The Māyā of Things: South Asian Reflections on Social Theory and the Magic of Humanism

ABSTRACT

Phenomenal experience does not represent correctly the state of things in the external word, because they have been modified by our senses. Reality perceived as sound, touch, form, taste and smell... is our “species view” of reality.... We perceive according to the competence of our organs. Cats may see a black and white reality, dogs hear sounds we humans do not hear. [This variation in perception] is māyā... Insects, plants and [non-human] animals have different experiences according to the capacity of their organs. The concept of māyā, therefore, challenges the anthropocentric view of the world, which privileges human interests. (Jacobsen 1999, 242)

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality (Seth 2017, 2021)

IN The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow question basic anthropological assumptions about culture and human development. As the title suggests, they propose nothing less than a new way to understand humanity in light of the past: a history that challenges Eurocentric assumptions and engages with diversity as an analytical method rather than a history of difference in all of its various forms. In essence they invite us to rethink fundamental assumptions about “everything” by invoking the scale and scope of Lucretius’s first-century BCE articulation of Epicurean metaphysics in a text that has come to be regarded as iconic of atomistic humanism: De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) (Stallings 2007). To effectively critique the Enlightenment, Graeber and Wengrow argue, one must understand how, why, and when fundamental questions concerning equality, freedom, and liberty came to be asked rather than assume that the answers to these questions—firmly anchored in modernity—define the trajectory of human history. In essence they provincialize the Enlightenment. For them the right question is not how to explain inequality as an aspect of natural law, as though it is a perennial, primordial, and organic problematic, but what provoked questions concerning inequality to be asked in ways that have made it seem like the question is universal, timeless, and singularly subject to encyclopedic denotation. More generally they seek to untangle the provocation of the question itself to understand the complex diversity of human experience across the full span of our collective species’ history.

Although brilliantly revisionist, Graeber and Wengrow’s new history of humanity is based on old ideas about the self that are the very bedrock of classical Greek philosophy and imperial Roman scholarship. As such, what is said to be new only appears to be so as a consequence of the way in which the “nature of things” is conceptualized in terms that reflect the basic structure of humanism. This structure, as manifest in the reasoning of pre-Socratic philosophers, not only involves the key elements of reason but also establishes a relationship between observer and observed such that perception and experience define reality as an aspect of individual human consciousness. The systematic use of language and the development of a philosophy of language that imposes a particular logic of meaning and representation on all signs—what might be called the hegemony of universal grammar—enable humanism to capture meaning in an ever expanding and inclusive net of words.

Needless to say, language seems like it cannot be questioned except in terms of the logic and structure of language itself, which would appear to give words a certain ontological status in relation to consciousness, a kind of objective, definitive permanence. But words, which have the power to turn the illusion of meaning in all signification into the magic of reason, produce a form of truth that is peculiarly anthropocentric. This involves the constant self-deception of forgetting the arbitrariness of the sign in order to believe that words correspond to the nature of things. The language of humanism that shapes the discipline of anthropology—and, more importantly, the incipient humanism of language—inhibits the possibility of any holistic critique of the Enlightenment that appears on the horizon of modernity. In essence, Graeber and Wengrow’s radical and very powerful critique is limited by the anthropocentric magic of humanism: the problematic and deceptive disenchantment of social reality and the endless quest for its re-enchantment by means of interpretive methods that extend from language through culture to... everything.

To understand the magic of humanism, and to engage with it as an analytical perspective on difference, this article draws on Sāṃkhyan dualism to theorize illusion as an important feature of signification. In many ways the nature of dualism and the relationship between discrete categories of reality is the fundamental problematic of Sāṃkhyan reasoning. As elaborated below, the concept of puruṣa (person/transcendent universal consciousness) and the concept of prakṛti (nature/ultimate material principle) constitute a form of dualism that takes illusion seriously as a problem that encompasses experience—human and nonhuman—as embedded in the nature of things.

The method of reasoning employed here is to think with and through a contemporary interpretation of semiotically informed Sāṃkhya, not to take it as a subject of discrete study relevant only to the cultural context of South Asia. There is great value in the relativism of South Asian ethnosociology, which focuses on the transactional nature of embodied substances to understand the meaning of social relations in deep cultural context (see Marriott 1990). What is proposed here, however, as intimated by the epigraph, is a more general theory of dependent disability that transforms anthropology, a discipline grounded in the fundamentalism of humanism, into an ecological semiotics of zoomorphic relations. This entails an extension of the logic of Sāṃkhyan discernment and is an exercise in the translation of the logic in enumeration into a theory of ecological semiosis. An ecological semiosis of dependent disability, it will be argued, constitutes the elementary form of the power both in the sacralization of things and in the relations among differentiated things—partial, illusive, and imperfectly self-contained—that form and inform consciousness of transcendental enlightenment.

Like other philosophical traditions, there are debates and disagreements on fine points of reasoning in the history of Sāṃkhya’s interpretation. The theory of dependent disability presented here engages with the range of meanings that have been assigned to key words while using definitions that allow for interpretative flexibility across the boundary of Sāṃkhya as a narrowly defined school of thought. For example, as discussed and debated in a broad range of literature from the earliest period to the present, māyā means illusion in the sense of a magic trick. This literal denotation is complicated regarding deception more generally, as manifest in the power of the Vedic god Indra’s “net of magic” that creates an illusion of diversity, the appearance of difference being a reflection of form in each of the infinite jewels that connect Indrajāla’s knotted, woven mesh. This reflects the complex principle of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination) such that the reality of things is dependent on their relationship to, and reflection in, other things.

The endless beauty of the infinite reflection of things ensnares the imagination. Trapped in the illusion of māyā—which reflects everything, including the gods—perception must be liberated to perceive the transcendent reality of empty singularity that is truth itself. Although the metaphor of the net is elaborated in Buddhist philosophy, in particular in the Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Cleary 1993), Gerald Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya note that in the Jayamaṅgalā (Sharma 1926), an eighth-century Sāṃkhya inflected text, the word is used as a synonym for prakṛti. As articulated in several schools of philosophical thought, māyā is the illusion of magic that animates life in the material world of ideas and things. It is the illusive substance of avidyā or un-understanding that produces a misperception of distinctions and difference (Dasgupta 1924, 11, in Jacobsen 1999, 178). Similarly, Knut Jacobsen’s comprehensive study engages with the question of how prakṛti relates to the concept of māyā as interpreted within the framework of Sāṃkhya rather than in Vedānta. This suggests the illusory nature of the “creative capacity” and the unreal “perceptible aspects of the constituents” of matter, as these constituents are enumerated (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 217, 285).

