Interconnectedness

Schopenhauer, who was a great admirer of the Upanishads, wrote a small book, “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (1847). He identifies four forms of causality, for example, small cause—large effect, or large cause—small effect, and so on… This fascinated me because it offers a broader understanding than the purely scientific model, which ultimately always follows the law of conservation of energy. When someone declares a war, for example, that is a relatively simple act (small cause) with an enormous effect. I wonder how this relates to historical scholarship. Here too there is the idea of causal relationships. In historical scholarship, things always happen for a reason. But this reason is often disproportionate to the effect.

Narratives

If we turn away from the rigid model of simple causality, then history is no longer a rational, causally necessary and unambiguous succession of linked events, but a network of different elements in a stimulus–response pattern. Deleuze introduced the concept of the rhizome, which fits here. Everything is somehow connected to everything else through various and countless junctions. The sack of rice that falls over in China and triggers a butterfly effect is a vivid example.

In postmodern and poststructuralist analyses of historical events, however, we see attempts not to reduce events causally, but to examine their web of relations. Possible narratives arise, one as valid as another, as long as it adheres to the facts. It is said that all human beings know one another at the seventh degree. That is statistics, but it reveals the complexity. Someone inspired another person to write something that was read by a third person and then presented to a fourth, who then reacted and prompted an action in a fifth that counts as a historical event. This can be very arbitrary and quickly contradict the linear narratives of history books. Yet it need not be wrong.

Such an understanding of the world, in which everything is connected to everything and a monocausal explanation is impossible, is not merely a critique of rationalism and the rigor of the sciences. It is ultimately an acknowledgment of an interconnectedness that exceeds human comprehension. It is actually spiritual, for it recognizes a complex force. In the Upanishads this force is sung of as the Self. Among postmodern thinkers, this tends to go under immanence, or a tolerant materialism that is ultimately not reduced to atomism but is rather to be thought of as an opposition to dualism. Everything is matter, that is, everything is a form of being—that is, there is only one Self. The circle closes.

The Ground in Being

The fundamental evil was the excessive overexaltation of understanding and reason, and the disregard of intuition. In the earliest Upanishads, mystical and rational thinking have not yet been separated. Here we find an intuitive beholding of the Self, an acknowledgment of active forces that are not irrational, yet not purely rational either. It is a holistic thinking that postmodernity intuitively revived in its somewhat eccentric materialist, Marxist and psychoanalytic reading.