Comment by NayamAmarshe
1 year ago
Sāṁkhya is the GOAT! Very happy to see this comment here.
Their metaphysics is way ahead, even now we see many brilliant people (scientists) struggling with metaphysics whereas Sāṁkhya clearly lays out stuff with logical reasoning. While modern people still can't define consciousness clearly, Sāṁkhya goes above and beyond to define it in detail, using material language to describe the immaterial.
It's a shame that the philosophy never got exported to the west, like the poses of Aṣtānga Yoga, which too are a part of Sāṁkhya school.
The difficulty in understanding Samkhya lies in the complex definition of "Prakriti" which the wikipedia page nicely clarifies as;
In Sāṃkhya puruṣa signifies the observer, the 'witness'. Prakṛti includes all the cognitive, moral, psychological, emotional, sensorial and physical aspects of reality. It is often mistranslated as 'matter' or 'nature' – in non-Sāṃkhyan usage it does mean 'essential nature' – but that distracts from the heavy Sāṃkhyan stress on prakṛti's cognitive, mental, psychological and sensorial activities. Moreover, subtle and gross matter are its most derivative byproducts, not its core. Only prakṛti acts.
Samkhya is first and foremost a experiential worldview. Wikipedia again;
Prakriti is the source of our experience; it is not "the evolution of a series of material entities," but "the emergence of experience itself". It is description of experience and the relations between its elements, not an explanation of the origin of the universe.
Finally, the concept of the "Gunas" are also quite difficult to understand in full generality. Wikipedia fails in this case to clarify matters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a
Nietzsche Schopenhauer and others reference Samkhya. It’s definitely had an influence but it’s definitely subterranean. Western philosophers all want to sound scientific and using old eastern phenomenology somehow undermines that.
So much eastern philosophy is just really good phenomenology, and some Japanese philosophers like Nishida tried to combine Husserl and Buddhism, but it’s the same thing, I think western phenomenologists have some sort of insecurity, so they implicitly condescend to the eastern thought.
It is not very satisfying to a philosopher to say “looks like this one’s already been figured out”. The original “not invented here” syndrome :)