From the vantage point of Sāṃkhya, biosemiosis is a web of interpretive, sensory, material relations that produces the powerful impression of things and their fabulous, animated diversity. In the context of neo-Sāṃkhyan theorization, animism is understood to be the power of multi-species interdependence that manifests what Émile Durkheim called real social relations. As a particular reflection of multi-species biosemiosis, and as elaborated below, parasitism can be understood to be the elementary form of a kind of socioecological theory of animism. As such, parasitism is a condition of living with and on another organism to the extent that the biosemiosis of their conjoined being—the interpretation of interpenetrated signs—reflects a kind of consciousness that is collective in an elemental sense that underlies the illusion of individuality and the apparent meaningfulness of a species-view of social, cultural, and material reality.

In specific terms, Sāṃkhya anticipates Piercean semiotics insofar as interpretation mediates the relationship between a sign and an object. The interpretation of signs is the constitutive dynamic of semiosis as a process that produces what only appears to be objective meaning and denotative truth. The triadic aspect of all signs transforms semiosis into a creative force rather than a mode of indicative representation. While the problem of perception and representation is integral to Sāṃkhya, Sāṃkhyan ontology incarnates the problematic of semiotic epistemology in the sense that all that is animated reflects three interdependent guṇa (properties of nature) that are constitutive of our experience of being in a world that creates the illusion of denoted material objects. As a reflection of this power, collective ecological consciousness is hiding in plain sight as the māyā of the nature of things: a net of illusion.

Elsewhere I have discussed the dynamics of living in a world of interconnected, contingent meanings that are biosemiotic rather than cultural (Alter 2007, 2015, 2021). The concern here is to articulate a natural philosophy that is adequate to ecology as an inclusive sociology of semiosis, encompassing language and other modes of communication. Implicit in this broad neo-Sāṃkhyan critique of humanism is the development of a holistic philosophy that is not intractably anchored in the logic of dominion and the desire to “go beyond” or “escape from” the discontents of self-overcoming that extend from the magic of language through religion to science and science fiction.

As suggested by the prefix “para” of the word parasite, what is being proposed is neither post-humanism nor a “more-than-human” perspective on ecological reality and environmentalism. The multi-species being of parasitism—with an emphasis on the designation’s inherently relational and commensal etymology—focuses on Sāṃkhyan codependency rather than on the competitive, conflictual, exploitative, and zero-sum-gain connotation of the more standard conceptualization of the word. Disabled codependency also makes it clear that parasitism cannot be domesticated through the use of words such as mutualism and symbiosis. These words reflect the amour de soi of a kind of humanism that creates animals in our own image. These words maintain the integrity of the illusion of individuality and freedom that derives from a conception of human nature in the very nature of things as real, a kind of salvation through self-sacrifice and the rebirth of all creatures, great and small, in the diversity of our perception of their evolving forms.

THE MAGIC OF HUMANISM AND THE MĀYĀ OF THINGS

Humanism is defined here as a broad movement with roots in pre-Socratic thinking that flowered in the Italian Renaissance, locating our species at the center of philosophical reasoning. It has been criticized for universalizing the morality and ethics of a deracinated Christian worldview. Rigorously applying Pierre Clastres’s anthropological admonition to think against the Enlightenment (Clastres 1977), Talal Asad questions the way in which humanism and the concept of humanity articulate forms of centralized power, assumptions about the nature of hierarchical knowledge, and the “emergence of the idea of the modern autonomous individual” (Asad 2015, 397).

As Asad points out, building on the insights of Charles Taylor, the moral aspects of humanism emerge in relation to the inward orientation of the “punctual self” and the objectification of the embodied soul (see Taylor 1989, 159–76). But the problem with humanism has less to do with articulations of faith in the soul of humanity, and secularized notions of compassion and redemption, than with more fundamental, post-Socratic suppositions about the power of reason to identify and capture truth. In essence, humanism involves what I have elsewhere called, in a slightly different context, a slow sleight of hand, turning diversity—individual and communal—into a deceptively inclusive history of our exceptional power to create ourselves through reason (Alter 2003). As Asad has shown, humanism creates the category of religion itself within this frame, essentializing the diversity of supernatural forces but then sacralizing the diversity of communities as the fetish of enchantment in the language of religion articulates the power of exception. Leaving aside the idealistic realism of enlightened reason—which has been critiqued by generations of humanists seeking to go beyond or separate themselves from science—paradoxes concerning the nature and form of truth animate a deep logic of disenchantment at the heart of Nietzschean perspectivism. Existential angst essentializes the self within discourses that mythologize the contingency of humanism. The problem with perspectivism is that it is anchored in the deceptive, phenomenological magic of language and in the paradoxical relationship between the apparent meaning and authenticity of words, on the one hand, and meaning as a feature—an intrinsically illusive feature—of sign relationships, on the other.

Critically engaging with the trap of humanistic dualism by taking issue with both the reductionism of scientism and subjective relativism, Jonardon Ganeri persuasively argues against epistemic pluralism focused on the nature of things in systemic configuration. Drawing on the thinking of classical-period southern Asian Jaina scholars, he makes a case for epistemic pluralism that involves a stance of orientation toward the experience of truth rather than one that focuses on systems that must resolve into some form of abstract, objective singularity (Ganeri 2019, 20). Extending this point, the question here is not how this stance makes us distinctively human, and certainly not how diversity makes us collectively and holistically human, but how to understand the nature of social reality in our experience of the shadows on the wall of our consciousness, as these shadows create the cultural illusion that we are not an animal. We are bound by the chains—or, as we will see, tangled in the net—of this misperception of liberty, freedom, and equality.

Cultural analysis in anthropology tends to reinforce a deep logic of disenchantment in modern social thought, as well as the impulse in certain trajectories of humanism to reenchant what is said to be disenchanted. Expanding on Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis, my argument is that anthropology can be more consistently holistic and critically focused on thinking against the Enlightenment, if illusion is liberated from a history of humanism that tethers it to the axes of empire and the devolved, monotheistic imperialism of dominion. Contemporary theory concerning posthuman relationality and agency can be more clearly and forcefully articulated if the power of self-consciousness is focused on the ontological status of the inauthentic contingency of things, rather than on the recursive contingency of deception as an intrinsic feature of relativism. The problem of infinite regress and nihilism that haunts the polarity of perspectivism in this mode of disciplinary understanding can be exorcised, so to speak, by way of a relational understanding of reality as māyā. As a semiotic being inextricably attached to others, self-reflection creates the illusion of difference in the perception of an animal thinking about its freedom. The projected significance of its freedom, within the frame of cultural meaning, is bracketed by the way in which language traps signs.

