Saturday 14th December 2024,
Sandeep Mann
Spotlight

Philosophy & Spirituality

Lala Hardayal and various commentaries on The BhagwadGita drew me onto philosophy. Being anti-establishment by nature, defiant for its disapproved acts, spirituality, and not religion pored through my system.

Have been following various philosophers, chronicled by Will Durant, and see myself as an exponent of speech thinking or dialogicism. The central insight of speech thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act which is the basis of our social existence. The greater part of my work has been devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. Speech makes us collective masters of time and gives us the ability to overcome historical death by founding new, more expansive and fulfilling spaces of social-life.

In my own way, I belong to that post-Nietzschean revival of religious thought, where common is the belief that religious speech, which is seen as distinctly not metaphysical, discloses layers of experience and creativity (personal and socio-historical) which remain inaccessible to the metaphysics of naturalism.

I see pervasion of perception of all that is intangible as the redeeming force for mankind on its evolutionary trip, grounded in philosophy of science marked not by a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also promoting a new style of philosophy of science that brings us closer to the history of science. Naturally, I see science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. I believe in the Kuhn’s ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.