[Knowledge & Experience: A critique of Dr.

Balagangadharas response to Jeffrey

Kripal]
Dear Dr. Balagangadhara
I am hesitant to bring up this old piece of writing. I read it only recently and discovered
subsequently that it is well known to people who are otherwise familiar with your work.
It deals with certain issues that I have been trying to grapple with. I have not read Jeffrey
Kripals book. I am more interested in the personal journey you describe, and in
particular, I want to take up the argument that you construct in the course of your
response to his book, which is based on the contrast that you set up between the way
science preserves the experience while producing new knowledge and the way Jeffrey
Kirpals explanations transform the experience divesting it of its original significance.
You describe your bewilderment when you were told that the linga actually means
penis. You also describe your discomfort with your friends holding your hands once you
had been exposed to public displays of homosexual love in Amsterdam. A barrier was
created between you and your earlier experiences of reverence and friendship by the
insertion of this new knowledge. You find this knowledge spurious because it distorts
and denies your genuine experience. The explanation came actively between your
experiences and you and prevented you from describing or reflecting on your own
experiences.
I think, first of all, that it is not just the nature of explanation, which prevented you from
accessing these experiences. If someone tells you anything, you dont believe it or you do
not necessarily take it seriously. It is the authority of these explanations that trouble you
and others. The explanation is authoritative because it is western (or American),
scientific, rational, modern. If it were not authoritative it would have no power to
transform your experiences. A person who does not accept this authority would ignore
these explanations or respond by knocking off a few teeth of the one who suggests such
explanations. This also explains the transformation of your experience of friendly
handholding in public. There were no explanations provided by anyone in this case. What
you perceived in Amsterdam transformed your experience. The new knowledge in this
case was your own perception, and your experience of another culture. The effect on you,
however, was completely opposite of what happened to those western travelers
experience of another culture who interpreted Indian religious practices in the light of
their own theological prejudices and preoccupations. How a knowledge claim affects us
depends on the relationship that we have with that knowledge claim. I would argue that
the way we relate to a knowledge claim is shaped by the normative structure or
framework of knowledge in which the claim is embedded and to which we may or may
not give our assent.
What kind of authority a culture or an explanation possesses and how this authority has
been produced? Colonialism may account for the authority a whole culture might acquire
for the colonized. But the authority of certain explanations or a constellation of
knowledge issuing from that culture cannot be entirely ascribed to its dominant status.

Very often the colonized would hate the dominant culture, but would be bewildered and
mute, or positively applauding, before the impartial authority of science, that emblem of
western superiority. In fact, some of the authority the western culture acquired was based
upon the superior authority of its knowledge. How exactly the superior authority of its
knowledge was constructed? What was the specific nature of this authority? If
colonialism denied the colonized access to their own experiences, was it simply the result
of domination or consequence of a specific configuration of knowledge, experience, and
domination?
I would also like to suggest that all knowledge transforms experience, provided we have
made that knowledge our own. When the western society moved from the geocentric
medieval cosmology to the heliocentric picture of the universe, the experience of the
universe was transformed, even if the sense perception of the sun going across the
horizon was saved. Man was displaced from the center of the universe. The authority
of perceptual knowledge received a setback in the process. Similarly, when we view a
stick immersed in a partially filled glass of water where it appears bent and know that it is
not really bent, our experience of seeing the stick has been transformed. One knows, now.
If it were not so, it would not be possible to arrive where we started and know the
place for the first time.. Your journey to the West, your building of conceptual tools,
your creating a body of knowledge, a science, your experiencing of your own culture
(and western culture) anew, how could this be possible if knowledge does not transform
experience? Incidentally, the course of this journey resembles a host of other such
journeys that have shaped the anti-colonial movements and thought worldwide.
Yet, there is indeed an ideal of knowledge, which seeks to separate knowledge from
experience. Since the time of Galileo and Descartes, science has been possessed by an
ideal of certitude that propels it towards making knowledge independent of experience.
Science believes that all knowledge is embodied in propositions and the very point of
scientific knowledge is to move from perception towards more and more universal
propositions expressed in a language free of experiential traces (ideally in mathematical
language). We start from a precisely demarcated fragment of experiences and perceptions
and move towards those propositions which simply stand for truth. These propositions
are either true or false, without reference to any knower and her experiences.
While knowledge is sought to be cleansed of all experiential traces, experience is
divested of its cognitive powers. Large parts of our experience is deemed to be
subjective, merely a product, a necessary product, of objective forces in operation. A
paradigmatic case is that of colour. Colour becomes a subjective sensation produced in
our head, when light interacts with our sensory apparatus. When we see colour nothing of
the world is disclosed to us. Science does not seek to interpret our experiences or refine
and deepen our perceptions. Science seeks to replace our descriptions with its own. It
overwrites them. There is no way back from knowledge to experience in this scheme, at
least in principle.
What I have outlined just now is part of a normative framework of knowledge, a scheme
which acts as a guide in matters concerning knowledge. It is a philosophy of right

knowledge, a pramanashastra. When we speak of science there is always an ambiguity.

