The Matter of Wonder

Abstract

Abstract The current discourse of New Materialism seeks to chart a way of addressing our contemporary predicament around environmental destruction through reassessing our relationship and attitudes to matter. This book argues that the panentheism of the 11th-century Indian Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta offers a cogent philosophical model that gives us new ways of thinking about matter, which can help contemporary New Materialist thought. What makes panentheism an attractive model for Abhinavagupta’s philosophy is its Tantric impetus toward both the materiality of the world and the transcendence of divinity, proposing a philosophy that finds consciousness—a subjectivity as and at the very core of matter. Abhinavagupta’s articulation of a foundational and encompassing subjectivity proposes a panentheist solution to a familiar conundrum, one we are still grappling with today—that is: how does consciousness, which is so unlike matter, how does it actually connect to the materiality of our world? In familiar 21st-century terms, how does mind connect to body? This book brings this question to bear in comparative fashion on contemporary issues: our current concerns around what is sentient—animals? viruses? artificial intelligence?—set in relation to Abhinavagupta’s articulation of what gives rise to sentience through his use of the term vimarśa; our current conceptions of information as data—articulated in juxtaposition to Abhinavagupta’s theology of mantra, mystic sound; examining Abhinavagupta’s use of wonder (camatkāra) as camata a philosophical concept, and how his cosmological system (tattva) underwrites his understanding of a foundational subjectivity.