CULTURAL

‘OTHERNESS

7 ' CORRESPONDENCE
’ * WITH
RICHARD RO RTY

’ Anindita Niyogi Balslev .

 Cultural Otherness
Correspondence with Richard Rorty
 AAR
The American Academy of Religion
Cultural Criticism Series

Number 4

CULTURAL OTHERNESS:
CORRESPONDENCE WlTH RICHARD RORTY

Second Edition

Anindita Niyogi Balslev

 Cultural Otherness
Correspondence with Richard Rorty
Second Edition

Anindita Niyogi Balslev

Scholars Press
Atlanta
 CULTURAL OTHERNESS:
CORRESPONDENCE WITH RICHARD RORTY

Copyright © 1991 by the

Indian Institute of Advanced Study
Preface to second edition copyright © 1999 by the
American Academy of Religion
All Rights Reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicafion Data

Balslev, Anindita Niyogi.
Cultural otherness, correspondence with Richard Rorty / Anindita
Niyogi Balslev. — 2nd ed.
. cm. — (The American Academy of Religion cultural
criticism series; no. 4)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7885-0300-6 (paper: acid-free paper)
1. Cross-cultural orientation-Philosophy. 2. Rorty, Richard—
Correspondence. I. Title. II. Series.
GN345.65.B35 1999
306’.01—dc21 99—38046
CIP

Richard Rorty's essay "Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Compari-

sons: Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” was first published in Essays in
Heideggerand Others, Volume 2 of his Philosophical Papers (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and is reprinted here with the
permission of Cambridge University Press.

This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.

9‘) ()0 ()I (I2 ()3 (l4 (l5 ()6 0708— 109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MANUFACTURED IN 'I'Hli UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Eva and Olav. Patricia and Kevin
 Contents

Preface ................................ 9
Letter 1: Anindita Balslev to Richard Rorty ........... 25
Letter 2: Richard Rorty to Anindita Balslev ........... 39
Letter 3: Anindita Balslev to Richard Rorty ........... 47
Letter 4: Richard Rorty to Anindita Balslev ........... 67
Letter 5: Anindita Balslev to Richard Rorty ........... 75
Letter 6: Richard Rorty to Anindita Balslev ........... 89
Appendix: ”Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural
Comparisons: Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,”
by Richard Rorty ...................... 103
 Preface

When one stands, as I do, at the crossroads of cultures, one

becomes aware that questions about cultural issues cannot be
dealt with adequately in a monologue or even in a dialogue with
an imaginary or projected other. Rather, they require an open
conversation. As a scholar, I have felt the lack of this active
interchange of ideas in the areas of philosophy as well as in
religious and cultural studies. Several years ago I initiated an
exchange of letters with Professor Richard Rorty, precisely with
the hope of creating an intellectual space (and eventually of
setting up a forum) where it will be possible to truly engage in a
conversation about a range of issues that present themselves
when one stands at the intersection of cultures. This correspon-
dence took place in the interval between two conferences spon-
sored by Philosophy East-West, one held in Hawaii in 1989 and
the other in India in 1991. The resulting letters were first published
in India by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in 1991. Since
then many readers, both outside and inside the academia, have
encouraged their republication in the US. They appear here in
the American Academy of Religion’s Cultural Criticism Series by
the kind permission of the Indian Institute and Professor Rorty
himself. This volume also contains the essay by Rorty to which
many of my own and Rorty’s remarks refer.
At the outset, a few remarks about the title of this book may
be in order. The theme of ”cultural otherness” has a definitive
contemporary relevance. An increasing sharing ofadvanced tech-
nology has significantly reduced distances between the remotest
parts of the globe during the twentieth century, allowing the catch
phrase ”global village” to appear in all sorts of discourses. As a
consequence of this, however, our awareness of the conceptual
and cultural distances that still divide us has augmented consid-