There are various sciences with diverse methodologies and complex histories. I am
interpreting science, as distinct from the sciences, as a normative framework, which
distinguishes science from other modes of knowledge, articulates an ideal of knowledge
and establishes the authority of scientific knowledge in society. If you ask any scientist
what science is and press for answers, he or she will come up with what we are calling
science.. Of course, science is not recognized as such as a normative framework of
knowledge. In fact, the western intellectual tradition will not recognize a normative
framework of knowledge and therefore finds pramanashastras of Indian Philosophy
difficult to interpret. It looks for philosophy of knowledge, epistemology, and fails to see
the philosophy of right knowledge which the pramana theories are. It is instructive to
note that while there is no consensus on epistemology of science, there is a fairly
dominant self-understanding of science articulated as a normative framework. The
authority of science and its framework seems to be in a crisis now and we are perhaps
living a transition to a different normative framework of knowledge.
Through the articulation of this normative framework, one of the things that science does
is to establish a relationship between knowledge and experience as I stated earlier. Such
an ideal of knowledge as science, promotes a culture of knowledge where a proposition
picked up from a scientific source can undermine a lifetimes experience or even entire
traditions of knowledge in a single blow. The speaker of that proposition is not required
to embody any knowledge in person, the authority is concentrated in the proposition
itself. We often used to encounter, in reality and in various media, modern evangelicals
going to a village and dismiss entire traditions of knowledge by a single statement. The
times may have changed now.
I can imagine some knowledge represented in the proposition linga means penis being
part of a body of knowledge, which may not divest my experience of linga of its sacred
and joyful significance. It might even enrich our experience and may even transform the
meaning of penis. But for this to happen one may have to attain a particular level of
perception, perhaps with the mediation of a teacher. I am of course speculating. I am
indicating a conception of knowledge similar to the one you speak of when citing a story
from the Upanishad. I want to distinguish this kind of knowledge from the one which
asserts that linga is actually (nothing but) male penis.. The latter is equivalent to saying
that the colours we see are nothing but sensations produced in our head when light of a
certain wavelength strike our retina. The world is actually colourless. The former kind of
knowledge has the potential to enrich our experience and deepen our perceptions whereas
the latter robs our experience of all cognitive significance.
I am distinguishing two cultures of knowledge, or two philosophies, or two normative
frameworks of knowledge. (They are two only for this argument. Actually the first one
is many but share in their contrast to the second one.) In the first, we move within a world
characterized by an abundance of knowledge and sources of knowledge. In the latter, the
world is opaque, even positively deceptive, and we seek guarantee for all our knowledge
in God or Method. In the former, reality is deeply textured, whereas in the latter, reality is
a unique text (book of nature) which can be read by those who know the language.

Therefore, science itself seems to embody a relationship between knowledge and

experience, which prevents it from serving as a counterpoint to the kind of experiencedenying explanations that you are arguing against. Freud may be conjectured to have
gone a step beyond science. It was not only our experience of the world, but our everyday
experience of ourselves that was rendered cognitively impotent. Having grown in the
West though, this configuration of knowledge and experience would have been operative
at first in the western societies. Here I would like to state that science as a philosophy of
right knowledge has had a social existence and a social force. It mediates between any
kind of knowledge and the society. It includes certain kinds of knowledge within science,
excludes others, shapes and organizes scientific research, gives an identity and authority
to the scientific profession and so on. The power of this framework is evidenced by the
fact that what even great scientists may say about science is excluded from consideration
while accepting and celebrating their contributions otherwise. Starting from natural
philosophy, eventually this framework came to encompass the entire field of knowledge
and research, though not without opposition. Perhaps it is for this reason that you could
evoke instances from optics and astronomy for your argument with their normative force
intact.
I would go even so far as to suggest that the position of authority in the field of
knowledge that was reluctantly relinquished by the Church came to be occupied by
science. The authority of science is different though from the authority of a doctrine,
dogma or philosophy. Science does not ask us to commit ourselves to a given body of
knowledge. It seeks authority over all future knowledge as well. If the answer to a
question is not known to science, we are told that it will be discovered sometime in
future. Meanwhile we must manage with what science has to offer. Science is supposed
to possess the key to knowledge.
How does it combine with other developments in western culture in shaping wests
interpretation of other cultures? How does the authority of science combine with the
authority of the modern and the western in a colonial context? I do not know. All I am
saying is that science is part of the problem and not a part of the solution. Secondly, the
problem with science-as-norm is precisely this: Experience is divested of its cognitive
significance and knowledge is denuded of all experiential content. Thirdly, this is done in
the course of instituting of a particular normative framework of knowledge, which
constructs the authority of certain knowledge systems as scientific, and excludes others as
unscientific. What is unscientific is not explained as a result of error or ignorance. What
is not scientific is not knowledge at all, but something else, which is mistaken for
knowledge. It is to be explained as a necessary product of forces, cultural or natural, an
extension of our being. Is it here that science joins colonialism? While the whole of
humanity may have a common essence, the being of the western culture could be seen to
be transformed by the possession of science. The West possesses Knowledge, while other
cultures only have Being.
In order to understand my argument it is important to realize that I am not contesting the
validity or otherwise of results of particular sciences. Though, I am defending the right to

contest any result of science on the basis of my experience or my knowledge that may be
derived from a different tradition. I am suggesting that various sciences representing
diverse research traditions and insights are constituted as a single formation of knowledge
by means of a framework, in which a certain pramanashastra plays a central role, a
prmanashastra that offers a particular, limited role to experience and perception, but
offers automatic authority to the sciences in return. I feel that sciences need to delink
themselves from this bargain and construct their own authority anew and establish a fresh
relationship with society and other knowledge.
What has been implicit in this argument is that the question of denial of experience of
the colonized is integrally linked to the question of knowledge and its authority. It cannot
be subsumed under the question of cultural difference though that may be important in its
own right. We do not merely seek understanding and affirmation of our experience (we
seek that too), but want to secure the possibility of our current and future knowledge and
build a different relationship with current and past knowledge traditions, our own and
others.

Yours in dialogue,
Avinash Jha
CSDS Library, Delhi.
Email: kalisaroj@yahoo.com

The original piece of Dr. Balagangadhara titled India and Her Traditions: A Reply to
Jeffrey Kripal can be found at:
http://www.sulekha.com/blogs/blogdisplay.aspx?cid=4501