Category Archives: Mahabharata

Interruptions and Philosophy

by Tim Gorichanaz Mahabharata, Rhetoric

Yo, Taylor. I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!

Kanye West, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards
Socrates, Study, Boardman Robinson, 1935
Boardman Robinson, Socrates (study for “The Law Givers”), ca. 1935, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A foundational work in European philosophy is Plato’s Republic. Even today, 2,400 years after it was written, it is still one of the top college texts assigned worldwide. The tome takes the form of a dialogue in which Socrates discusses a number of topics with various interlocutors, from the meaning of justice to the structure of the soul.

An interesting feature of the Republic is the role of interruption in the dialogue. Plato scholar David Roochnik goes so far as to say the Republic is structured around five key interruptions. Perhaps a chief observation here is that the entire book itself is framed as an interruption. The Republic starts this way:

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess […] When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

Republic, Book I

At this point, the characters go to Polemarchus’ home, where the philosophical dialogue takes place. For Roochnik, the interruptive character of the Republic emphasizes that the book is (a) a conversation, which is how philosophy happens; and (b) deeply human, rather than abstract or systematic in nature.

If the Republic is a monument of Western philosophy, the Mahabharata is a monument of Eastern philosophy. It’s a Sanskrit epic—the national epic of India—and one of the major texts of Hinduism. But besides being purely spiritual or historical, the Mahabharata is also deeply philosophical.

I’ve only recently begun studying the Mahabharata, but I’ve already been piqued by the role of interruption in this text as well. Just as with the Republic, the entirety of the Mahabharata is sparked from an interruption: In this case, the seer Vyasa and his disciples have come to interrupt King Janamejaya, who was carrying out a snake sacrifice that threatened to wipe out the entire race of serpents. Nothing like a 1.8-million-word poem about your ancestors to make you forget what you were doing, I suppose.

And just like with the Republic, the dialogue of the Mahabharata is dotted with interruptions along the way. Perhaps the most famous is when Prince Arjuna is riding into war alongside his charioteer Krishna, when he calls Krishna to pause in no man’s land—”time freezes,” says my translation—to have a discussion about metaphysics and ethics. In the West, this part of the Mahabharata is best known of all: It’s the Bhagavad Gita.

I’m not sure what to make of all this yet. Perhaps it is only that we humans interrupt each other, and that interruption is present in any dialogue. But it seems that there’s something deeper at play.

In the Republic, Plato makes the point that learning is a matter of turning around—exemplified in the Allegory of the Cave—of questioning, of thinking, of dialogue. Perhaps these are all forms of interruption. This is quite interesting, given that the word interruption has a negative connotation: we don’t want to be interrupted, and we feel we shouldn’t interrupt other people. Then again, we don’t quite like learning, either, and we avoid it when we can. But when is interruption good, and when is it Kanye West at the 2009 VMA’s? (Or is it, perhaps, that Kanye West was being the consummate philosopher here?)

Origin Stories and Being Thrown

by Tim Gorichanaz History, Information, Mahabharata

Humans are storytelling creatures, and some stories have been with us for as long as we’ve been human. Among these are, fittingly, stories of our own origins. It’s futile to try to pin down when such and such story originated—and what’s more, it’s mostly missing the point.

17th century RajasthanI manuscript of the Mahabharata depicting Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, who serves as the scribe
Detail, 17th century Rajasthani manuscript of Ganesha recording the Mahabharata (Wikipedia)

I’m reading the Mahabharata, in Carol Satyamurti’s retelling, and the opening pages of the epic give a fascinating example of what I mean. The story begins with the story of its own origin, in crystal clear description. Yet by the story’s own story, it’s hard to say how exactly it came about. We are told that Vyasa, a seer, composed the poem, and then he dictated it to Ganesha, who wrote it down. Vyasa then taught the poem to a number of disciples, who recited it to a king to interrupt a sacrifice. Ugrashravas, a poet, was present at that event, and he later told the story to a group of ascetics in a forest. The Mahabharata tells us that the version within its pages is the one told by Ugrashravas—as if Vyasa and Ganesha already knew that Ugrashravas would go to the forest from the start.

So what should be made of this? Why not simplify matters by just saying that we’re reading what was written down by Ganesha? Or why not have Vyasa write it down himself? It’s all as if to suggest that if we are looking for origins we’ll wind up going around in circles.

It may be useful to think about this through the concept of thrownness from phenomenology. The idea is that we humans are “thrown” into our human situation. Part of what this means is that we don’t choose our starting conditions: we don’t pick our family, location and so on. As James Baldwin wrote memorably in Giovanni’s Room, “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

More deeply, being thrown means that there’s not an objective starting point for our lives. We don’t remember our first moments. Of course we must have started at some point, and certainly we have some impressionistic early memories, but our conscious lives seem to start up already on, sort of like how giraffes are born running.

The phenomenological concept describes human conscious experience as thrown, but it also seems to describe humanity more broadly. Our species evolved from some common ancestor with other primates, indeed with everything else alive today, shaped within and as part of our world… and so there never was a first human. And nor was there ever really a first story. Our stories about our origins seem to have emerged in the same way. Today we are thrown into them.