Surajnayan Paul Gurdayal Kashap, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, died at his home in Santa Cruz on Dec. 3, 2015 after a long struggle with cancer. Paul, as he was known to his family and friends, joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty in 1969 and was a Fellow of Cowell College.
Paul taught philosophy at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and then at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island before coming to UC Santa Cruz. He was a recognized scholar of Spinoza's philosophy (principally his Ethics), and published two main works on this subject, Studies in Spinoza, and Spinoza & Moral Freedom. At UCSC, Paul also taught popular seminars on the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi and courses on Sanskrit texts such as the Bhagavad Gita.
He retired from the university in the early 90's but returned to teach several courses. In 2012 he gave a series of well-received talks to the Life Long Learning Institute on The Upanishads (Philosophy in Ancient India).
Born July 1, 1927 in the family's ancestral home in Jalalpur, India (now part of Pakistan), Paul grew up in Pachmarhi, a small hill station in central India where his father was the army doctor. He studied at the University of Lahore until 1947, and received his BA and first MA from the University of Bombay (Wilson College). He went on to receive a second MA from the University of Edinburgh and later a BLitt from the University of Oxford (St. John's College). He also spent several summers as a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla, India.
Paul had many other interests during his long life. For instance, as a star struck teenager, he managed to get a part in a 1940's Bollywood film. He was also a natural athlete. He played on the St John's College tennis team while at Oxford, and enjoyed a friendly competition with his sons at tennis, ping pong, racquetball and golf. Paul also generously shared his mastery of Punjabi cooking, providing great pleasure to his family, colleagues, friends and students with delicious Indian meals over many years.
Throughout his life Paul was an excellent artist, particularly gifted in sculpture. Inspired by ancient Indian carvings, Paul took up sculpting in bronze and wood more seriously after retirement. He attended many sculpture classes at UCSC and Cabrillo College and showed his art at a one-man retrospective at Cowell College's Smith Gallery in 2012.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy, three sons and their wives: Philip and Martha (Rockwood), Christopher and Michele (Chase), Andrew and Monika (Batra) and nine grandchildren, Joseph, Albert, Helen, Philip, George, Alessandro, Isabella, Kabir and Karishma.
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Statements from former students, collected by Robert Goff for the memorial service.
Sophia Kidd writes from China, where she teaches literature at Chengdu University.
Twenty years ago Professor Kashap was double-teaming me with two seminars, one foundational, the other specialized. The first covered the rationalists Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes. The other studied the Upanisads. It still astonishes me that one person could effectively teach ancient Vedic literature and 17th century European philosophy at the same time.
Professor Kashap’s approach, his refusal to accept intellectual mediocrity, the classy way he conducted class, was very appealing. He demanded a commitment of mind that changed my way of thinking. Even today I use what I learned then, as I teach Chinese students and study under Chinese professors. His example of attending to one’s mind, waiting for the naturally arising question, has helped me during 15 years of living in a foreign culture.
Professor Kashap’s moral compass included a compassionately honest use of language: In 1995 I was failing his Upanisads course: he did not give a Pass to anything I had written. Near the end of the semester I followed him back to his car, asking him please to tell me what I could do to pass. He strode steadily through the redwoods, and upon reaching the car turned to me: “Sophia, I cannot teach you. But you can learn.” I remember looking into his eyes. I walked away with mind aflame.
As it was, I gave up and missed the deadline for handing in the final paper. When I heard that Professor Kashap had extended the due date, I spent the weekend writing on some passages in the Upanisads. When I saw him next, he handed me my paper, marked with a glowing comment as one of the best in the class. It’s hard to explain what happened there, but I do know he awoke something in me as a writer and thinker. I am always grateful for his unique presence, for his rigor and vision.
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Timothy McCarthy writes from the University of Illinois, where he is Professor of Philosophy.
I attended UCSC in the early days, arriving in fall 1969 and graduating in 1973. Paul was my teacher and in time became a good friend. He was one of a handful of Santa Cruz faculty that helped form my interests in philosophy and encouraged me to go on to graduate work in the field. Paul’s course on continental rationalism was a deeply rewarding intellectual experience focused upon Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, three figures of lifelong interest to us both. This course, a requirement for philosophy majors in those days, was run like a seminar, and the students found themselves in an ongoing conversation with the three figures, with Paul, and with one another. I remember vividly the final event of the class, a magnificent curry dinner prepared by Paul at his home. While such dinners may have become an extra incentive for some students to study with Paul, the center of those evenings was always philosophy.
Paul beautifully embodied an ideal of what a teacher of philosophy could be, showing intense engagement both with the sources and with the students grappling with them. More than that, he led us to engage the material. Paul was a seasoned guide to a sometimes bewildering intellectual landscape, placing us in a serious conversation and then stepping aside, freeing us to explore for ourselves.
I will always remember the humane and gentle man who brought us there.
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Flash qFiasco writes from Bern, Switzerland. After UCSC Flash completed a graduate degree in philosophy at Cambridge University. He is an independent philosopher.
