Berggruen Press
In Search Of Greater India
De lá: «What if Western liberalism was not the only answer to the great questions of human life? What if other peoples, histories, and philosophies held equally plausible visions of what it is to live and to think?
This book advances a program for the civilization state. What is a civilization state? It is a polity that embodies an organized set of ideas about human life and human society, which is radically different from the modern, Western concept of the state. The civilization state gives expression to a worldview. (...)».
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«“Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West,” the Portuguese diplomat and scholar Bruno Maçães has written in Noema.
In his new book for Berggruen Press, “In Search Of Greater India,” Maçães explores what the light of Indian civilization that existed millennia before the advent of the nation-state might teach the modern West — and the rest of the world its dominance shaped for centuries.
He cites Carl Jung on the unenlightened and insecure person as an analogue for the national ego, which “projects the traits they repress or reject in themselves onto others, who as a result are transformed into convenient repositories of everything evil and ugly in the human personality. This is how world politics becomes a final confrontation between good and evil. The monsters we confront are the monsters we ourselves have created. And since they are all too ready to destroy us, we must be ready to destroy them. Until that final moment, one must wait, perhaps responsibly, but life is already haunted by annihilation.”
In the Indian tradition from the Emperor Ashoka to Mahatma Gandhi, Maçães writes, we find a different attitude and spirit that rejects such dualism as a fateful illusion (...)». +.
