Materialization And Humanization Of The Spirit: A Contextualization Based On The Stylistic Representation Of The Balinese Hindu Modern Philosophy

Abstract

The prominent characteristic of the pre-modern and modern philosophical discourse in the archipelago is generalized to that of the spiritualism with the saivistic discourse; including a Balinese modern philosophical text entitled Aji Sangkya. However, the title of the text shows diachronic relationship with the Samkhya Dharsana the so-called Indian (Hindu) materialism with its jargon ‘evolution’. The tension between the discourse of spiritualism and materialism in the text is the main concern of the article based on its stylistic representations. The contextual stylistics and the deconstruction approach provide great opportunities to the Aji Sangkya to be interpreted as well as contextualized. Having elaborated the data, it is found that the text implies the process of materialization of the spirit (purusha or atman) into the circle of material (pradhana), until finally becoming material itself. Nonetheless, this materialization cannot merely be understood as the process with the ultimate goal of materialism, but implicitly of humanization since the human (manusa) comes as the ultimate accumulation of all the philosophical categories. The term related to the materialization must be taken as the process of humanization or making the spirit humanized; the humanism take the middle position between the spiritualism and the materialism in Aji Sangkya, the so-called Balinese Hindu modern text of philosophy.