Science is not exclusive to western countries. In fact, I would argue that a lot of the basis from science is Eastern philosophy. It is merely a method for determining the validity of truth claims.
Science is characterized by objective empiricism; it relies on third-person observation, quantifiable data, and the principle of falsifiability to build a predictive model of the external, material world. Its goal is to establish "public" knowledge that remains true regardless of who is observing it.
In contrast, many traditions within Eastern philosophy are rooted in disciplined phenomenology or first-person inquiry. Rather than seeking to measure external objects, these traditions provide a systematic framework for investigating the nature of consciousness and the "felt" quality of experience from within.
While science seeks to explain the mechanisms of reality through a detached lens, Eastern philosophy seeks to realize the nature of being through direct, subjective realization.
In a scientific world where we have already acknowledged that perception itself can change the quality of the objects observed, that the obsever himself stands within an economy of the material he is observing, why is there an insistence here on a strong subject/object distinction? I think this is only because of a misunderstanding of “oriental” philosophy against “western” philosophy. But there is a reason Oppenheimer qoutes the Bhagavad Gita, it wasn’t arbitrary—if you read the text yourself, you will find the distillation of the grammatical principles above as an ontology.
In the Gita, there is a “detached,” method of accessing being, but it is moreso reccomended for those who are not capable of living in the world, whose Dharma is not to live a life of activity. As Krishna tell Arjuna, nobody cannot avoid acting at any moment, the world is composed of myriads of actions and reactions, the results of which we cannot ever fully know and should live at a remove from. This would be an embrace of an “objective” universe, an unpredictable universe, a universe full of movement and energy—far more objective, I would say, far more immersed in the object, than any “subjective” understanding could possibly fulfill. But here there are no subjects, there are no objects, there are only, as Latour might’ve said (though he abandoned it later), actors and actants, there is only activity.
I would like to learn the Gita. Everytime I feel is overly repetitive with to much Krishna praising. Do you have any Bagavad Gita book recommendations that goes into the kernel of the teaching without all that noise?
Goldman’s Devavanipravešika [0] was what I learned Sanskrit from, that will teach you the grammar but Sanskrit grammar is notoriously difficult to learn, it functions almost like a computer language (though, not quite), it was the first formalized language, formalized into a system of thousands of rules that young kids of the upper castes would spend years memorizing. This book is a much simpler way to learn the grammar, but it still won’t be easy.
>Do you have any Bagavad Gita book recommendations that goes into the kernel of the teaching without all that noise?
Any interpretation you read will have some measure of sectarian influence, even my interpretation is quite contemporary, I’m drawing from more recent currents of thought to discuss the Gita in terms of an economy of force—-a good stepping stone between the text itself and this contemporary thought would be this volume of essays, in particular “The God and the Warrior,” by Mario Tronti, which touches on these things directly [1]. In the end it will be up to you, after your own studies, to form your own interpretation and your own relationship to the work.
[0] https://avg-sanskrit.org/avgclasses/Books&PDFs/TextBooks/Dev... [1] https://assets.kingston.ac.uk/m/ced5eece7fb5ed9/original/Voc...
That's only really true of the natural sciences. Cultural sciences (humanitas) are of a different kind. Here, we don't look for universal truths and laws but for meanings and interpretations. And they come from the Western philosophical tradition.