Firstly, I am deeply grieved that you have given up on philosophy. I am reading your fascinating Santarasa (1) and find it a model of what a scholarly text should be morally. It is enthusiastic, beautiful in conveying beauty, difficult in such a manner it makes you want to pry out more, honest in that your motive is not simply attaining castrated truth but writing what is FUN. When you say on the first page, "If we were to sum up Abhinava’s theory in one phrase as ‘great art demands the transcendence of self’", at first it seems anybody could say that. But you show Abhinavagupta means it truly, fully, literally, for the bliss of the experience of great art is the same as the bliss of the experience of Shiva or any ‘transcendence’ as transcendence so that they are interchangeable. Then you can say, "Shiva demands .the transcendence of self".

"Santarasa might be translated as ‘the imaginative experience of tranquility’."(2) You also define it as aesthetic bliss somewhere. You state that, "in a sense we are dealing with religious material," but I would say only in a Kashmiri Shaivist manner, and not in a Hindu and certainly not Judeo-Christian sense. You go on to say on the same page, "We can respond to the power and grace of a mind without necessarily agreeing with what is said". But that sounds as if you are saying Abhinavagupta is spouting dogmatics which I do not think, and I am not qualified to do so, he ever does in any sense. I think Abhinavagupta is committed to Shaivism as a director is to a play, and you know the comparison is apt. Your example Dante is committed in a personal, ethical, and philosophical sense to Latin Christianity and Thomas Aquinas. This makes him an opposite, not an example. Then I would say, ’We respond to the power and grace of Abhinavagupta’s mind and therefore must agree in some way with what is said’. This is actually the spirit in which you write your book and makes it so fascinating. "In extracting Abhinava’s philosophy of aesthetics, we have discovered that he is deeply concerned with religious values in literature"(4). But we must view this from your earlier statement that "Great art demands transcendence of self", which applies just as much to Shakespeare, Aiskylos, Sophokles, Euripides, Racine, Homer, and Rilke as it does to the Mahabharata. It also makes it relevant to Heidegger in your forthcoming book Fallen Heroes since this is fundamental to his thinking of art.


We have tried to show in this volume how often Abhinava draws on santarasa for his major contribution to Sanskrit aesthetics, the theory of rasa. Reduced to its bare essentials the theory is as follows: watching a play or reading a poem for the sensitive reader (sahrdaya) entails a loss of the sense of present time and space. All worldly considerations for the time being cease. Since we are not indifferent (tatastha) to what is taking place, our involvement must be of a purer variety than we normally experience. We are not directly and personally involved, so the usual medley of desires and anxieties dissolve. Our hearts respond sympathetically (hrdayasamvada) but not selfishly. Finally the response becomes total, all-engrossing, and we identify with the situation depicted (tanmayibhavana). The ego is transcended, and for the duration of the aesthetic experience, the normal waking "I" is suspended. Once this actually happens, we suddenly find that our responses are not like anything we have hitherto experienced, for now that all normal emotions are gone, now that the hard knot of "selfness" has been untied, we find ourselves in an unprecedented state of mental and emotional calm. The purity of our emotion and the intensity of it take us to a higher level of pleasure than we could know before – we experience sheer undifferentiated bliss (anandaikaghana) for we have come into direct contact with the deepest recesses of our own unconscious where the memory of a primeval unity between man and the universe is still strong. Inadvertently, says Abhinavagupta, we have arrived at the same inner terrain as that occupied by the mystic, though our aim is very different from his. Such an experience cannot but make us impatient with the ordinary turmoil of emotions that is our inner life, and though Abhinava never explicitly says so, one cannot help feeling that he expects the reader to search out now these experiences on a more permanent basis.(5)


(Abhinavagupta attempted) to show that the states of mind during religious experiences and during literary experiences bore a basic affinity to each other. Literature, he wished to prove, at least the best literature, is just one more expression of an ineffable transcendent experience.(6)


The one thing that santarasa does that no other rasa can, is that it disturbs us. If we really believe the message that any successful play dealing with santarasa tells us, we hear what Rilke said was the final lesson of all great literature: "You must change your life". (7)


