Abstract
Samuel Wright, A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India 1500–1700 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 278 pp.
The last two decades have seen a scholarly re-engagement with the philosophical tradition of nyāya—a term most easily translated as ‘logic’—leading to the publication of several important essays and monographs reassessing the significance of the ‘new’ (navya) science of nyāya during the early modern period. A Time of Novelty builds upon the findings of this scholarly discussion (most easily recognised in Sheldon Pollock’s Sanskrit Knowledge Systems project) but departs from its conventional wisdom in two significant aspects: first, in the author’s theoretical approach to newness and novelty both as concepts and as historical phenomena, and second, in the book’s emphasis on emotion and, consequently, the lived social worlds of intellectuals in early modern India. Wright’s central argument is that we cannot understand how new knowledge alters the course of philosophical thinking without attending to the emotional as well as intellectual content of that new knowledge; to demonstrate this, he investigates how ‘novelty’ or ‘newness’ became the means through which nyāya thinkers theorised, articulated and organised intellectual difference, geographical space and their social lives as scholars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the introduction, Wright convincingly argues that nyāya should be understood as a ‘discipline’: a field of knowledge but also a hierarchically structured, methodologically distinct practice that gave rise to a corresponding social formation—a ‘community’. The book is elegantly divided into three parts—‘Newness and Emotion’, ‘Feeling and Reasoning’ and ‘Space and Time’—each of which contains two chapters. In the first chapter, ‘Doubt’, Wright identifies a ‘linguistic turn’ in the nyāya tradition during the sixteenth century, arguing that navya-nyāya intellectuals formulated a new concept of doubt (saṃśaya) that allowed them to question potentially any metaphysical tenet, in turn opening up a space to stake out new metaphysical positions and differentiate themselves from other traditions of thought. Chapter 2, ‘Objectivity’, explores debates between nyāya intellectuals regarding the nature of objectivity (viṣayatā or ‘object-ness’); navya-nyāya intellectuals used this question (as well as others) to differentiate themselves as occupying a ‘new’ (navya) philosophical position in distinction to a competing, ‘old’ (prañc) position. Wright reveals that this deployment of ‘new’ versus ‘old’ was more of a discursive move than a diachronic historical development: The navya-nyāya thinkers were, in fact, recycling ideas propounded centuries earlier by Ekadeśī philosophers. The third chapter, ‘Happiness’, charts how differing opinions on the locus of happiness—whether and how happiness is to be found in Īśvara, the arranger of the universe, or only in humans—led to competing soteriologies and political programmes in the region of Bengal: while nyāya logicians and their patrons regarded Bengal and particularly Navadvip (the centre of navya-nyāya scholarship) in a mood of ‘logical pathos’, their Vaiṣṇava-devotee contemporaries regarded Bengal as a second Vrindavan (the home and playground of Krishna). The fourth chapter, ‘Dying’, examines nyāya writings on the significance of dying in Kashi (Varanasi/Banaras) in order to reconstruct how nyāya authors produced an affective relationship with the city. Chapter 5, ‘Space’, attempts to reconstruct the geographical extent and social structure of the community of nyāya thinkers through a meta-survey of known manuscripts of nyāya works. Wright identifies a ‘manuscript economy’ of nyāya works consisting of pandit households, teacher–student relations, professional scribes and the manuscripts that they produced and circulated, arguing that this economy reflects a trans-regional network of intellectuals that, while cognisant of local politics, functioned independently of political structures and was driven by both ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ considerations. The most important ‘emotion’ for the reading community of navya-nyāya intellectuals was a ‘sensibility’ of novelty. The final chapter, ‘Time’, puts forward three arguments regarding novelty in the thought and writings of nyāya scholars: first, that the concept of novelty as it was deployed by nyāya thinkers refers not simply to a diachronic temporality but to a synchronic distinction between intellectual trajectories (what Wright calls ‘synchronic novelty’). Second, that for navya-nyāya intellectuals, language, as we use it to describe the world, encodes certain ontologies (deployed as ‘homogenised’ elements), and so words like ‘new’ and ‘now’ must refer to some kind of real ontological entity; consequently, those who espouse novelty in their thought must embody some kind of ontological difference from those who do not embrace novelty. Third, that navya-nyāya works encode a dimension of narrativity by virtue of dubbing some intellectual positions ‘old’ and others ‘new’; navya-nyāya intellectuals had an affective relationship with the new, and that relationship both bound them into a community and informed their actions.
A Time of Novelty presents a convincing argument that emotion and the lived social lives of intellectuals are critical to the production of new knowledge and thus to historical change in philosophical thinking; however, the current reviewer finds that the book makes this argument best when it makes it philosophically—for example, by invoking the structure of discourse (taking recourse to Bakhtin) or the phenomenology of space (per Simmel) or the ontology of language (utilising the thought of the navya-nyāya philosophers themselves). In this regard, the book is exemplary in its clarity and coherence. Yet the book does not always, in this reviewer’s opinion, demonstrate this argument historically or, in some places, textually. The reader encounters assertions that narrativity, affect or identification of an object with the self must be at work in a given utterance or text; yet the examples taken from nyāya works and their analysis do not always make this readily apparent. The reviewer is also unsure whether ‘novelty’ can be theorised in such capacious terms as those proposed in A Time of Novelty. Across the book as a whole, and particularly in the final chapter, novelty is theorised as a temporal distinction, as ‘qualities’ that are not found previously in a system, as ‘ideas and arguments’, as an ontological category, as a feeling (the object of a sensibility or an affective relation), as a value, as a sensory experience, as a ‘homogenising element’ and as a synchronic marker of identity. Novelty may indeed have been deployed and experienced by navya-nyāya thinkers in all of these ways, and Wright makes a good case for considering all of these possible dimensions. Yet it is not always clear whether and where a philosophical argument regarding the metaphysical definition of novelty is being made versus a historical argument about what appeared, what was judged to be, what was presented as, or what was experienced as ‘new’ in the domain of philosophy in early modern India. This ambiguity aside, the current monograph, with its provocative thesis and broad scope, is sure to initiate productive discussions about our approach to not only nyāya but the history of philosophy during the early modern period as a whole.