Abstract
This chapter sets out the general project undertaken throughout the following six chapters. It identifies what can be considered the ontological dimension of colonialism, a dimension many postcolonial critics fail to recognize. Insofar as that is the case, the argument is made that the emancipatory motivation behind postcolonial discourse and practice does not achieve its ends. In order to move postcolonial criticism forward, an interrogation of the ontology of empire must be undertaken. This interrogation is precisely what Mehta’s postcolonial hermeneutics sets out to accomplish. Negotiating Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, Mehta’s work shows how the Western philosophical tradition has been committed to a “metaphysics of presence.” The metaphysics of presence reduces alterity to identity. Such totalizing philosophical gestures underwrite the colonial project. Mehta’s work demonstrates how a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence not only delimits the reach of Western culture but also how it opens up new vistas for viewing classical Hindu traditions. Mehta’s novel interpretation of Hinduism provides a point of contestation regarding the dominant models in twentieth and twenty-first century Continental philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Attempts at truly equitable comparisons/dialogues between Western, especially Continental, and non-Western philosophies certainly abound in today’s academic culture. Consider, for example, Serequeberhan (1994), Li (1999), Bongmba (2000), and Zhang (2006); for a review of the latter, see Ellis (2008b).
- 2.
To the extent that this is a project in hermeneutics and comparative philosophy of religion, certain Western names intimately tied to such topics will recur throughout, most notably: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Emanuel Levinas, John D. Caputo, and Mark C. Taylor. While Mehta speaks specifically of only Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, and Caputo, I nevertheless feel that Levinas and Taylor discuss themes that so closely resonate with Mehta’s that they occasionally serve for exposition as well as illustrative contrast. In general, I believe these figures (save Heidegger of course) to be not only post-Heideggerian thinkers like Mehta, but they are also most representative of late twentieth century Continental philosophy of religion, and in this regard they are the implicit dialogue partners for many of Mehta’s reflections on comparative philosophy and religion.
- 3.
I want to thank John B. Carman for drawing my attention to this rather pertinent concern.
- 4.
- 5.
In this regard, we read the following from Mehta: “Whatever a sociologically oriented study of the epic [i.e., the Mahābhārata] may have to say on this, a reader who takes it as poetry or as an imaginative verbal structure encompassing a total vision of human life in its necessity, actuality and possibility, should not find it difficult to penetrate beneath all caste-talk to the deeper meaning underlying it” (DV 259). Mehta also sides with Heidegger’s assessment of mysticism: “As he [i.e., Heidegger] points out… the notion of mysticism in the sense of an irrationalistic Erleben (immediate inner experience) rests on an extreme rationalization of philosophy…. Almost a quarter of a century later, Heidegger makes the same point when he asserts that mysticism is the mere counterpart of metaphysics, into which people take flight when, still wholly caught in their slavery to metaphysical thinking, they are struck by the hiddenness in all revealment and lapse into unthinking helplessness” (HV 251).
- 6.
Here I am referring in particular to the series of articles under the heading “Who Speaks for Hinduism?” in a 2000 publication of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68(4).
- 7.
By no means is Mehta alone in this appreciation of the Continental tradition and its role in cross-cultural dialogue. Mark C. Taylor also notices a certain emancipatory value latent in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian philosophy: “Beyond, or even ‘within,’ the closure of the western ontotheological tradition there might lie an opening to and of the East” (1986a: 549). Taylor also notes that “the distinguished Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu has shown considerable interest in approaching oriental philosophy from the perspective opened by post-Heideggerian thinking” (1986b: 163). By means of Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of facticity” and Gadamer’s “philosophical hermeneutics,” Mehta, much like Taylor and Izutsu here, finds the necessary foundation upon which to critique the cross-cultural encounter and its proclivity towards comparative philosophy and comparative philosophy of religion, that is, towards the universalizing philosophia perennis. For Mehta, “perennial philosophy” (East and West) betrays a colonizing predilection: perennial philosophy aggressively presumes a metaphysical identity hiding behind disparate cultural idioms. Comparative philosophy, generally speaking, distills cultural singularity in the name of an overarching commonality, a topic dealt with at length in Chap. 4.
- 8.
The term Bildung is discussed at length in Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989). Considering it essential to the humanistic sciences, Gadamer characterizes Bildung as follows: “In accordance with the frequent transition from becoming to being, Bildung (like the contemporary use of the German word “Formation”) describes more the result of the process of becoming than the process itself” (11); “In Bildung… that by which and through which one is formed becomes completely one’s own” (11); “Bildung is a genuine historical idea, and because of this historical character of ‘preservation’ it is important for understanding in the human sciences” (12); “To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other. Hence all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier…. Thus what constitutes the essence of Bildung is clearly not alienation as such, but the return to oneself” (14). Anticipating the full discussion in Chap. 3, the point here is that philosophical hermeneutics suggests that the other is a moment in the return to self. The self takes over the other through a process of preservation and supplementation. Mehta, on the other hand, conspicuously highlights the displacements and alterations suffered at the hand’s of an other that does not become one’s own. This is a subtle shift because Mehta too emphasizes the return to oneself that is essential to hermeneutics as such. But, again, the condition of the home to which the self returns makes all the difference. As detailed in Chap. 4, Metha’s postcolonial hermeneutics emphasizes ruptures and not conservations.
- 9.
John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, O.S.A. have organized three international conferences on “Religion and Postmodernism.” All three conferences, held at Villanova University, conspicuously privilege the Western traditions (in particular, Christianity and Judaism). The themes of the conferences have remained European: The Gift (1997), Forgiveness (1999), and Confessions (2001). Most recently, Caputo organized a fourth conference explicitly engaged in reflections on the future of Continental philosophy of religion at Syracuse University (2011). Continental philosophy remains just that, that is, a historically and culturally bound entity in need of cross-cultural interrogation.
- 10.
Although I will present a strong case for Mehta’s logic culminating in recognition of structural incompletion, an incompletion preclusive of Advaita Vedānta’s brahman, I will admit here that Mehta may not have had such a complete break from the Vedānta. I wish to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing this to my attention. I will say, however, that the argument presented in what follows disallows an appeal to a both/and position, one often taken up by Hindu authors. The logic I trace in Mehta’s work attends to transcendental conditions and as such does not admit of both/and reasoning. To be sure, the structure of viraha bhakti and the structure, so-called, of the Advaita Vedānta’s ontology are mutually exclusive in the strongest sense possible. Of course, one could appeal to notions of saguṚa brahman and nirguṚa brahman, but this would be a mistake. The difference between saguṚa and nirguṚa is not truly one on an ontological level, after all, saguṚa brahman is still, at the end of the day, misrecognized nirguṚa brahman. The Hindu logic I find in Mehta’s work identifies two possible models for transcendental subjectivity and they are different in kind, not just degree.
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Ellis, T.B. (2013). Introduction. 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_1
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