If our reading is extensive enough, concentrated enough, with no distractions from the outside world, then we can induce in ourselves a profound imaginative experience of tranquility, santarasa.(8)


Abhinava was not only a philosopher, he was also an authority on Tantric ritual. The rites he practiced, probably even before he became interested in literary theory, must have provided him with his first contact with the kind of play activity he later found once again in the theatre. It seems to us no accident that Abhinava was fonder of the theatre than any other form of literature. (He established) the intimate connection between theatre and ritual (and thus by implication mythology as well) . . . (9)(10)

When I finish this, I shall read your other books on Abhinavagupta, most of which seem to be only available through interlibrary loan and the Xerox machine. I wish you would get the Santarasa reprinted in a revised form intended for the Sanskritless reader. There still seems to be appreciation for you in Sanskrit scholar community, though they miss much if they just study your Harvard book. Kashmiri Shaivism seems to be a world you utterly reject in your book Oceanic Feeling, (though as I grasp more and more of Shankara and Abhinavagupta—the one cannot go without the other—and see the religious and magical aspects that seem so prominent to the ordinary person efface themselves into something we are completely unfamiliar with in the west, worship as drama instead of coercion of the divine, I wonder why you so emphasize the fraudulent and self-deceptive when you must have understood something else was going on all the time). Still, the proposition one should seek motivation through attaining true and rewarding human relations, instead of an imaginary self-inflated god, is depressing since human relationships are, in plain reality, neither true nor rewarding in their very nature. Human beings are at their best writing books as you do. Common, ordinary, devious intents, built into language itself at a superficial level, constantly corrupt our everyday relations and twist the very words we speak as we speak them, even when trying to be honest. They can to some extent be laid aside when writing and rewriting, especially the latter that is an inverting of consciousness which delves into what you are really trying to express. Even though books can be, not just suggestive which can be missed, but downright, deliberately deceptive (re Nietzsche, Genet, the Marquis de Sade, Shankara, Abhinavagupta), they still have the bare, literal honesty of saying, laying open to view, what they say irrevocably. All their evidence is essentially present, at hand, for the reader to find out what the context of truth is. Reading and writing are the only forms of the soul we have left in the modern world. It is the only legitimate form of worship left (re the atheistic reverence of tradition of Gershom Scholem).

Secondly, as to dogs, your book Dogs Never Lie About Love has been a revelation to a dog hater. It has taught me to properly project my hate on irresponsible people who own dogs. A friend once told me that the only things which could save the world would be if the Martians came (Heidegger said something similar, "Only a god can save us."). Your book has shown me dogs are those Martians. Though their overall ‘mission’(3) of human salvation has failed, they are at least THERE for you in a way that is thoroughly compromised in a human being (yes, I know I am taking about myself). I now take my daughter’s dog "Sugar" out on walks to the park, and certainly receive as much from her as she does from me. Unfortunately she thinks cars are playthings (and your book demonstrated to me dogs non-verbally think), and the faster they go the more attractive they are. She is part border collie and part German shepherd. As ‘Border collie’, is she trying to herd the cars. I go everyday to a fence enclosed baseball diamond, let her loose inside, and watch her race the cars that go by while I read your books. On the way into the park, we always pass by one particular bush always filled with sparrows that fly away as we get up to them. Sugar pays no attention to them. I have never seen a dog do that before. But I’m told that she chases them off when she is in the back yard. Is it her territory? The obvious process of her learning about other dogs may indicate she thinks of herself as human and does not yet identify with those four footed things. In other words, she has ceased to be an inferior being, sub-human, a thing to me, and has become a individual that is not human at all, especially in the mystery of smelling which is not communication, at least as we think of it.

