Bhakti Ethics, Emotions, and Love in Gaudiya Vaisnava Metaethics

Bhakti Ethics, Emotions, and Love in Gaudiya Vaisnava Metaethics explores the broader implications of understanding bhakti, “devotional love to the divine,” as an ethical theory based on a “realist” account of emotions, where emotions are sensory perceptions of the real ethical qualities of classes of actions. The book spotlights one complex articulation of an Indian epistemology and ontology of ethics based on the metaphysics of Gaudiya Vaisnava psychology of emotions in dialogue with a variety of academic fields, including the philosophy of religion and related methodologies such as virtue ethics, theological voluntarism, and ecofeminist and feminist care ethics. The work discusses how emotions are understood metaphysically as extra-mental, objectively real qualities, what Cogen Bohanec refers to as “affective realism.” This follows from a cosmogenic model where the universe emanates from the loving relationship between the divine feminine, Radha, and her intense loving relationship with her masculine counterpart, Krishna. Since the origin of all of reality emanates from the ultimacy of an affective relationship, then the fabric of reality can be described as having objectively real affective qualities and that is the basis for grounding this ethical system.