Jacob Palaparambil, "Richard De Smet's Discovery of the Notion of 'Person' in Adi Sankaracarya's Advaita Vedanta," defence, 16 May 2022

Jacob Palaparambil's defence at the UPS, Rome. Scaria Thuruthiyil, 1st reader; Bryan Lobo, SJ, 2nd reader, Mauro Mantovani, 3rd reader. President: Andrea Bozzolo.

Most of the questions were about De Smet's interpretation of Sankara and its correctness, rather than about Jacob's interpretation of De Smet. 

Suggestions by Mauro Mantovani: (1) develop analogy, just as you have developed relation; (2) expand also on attributes; (3) read Gilles Emery, on q. 28 of the S.Th. 

He also said Thomas spoke of two notions of person, one suitable for the human person, the other for the divine persons. 

Bryan Lobo asked about person and reincarnation and moksa: without the body in moksa, is there a person or not? [But in Christian theology we have the same problem: is the separated soul a person, if person refers to the integrity of a being?]

He also asked about intuition: did De Smet speak about intuition? is there not an intuition at least in the mystical experience? that surely is not reasoning. [The Marechal tradition does not like the notion of intuition. and not Lonergan either. But one would have to examine De Smet's writings on the matter. He certainly wrote about the supreme experience.]

De Smet, Discovery of the Person, video in Portuguese

 dear Scott,

good morning to you!

one of my young friends, currently engaged in a PhD on Person in De Smet, found this video. do you know anything about it? are you behind it? just curious. keep well.

Ivo

Scott Randall Paine, <srpaine@gmail.com> 27.10.2021:

Hi Ivo,

      Ultimately you are behind it, since you shared with me a PDF of Brahman & Person, which I recently shared with one of my philosophy students. He is also a translator, so made a provisional spoken Portuguese translation of parts of the book available on youtube. Maybe we can find a publisher who will pay him to translate and bring out the whole book here in Brazil. I'd love to see De Smet better known.

the video: 

A Descoberta da Pessoa - Richard De Smet, 16 sep 2021

https://youtu.be/-H0odw9B8rQ

Person, varna, samsara, and so on

From Peter Gonsalves, part of an email to me, 24 Feb 2013:
Ivo, congrats again!
Reading your article took me back to those JDV days.
I remember faintly De Smet's reinterpretation of avidya...which was interesting although it did not concur with the dominant Hindu thinking at that time.
I feel De Smet scholars may need to explore if Hindu sects have co-opted a quasi Thomistic notion of 'person'. And if these sects do exist, it would be interesting to know how they may have 'resolved' the varna and samsara dilemmas while holding on to such a concept.
Without this check, De Smet's research will continue to remain a parallel interpretation that has no basis in the real, lived Hinduism - a bit like Gandhi's rejection of untouchability on the basis of his vishishistadvaita that accommodated a non-hierarchical, non-discriminatory interpretation of the varnas that, unfortunately, has few takers even today.
Until then, the fundamentals of Christian personhood will remain a thorn in the side of Hindu orthodoxy.


From me back:
de smet and person: we're just beginning! but yes, your openings are great.
nb: 'person' is fundamentally Christian, not Thomist.
Thomas offered a great definition.
Ratzinger offers a critique of both Augustine and Thomas, saying they are not 'relational enough' in the application of person to human beings. they reserve relation to God, sort of. (see my article in the Veliath festschrift).

could you say something more about "resolving the varna and samsara dilemmas while holding on to the concept of person"?

for DS, interestingly, hierarchy also means a type of relatedness that is absent in the modern western atomic individualist notion of person... so for him, surprisingly, varna is positive. how to transmute that - or how to face that today -is one of the thorny questions, not so much for the orthodox hindu as for anyone with a subaltern sensitivity.

Mahadevan for one had no problem accepting DS' thesis way back in 1974.

and so on.

From PG again:

By the dilemma I mean: how would those Hindu sects (if they do exist) who accept the 'christian' concept of person (as sharing the inalienable right to dignity and equality with all others) sustain at the same time the existence of caste hierarchy that is intrinsically linked to karmic effects of actions from previous births.

