i am currently finishing up a thesis which ties together vedic ontology, cosmopolitanism and human rights. sounds unrelated? well… they are rather disparate topics i’ll admit, but in examing each philosophy at a deep hermeneutical level i have concluded that they may, at some level, be saying the same thing: we are one, this is justified by nothing (but nothing is really ever justified), and what is the point of violence given this schema?
obviously i fill out this argument extensively in the actual thesis, but this is basically what it boils down to for me. as much as i am invested in certain critical race discourses, the entire disipline is honed in a soil of difference. i am pretty much unable to reconcile this my cosmopolitan identity and yearning to be one with the world and all. so i leave it as a contradicition and remind myself that life is not a neat or coherent narrative.
i realized if i wanted to claim both the uniqueness of the brown womanhood and the cosmopolitan ethos of one world humanity (without that being a suffocating one world blanket mono culture model) i would need to approach this thesis creatively. hence i turned to vedic scripts which are thousands of years old and which are both intimatley indian in thier origins and universally applicable in their themes of questions about reality and our place in reality. the result has been interesting so far… i am attempting to suggest modern cosmopolitan discourse look to vedic ontology to underpin its own weakly defined ontology. this vedic-cosmopolitan discourse then supplies a rather powerful argument to the construction of identity as understood in contemporary human rights discourse… how do we understand the human in human rights anyway? i try to unpack this construction by contrasting it with vedic-cosmopolitan understandings of human identity to through it into sharp relief.
the thesis is yet unfinished so i have yet to see if this project will come together… will be happy to get the project done in case. one month countdown… dun dun dun.
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