9
 Preface

erably. We often speak, especially in academia, about the difficul-

ties of crossing cultural boundaries and about the ”otherness” of
the other. This new closeness has also made us conscious of the
persistence of commitments to religious beliefs and traditions in
many segments of society and different parts of the world, thus
putting into relief the major importance of a genuine encounter
of world religions.
It is true of course that a great variety of difficulties arise from
our new proximity, difficulties of concern to both dominant and
marginal groups. These occur not only in the context of huge
complexes of culture designated as East and West or North and
South (or any other actual and possible modes of conceiving
blocks in terms of cultural differences or political economy alone),
but also within any given culture, more aware of the boundaries
of gender, religion, ethnicity, race, and political ideology than ever
before. However, while engaging in discussion of any aspect of
the problems posed by the plurality of cultures and subcultures,
we need to question the hard sense of the metaphor of boundary
that divides one from the other. When the metaphor of boundary
implies impermeable barrier, it is not conducive to the kind of
conversation I have in mind, as this actually creates a space where
old ignorance continues and new cliches prevail. The soft sense
of the metaphor, on the other hand, is indeed useful. This allows
us to acknowledge differences without jeopardizing communica-
tion.l
As a pertinent example, and one with important implications
also for religious studies, let me focus on the manner in which the
so-called otherness of the Indian philosophical traditions has
been and still is projected by significant philosophers in the West.
Since I have briefly mentioned this point in one of my letters to
Professor Rorty, let me elaborate on this a bit more here as I believe
that the lack of conversation between India and the West is most
glaring among philosophers. Although many on the Indian sub-
continent are unaware of the fact that there is any problem with
representing darsmm (or mlviksiki) as philosophy, mainstream West-
ern self-understanding has always posited that philosophy is a
unique creation of the Greeks and consequently that it is an
exclusive enterprise of those who are the direct inheritors of that

1()
 Preface

culture. Notable Western philosophers such as Hegel, Husserl,

and Heidegger—to take only the most prominent examples—
have all denied that there is in the East any project of thinking at
all like that of Greek philosophin.
Occasionally those who knew better have protested against
this view,2 and historical forces have gradually brought us to the
phase when, despite doubts and scorns about the search for
philosophy elsewhere than in the West, accounts of the intellec-
tual adventure in the Indian subcontinent have become available
as histories of Indian philosophy, written in European languages
by both Western and Indian scholars.1 In the course of time
scholars from both sides of this apparent divide between these
traditions have carried on the daring adventure of relating and
contrasting specific philosophical themes, suspending their sense
of the hard boundaries of various traditions of thought. Conse-
quently the project of ”comparative philosophy” has become
increasingly visible. Despite difficulties, this enterprise is now
open to crosscultural philosophical reflections, in the course of
which scholars struggle to establish their claims through historical
scholarship and analysis, rather than by a priori argumentation
and cultural clichés that shun genuine confrontation with actual
historical unfolding of thought-traditions.
Nevertheless, the conservative attitudes seem to remain a
dominant mode of self-understanding of those who continue with
the mainstream Western philosophical tradition. These attitudes
account in part for the persistent indifference toward Eastern
thought in the academic offerings of the philosophy departments
in the West. To be reluctant to examine this question is to continue
uncritically with old prejudices that perpetuate the image of the
”mythical, mysterious, non-rational East.”I Thinking about our
”global village,” one is tempted to hope that the days are finally
over when it was commonplace to describe the huge complexes
of cultures in diagrammatically opposed terms, such as those old
stereotypes of the East as ”spiritual" and the West as ”materialis-
tic.” Yet one still hears the voice of philosophers describing the
West as a ”culture of hope” and the East as a ”culture of endur-
ance/'5 As an observer of such cliches, I find a conspicuous lack of
balance in the way we perceive each other, a lack of comprehen-

l'l
 Preface W ., _ 7777‘ A

sion that generates a number of our failures to establish the

conditions for fruitful social and intellectual negotiations in a
global context.
Given the scenario of contemporary technological civilization
and the sense of differences and boundaries it creates, both for
good and for ill, it is important to take up the question of how to
generate a creative and a critical crosscultural discourse, not only
by challenging stereotypes about cultures and sub-cultures in
general and traditions of thought in particular but by being careful
not to entirely abolish the common ground on which they can be
addressed. Above all, we must shun the monologue—or even the
halfway house of the implied dialogue with a projected other—in
favor of genuine, living exchange.
My sense of the need for an open conversation along these
lines is born of my awareness of the intellectual vacuum which is
created when concerns for mutual understanding are addressed
without actually hearing or including the voice of the other in the
same forum. In my view, we must not only consistently seek out
this other voice, but actively avoid strategies and occasions of the
interpretation of ”otherness” where the absence or silence of the
other is assumed to make no difference. The conviction that is at
work here, at least on my part, is that if we are to seek a higher
level of critical self-understanding and to engage ourselves in
redescribing human relationships, it is not enough that we simply
speak about others or even to others—we have to get ready to
speak with each other.
Thinking of academia in particular, if universities are not to be
ivory towers and educators not to be simply arm-chair intellectu-
als, there must be made room for an on-going conversation which
reflects the issues and concerns of our time that have clear cross-
cultural dimensions. Our institutions must provide opportunities
in this respect for the next generation to grow up somewhat
differently from the way their elders have done. If existing struc-
tures of knowledge and power just remain static and the potency
of the educational channel is not fully explored in new directions,
nothing will be achieved. We will be stuck with wishing for a ”new
world-order” to emerge without a clear sense of what that order
might be. While I am here primarily interested in the theoretical