I was an undergraduate at Cowell College from 1973 until 1977. I originally intended to study mathematics, but the summer before coming to Cowell I read a book, “Thought & Action,” by Stuart Hampshire [one of Paul’s teachers], and was intrigued. In my first quarter I took a course in logic, where I found the philosophical aspect more interesting than the mathematical. Philosophy became my field, and Paul was one of the reasons why. I attended several of his courses, including Ethics and Spinoza. With Paul, students were not an interruption of his philosophical work but one of the reasons for it. He was quietly engaging and brought forth engagement in his students. He co-supervised my senior thesis—in this he was kind and encouraging, offering valuable assessments of my efforts.
[Henry David] Thoreau wrote, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” [Walden]
Paul was a professor of philosophy and somehow was philosophy. He offered a philosophical demeanor--upright and forthright, clear-headed and thorough--and also what a teacher of philosophy could aspire to: reaching his students and enriching them through living example. He was a mentor who touched my life and my soul.
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Casey Haskins writes from the State University of New York in Purchase, where he is Associate Professor of Philosophy.
Paul Kashap was my most important mentor in an undergraduate career in the seventies that spanned three schools and two majors--music and philosophy. An older philosophy major at Cowell College told me: “You must take a class with Kashap. He knows all about Indian and analytic philosophy and has a mind like a razor!”
The power Paul’s teaching had for me wasn’t just about razor-sharp analysis. He embodied something I had never experienced in a non-Christian acquaintance: an articulate, passionately held vision of the source of human value in a larger world.
Isaiah Berlin once characterized the spectrum of intellectual temperaments with the figures of the fox, an animal that knows many small things, and the hedgehog, who knows One Big Thing. Paul was a bit of a hedgehog. His idiosyncratic mix of Vedanta, Spinoza and British analytic philosophy of language wasn’t just what puzzle-solving professional philosophers call a “position.” It was more like a religion. For Paul’s seminar on the Upanishads I remember writing a paper on the sthita-prajna, or person with “stable intellect”—someone who is free from attachment, fear, and anger, as well as from allegiance to conventional standards of good and evil. I found this fascinating and wondered, could this characterization describe any normal adult today? I wondered warily whether it might actually describe Paul, who once mentioned that he practiced a yogic discipline.
I picture him sitting on the floor in his office forty years ago in Cowell—I never saw him use the chair—dressed in very un-Santa Cruz-like coat and tie, student papers arranged around him, a hint of sandalwood and tobacco in the air, quietly expounding ideas that pushed the limits of my quite un-stable intellect. He could speak to you in a way that made you feel that he knew exactly what state of mind you were in and who you really were even if you weren’t sure you knew this yourself. I’ll never forget his accent and his precise posture and gestures as he made remarks like “People have tried to interpret Spinoza’s doctrine of ‘knowledge of the third kind’ as being about some kind of formal deductive reasoning. They don’t know what they’re talking about. That wasn’t the kind of thing Spinoza had in mind at all!” Paul’s conversation in and out of the classroom vividly reminds me of Wittgenstein’s dictum—which I first encountered in his classes—that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
Paul was in no sense a postmodern thinker. I never heard him express sympathy for the currents of anti-foundationalism and ironism that were making hedgehog thinking harder. These currents were also complicating the post World War II divide between the Analytic and Continental traditions which had been part of Paul’s philosophical upbringing. In graduate school my encounter with pragmatism (especially the thought of John Dewey) pulled me further in more fox-like directions. I realized at a certain point that the gravitational power Paul’s way of thinking once held over my own had weakened a good bit even while its importance as a formative part of my own story remained as strong as ever. Being a good teacher is not, as I now know, about cloning yourself or having disciples. In philosophy it is less like one person passing something to another than about showing someone how to play a musical instrument. There it is understood that after a student internalizes the basic skills and principles, the player must develop in ways that lead to a style of playing that is authentically one’s own.
Philosophy, Paul used to tell us, echoing Wittgenstein and Stuart Hampshire, isn’t something you have or get so much as something you do. This insight was his gift to me, as it was to many other students. It is what I now struggle to give my philosophy students: a knowledge of how simply to keep on thinking, which is of course part of living. To understand his style of meeting this challenge as a teacher—his own authentic playing style--you had to know him. I had that good fortune, and it really did change my life.
These four former students show Paul bringing them into an extraordinary reflective dialogue, one he learned and practiced in Oxford tutorials, and whose awakening power extends back to Plato’s Socratic dialogues and even further back to conversations among the Vedic sages. Throughout the long tradition of philosophical teaching, a spirit of critical questioning--very much including self-questioning--calls thought to life.
Paul taught philosophy---philosophically! The students’ tributes tell us what it was like being taught this way.
Paul and I shared an abiding respect for the work of the philosophically-minded religious writer Kierkegaard, who issued a challenge for anyone who takes a position in front of a class: whatever the subject of your address or lecture, and however that effort may tumble about, it must give access to its whole category, namely, its orientation in the life of which it is a part [Concluding Unscientific Postscript].
If the teacher is serious then his/her stance makes available an orientation in life that summons both students and their teacher actually to be there, present to one another in curiosity, puzzlement, and wonder, part of an endeavor that indeed changes lives.
Paul taught this way, wholeheartedly and with careful attention to what matters.
With Paul as a colleague and friend I became a better teacher of philosophy.
--Robert Goff, Professor Emeritus
