Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism

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Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India's most influential philosophers.

Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of Sankara's Advaita Vedänta or as a "Neo-Vedantin" influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation of Vivekananda's philosophy, highlighting its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, the book argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers.

Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedanta as a non-sectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with numerous philosophers past and present, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda's views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education in Mysore, India. He is the author of Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedänta (2020). He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and studied at Oxford University and Humboldt University in Berlin.

I am grateful to Revered Swami Muktidananda for providing me with an intellectually and spiritually congenial atmosphere to conduct research at the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education. In the course of researching and writing this book, I benefited from conversations with the following scholars: Ermine Algaier, Rupa Bandyopadhyay, Arindam Chakrabarti, Amit Churvedi, Nilanjan Das, Matthew Dasti, Jonardon Ganeri, Jonathan Gold, Malcolm Keating. James Madalo, Joseph Milillo, Arpita Mitra, Todd Leroy Perreira, Stephen Phillips, Sister Gayatri Prana, Anantanand Rambachan, Prabal Kumar Sen, Itay Shani, Linda Simon, and Anand Vaidya. For insightful feedback on one or more chapters of the book, I am grateful to Jonardon Ganeri, Itay Shani, Anand Vaidya, Norris Frederick, Matt Seidel, Joseph Milillo, Swami Mahayogananda, Swami Chidekananda, and four anonymous peer reviewers for Oxford University Press. I also had helpful discussions with the following monks of the Ramakrishna Order: Revered Swamis Shivavratananda, Atmavidananda, Bhajanananda, Nityasthananda, Atmarupananda, Atmapriyananda, Balabhadrananda, Muktidananda, Sarvapriyananda, Divyasukhananda, Chandrakantananda, Chidvikashananda, Mahayogananda, Vedanishthananda, Harinamananda, Sukalyanananda, Paramahamsananda, Vedarthananda, Tadvratananda, Pravrajika Vrajaprana, and Brahmacharis Subrata and Nachiketa.

Joseph Milillo, Apala Das, Swami Mahamedhananda, and Brahmachari Nachiketa kindly sent me articles and book chapters that I had trouble finding in local libraries. Swami Atmarupananda provided me with more accurate and precise dates and titles of some of Vivekananda's lectures and writings than the dates and titles found in the Complete Works. Swami Divyavibhananda, Head Librarian at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, and Swami Bhavantakananda, Head Librarian at RKMVERI, kindly allowed me to use their libraries to my heart's content. I would also like to thank Hannah Doyle and Lucy Randall at Oxford University Press for their support and guidance throughout the process. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Most Revered Swami Smaranananda, President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, and Revered Swami Suvirananda, General Secretary of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, for their kind encouragement and unfailing support of my work. It should be noted that this book was not vetted in any way by the Ramakrishna Order. All views expressed in this book are mine alone.

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), the Bengali spiritual figure who played a pivotal role in reviving Hinduism in India and Introducing Vedanta and Hinduism to the West, is also one of modern India's most important philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses that fail to capture the sophistication and originality of his thinking. Typically, scholars have argued either that he simply gave a modern ethical twist to the eighth-century Sankaracarya's philosophy of Advaita Vedanta' or that he championed a "Neo-Vedantic" philosophy shaped more by Western outlooks and expectations than by indigenous Indian traditions. Rejecting both of these prevailing interpretive approaches, this book offers a new interpretation of Vivekananda's philosophy that highlights its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, I argue, is best seen as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed distinctive new philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with thinkers in both Indian and Western philosophical traditions.

The young Vivekananda's upbringing and education in Calcutta, then the cultural and intellectual hub of British-ruled India, were thoroughly cosmopolitan. His father, Viśvanath Datta, was a successful lawyer proficient in Bengali, English, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi. Endowed with a broad religious outlook, Viśvanath was fond of reciting passages from the Bible and the Dewan-i-Hafiz, and he sometimes asked his son Narendranath-Vivekananda's pre-monastic name-to read aloud from these books as well (Gambhirananda 1984, vol. 1: 16). Meanwhile, Vivekananda's mother, Bhuvaneśvari Devi, was a traditional pious Hindu woman who performed daily worship of Siva and regularly studied the Ramayana and Mahabharata (LSV 1:8).

From 1881 to 1884, Narendranath studied at the General Assembly's Institution (now known as Scottish Church College) in Calcutta, where he took numerous courses in Western philosophy from mostly European professors, including Reverend William Hastie. As a college student, he studied such thinkers as Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer.

As we will see in the course of this book, Vivekananda's early study of Western thought had an enormous impact on his thinking. As he himself later admitted in his lecture on "Soul, God and Religion" (1895), when he was "a boy," he got swept up in the "surging tide of agnosticism and materialism" and became skeptical of the very existence of God: "[I]t seemed for a time as if I must give up all hope of religion" (CW 1:317-18). However, in late 1881 or early 1882, his life took a decisive turn when he met the mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), who would be- come his guru. In an 1896 lecture, Vivekananda described his first life-changing encounter with Ramakrishna: "For the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw God, that religion was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than we can sense the world" (CW 4:179). As I will discuss in detail in the first chapter, Ramakrishna trained and guided Narendra both spiritually and intellectually from 1882 to 1886, and shortly after Ramakrishna's passing in August 1886, Narendra became a sannydsin, eventually assuming the name "Swami Vivekananda." After traveling throughout India as a wandering monk from 1888 to March 1893, Vivekananda took two extended trips to the West, giving lectures and classes on Hinduism and Vedanta in America and England from 1893 to 1896 and again from 1899 to 1901.