Is it possible to live without relying psychologically on authority—either on external authority or even on the authority of one’s own past experience? For Jiddu Krishnamurti that, suitably qualified, is the key question. His answer is that it is possible and that only in this way can one connect fully with what is real.
Krishnamurti was not a philosopher in the classical sense. He wasn’t interested in presenting theories or in arguing for his views. Still what he was up to is continuous with philosophy. Like Socrates, who through his example and questioning encourages his audiences to examine critically the assumptions on which their beliefs depend, Krishnamurti, through his example and questioning, encourages his audiences to examine critically the assumptions on which their very experience of themselves and the world depends. In other words, whereas Socrates encourages what today we would call critical thinking (or, simply, philosophy), Krishnamurti encourages what we might call critical looking (and what he sometimes called choiceless awareness).
What Socrates asked the Athenians to do is by now commonplace, at least to philosophers and to students of philosophy. We have learned the lesson he was trying to teach. But to his original audience—the Athenians—what he was asking them to do often must have seemed strange and even pointless. What good could possibly come, many of them must have wondered, from giving the axe to conventional wisdom? Why, they must have asked, should we start freshly when we have accumulated so much? But the distorting weight of what you have accumulated, Socrates tried to point out, is precisely the problem.
At the time Socrates proposed critical thinking there was not much reason for the Athenians to suppose it would bear fruit. But it did. Science is part of that fruit. So is the modern disposition to question the authority of received views.
Have we learned all we need to know about questioning authority? Have we gone far enough? Or is our questioning still seriously limited? Contemporary philosophers and students of philosophy tend to think that we have carried the questioning process about as far as it can go…But up to this point we have questioned mainly only explicit beliefs. In addition to these beliefs might we not still take a great deal that is questionable for granted? And if we do, couldn’t this also be an obstacle we need to overcome?
Krishnamurti was not the first to propose critical looking. Others, such as the Buddha, had already proposed it. But Krishnamurti’s approach was different and perhaps better suited to sceptically minded philosophers and students of philosophy. For one thing, Krishnamurti was anti-authority to a degree that few thinkers have ever been. He had no use for creeds or theories. He discouraged people from examining themselves in an institutional setting or as part of a spiritual discipline. He taught that in examining oneself one should not rely even on what one has learned in previous examinations. The freedom we need to see what is true, he said, is freedom from the known. And because he spoke to us in a contemporary idiom, it may be easier for us to understand what he said.
Krishnamurti had little use for academic philosophy. Occasionally he dismissed it as a waste of time, or worse as a generator of theories that become obstacles in an individual’s attempt to understand him or herself. Yet…much of what Krishnamurti said is deeply relevant to philosophy. Its relevance is not that he had theories to propose or critiques of extant theories. Krishnamurti’s focus is on insights. His talent as a teacher is that he facilitates them. As it happens, many of the insights he helps his readers to have are centrally relevant to contemporary philosophy, particularly to theories about human subjectivity and values. And if indeed he does facilitate insights about the human condition, how could it be otherwise?
Rather than a theorist, Krishnamurti was a seer and a teacher. Among the things he thought he saw are certain inherently distorting psychological structures that bring about a division in almost everyone’s consciousness between ‘the observer’ and ‘the observed’. This division, he believed, is a potent source of conflict—both internally for the individual, and through the individual externalized for society as a whole. Krishnamurti also proposed a way to remove these damaging structures, or, more accurately, to facilitate their removal. That is what he intends—a radical transformation in human consciousness.
Krishnamurti talked a great deal more than he wrote. His talks were not lectures but, rather, attempts to engage his audience in a dialogue in which he and they are wholly focused on the same aspect of experience or behaviour. His talks were, in effect, guided meditations. That is, they were attempts by Krishnamurti to go through an experiential process with his audiences—with you— the result of which is that something about your understanding of your own experience and its effect on your behaviour is clarified. As such, his talks—transcribed and edited as if they were writings—make unusual demands on the reader, especially if the reader is a philosopher who is accustomed to looking for a theoretical punchline when reading something that seems to put forth philosophical views. In Krishnamurti’s thought, rather than theoretical punchlines, there is an opening to important insights, for instance, about the nature of identification and its role in the formation of the self. To have such insights, Krishnamurti suggests, one has to look freshly.
Krishnamurti spoke with a distinctive voice. As an uncompromising enemy of authority, even of the authority of one’s own past experience, his focus was on examining current experience directly. Refusing to discuss books or theories, he encouraged people to look at themselves, particularly in their relationships to other people, things, and activities, and he told them just enough about what he thought they would see if they did look, to get them going. It is as if through the habit of understanding ourselves in familiar ways we are even at the level of experience stuck in theories. Krishnamurti was—is—extremely good at helping people to get unstuck, that is, at helping them to have insights that break the moulds of deeply ingrained patterns of thinking. In other words, his concern was not that his remarks be relevant to theory—although often they are—but that they be relevant to life. His intention was to engage with people who are passionately interested in understanding themselves and the world in which they live. The point of this engagement was to clarify what it means to be oneself and to live in this world. In my opinion, Krishnamurti succeeds in this as few others have.
Philosophers and students of philosophy are surely among those who are passionately interested in understanding themselves and the world. Many of us have devoted much of our lives to this project. We may be surprised, then, to discover how little time and energy we have spent in the sort of inquiry Krishnamurti tried to facilitate. The reason for this is that Krishnamurti’s approach to topics of perennial philosophical interest was more meditative than rationally discursive. So, the question for philosophers and students of philosophy in considering how seriously they should take [his teachings], is whether they’re willing to try an approach that’s philosophical, in a broad sense, but so different from what they’re accustomed to doing when they think about or read philosophy that it may be difficult at first for them even to see its relevance. True philosophers are always open to new approaches. Indeed, when an approach has promise, the more radically new, the better.
*This article is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book, Reflections on the Self edited by Raymond Martin, published by Krishnamurti Foundation India.