Abstract
This chapter engages in a bit of cross-cultural dialogue pertaining to the putatively imperious nature of the transcendental subject. It specifically addresses the role of what I call “ethnotropes” in contemporary comparative philosophy of religion. I align the Greek Hero, Ulysses, with the transcendental subject associated with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (the latter an extension of the former). Likewise, the Jewish Nomad is associated with the subjectivity of Franco-American postmodernism, that is, the work of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo, and Mark C. Taylor. The Greek Hero is the subject who encounters only himself in what is other. The Hero travels out to the other (i.e., transcendental intention) but soon realizes that whatever of the other is worthwhile is either something the Hero easily assimilates into his base or is something there along in the Hero himself. Heroes – like transcendental egos – never truly leave home. The Nomad, to the contrary, is the one who apparently never returns home. This subject roams aimlessly through the desert without ever returning home, a position rightly associated with political and ethical indifference. The Pilgrim – Mehta’s unique contribution to contemporary thought – strikes a certain balance between the Hero’s conservatism and the Nomad’s transcendental prodigality. The Pilgrim is the one who travels out to another, knowing that return to home/self is inevitable (thereby maintaining the hermeneutic centripetality). However, whereas the Hero returns (the Nomad does not), the Pilgrim’s return is not one of triumph and glory but rather one of disruption and incompletion. Insofar as the Nomad never returns, and thus cannot allow the other’s alterity to displace him or her, the Pilgrim’s return is precisely the moment of allowing the other’s alterity to remain other. The Pilgrim is the postcolonial subject freed of metaphysical pretense, a pretense equally applicable to both the ontotheological traditions’ commitment to presence and the deconstructive traditions’ commitment to the other to come. Deconstruction’s messianic – i.e., a philosophy of the other to come (to presence) – is offset by Mehta’s “negative messianic” – i.e., the other withdraws. The dynamics of Mehta’s Pilgrim truly complete the ethical criticism of Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity begun – but left incomplete – by deconstruction.
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Notes
- 1.
On the “ontophenomenological,” see Derrida (1997): 6.
- 2.
On this point, some caution is warranted. I am, indeed, unsure if Mehta himself recognized this possible reading of his work. Of course, from one hermeneutical standpoint, this point may be irrelevant; after all, any one author tends to admit to several interpretations. That being said, I believe Mehta’s work on Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida encourages one particular reading over another. To be sure, Mehta’s sustained critique of the metaphysics of presence cannot ultimately endorse the Advaita Vedānta’s ontology, itself a preeminent example of not only the metaphysics of presence, but also ontotheology. Mehta’s work on bhakti and the friend – as I discuss below – is logically incompatible with the Advaita Vedānta. Appeals to Indian sensibilities concerning the ability to think the both/and as opposed to the either/or simply miss the mark here. As mentioned in the Introduction, Advaita Vedānta’s recognition of saguṇa brahman and nirguṇa brahman is not a both/and scenario; the former is simply reduced to the latter. Here I submit that Mehta’s separated bhakta reflects a quasi-transcendental condition and as such cannot co-exist with the radical, monistic idealism of the Advaita Vedānta.
- 3.
While Auerbach uses “Odysseus,” I will use in my discussion “Ulysses,” establishing thereby continuity with the Continental philosophers addressed in this chapter.
- 4.
Mark C. Taylor, citing Merleau-Ponty, writes: “In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty elaborates the implications of his criticism of the modern interpretation of subjectivity in an account of what he describes as the ‘the philosophy of reflection.’ By interpreting the subject as ‘thetic,’ i.e., the constitutive source or origin of the world of experience, ‘the philosophy of reflection metamorphoses the effective world into a transcendental field; in doing so it only puts me back at the origin of a spectacle that I could never have had unless, unbeknown to myself, I organized it. It only makes me consciously what I have always been distractedly; it only makes me give its name to a dimension behind myself, a depth whence, in fact, already my vision was formed. Through the reflection, the ‘I’, lost in its perceptions, rediscovers itself by rediscovering them as thoughts. It [the ‘I’] thought it had quit itself for them, deployed in them; it comes to realize that if it had quit itself, they would not be and that the very deployment of the distances and the things was only the ‘outside’ of its own inward intimacy with itself, that the unfolding of the world was the enfolding on itself of a thought that thinks anything whatever only because it thinks itself first’” (1987: 64).