The idea of magic, and the placement of that idea in the history of modern social thought, has played a significant role in the development of knowledge about everything and in the categorization and classification of knowledge into domains such as religion, science, and philosophy (see Jones 2017; Mazzarella 2017; Pels 2017; Shanafelt 2004). An intellectual history of magic highlights problems of clear and concise definition, problems of distinction between it and other things, and problems that reflect profound ambivalence about the nature of its power as conceptualized within a binary framework such that it must be either black or white, good or evil. As Bernd-Christian Otto points out, even deeply historicized understandings of magic in context do not necessarily reveal the distinct reality of the word’s inherent meaning, which remains elusive. The otherness of magic encodes the logic of in-group and out-group delineation. Magic in this articulation structures a field of practice intent on the exercise of power through ritual manipulation that extends from an elementary form of social engagement to the level of profound abstraction involving unseen forces (Otto and Stausberg 2013, 326).

This is especially relevant when considering the power of magic within a Sāṃkhyan framework of epistemic dualism in the sense that binary distinctions encoded in words manifest the deceptive illusion of abstract denotation, the contingency of meaning as a function of communication, and the misplacement of meaning from relationships onto material things. In essence, and in contrast to the problem of what is really real in terms of idealistic Cartesian dualism, māyā invokes the power of illusion to produce meaningful knowledge while living, creatively, in a world that generates endless questions about the nature of truth in relationships. The encompassing banality of illusion manifest in the principle of māyā flips the Eurocentric history of magic on its head, so to speak. It is intimate, pervasive, and encompassing rather than arcane, exotic, and intentional. It does not serve to explain what happens—either in terms of fortune or misfortune, as in Evans-Pritchard’s classic account of the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1937)—but to theorize the nature of imperfection in the diversity of nature’s perception. The question is not how deception of and by others works to create a cause-and-effect illusion out of material reality, but how the illusive nature of emanation, as a theory of nature based on imperfect sensibility, entails mediated relations with other beings to produce a form of meaningful, experiential perception.

Modern social thought is said to dispel illusion by means of disenchantment. Everything about knowledge and about the development of knowledge is thought to be the antithesis of the danger inherent in magical thinking. Whatever its complex history, and regardless of the extent to which the study of magic can be sympathetically framed by relativism, giving it legitimate meaning in context, magic has been essentialized, objectified, and classified to such an extent that knowledge about it reflects the form of an illusion that is itself intrinsic to enchantment. A figuration of the real, and of truth that captures the essences of what is experienced as real, takes shape in this illusion. As such, the experience of reality, as it is humanistically constructed, entails the work of deception in the guise of discovery as a corollary to codified, materialized, and externalized memory. This involves unselfconscious forgetting that our significance, in the full semiotic sense of that term, is that of a dependent animal.

If things are not supernatural, as the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius argued in De Rerum Natura, then understanding the nature of things entails the empiricism of human experience. If the logic of humanism itself defines the critique of humanism’s ontology—its assumptions about what is real and what is false, either in terms of empiricism or transcendental idealism—then the critique of enlightened humanism is a kind of perpetual self-deception wherein the discovery of truth becomes one articulation of truth, pushing truth itself further away to be discovered again and again as either the essential nature of our species being or as real, authentic differences that cast doubt on that possibility. With reference to Rousseau’s influential thinking on the origins of humanity, Jennifer Einspahr is correct in pointing out that the chronic mediation of experience and immediacy produces a “paradoxical chronology” of development that presumes a beginning that never was (Einspahr 2010).

Humanism is, in a sense, the magical resurrection of a god that was killed by reason, the transcendent power of affected, self-affirming creativity to overcome dominion in the phenomenological realization of our absolute species being and in the multiplicity of forms that reflect human nature. Humanism is so closely tied to disbelief in god and the problem of supernatural forces that it distorts perspectives on an understanding of reality that engages seriously with questions of illusion. As an integral feature of experience, the suspension of disbelief is not so much about making the fantastic seem possible in the human imagination as it is about reifying a perspective that makes the idea of the fantastic possible. Humanism creates god in its own image, as the power of belief in the power of disbelief. Humanism is religion’s mimetic alterity in the context of the Enlightenment and its empire of signs.

Material semiotic relations are the basis on which the world is animated and how human activity becomes part of a dynamic articulation of interspecies animism. The ontological turn in anthropology highlights the significance of these relations. Theorizing along this trajectory pushes against the limitations of humanism by questioning and displacing anthropocentric priorities and by questioning fundamental assumptions about collective responsibility to live with and within the trouble of dominion, as Donna Haraway has put it (Haraway 2016). However, critiques of humanism are often intent on reclaiming the power of enchantment—engendering a cycle of re-enchantment that ultimately isolates the self in what appears to be a sense of freedom—and can be more effectively, coherently, and consistently articulated if one begins, as proposed here, with a conceptualization of material reality as organically magical: as wholly illusory in relation to semiotically mediated socioecological relations of disabled dependency.

SĀṂKHYA, SEMIOTICS, AND THE CALCULUS OF REALITY

Literature on the history and philosophy of Sāṃkhya is extensive and overlaps with the closely related literature on yoga and Āyurveda. Gerald Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya’s encyclopedic work is comprehensive and authoritative (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987; see also Larson 1979). They explain how interest in calculation and the enumeration of symbolic relationships manifest in Vedic hymns composed well before the fifth century BCE developed into cosmological reasoning focused on the problem of liberation in the “proto-Sāṃkhyan” speculative literature. This body of literature, extending from the fourth century BCE to the first century CE, reflects emergent themes in various strands of thought that developed further in Buddhist and Jain philosophy as well as in branches of Vedānta.

Iśvarakṛṣṇa’s fourth-century Sāṃkhyakārikā represents the formalization of Sāṃkhya as a discrete school of thought. Numerous commentaries and exegetical treatises extend from the fourth century through to the early modern period (Sinha 1915; Virupakshananda 1995). As Knut Jacobsen puts it, “Dualism, rather than being seen as a solution, is one of the fundamental problems to be solved in the Hindu systems of thought” (Jacobsen 1999, 243). Whereas Tattvavāda is a form of thirteenth-century Vedantic dualism that similarly engages the problematic of duality in terms of realism, a key difference is that Sāṃkhyan dualism does not depend on the logic of theology and the power of absolute divinity to resolve questions concerning ignorance, misunderstanding, and the illusion of perception. As Larson and Bhattacharya point out, over time Sāṃkhya has become, in essence, an intellectual exercise in discernment concerning the question of how knowledge can be developed to achieve transcendence.

