The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

Abstract

ABTRACTA distinctive claim of some of the configurations of ‘modern Hinduism’ is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides us with a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada, and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as a ‘scientific religion’, which is geared towards the spiritual perfection of humanity. Many of these figures appropriated a classical Vedāntic Hindu distinction between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ knowledge, and mapped it onto the distinction, inflected by colonial power, between ‘western science’ and ‘Vedic/yogic wisdom’. Whilst for some classical thinkers, this distinction applied to the disjunction between the ‘lower’ pathway of ritual action and the ‘higher’ pathway of insight into the Self, Vivekananda and others reformulated it in terms of the difference they proposed between, on the one hand, the empirical processes of the natural sciences and, on the other, the liberating efficacy of self-knowledge. I examine three key aspects of this mapping: the semantic ranges of ‘science’ in some western and Hindu traditions, the Orientalist milieus of colonial India in which these translations were developed, and the conceptual instabilities of the hybrid trope of ‘Hindu science’.