- 5.
This of course recalls our discussion from Chap. 4 concerning the Christian chrêsis and the Neo-Vedānta’s proclivity to inclusivism. Russell T. McCutcheon has recently argued along these very lines: “It is to our own detriment that we often forget that earlier efforts on the part of Christians to convert and missionize, on the one hand, and the more contemporary and largely Christian-initiated efforts at dialogue, on the other, may be intimately related in terms of the shared strategies and technologies that function to translate, manage, and domesticate the other” (2001: 81–82).
- 6.
Lest I seem to favor an anti-Western sentiment here, I need only point out once again, as Mehta himself points out, that modern Hindu intellectuals, e.g., Roy, latched onto rationalist principles that eventually led to the disparaging and denigration of a large portion of the Hindu tradition, e.g., the Purāṇic traditions as well as the Tantric traditions.
- 7.
In a similar manner, Daya Krishna provocatively contends, “In a deep and radical sense… it is only the West that has arrogated to itself the status of subjecthood in the cognitive enterprise, reducing all others to the status of objects” (1988: 78). Rada Ivekovic likewise argues, “As regards the East and the West, not to speak of other directions, there seems to be but one historical ‘subject,’ and that is the West self-legitimized by placing itself face to face with the Other it is giving itself. This Other, a historical and social construct as much as the subject, is defined through its relationship to the Same, or the subject, but is not supposed to self-define itself. India, among others, has found herself in the role of an Other for Europe, particularly since the 17th century” (1997: 224–225).
- 8.
Note that even Caputo does not want to do away with “hermeneutics” tout court; rather, he simply wants to make Gadamer’s tremble a bit: “I am not arguing against hermeneutics, but for loosening the constraints that are imposed upon hermeneutics in its Gadamerian version in order to make possible a more radical hermeneutics… The aim is not to edify ourselves with the thought of transcendental finitude, which is the tendency of Gadamer’s appropriation of Heideggerian facticity, but to face up to the infinite slippage, the grammatological infinity, which scrambles everything determinate, definite, and decidable” (2000: 55).
- 9.
Paul Ricouer notes in this regard, “I seek to understand myself by taking up anew the meaning of the words of all men” (1974: 52). James Risser addresses the nuances of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the last couple of chapters of his Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (1997). He notes that Derrida, according to Gadamer himself, really attacks a Ricoeurian hermeneutics rather than those of Gadamer: “Gadamer has said on more than one occasion that Derrida’s criticism of hermeneutics is a criticism of the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. To take hermeneutics engaged in the reconstruction of meaning, which is one way of describing Ricoeur’s methodological procedure of explanatory understanding, does not accurately describe the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer” (1997: 163). This being said, Risser continuously betrays Gadamer’s “Neo-Platonic tendencies” (a point noted by John D. Caputo). Consider: “For Gadamer the eminent text is something in itself that can always say something more to the reader” (166); “Both experiences (i.e., philosophy and art) are hermeneutical, both engage in the experience of understanding, both are caught up in interpretation in which the world becomes larger not smaller” (186); “What do poetry and philosophy, then, share in common? Certainly, they both share in the effort of communicating, whereby what is imparted becomes greater” (189). In all three quotations, Risser in effect suggests that the hermeneutic experience expands the base of the self. In all three, there is conspicuous attention given to the idea that the other enlarges the self. Risser continues: “If understanding would be appropriation, which involves the covering up of otherness, then one surely has entered the sphere of logocentrism. But, for Gadamer, it is precisely the voice of the other that breaks open what is one’s own, and remains there – a desired voice that cannot be suspended – as the partner in every conversation” (1974: 181, emphasis added). While Risser attempts to preserve the voice of the other here, his rhetoric betrays its good will. The other merely “breaks open what is one’s own.” In this way, the other is really not an other but merely a partner who can aid the self in its understanding of what is already its own. It may be interesting to note in this regard that even for a pluralistic account of cultural psychology as that found in the work of Richard A. Shweder, we still find remnants of heroic hermeneutics. Consider the following from