Mohan's work inspired the Belgium based artist Philippe Braquenier. Braquenier makes photographs which invites the audience to think where and how their data is stored. The series titled "Palimpset" questions the secretive nature of data centers, and the collapse of human memory following the works of Mohan.[41]

Criticisms

Mohan's work on Gandhi was criticised from the point of view methodological and stylistic difficulty. Robert Bernasconi noted that Gandhi and Philosophy is a difficult book and it is "not a book that you will understand at first reading".[27] The difficulty due to the constructivist style was noted by other authors as well.[29][26] Tridip Suhrud pointed to the "opacity" of style in The Hindu and explained it as the effect of "reflections on language".[35] Gandhi and Philosophy was criticised from the point of view of the recent mounting criticisms of Gandhi in India and internationally. It was said that Gandhi and Philosophy might be exalting Gandhi while being very critical of him at the same time. The ambiguous approach to Gandhi was described in one of the commentaries in The Indian Express as "Mohan and Dwivedi have done a masterful job of avoiding the binary fork – hagiography or vituperation – as much of Gandhi and hagiography comes from a need to spiritualise Gandhi".[30] Economic and Political Weekly pointed to Mohan and Dwivedi's participation in the paradigm of "western philosophy", especially when Gandhi's goal was to create an alternative to Eurocentrism. EPW said that her work may be of interest only to continental philosophy as she does not participate in Indic discourses.[42] In The Indian Express Aakash Joshi commented on the negative implications of Gandhi and Philosophy and said that through this book "Gandhi can be seen as a nihilist – someone who even decries sex for reproduction and would like human society to wither away." Joshi stressed that this point of view is opposed to "secularism of a particular kind, freedom from colonial concepts, caste without violence".[3]

References

  1. ^ "Book Review: Gandhi as Chrysalis for a New Philosophy". The Wire.
  2. ^ a b "Gandhi's Experiments with Hypophysics". Frontline.
  3. ^ a b c d e "A new book examines what we talk about when we talk about the Father of the Nation". The Indian Express.
  4. ^ a b "Hindu nationalism and why 'being a philosopher in India can get you killed". Mediapart.
  5. ^ "Biography of Shaj Mohan". Night of Philosophy. 28 October 2018.
  6. ^ "Shaj Mohan bio at Bloomsbury Academic, UK". Bloomsbury Publishing.
  7. ^ "Une nuit de philosophie (1/4) : Philosopher en Inde". France Culture.
  8. ^ "Shaj Mohan". École normale supérieure.
  9. ^ a b Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya; Nancy, Jean-Luc (13 December 2018). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4742-2173-3 – via Google Books.
  10. ^ "Reviews Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics". Bloomsbury Academic, UK.
  11. ^ a b Stiegler, Bernard (14 November 2018). Qu'appelle-t-on Panser ?: 1. L'immense régression. Les Liens qui Libèrent. ISBN 979-1-02-090559-8 – via Google Books.
  12. ^ a b c d "The Resurrection of Philosophy". The Wire.
  13. ^ "The sound of flicking nails". The Hindu.
  14. ^ "New book rubbishes BJP aim to assimilate Gandhi". Deccan Chronicle.
  15. ^ "L'antifascisme, un crime en Inde Par Divya Dwivedi et Shaj Mohan". Libération. 5 September 2018.
  16. ^ a b "Courage to Begin". The Indian Express. 30 September 2019.
  17. ^ "Shaj Mohan at Serpentine Galleries". Serpentine Galleries.
  18. ^ "Is privacy a privilege?". The Tribune.
  19. ^ a b Mohan, Shaj (2015). "On the relation between the Obscure, the Cryptic, and the Public". The Public Sphere From Outside the West. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472571922 – via Google Books.
  20. ^ Voice and Philosophy | Kerala Literature Festival 2018. 23 March 2018 – via YouTube.
  21. ^ a b Mohan, Shaj; Mohammed, Anish (2015). "Principle of Sufficient Reason 2: On Information Metaphysics". The Public Sphere From Outside the West. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472571922 – via Google Books.
  22. ^ "The Anastasis of Philosophy". nightofphilosophy.com. 28 October 2018.
  23. ^ "Gandhi and philosophy". Bloomsbury Publishing.
  24. ^ a b "Book Excerpt: What different theories of philosophy tell us about Gandhi's experiments with truth". Scroll.in.
  25. ^ "Reviews Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics". Bloomsbury Academic, UK.
  26. ^ a b c d e "Gandhi as Chrysalis for a New Philosophy". The Wire.
  27. ^ a b Robert Bernasconi speaking at the launch of 'Gandhi & Philosophy'. Bloomsbury India. 14 March 2019 – via YouTube.
  28. ^ Singh, Siddharth (27 September 2019). "A philosophical appraisal of Gandhi's outlook and ideas". Open Magazine.
  29. ^ a b Tankha, V. "Philosophizing Gandhi". The Book Review.
  30. ^ a b c Ayyar, Raj. "Bending the binary". The Indian Express.
  31. ^ Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (13 December 2018). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 217. ISBN 978-1-4742-2173-3 – via Google Books.
  32. ^ "Theo Jansen's Strandbeests Walk New England Beaches".
  33. ^ Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (13 December 2018). Gandhi and Philosophy Front Cover. ISBN 978-1-4742-2172-6.
  34. ^ Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (13 December 2018). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4742-2173-3 – via Google Books.
  35. ^ a b Suhrud, Tridip (17 August 2019). "'Gandhi and Philosophy – On Theological Anti-Politics' review: Leap of faith". The Hindu.
  36. ^ "Book Excerpt: When Gandhi Threatened Nehru With Making A Letter Public". NDTV.
  37. ^ "New book rubbishes BJP aim to assimilate Gandhi". Deccan Chronicle.
  38. ^ Template:Cite article
  39. ^ Anish Mohammed; Shaj Mohan (26 March 2011). "The New Secret". Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 46, no. 13. pp. 7–8.(subscription required)
  40. ^ Sundaram, Ravi (2015). "Publicity, Transparency, and the Circulation Engine". Current Anthropology. 56: S297–S305. doi:10.1086/683300.
  41. ^ "Semblance". juileeraje.com.
  42. ^ Raghuramaraju, A (3 August 2019). "Gandhi in the Company of Western Philosophers". Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 54, no. 31. pp. 7–8.
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