Puruṣa is a key concept in Sāṃkhya that lends itself to a semiotic theorization concerning the nature of human consciousness. Because it can simply mean person, the word’s complex significance with regard to self-consciousness, soul, and spirit as connected to prakṛti produces a dynamic with important social and ecological implications. For example, the iconic Vedic myth of creation involves the sacrifice of the primordial being Puruṣa, whose body is infinite, magnificent, and pure. As the sacrificial fire burns, fat drips from the cosmic body, exuding the endless diversity of life. Although typically interpreted within the framework of cosmogony, this myth, and the affordances of meaning associated with puruṣa—as transcendent consciousness, as self-awareness, as person, and as a concept deeply implicated in the animation of life—invokes the logic of dependent origination, suggesting a relational theory of ecology. Ecology can thus be interpreted semiotically and with neo-Sāṃkhyan dualist skepticism. This reading of the myth against the grain of its anthropocentric concern for hierarchy, and against the impress of theology, puts the focus on the problematic meaning of the gods’ sacrificial fire as an animating force. Perhaps more significantly, the philosophical question becomes: what are the epistemic consequences of puruṣa being a being whose stipulated existence apart from prakṛti relocates the power of consciousness into a world in which our relationship with animals, and our emergent understanding of the power of those relationships, transcends our illusory sense of self as an exceptional creature?

A problem with Sāṃkhya—and with premodern South Asian philosophy written in Sanskrit more broadly—is that the burden of Orientalism is large and heavy, and colonialism has drawn all the maps. It tends to be interpreted within a framework of asceticism with an orientation that is humanistically soteriological, rather than as a natural philosophy of mind (for exceptions, see Jacobsen 1995; Larson 2017). Sāṃkhya is often referred to as a rational system of dualistic reasoning that is oblique to, rather than in line with, a history of religion, as manifest in the derivative contingency and materiality of the divine. Nevertheless, problems associated with theism and world renunciation have shaped the structure of logic and commentary over several millennia of southern Asian scholasticism.

As a philosophy of consciousness, Sāṃkhya does not focus on the question of what is real in the nature of things but rather on the question of why the illusion of reality is an intrinsic feature of all manifest and unmanifest things. In essence, this is a semiotic question. Knowledge in the early Upanishads is the realization of the ignorance of mistaking illusion as reality. It entails enlightenment as a logical extension of this such that enlightenment signifies liberation. Knowledge is the liberation from reasoning focused on understanding things as particular things. It is the realization that discriminating calculus is inherent to the infinitely enumerable relation of everything to everything else, encompassing the most fundamental, binary calculus of the relationship of everything in the aggregate of the universe to the atomistic perception of self-consciousness as a particular aspect of the universe. This is the realization that an epistemology of enumeration and delineation reflects the illusion of ontology.

Sāṃkhyan naturalism holds to the logic of dualism. Puruṣa, contentless consciousness—referred to as the cosmic soul or self—is separate and distinct from prakṛti. Prakṛti is the animated world of things, the primordial cause of animation, and our perception of things. As such, the animated materialism of prakṛti encompasses everything, including the most subtle manifestation of intellect and awareness. Not understanding puruṣa is a function of the misperception of reality. In Sāṃkhya this is referred to as avidyā, or “metaphysical ignorance.” It is not that the world of things is an illusion, but that metaphysical ignorance is a function of the “identification of the soul [puruṣa] with the things of the world” (Jacobsen 1999, 194) and with emergent reality that devolves from this. Yet, animation is dependent on the effect of self-consciousness being latent in transcendent consciousness, thus transforming consciousness of the self into a reflection of itself in the mind. This is captured by the principle of puruṣārtha. As Larson and Bhattacharya point out, this key term “always refers to ordinary ‘experience’ (bhoga or upabhoga) and the extraordinary ‘experience of release’ apavarga). The usual translation ‘for the sake of the purusa’... therefore, simply refers to the inherent teleology of prakṛti” (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 640n78; see also Ruzsa 2003). Since teleology is circular, this leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the idea of puruṣa, and any manifestation of it in practice, is an aspect of prakṛti. Knowledge is a discerned, encompassing understanding of the illusion of teleology and the animation of life as it can be discerned in relationships. Reflection on the relationship of self to self and of the distinction between puruṣa and puruṣa leads to a critical engagement with the incipient anthropocentrism of all dualism, encompassing the distinction between dualism and nondualism that is manifest in the idea of transcendental consciousness, on the one hand, and reason, on the other.

An important point to keep in mind here is that puruṣa, as a word used to denote transcendent consciousness, is the same word that is used to signify a person. As a person with self-consciousness, a puruṣa is a paśu, a domesticated animal. Paśu are tethered souls. They are, quite literally, bound to the reality of their dependency. Consequently, there is an important sense in which the word puruṣa reflects an awareness of the arbitrariness of signification and the ambiguity of dualism that is inherent to language. This awareness incites a sense of skepticism concerning the binary structure of words and the way in which words tether meaning to things, including the most subtle aspect of consciousness.

Māyā and avidyā both refer to illusion, but within different frameworks, māyā being the illusion of reality that is resolved into the nonduality of Vedāntic theodicy and avidyā being ignorance and the illusion of misperception that stems from the animation of prakṛti in conjunction with puruṣa. It is important to keep in mind, however, that māyā and avidyā are virtually synonymous (Jacobsen 1999, 194). The relationship between māyā and avidyā reflects the tension between dualism and nondualism.

A simple semiotic perspective, implicit if not explicit in the classical literature, points toward a naturalistic understanding of the paradoxical tension in Sāṃkhyan reasoning to the extent that transcendent consciousness (puruṣa) is to semiosis what language is to the perception of the animated world (prakṛti). In other words, Sāṃkhya is only a natural philosophy of human experience to the extent that it primarily demonstrates that semiosis is the transcendent, universal principle connecting all forms of life in terms of meaning as an aspect of signs and signification. Meaning in this sense is always and only created with, and therefore for, some other, even though the meaningfulness of things is a reflexive illusion produced by the artifice of language in the self-conscious mind.

Although the word prakṛti has come to mean “nature” both in English translation and in other contemporary languages spoken in India, from a philological point of view, dating to 500 BCE, the term refers to the material essence of ritual sacrifice as a form of praxis and the elemental power of sacrifice as a form of meta-communication. This meaning of the term anticipates the articulation of the rules of grammar and phonetics and is clearly indicative of an understanding that the effect of language—its meaning—is dependent on the nature of semiosis and the material semiotics of nature, as manifest in sacrifice.

Prakṛti is a technical term in these sciences [the śrauta-sūtra-s] referring to primary sounds, stems of words and the primary sacrifices. From these primary sounds, stems and sacrifices, multiple “modifications” (vrikṛit-s) are derived. It was within these contexts that the idea originated that the effect pre-exists in the cause. (Jacobsen 1999, 34)

It is in these terms that prakṛti signifies the archetypal sacrifice as a material semiotic model from which all other forms of communication derive, including language.

