Recently I stumbled upon David Hume again. I remember how intensive the study of his writings in Heidelberg was. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American lectures on the history of ideas. So I stumbled upon the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his “aesthetic” theory. I thought of rasa and began a conversation with AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines I had never seen. Yet I was a little disappointed by the superficiality. But if I compare the conversation with other conversations I have had with people over dinner, it was one of the more interesting ones after all.
So I wanted to know a little more precisely and looked it up in Gilles Deleuze. He had already taken part fictitiously in the conversation with AI, but his late essay on David Hume is on quite another level. Deleuze’s analysis is brilliant. He shows the full force of Hume’s revolutionary approach: a thinking that is empirical and positivist, that works through the power of the intellect, with conjectures about causality, and also with the power of association and intuition, to show how the human being builds an edifice of thought. This edifice of thought is not oriented toward metaphysical concepts such as Self, God or world, but shows how thinking itself moves and unfolds. It quickly becomes clear why Deleuze takes up David Hume once again toward the end of his life.
Dvaitadvaita
But this throws me a little into a crisis, or hopefully brings me to a point of new synthesis. For crises and new beginnings often do not differ so very much, really. Since I am moving here at the edges of what I can think, it becomes difficult to formulate. An attempt nonetheless: The dualism of the Western tradition of thought is a trap it is hard to move out of. This is largely connected with the great importance this dualism assigns to the Self. Once you have assumed yourself to be the center of the world, placed your own rights above those of everything else and fenced them back in only by the force of rational principles, a worldview arises that is concentrated on the individual human being, expressing itself religiously in the story of the suffering of individual prophets. The twists and turns of this story of suffering are part of great subjective narratives that express themselves in art.
The way out of this is not to dissolve dualism one-sidedly, into a materialist position or into a purely metaphysical position, but into a philosophy of immanence. That immanence, the conception that there is only one world which contains everything in its complexity, demands a new thinking. Space and time, change and process, relation and individual, difference and repetition, resonance and language, and so much more, must be thought anew. That was Deleuze’s project. And that is also the project of the Upanishads. And that is why I read Deleuze in India.
Now I read Deleuze’s thoughts on Hume and remember my philosophy studies and the desperate trench warfare within dualism. Yet I see that Hume and the Vedas strive for something similar. A deep insight into the nature of the cosmos that manages without an excessive self-exaltation of the Self. This may sound somewhat absurd, since in the Upanishads, Atman, the Self as principle, Puruscha as the primordial soul, and Brahman as the creator are the starting point of thinking. But precisely here is the connection too. The Upanishads think them together, as a kind of self-differentiation, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This differentiation is possible only in a thinking of immanence; here the different traditions of thought converge across millennia and continents.
So the crisis this triggers for me is this: I understand the empiricist’s perspective and the perspective of the Vedas. Both overcome dualism, in two forms, in a dualist manner. And in the Vedas, people then speak of Dvaitadvaita – dualism-non-dualism, the duality of duality and nonduality. And as I myself approach this concept of Dvaitadvaita a little, my confusion arises from the fact that this happens with the help of AI.
