J.L.Mehta

I was claimed by science, its methodology and outlook, as well as by depth psychology in all its offshoots and ramifications, and in all its dubiousness. For a decade Sigmund Freud held me spellbound as the embodiment of all that was strange, questionable and deep. From this adventure I drifted back into philosophy, landing eventually and inevitably into Wittgenstein as the central figure in the empiristic, analytical, neo-positivist thought. What inspired me here again was a novel mode of thought. What sublime indifference to the concrete realities of human experience, what passion for clarity and intellectual cleanliness, even if the baby had to be poured out with the bathwater! Heidegger gave my sense of wonder a basis of historicity and a valid perspective so that I could turn again to my own cultural tradition. [70-71]

My life-work has been too intimately visited by modern secular winds for me to be able to take unquestioningly for granted my inherited modes of thought and living. But I am also unable, because my bond with tradition is not broken, to take the modern present as normative or as giving me a right to sit in judgement. [248-49]

Just as in the case of writing history, each generation must re-interpret and re-comprehend its past from the perspective of the present, so also the great sacred texts like the Rigveda and the Upanishads must be re-translated, re-read and re-interpreted again and again in the language and idiom of our ever-changing current mode of speaking and writing, and of our present intellectual awareness. [159]

All I am suggesting is that, the new awareness of the dimension of historicity in human matters, a new sensitiveness about the linguisticity of experience and about the world-context of the life of particular traditions, all this has placed us today in a situation where we can seek to read this ancient text afresh and thus gain novel insights from it. [93]