As manifest in Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā, a fourth-century CE treatise on the nature of things, Sāṃkhya philosophy, which developed out of earlier Vedic speculation on the power of discerning enumeration, should be understood as a commentary on the forms of suffering that ensue from misperceptions of the relationship among things (see Burley 2004; Larson 1979). Correct perception of the cause of suffering prevents one from becoming trapped, so to speak, in the misguided pursuit of happiness. Sāṃkhya is only one particular articulation of an approach to this problem. Other schools of thought, Vaiśeṣika and scholastic Buddhism in particular, similarly dig into the question of the fraught and uncertain relationship among things, forms, and words, and the relationship of these relationships to experience (see Bronkhorst 2011). What is especially important about Sāṃkhya, however, is the ontological dualism of its enumerative calculus of reality.

With antecedents in the earliest Vedic literature, Sāṃkhya posits that māyā is the nature of things. The illusive nature of māyā encompasses absolutely everything from the reality of sensory stimulation to the most subtle and abstract thought—the idea of freedom or happiness, for example—to a thing that can be touched, heard, felt, and smelled. Sāṃkhya holds to a form of logic, at once profoundly social and ecological, in which individual sense perception can only reproduce an experience of reality that is fragmentary and transitory (see Burley 2004). As an epistemological counterpoint to Lucretian empiricism, Sāṃkhya enumerates a logic of reflexive dualism that transcends the distinction between natural and supernatural domains—materialism and idealism—locating ultimate reality in the dynamic of sign relations (Antony 2016; Arnau 2013).

Since puruṣa can only ever be an ideal that emerges from fragmented human consciousness, the elusively binary calculus of Sāṃkhyan enumeration, which is based on principles of semiosis that enable but undermine the logic of its own duality, provides an orientation toward truth (see Perrett 2001; Ruzsa 2003). This orientation avoids both the suffering of empiricism’s endless anticipation of definitive future knowledge and the chronic misperception of understanding that devolves from recursive critiques anchored in the illusion of language, in humanism’s history of transcendent self-realization, and in genealogies of knowledge that reproduce the isolation of introspective self-reflection as the bondage of difference that is our species being (see Sharma 2004).

Sāṃkhyan reasoning does not depend on a distinction between natural and supernatural things or on dualities structured in terms of the binary opposition of body and mind (Jacobsen 1999; Lucyszyna 2016). On a fundamental level, cognition, perception, and consciousness are all aspects of nature, as nature is understood to be the continuum of a calculus of endless, animated transformation. Ideas and thoughts, in both their most basic and elaborate forms, reflect on and are part of this calculus. God is as much an aspect of nature and is created and animated according to the same calculus as are people and other living things (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 523). In some ways the idea of god—which is all that it can be—is simply in the emergent tension between manifest and unmanifest nature.

Given the extent to which mythology and the power of divinity defines almost all of the early literature of South Asia, it is remarkable that Sāṃkhyan reasoning from the late centuries BCE does not make a categorical distinction between the human and the divine, does not attribute creation to the gods, and, in essence, presents an argument for both the contingency of human consciousness and the contingency of god as an idea constituted of the same substance as human consciousness. In this light, god is not, as Durkheim suggested, an expression of collective consciousness: human sociality. The idea of god is the subtle mental residue that devolves from avidyā: un-understanding the nature of dualism in a world full of differentiated things, including self and other.

This reasoning only seems to be remarkable, however, given the extent to which philosophy in South Asia tends to be interpreted, quite literally, as it is expressed, in the “language of the gods.” A Sāṃkhyan understanding of the soul does not depend on or refer to divinity. It is in all ways transcendent and external rather than personal and linked to individual experience or self-discipline. Yet, enumeration produces knowledge of discrimination and delineation that reflects the distinctive duality of Sāṃkhya such that individual experience based on this knowledge reflects ultimate truth. By this means one does not become god-like through reason. One’s reasoning “reflects,” in the full semiotic sense of the term, an understanding of the relationship between the transcendent soul and primordial nature.

In this light the nature of reality changes significantly. It conforms more explicitly to the structure of language than to the logic of scientific reasoning and proof. As such, the ontological epistemology of Sāṃkhya provides a clearer perspective on all the discontinuities of contemporary experience, especially those based on contrived, metaphorical dualities such as real/unreal, supernatural/natural, ideas/things, human/divine, animal/nonhuman animal, and so forth.

To understand this more clearly, it is useful to contrast the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic with an allegory in Īśvarakṛṣṇa Sāṃkhyakārikā. The allegory of the cave is well known and may be understood as the founding myth of a certain kind of empirical reason that posits reality in the singularity of forms that can be understood by breaking the chains of ignorance. Turning one’s back on the images that appear on the wall of the cave is an act of liberation. It is a claim to see reality as it is in the permanence and transcendence of the form itself against the light of the fire that produces the illusion of the shadows on the wall. Phenomenological interpretations of the allegory, most notably Heidegger’s, problematize questions concerning the nature of reality but ultimately locate the form of truth and the truth of forms in the experience of a being that is capable of revealing to itself the truth of being in experience. Unchained from the focus on objectified truth, so to speak, the knowing self becomes a locus of interpretive power at the center of an expanding hermeneutic circle. In the allegory of the cave, human agency and the power of self-knowledge, based on critical self-reflection, is profoundly essentialized, forming the essence of a kind of humanism that suffers the burden of anthropocentrism and its sacralized and secularized discontents.

Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s allegory is strikingly different, engaging directly with the question of knowledge as dialogic, social, and ecological rather than reflexively introspective, however odd this may seem in relation to scholarship that has applied the logic of humanism to understanding the practice of asceticism in South Asia. In the Sāṃkhyakārikā the transcendent soul—puruṣa—is like a person who can see but cannot walk. Primordial nature—prakṛti—is like a person who can walk but is blind. The ability to witness and move through the world, thereby animating it, devolves from the chance encounter of the lame and the blind in a forest. The Sāṃkhyakārikā makes it very clear that seeing illusion as illusion, which is very different from looking for the singularity of truth either behind illusion or in Dasien, is the only rational and consistent epistemology of self-reflection in a universe of signs that only appear to be things. As Larson and Bhattacharya point out, the use of metaphor and simile by Iśvarakṛṣṇa, as interpreted with different degrees of focus on the relationship of consciousness by Vācaspati Miśra and Vijñānabhikṣu in the Sāṃkhyasūtra, invokes the ineffable or “brief intuitive glimpse” (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 83) of insight that reason cannot perfectly capture, except by referencing the necessity of interdependency in practice. Here the metaphor of the relationship of the cow’s milk (as prakṛti) to the calf’s dependency on milk (as puruşa) explains the principle of satkāryavāda (the subtle effect in the cause), suggesting a relationship of integrated codependency in the action of suckling.