(I once had an interesting conversation with an auto rickshaw driver who very casually explained that it wasn't his duty to help the poor just as it wasn't right of him to envy the rich. People were where they were on the ladder of life with the duty to do their best on their own rung, because they merited God's reward/punishment on the basis of how each one behaved in their previous life.)

So how would Hindu groups (not individual philosophers, but leaders of contemporary hindu revivalism) who are open to the Christian concept of person reconcile such thinking with traditionally accepted Hindu understanding of man: where 'being human' does not carry a single definition of 'personhood' but is ontologically differentiated on the basis of a karmic hierarchy...that even includes the possibility of reduction to sub-human forms.

My reply:

thanks for expanding.
ds in an aside says that rebirth remains a major problem re the acceptance of the personhood of the human being...
as for caste, it is an evil but not one that regards the ontological constitution of the human being. though even that would need to be rethought, in the light of the fact that meaning is part of human being.

Release of 'Brahman and Person' in Pune

I was happy that Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet, ed. Ivo Coelho (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2010) was released at De Nobili College, Pune, on 2 March 2010, which happened to be, fittingly, the 13th death anniversary of Fr De Smet.

The book was released at the hands of Dr Noel Sheth, SJ, former President of Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, and well-known Indologist. Dr Sheth paid homage to Fr De Smet in glowing terms. Dr John Vattanky said a few words also about the person of De Smet and about the book.

The book contains 14 essays by De Smet spanning a period from 1957 to 1996, a veritable campaign on the notion of person. (One essay could not be traced: "Contemporary Philosophical Anthropology," New Consciousness 1973.) De Smet's concern was (1) to trace out the history of the term 'person' as it emerged in the West; (2) to use this history to highlight the inappropriateness of translating nirguna Brahman as impersonal Absolute; (3) to raise a notion of person from within Indian thought, drawing upon both orthodox and heterodox streams, not discounting also the contribution of great contemporary Indian thinkers.

De Smet's thesis is that the term 'person' was fleshed out in the Christian effort to speak precisely about God, and that this meaning was lost in the modern age of the West, so much so that an obscure German philosopher called F.H. Jacobi could decide that 'person' could be applied only to beings having qualities, and therefore only to finite beings. This choice influenced a certain number of German philosophers, and also, eventually, the great, mostly German, translators of the Sanskrit works, who rendered saguna as personal and nirguna as impersonal. This fateful choice led to the still current situation in India, where the para Brahman is regarded as impersonal, and, conversely, the Christian God is regarded (with condescension) as personal and therefore as somehow anthropomorphic.

This thesis, presented several times at various meetings of Indian philosophers and Indologists, led to the declaration by no less a Vedantin than T.M.P. Mahadevan that the Brahman of the Upanisads was nothing if not personal. For person is an analogical term, a term that is capable of being applied not only to human beings but also to the divine Absolute, though of course in a super-eminent way.

The problem is that India does not have a proper and adequate equivalent to the notion of person, especially to that notion worked out by Thomas Aquinas, "a singular subsistent of an intellectual nature," one capable of interpersonal relationships and therefore intrinsically social. Vyakti is rooted in the idea of manifestation and leans towards 'modalism'; purusa really means male human being, and has its own history heavily coloured by Samkhya; jana has no philosophical tradition behind it. In the end, if we go by the article De Smet contributed to the Marathi Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it would seem that he settled for vyakti as best rendering 'person'; the felicity of this choice seems to be borne out by the current usage of vyakti in Marathi and related languages not only as 'individual' but also as 'person.'

The 14 essays that make up Brahman and Person include one translated from the German (earlier published in Kairos), and 7 entries translated from the Marathi Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This publication is a first step towards making De Smet's rather voluminous output more easily accessible and available, his publications being mostly in the form of articles in a variety of rather inaccessible and mostly Indian journals. That was part of his 'ascetical' option to write for people of other faiths rather than for Christians, and for an Indian public rather than for a Western one.

Hopefully De Smet's Sankara essays, his doctoral dissertation on Sankara, and his notes for students (Guidelines in Indian Philosophy) will be made available in the same way.