Shweder (1991): “Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality” (5); “Because we are limited in that way, the inconsistency between Roop Kanwar’s view of suttee and Allan Bloom’s (or a feminist’s, for that matter) is not something we need to resolve; it is something we need to seek, so that through astonishment we may stay on the move between different worlds, and in that way become more complete” (19); “Yet, in a postpositivist world that is what an enlightened and noble anthropology ought to be about, at least in part – going to some faraway place where you honor and take ‘literally’ (as a matter of belief) those alien reality-posits in order to discover other realities hidden within the self, waiting to be drawn out into consciousness” (68–69); “First, there is ‘thinking through others’ in the sense of using the intentionality and self-consciousness of another culture or person – his or her articulated conception of things – as a means to heighten awareness of our less conscious selves” (108). In all of these citations, the other provides the self the means by which it can come to know itself better. For M. C. Taylor, such “colonial” hermeneutics is edifying hermeneutics: “Edification involves the process of building up oneself in and through the expansion of consciousness and self-consciousness brought about by ‘acculturation’” (1990: 130). Elsewhere he writes, “The relation to the ‘other’ is… a self-relation that is self-transforming. The ‘other’ is not really other but is actually a moment in one’s own self-becoming. The trick of conversation is to turn around (i.e., con-verse) in such a way that one rediscovers self in other” (1990: 131). The point here and in what follows, is that for Mehta, Caputo, and Taylor, such an other is precluded from rendering the self less. In other words, this reading of hermeneutics seems to preclude the possibility that the other’s voice renders the self’s previous possibilities defunct rather than augmented: pilgrims do not practice philosophical hermeneutics.
- 10.
Mehta’s distance from an exhaustive fusion of horizons is not meant here as a direct corrective to Gadamer’s own fusion of horizons. In other words, I do not mean to directly attribute to Gadamer any sense that the fusion of horizons exhaustively empties the other of his otherness. This notwithstanding, Gadamer’s project, unlike Derrida’s, seems to be most concerned with the unity shared between self and other through a common Sache rather than on discontinuities. Risser notes in this regard: “The fact that a potentiality for otherness remains suggests that for Gadamer the text remains plural and not for reasons of an ambiguity of its content. Rather, the text remains plural by virtue of the structure of interpretation itself. According to Gadamer, the history of the concept of text shows us that it does not occur outside the interpretive situation; it refers to ‘all that which resists integration in experience’” (1997: 164). Gadamer’s other, in contrast to Derrida’s “bad infinite” and its inherent ambiguity, remains because there is always a positive excess.
- 11.
“The constructive subject exercises its imperial power through the ‘hegemony of representation’,” writes Taylor, “Representation – be it philosophical, religious, artistic, or political – presupposes the ego’s intentional activity” (1987: 203).
- 12.
Levinas notes in this regard, “Clarity is the disappearance of what could shock. Intelligibility, the very occurrence of representation, is the possibility for the other to be determined by the same without determining the same, without introducing alterity into it” (1969: 124).
- 13.
- 14.
“The aleatory margin that they seek to integrate remains homogeneous with calculation, within the order of the calculable,” Derrida writes, “it devolves from a probabilistic quantification and still resides, we could say, in the same order and in the order of the same. An order where there is no absolute surprise, the order of what I shall call the invention of the same” (1989: 55).
- 15.
I want to point out that we have here a possible Indo-European connection between the Greek Hero and the Hindu God. I will further discuss this below, but for now compare Doniger: “The traditional Hindu belief that at birth one already contains in nuce all the possibilities that time will reveal” (1980: 68).
- 16.
Taylor provocatively contends in this regard: “To be inscribed in language is to be circumcised and to be circumcised is to be Jewish…. [W]e are all Jews of a sort” (1990: 165).
- 17.
On this point, The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (1995) ostensibly agrees. Indeed, Nāgārjuna argues that it is only when we acknowledge the ultimate emptiness of all things that we can truly acknowledge the possibility of having the Buddha’s teachings make a true difference. Movement takes place only when there is a lack of svabhāva, or ‘self-essence.’ See his Mūlamadhymakakārikā XXIV.
- 18.