What makes this relevant to a critique of the conceit of humanism is not the possibility of enlightenment manifest in the practice of ascetic self-discipline. Nor is Sāṃkhya’s relevance limited to the conceptualization of a pantheon of alternative sciences resurrected from relativism that devolves from the endless rebirth of old ideas in the discovery of more differences. What makes Sāṃkhya relevant as an alternative to the humanism of the Enlightenment, as well as to the mystical esotericism of higher consciousness, is a theory of communication that emerges from its distinctive conceptualization of dualism.

THE NATURE OF THE WORD AND THE SACRIFICE OF GOD

Language is based on the illusion of an objective correlation between sign and signified that is, in fact, contingent and arbitrary. This derives from the fact that all sign relations are mediated by interpretants and the problem of recursive meaning that consequently animates mediated consciousness as a defining aspect of life. In a world perceived by the lame-leading-the-blind-leading-the-lame—where the connection between sense and agency is epiphenomenal—communication is essential, but as a reflection on the reality of semiotic relations rather than of the meaning of things that the denotative elision of language portends. By drawing attention to aporia in the semiotics of the world at large, encompassing consciousness and perception, Sāṃkhya provides a way to understand language as a form of magic. It follows the logic of semiosis, which is integral to all language, but without the confounding problem of recursive representation in signs that essentialize the mind’s perception of the body and all other things (see Martino 2020; Shaw 2002).

All languages are governed by the same basic rules, and studies of Sanskrit grammar have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the history and philosophy of language as a whole and the precise changes that generate languages. It is useful, however, to think through Sanskrit with reference to a Sāṃkhyan understanding of semiosis to understand the magic of communication. Sanskrit is no more or less a language of the gods than any other language, but its grammar and, more significantly, reasoning about the power of grammar and the application of this reasoning to ritual, provides a critical perspective on the problem of human self-consciousness in a world where it is difficult to forget—as we do all the time when we speak—that words have no intrinsic meaning (Staal 1988; see also Hastings 2003).

Underlying Sanskrit’s well-known concern for precision and rules—and the performance of rules in the enactment of ritual—is an important trajectory of reasoning that does not connect the language of sacrifice to communication with the gods. Instead, as Veena Das has pointed out,

in the interpretation of sacrifice offered by the Mīmāmsā school, two poles are constituted by the renunciation of all objects of desire by man and the willing submission of God to man in entering the sacrificial area and being revived by sacrifice. This is the meaning of the partnership established between the gods and men by their common submission to Logos. (Das 1983, 560)

Following B. K. Matilal’s analysis of the fifth-century philosopher Bhartṛhari’s discussion of sphota (eruption of meaning in the mind), language in general and the acoustic elements of varna (phonemes) in particular reflect the substance of thought in the vibration of cognition itself (see Matilal 1985; Matilal and Ganeri 2005). The principle of sphota does not anticipate or derive from a semiotic chain of signified and signifier across the plane of perception and meaning. Sphota is the burst of insight that makes it possible to conceptualize transcendent consciousness, but only to the extent that it is primarily the invariant vibration of sound that animates the mind.

For Bhartṛhari we live in a world of words that are animated by the vibration of primordial sound that dissolves into the illusion of consciousness and its transcendence. As with the performance and practice of haṭha yoga, which stops the flow of generative substances that reflect the animation of guṇa, Sanskrit grammar has “degenerative” properties, if degenerative is understood nonpejoratively as a mode of essentializing perception that works against the logic of grammar, which is inherently generative. In fact, if Sanskrit grammar is understood in terms of the duality articulated in Sāṃkhya, rather than in terms of Sussurean linguistics, the codification of rules that produce meaning simply produce the illusion that things are real by generating words from sounds to signify those things (see Matilal 1971; 1986). As Larson and Bhattacharya explain, in Bhartṛhari’s conceptualization “words taken out of a sentence are like sense taken out of the body” (Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 231).

Remembering that prakṛti means sound, primordial substance, sacrifice, and grammar, Veena Das’s argument is especially important in light of Sāṃkhyan dualism. Taking issue with the ontology of humanism that has structured anthropological analyses of sacrifice, she shows how the essential Vedic ritual is not about reconciling human desire to a conception of cosmic order by sacrificing to god. It is a sacrifice of god. Most importantly, however, Das shows how, in the logic of prescriptions for ritual, grammar is the substance that brings human and divine together to perform an act of generative destruction:

Desire freed from its slavery to objects, becomes desire created by the Logos itself... Thus it is not language which is predicated upon human existence but human existence which is predicated upon language. The principle of dharma (eternal order) is, therefore, to be found in the nature of the Word. (Das 1983, 446)

Focusing on the nature of the word in this literal sense, it is useful to think through Frits Staal’s argument about rules without meaning and the origin of linguistics in southern Asia (Staal 1989). Staal’s analysis hinges on the idea that rituals are meaningless but rule bound, and that the use of utterances in ritual has significance because of their phonemic structure rather than their meaning. This is anchored in the notion that rituals are performative acts that do not entail belief but are structured by rules that have no meaning other than the fact that they are rules. Staal likens the deep structure of ritual to the deep structure of generative, universal grammar, focusing on mantras as meaningless sounds that correspond to and are incorporated into the structure of ritual.

If we think of mantras, conceptually, as semiotic wedges in the cracks of logic that define the structure of grammar, the architecture of language takes on the character of a defensive strategy to maintain the illusive integrity of human self-consciousness—the notion that sounds are meaningless if they do not take shape as words. From this perspective, mantras become the means by which the illusion of self-consciousness is manifest in divinity and are an integral part of the edifice of ritual that maintains the integrity of that mediated illusion. As analyzed and interpreted by Staal, the mathematical structure and musical properties of mantras do not give these meaningless sounds significance in the context of sacred ritual and soteriology. Mantras signify how sounds are rendered nonsensical by language and how the perversity of this contrived paradox generates the distinction between meaning and meaninglessness.

As such, grammar is both generative and destructive, with everything that is human taking shape in a world where we can only hear ourselves think (so to speak) by forgetting that we are, by nature, in Sāṃkhyan terms, conscious because we are blind and lame. If reason enables us to “break the chains” of ignorance, the degenerative property of grammar reminds us that consciousness is only meaningful to the extent that it is collective, and collective consciousness is the vibration of sound made by the feet of the other that is us. It leads us out of the cave and—with the humility of animated dependency rather than the heroic hubris of humanism—back down into a forest that we hear, touch, smell, taste, and see in a new light. We might call this trans-rescinding consciousness.

PARASITISM IN A NEW LIGHT: DISABILITY AND THE EMBRACE OF ECOLOGY

If the problem with humanism is the heroic triumphalism of god-like reason that follows on the development of language, where does a Sāṃkhyan perspective on degenerative grammar take us if not simply into the domain of transcendental enlightenment? When untangled from the web of culture that is the substance of humanism, this self-consciously disabled epistemology leads us in a different direction.

