Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata, and Culture Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I About Theories and Philosophies
- Part II About Self
- Part III About Memory
- Part IV About Interpretation
- Chapter 7 The Reading Act
- Chapter 8 Readers, Plots and Discourse
- Part V About Self, Memory and Interpretation
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Interview Documents
- References
Chapter 7 - The Reading Act
from Part IV - About Interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I About Theories and Philosophies
- Part II About Self
- Part III About Memory
- Part IV About Interpretation
- Chapter 7 The Reading Act
- Chapter 8 Readers, Plots and Discourse
- Part V About Self, Memory and Interpretation
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Interview Documents
- References
Summary
jnanam jneyam parijnata
trividha karmacodana
karanam karma karte ti
trividhah karmasamagrahah
Knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knowing subject, are the threefold incitement to action: the instrument, the action and the agent are the threefold composite of action.
The Bhagavad GitaAn active understanding, according to the Bhagavad Gita, is equivalent to action, in which there are many actors. Knowledge (product), the knower (subject), the tools for acquiring knowledge (instruments) and the application of these tools (processes) and the object of knowledge (known) are all equal partners in this act. In the Philosophy of Act, Bakhtin (1993) expresses similar sentiment, and he says, “every thought of mine, along with its content, is an act or deed that I perform” (p. 3). For Bakhtin, removing the “thought” from its concrete “act” results in invalidating the thought itself. He writes,
As a performed act, a given thought forms an integral whole: both its content/sense and the fact of its presence in my actual consciousness – the consciousness of a perfectly determinate human being – at a particular time in particular circumstances, i.e., the whole concrete historicalness of its performance – both of these moments (the content/sense moment and the individual–historical moment) are unitary and indivisible in evaluating that thought as my answerable act or deed. (1993, 3)
My focus in this chapter on the reading act is on the indivisibility of the “content/sense moments” and the “individual/historical moments” that Bakhtin points out.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata, and CultureThe History of Understanding and Understanding of History, pp. 157 - 224Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010