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The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism
In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent--as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants--from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice--with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm -- when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century terms, how does mind connect to body?
These questions drive Loriliai Biernacki's The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism. Biernacki draws on Abhinavagupta's thought--and particularly his yet-untranslated, philosophical magnum opus, the Isvara Pratyabhijña Vivrti Vimarsini--to think through contemporary issues such as the looming prospect of machine AI, ideas about information, and our ecological crises. She argues that Abhinavagupta's panentheism can help us understand our current world and can contribute to a New Materialist re-envisioning of the relationship that humans have with matter.
Book Details
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publish Date: Feb 6th, 2023
- Pages: 264
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.34in - 6.36in - 0.95in - 1.11lb
- EAN: 9780197643075
- Categories: • Hinduism - General
About the Author
Loriliai Biernacki is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests include Hinduism, gender, New Materialism, and the interface between religion and science. Her first book, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra (2007) won the Kayden Award in 2008. She is co-editor of God's Body: Panentheism across the World's Religious Traditions (2013).
Praise for this book
"The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism is a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary work that draws from a broad palette, including medieval Indian philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy, neuroscience, physics, and information theory...The book shows how useful it can be to work across traditions and disciplines to reveal new insights about consciousness." -- Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion"The Matter of Wonder interrogates our notions of human-nonhuman relations, agency, will, and sentience, raising questions about what is "living" and "alive," and thereby raises questions on the nature of consciousness itself. The book is an important contribution to understanding panentheism through the lens of Indic philosophy. Abhinavgupta's theory can enrich western accounts of new materialism, as it discusses the awareness of the innate and pervasive subjectivity of materiality." -- Amee Parikh, Reading Religion