It leads to a critical, material understanding of environmentalism as a kind of ritual praxis to reanimate a world of signs rendered lifeless by an epistemology of illusion that is based on a mistake in the perception of reality. Signs are, of course, regularly brought back to life by the magic of humanism but only in terms of the suspension of doubt manifest in the work of reason, the trickery of perspectivism, and the artifice of words. Consider the phrase “bird songs.” It is evocative and suggestive as well as precise enough to mean what we think it means. But these and other words that occupy our mind cast very long and dark shadows on reality because they are much more precise than a reality in which our categories of suspended doubt fall apart. Vedic sacrifice is about terror at the shadowy boundary of consciousness created by the violence of language and doubt that is unsuspended by the meaninglessness of ritual. With a focus on its semiotic properties, sacrifice is a self-critical reflection on the desire for control over things, including the self. As a reflection of the power of words, the praxis of sacrifice—itself simply a reflection of the substance of the light of the fire in consciousness—affords a critical perspective on incarnate omnipotence and eternal life. This perspective is significantly different from meaning that is materialized in iconic words that nail meaning to reality in the terminology of John’s iconic gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Sāṃkhya is about every “thing” that is problematic about that all too human sentiment/sentience/sentence.

Given the nature of Sāṃkhyan dualism, it is necessary to make use of language to animate perception, to use words not to capture and make sense of other signs but as signs of a sort that enable the meaning of other signs to take shape in consciousness. This is analogous to the way in which our elusive sense of the body’s permanence is the means by which the practice of yoga works to undo any sense of sensory permanence and preeminence that reflects being in touch with the world (see Whicher 1998; Couture 2017). The yogic internalization of the ritual sacrifice rekindles a sense of self-conscious disability that is masked by the idea that we can break the chains of our mute ignorance and embody god-like power and sensibility (see Alter 2006, 2012).

Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s allegory provides a way to think about biology in terms of a more inclusive semiosis than is bracketed by language, drawing attention to ecology and ecological relations rather than to organisms as discrete things that function based on either their instinct or independent self-awareness. As such, a Sāṃkhyan social ecology may be characterized in terms of parasitism as against humanism, with mutualism replacing the logic of dominion (see Dasti 2012 and Vaidya 2013 for an interpretation of parasitism and disjunctivism in Nyāya epistemology).

Parasites and parasitism recall negative images in a Hobbesian mode of thinking about the state of nature as an endless war of all against all to the end of singular, individual advantage. Underlying this is a notion that freedom from the constant fear of violence is based on self-determination and independence, both in abstract terms that signify autonomy but also, and significantly, in practical terms that bring to mind practices of immunization, quarantine, and the eradication of viral infections, as well as reclusive isolation and the renunciation of attachment to all things.

But if we think about parasitism in terms of Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s allegory, we do not see the “it” of a parasite at all. We see-as-we-feel, instead, a relationship of disjunctive, undomesticated mutualism that characterizes all semiosis. Semiosis is parasitic in this nonpejorative sense, just as an understanding of parasitism entails a mode of perception that is disabled from seeking its own tragically singular perspective on contingent reality.

Just as magic takes shape as a thing apart—evil, powerful, dangerous, secret, mysterious—as a result of the illusion of disenchantment that animates the modernity of humanism, parasitism, within the rubric of biology and medicine, on the one hand, and literature, history, and social science, on the other, tends to be regarded as a particular and problematic example of dependency, exploitation, self-interested extraction, and violence. Even when inverted, delineated, and reinterpreted within a framework guided by the logic of Lucretius’s thinking, the parasite becomes a metaphor to conjure with (see Serres 2007), a force that represents, in Nietzschean terms, the power of the negative in an environment where both positivism and critiques of positivism are sustained by the same life blood.

It is important to point out that the argument presented here provides a different route to many of the insights afforded by theories of material semiotics, actor-network theory, and an understanding of the social reality of human–nonhuman animal relations. However, there is a difference. In starting with a perception of reality that is grounded in semiosis, as against applying semiotics to deconstruct the reality of things and then reconstructing meaning based on an epistemology that undermines its own constructivist goals, the ontological relativism of Sāṃkhyan ecology does not generate the kind of intellectual struggle of relativism that characterizes humanism in general and anthropology in particular.

Humanism is a mode of thinking that reflects the power of reason to extract meaning from things either through generalization or a celebration of diversity. But parasitism, in the mode of Sāṃkhyan ecology, encompasses the human and the nonhuman within a paradigm of illusive interdependence, a paradigm in which words are not different from things, from sounds, and other signs. To metaphorically invoke Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s world view, parasitism is the fabric of the web of illusion that can be extended to the most fundamental illusion—that there is a transcendental reality apart from that which is animated by collective ecological consciousness. There is not. We are not spirits in a material world of self-perfectibility. We are mediated interpretants in a relational, interdependent universe of infinite, productive regress.

As a socioecological paradigm, parasitism is defined by semiosis and requires a mode of thinking that embraces the perfection of imperfection and complete incompleteness. Real social relations—involving a host of different organisms in perpetual communication—devolve from the illusion of reality that is the grounds of their interaction. Humanism and its discontents emerge from the collective self-consciousness of one species talking to itself in the language of the gods. As the animating force of real humility, magic entails a performance of illusion that masks the infinite regress of semiosis behind the deception of duality that structures language. Magic does not so much invoke the power of enchantment, which is hiding in plain sight behind the cultural meaning assigned to signs, as it produces the logic of reason that makes the performance of illusion seem like deception. Parasitism is how enchantment works to disable the deceptive magic of humanism encoded in language and the alienating artifice of difference-that-is-not difference that language produces through generative grammar.

By confounding duality, parasitism does not take us “beyond” anything, certainly not beyond good and evil. It is intrinsic to the semiosis of ecology (the forest in Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s analogy) and to collective consciousness independent of, but necessarily reflected in, the illusion of māyā. The Sāṃkhyakārikā is, in this sense, not so much a treatise on the philosophy of mind as it is a natural philosophy of social reality wherein the ultimate truth of puruṣa is manifest, however imperfectly as a consequence of mediated perception, in the social fact of ecological interdependence. To put it this way does not turn Sāṃkhya on its head, for that would reproduce the illusion of duality. To understand puruṣa as collective consciousness entails the praxis of self-conscious disability and simply does not let the grammar of world renunciation generate a language of self-reflection that binds the meaning of all signs in the universe to the illusion of words.