It is interesting to note here that Derrida sees in Gadamer’s hermeneutics a certain extension of this apperceptive transfer. In the (in)famous encounter between Derrida and Gadamer, Derrida questions Gadamer’s notion of “good will.” He questions the sense that the reader must approach the other with good intentions. This would make the encounter with the other ultimately dependent on the self. Risser notes in this regard, “The good will is basically the projection of intelligibility of the text on the part of the reader that is necessary for the text to speak at all” (1997: 168). Is this “good will” not in some way convergent with Husserl’s “apperceptive transfer”?
- 19.
McCutcheon also notes in this regard: “Ethnocentrism is not the fact of having a culture but the assumption that one’s own culture – as well as the goals relevant to one’s own culture – is by definition everyone’s goal” (2001: 81).
- 20.
Throughout the remainder of this chapter I will have recourse to quotations already cited in previous chapters, notably Chap. 5. I will do this for sake of clarity rather than constantly referring the reader to the appropriate passages in the preceding chapters.
- 21.
I recognize that privileging Uddhava does so at the expense of many other characters in the Hindu tradition(s). All the same, Uddhava illustrates an initial point of departure in Vedāntic ontotheology and ends with a lesson concerning the departed Kṛṣṇa. In this regard, Uddhava is the perfect ethnotrope for Mehta’s concerns. Also, as mentioned above, when considered on the transcendental register, we simply cannot have it both ways, that is, that there is both monistic idealism and devoted separation.
- 22.
Personal communication from 7 July 1999.
- 23.
Mehta, in fact, once referred to his life’s trajectory as “[his] own particular pilgrimage” (MY 65).
- 24.
This privileging of Advaita Vedānta continues. Alan Roland, whose work is quite significant as far as developing a model of the self tailored to South Asia, repeats this prejudice: “Without positing the realization of an inner spiritual self (Ātman) – a self considered to be one with the godhead (Brahman) – as the basic and ultimate goal of life (mokṣa), it is virtually impossible to comprehend Indian psychological makeup, society, and culture” (1988: 289). Here Roland makes Indian culture and psychology functionally equivalent to the position of Advaita Vedānta. For a psychological criticism of Roland’s position, see Ellis (2009).
- 25.
On Mehta’s “contemplative interrogative” see Jackson (1992b: 290).
- 26.
I find Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar useful here in that both employ psychoanalytic as well as philosophical themes in their interpretations of Hindu tropes, a methodology certainly most familiar to Mehta. They are also considered general authorities on the Hindu tradition. It should be noted once again that references to Doniger’s work are ultimately references to her work while she was still publishing under the name, “Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.”
- 27.
Doniger thus contests Spratt’s interpretation of the theistic and bhakti traditions. Spratt writes, “From the psychological point of view, therefore, all the six philosophical systems traditionally accepted as orthodox are fully narcissistic. Other philosophical systems, propounded by leaders of theistic or bhakti movements, have attained popularity. But just as the Samkhya and the Vaisheshika combine ontological pluralism with psychological monism, so many of these theistic doctrines encourage not only worship but identification with God, and so are in the psychological sense monistic and narcissistic” (1966: 45–46).
- 28.
Here I could add that to shore up against the future is to shore up against that which a chancy future might bring.
- 29.
Eliot Deutsch writes in regard to the Vedānta’s Brahman: “Phenomenologically, then, Brahman is affirmed by the Advaitin as that fullness of being which enlightens and is joy” (1969: 10).
- 30.
On just this point, Taylor notes, “The sacred is no longer associated with excess of primal plenitude or undifferentiated totality. Far from holding the promise of mystic fusion, the crypt of the sacred opens a space that makes fusion impossible and unity secondary rather than primary” (1999: 42).
- 31.
On this note, I believe even Derrida senses that his messiah needs to be a figure of withdrawal insofar as he argues that should the other actually come to presence then the whole affair is over: “I would therefore command him to be capable of not answering – my call, my invitation, my expectation, my desire…. If you answer my call, it’s all over” (1997: 174).
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Ellis, T.B. (2013). Greek Heroes, Jewish Nomads, and Hindu Pilgrims: Ulysses, Abraham and Uddhava at the Cross-Cultural-Roads. In: On the Death of the Pilgrim: The Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Jarava Lal Mehta. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5231-3_6
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