Category: Political Philosophy

The Lover of Che and Marx


Samudrala Avinash Rahul Vamshi KrishnaWhat a long name. Does not sound at allLike the name of someoneWho belongs to the … More

“They are no philosophical race”: Nietzsche’s Critique of the Englishman’s Philosophy


Nietzsche reserved special contempt for the English philosophical tradition, seeing in its utilitarianism and empiricism a triumph of mediocrity over greatness. “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does,” he declared — skewering Bentham and Mill’s reduction of morality to mere comfort and calculation. For Nietzsche, British moral philosophy was herd morality dressed in academic clothing: it flattened human hierarchy, punished excellence, and mistook survival for nobility. Even Darwin’s legacy, filtered through Spencer, pointed downward toward the average. The English, he charged, were industrious but philosophically shallow — incapable of the dangerous, self-overcoming thought true philosophy demands.

Nava-Dvara Pura: Why the “Nine Gates” Body Metaphor in Indian Philosophy Is Inherently Patriarchal


The ancient Vedic concept of Nava-Dvara Pura — the human body as a city of nine gates — is one of Indian philosophy’s most sophisticated metaphors for embodied consciousness. But there is a profound problem hiding in plain sight: the template body is male. The female body possesses a tenth gate, the vaginal canal, yet the tradition universalizes nine as the human count, silently erasing female anatomy. Worse, in the Bhagavata Purana’s Puranjana allegory, the female principle appears not as the soul inhabiting the city, but as an object encountered within it — intelligence subordinated to a male sovereign.

Beyond the Golden Veil: Transcending Sattva, Para Vidya, and the Final Frontier of Self-Knowledge in Advaita


Of the three gunas that constitute all of manifest existence, Sattva — the quality of luminosity, harmony, and knowledge — is the most seductive bondage. Unlike Tamas, which crushes, or Rajas, which burns, Sattva seduces with bliss, ethical refinement, and the pleasures of understanding. Ramakrishna’s parable of the three robbers captures this with surgical precision: the sattvic robber alone unties the traveller and shows him the path home — but does not take him there. The finest veil is still a veil.
The Mundaka Upanishad’s distinction between Apara Vidya — all systematized human knowledge, from the sciences to the humanities — and Para Vidya, the knowledge by which the Imperishable is realized, frames this predicament with extraordinary clarity. No accumulation of apara vidya, however refined and sattvic, can answer the question the Upanishad’s Shaunaka poses at the outset: by knowing what does everything become known? That question dissolves the knower, and no object of knowledge can accomplish that.
Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and J. Krishnamurti — approaching from different angles — converge on a single insight: the final obstacle to liberation is not ignorance or desire, but the subtle, luminous, deeply respectable self that knows.

“I will go wherever my argument leads me”


“Follow the argument wherever it leads” — drawn from Plato’s Republic — stands as the cornerstone of the Socratic method. It reflects a profound commitment to pursuing truth through rational dialogue, even when conclusions challenge our deepest assumptions. Socrates held that intellectual honesty demands we set aside bias and comfort in favor of objective reasoning. Through dialectic — the art of reasoned questioning — he pushed interlocutors to confront contradictions in their own beliefs. This relentless pursuit of truth over reputation ultimately led to his trial in Athens, yet he never wavered. Philosophy, at its best, asks us to do the same.