CONCLUSION: THE ENCHANTMENT OF NATURAL HISTORY

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Graeber and Wengrow 2021), Graeber and Wengrow support the provocatively revolutionary claim of the title. They challenge the founding mythology of holistic anthropology by questioning assumptions concerning the nature of modern social thought. Drawing primarily on archaeological evidence, they question unexamined assumptions that are built into foundational questions concerning the trajectory of human social and cultural history. Their conclusion reflects the power of humanism, showing that we have been asking the wrong questions. One of the right questions, in their view the most fundamental, is why the Enlightenment essentialized the problem of equality in a way that has produced and reproduced an endless search for its ideal form, as reflected in the shadows on the walls of history, both ancient and modern.

Although the title of their book invites a seemingly unlimited revisionist perspective, I do not think they have, in fact, taken us far enough... into the forest that they help us to see. A genealogy of questions about questions about equality cannot take for granted more fundamental questions concerning the nature of consciousness, perception, self-reflection, and the relationship among knowledge, truth, and freedom, especially not in a context where the nature of being human—as different from but not different from being animal and therefore animate—is essentialized by the deep logic of humanism.

The argument put forward here is to think against both the trajectory of the Enlightenment and its imperialist entailments and against derivative forms of humanism in world religions. To think against the form that religion has taken as the humanism of the humanities is to conceptualize a point of philosophical reflection—a meta-theoretical dynamic—that supports a growing body of scholarship on the social reality of multi-species ecologies. These realities are enchanted in the simple sense that semiosis is magical. The endemic fact of illusion in semiotic reality belies the deception in humanism’s claim to truth in the performance of reason’s disenchantment. Perhaps most significantly, the performance of reason’s disenchantment brings into critical perspective the contrivance of various forms of re-enchantment that are performed as relativist critiques of reason.

Independent of so-called parasitic organisms, which suffer the ignominy of a very particular articulation of māyā, parasitism, as a pervasive epistemology that makes it possible to conceptualize ontology, is the prehuman praxis of what is conceptualized as posthumanism. In articulating this mode of reasoning and the possibility of alternative futures, Donna Haraway draws on a mythology of tentacular, subterranean interconnections to locate a politics of the possible in what she calls the Chthulucene (Haraway 2016). The Chthulucene, as she characterizes it, is an environment of making with, rather than seeking the transcendence of self-making, to overcome the Anthropocene. As such, “staying in the trouble” of making reality collectively in the Anthropocene is the praxis of embedded recovery.

In an environment such as this, parasitism reflects a more intimate and holistic sense of prosthetic being. It strikes me, perhaps only sphota like but in an important sense nevertheless, as intimately semiotic and alienating. Alienation, in the sense that it objectifies the self in relation to other, can thus be used nonpejoratively to counterbalance the magic of affective, alternative futurism. In this way, parasitism is neither positive nor negative but a semiotic condition that reflects what Bernard Stiegler has conceptualized as prosthetic dependency (Stiegler 2001). Prosthetic parasitic dependency is an expression that extends techne to ecology, as organisms depend on each other’s incorporation of each other. Parasitism is alienating in the sense of the blind-leading-the-lame-leading-the-blind to the point of experiencing the dependence of self in other. It is a collective embodiment of consciousness that reflects memory as a function of the way in which everything is a materialized sign of everything else’s relationship with it. As particularly ignominious organisms, ticks, lice, and fleas—even rapidly mutating viruses—are iconic of a dynamic of trans-rescinding consciousness that is much more pervasive than is permitted by the incipient, binary moralism of language.

At the risk of inviting the recrimination of theistically oriented devotees, it is useful to conceptualize parasitism, in the sacrificial sense outlined here, as, in essence, the philosophy of karma yoga.

Karma yoga is the central teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā (Flood and Martin 2012). To do your duty selflessly, as Kṛṣṇa explains to Arjun, as the warrior king searches for words to express and overcome the fear, uncertainty, and self-doubt of human bondage, is to embody enlightenment and experience the transcendence of self. In the Gītā bondage is explained in terms of attachment to the significance of the guṇa and, one might say, to the power of the guṇa to ensnare consciousness. As a function of the guṇa, action is necessary. But attachment to the meaning—to the significance—of action is to live in the delusion of self-centeredness, however justified this may seem. Detachment would seem to entail renunciation, but karma yoga calls for embodied action that is detached from the ignorance of metaphysical duality. And theistic nondualism is certainly encoded in the language of the Gītā and hammered home in commentary after commentary after commentary. However, a call to embodied action that draws on a Sāṃkhyan philosophy of prakṛti, as the text most certainly does, suggests that the action of karma yoga, instead of resolving through devotion and sacrifice into the nonduality of god, can resolve the illusion of metaphysical duality into the selflessness of active “attentive” dependency on the imperfect nature of the action of others (see Maitra 2022).

To act is to engage in praxis that is ecological rather than moral or ethical within the limited framework of human experience. Enlightenment can only be incremental and relational. It is what the application of theory should be to understanding social relations. Selflessness leads to the realization of a divine life only if we hitch our wagons—with blind faith and fearlessness that masks the terror of language on the battlefield of culture—to images of ourselves listening to the word of god. Motionless, introspective creatures in a forest of symbols animated by the magic of our god-like humanistic self-perception, we see divinity in the nature of things, including human nature.

This is what strikes terror into Arjun’s heart and is the source of anguish that consumes him in the Bhagavad Gītā—a “song of god” in the same sense that we can understand the problem of using words such as song to capture the sounds that birds make. The action we must take, which is philosophical in a collective, ecological sense that transcends our senses and signifying, sacralized sensibility, is inherently dependent on our location in the illusion that keeps us “in the trouble”—fully engaged in the profound contradictions that are allegorized as war in the song of god: the “relativism” of fractured kinship, killing to live, and the foundational immorality of self-determination that is the keystone of differentiation—us but not us; me not you—that structures hierarchy, privilege, and social inequity. In meta-theoretical terms that reflect a philosophical position in the trouble of the battlefield, we are semiotically attached to other creatures on whom we depend and who depend on us to regenerate life and knowledge. That is the perfect imperfection of alienated right action.

To think along these lines, within the anthropogenic trouble that is our chronic misperception, I hope to have made several points regarding the nature of things. The nature of things is an illusion because reality is semiotic. As a thing that gives substance to reality, language anticipates the dominion of humanism. Political ecology is possible through the power of magic in our collective and significant disabilities rather than in the violence of singular insight or the attribution of meaning to discrete organisms that take their place—with names, identities, and fabricated powers attached—in a mythology of endless perspectivism that is invariably utopian. As paśu we have come to hear sounds only as language and to attach ourselves to words that reflect the power of memory in the nature of things, a grammar of eternal return and self-sacrificing humanism. If the dawn of everything portends a new understanding of our past, it is in terms of a deep history of the human animal where the blind are dependent on the insight of the lame to see what it feels like to be carried on the shoulders of souls tethered to signs rather than to stand on the shoulders of the heroes of our prehistoric species alone, listening to the god of words.

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