Thirdly, in reference to your forthcoming book Fallen Heroes, Heidegger, regardless of anything, is the most powerful and enduring philosopher since Aristotle. His philosophy pursues a dogged and thorough logic throughout his work even when he is supposedly being mystical by pointing beyond logical boundaries. But everyone does that in everyday life when they say, "I don’t know about that" and then indicate. In everyday life, ‘one’ always assumes there is a logical explanation that either some one else possesses to give you or lies there to be dug out by yourself. But this ‘common sense’ assumption is mere faith combined with a desire to avoid the ‘inconvenience’ of what it actually is that you are confronting and really want to demean and control. Like him, this is something the Indian philosophers also do, maintaining logic up to the edge of experience and no further because experience is not logical: it is not words. Experience is what logic is about. It is what logic attempts to describe. Language is inherently logical, and, though people have tried to ‘prove’ otherwise (the ultimate irrationality), there is no such thing as an irrational language. Language describes experience and experience is just THERE, no matter what, in the irrevocable course of time. Aristotle is the fundamental basis of all of Heidegger’s philosophy. Metaphysics was not the title of his metaphysical work, but rather he had two titles for it, either First Philosophy or Theology. "All men, by nature, desire to know," to Aristotle is a theological proposition. Heidegger, philosophically, is antiPlatonic, though I am slowly finding out there is a very deep and wide spread influence by Plato on Heidegger. His only book on Plato, Plato’s The Sophist(4), discusses in its first half book VI of The Nicomachian Ethics, then goes on to give a fascinating account of Plato’s dialogue (I need to go back over that path again to understand exactly why he did that), including Plato’s ‘Seventh Letter’ where Plato denounces all of his interpreters. Although Heidegger thoroughly rejects Plato’s idea concept, he makes it far more clear what it fundamentally is, i.e., a reality of SIGHT—NOT ABSTRACTION. That is, an identity, an ‘idea’, is seen, named, and remembered. Plato always intended the primacy of the uncoveredness of the seen.

Heidegger’s Being and Time has been accused of being a paraphrase of the Nicomachian Ethics, which it is not, but it is there where Aristotle was the first to create the existentialist concept of ‘project’. Think about the common Greek saying, "Count not a man happy until he is dead" which plays an important part in the Ethics interpreted in the sense of futural time, the project completed! My point is this: Heidegger almost never mentions Aristotle’s Politics where Aristotle says Plato’s Republic, as a serious political model, is ludicrous. The Ethics and Politics are based on a fundamental notion of morality basically vague teachings learned from your parents and friends that, when one becomes mature, one uses the judgement process of epiekeia, best translated as ‘equity’ like the variable scales of justice, a weighing out of the real and present situation in all of its factors. Heidegger only notes, that I know of, the Republic one time—in the rector speech. It has nothing whatever to do with his consistent philosophy—his books! As a person, he is a slimy, deceitful, vicious son of a bitch. (I use these terms deliberately because discussing it in a sterile academic way destroys what really happened.) In your dog book, I do not remember your saying Konrad Lorenz actually hurt specific, real people. Heidegger tried to have Jews and Jewish sympathizers fired from their jobs. Then he deliberately lied about his Nazi past even when there was little point in doing so. Kisiel says that he pretended to his students that he had been a front line soldier during WWI in his early classes. He also fostered the myth that his role under the Hitler government had been one of resistance. I grew up with the myth of Heidegger’s resistance to the Nazis , the supposed retaining of antiNazi faculty members in the administration of the University of Freiburg and that he was forced to resign the rectorship because of his political unreliability. He resigned because the Nazis thought he was a jerk and would have fired him. Someone has proposed that he thought he was going to reform the Nazi party from within, and that he considered himself a preferable fuhrer to Hitler. I believe he possibly thought so, if for no other reason that the pure crudity of the Nazi leadership. But his actual acts, despite all of his Jewish friends, lovers, students and followers such as Karl Lowith, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Paul Celan, and Emmanuel Levinas, belie any benevolent notion to that leadership he might have proposed. As a person, he was simply vicious. But his books are still wonderful. Some people have tried to find Nazism in his concept of authenticity from Being and Time (1927), but that would make the fool Polonius’ saying, "To thine own self be true, and thou shalt be false to no man," which, as a Nazi doctrine, is absurd (but what did Shakespeare intend for that to have come out of Polonius? the utter uselessness of wisdom?)