12
 Preface

issues having bearing on philosophical and religious studies, I

take seriously the point that pragmatist philosophers such as
Rorty make when they say that philosophical problems ”are
disguised forms of practical problems.” I also seek to observe the
maxim that states that if a set of ideas do ”not make any difference
to our practices, they make no difference at all.”
It is indeed urgent to recognize the crucial importance of
crosscultural conversation in the domain of religious studies,
which deals with a discourse with great potential for misunder-
standing and violence at both the theoretical and practical levels.
Some scholars, however, are of the opinion that it is not quite so
easy to achieve a Gadamarian fusion of horizons in crosscultural
contexts, especially involving religion, where force, power, and
violence are always creating different sorts of asymmetries." I
agree that certain social and political conditions facilitate the task
of engaging in hermeneutical understanding of different cultures.
However, my belief is that instead of taking these desired socio-
political conditions as prerequisites for a possible and a proper
intercultural exchange and simply waiting for such a situation to
come about, those who from both the hemispheres are acutely
sensing this intellectual vacuum must begin to break the silence
even before these ideal conditions obtain.
Certainly, the asymmetries of which we are aware today will
not disappear of their own accord, even in a relatively peaceful
context. In order to comprehend the deficiencies in theory-making
as well as in practical policy—making, the parties involved need to
converse candidly. Furthermore, to speak for a moment theoreti-
cally, it does not seem to me possible to conceive a priori of a
transcultural interpretive strategy for analyzing the immanent
structure of cultures, let alone while highlighting religious
themes. What is needed is a multi-layered narrative, as it were, in
order to confront the subtleties and complexities of the cross-
cultural encounter. As we gradually become proficient enough in
this conversation to focus on lived encounters and situations, we
will be able to unpack the cultural baggage that interpreters carry
while weaving theories about philosophy, religion and a wide
variety of other topics. One process cannot proceed without the
other.

13
 PM“? ,W. M.
For these and many other reasons, educational institutions are
vital places for innovating ways of correcting the basic asymme-
tries and initiating the crosscultural conversations. If forums can
be set up where students and teachers of various backgrounds
can engage in conversation precisely with the intention of raising
those issues about which they usually remain silent (only to pave
the way for later violent eruptions), they might well be seen as
effective social investment. This emphasis may also help us better
to construe the relation of various institutions (be that for social,
political or religious purposes) to society at large. Educational
institutions, no matter where these happen to be, are created by
the societies they serve, but they also in turn empower these
societies and help to change as well as to maintain the status quo.
These are mutually reenforcing processes. In the case of educa-
tional policy-making, for example, if the educational policy mak-
ers could exert some influence in highlighting those concerns
which now lie at the periphery of educational programs in phi-
losophy, religion, etc., and help bring them more and more to the
center, they would make a difference to the society as a whole.
Let me return to the issue of persistent stereotyping. Even in
locations which we presume to be edifying and progressive, such
as academia, many clichés prevail. As an example, let me probe
more deeply into the contemporary practice of teaching and
doing philosophy at the university level and into the inept man-
ner in which the concerns of diverse intellectual traditions are
actually represented there. This will help to show why the delib-
erate and conscious fostering of crosscultural conversation in the
sense I am calling for is necessary. I use the word ”philosophers”
here to refer to those who carry on the task of doing philosophy
as a vocation in the formal academic departments of philosophy,
usually in a university context. I might remark in passing that only
a small number of professional philosophers—and this, I am
afraid, holds true conspicuously of the West—have taken the
pains to look elsewhere for conceptual resources outside of their
cultural horizon, resources which could be fruitful not only for
their understanding and appreciation of alternative modes of
thinking but for the enrichment of their own pursuits, however
classically conceived. Certainly, the standard curriculum pertain-

l4
 Preface

ing to the discipline of philosophy in the West displays (with very

few exceptions) a dearth of representation of other intellectual
traditions, which though relevant are considered alien. The per-
petuation of this practice maintains precisely the prejudices we
must go beyond.
In this connection, let me also observe that we need to compre-
hend that the geographical demarcatio'n of philosophical thinking
that has produced such nomenclatures as ”American Pragma-
tism,” ”German Idealism,” ”French Existentialism,” or ”Indian
Vedanta” should not be taken to indicate that only a native can
have access to these or produce good work within these schools
of thought. There are several examples of scholars who have been
recognized as significant interpreters of a given tradition to which
they had nothing of that prima facic claim to authority which is
generally granted almost as a birthright to those who are consid-
ered insiders. Indeed, initiation into intellectual traditions outside
of one’s own cultural horizon might lead to fresh challenges
helpful for creative thinking.
Furthermore, a total lack of familiarity with major intellectual
traditions of other cultures is particularly conducive to misleading
conceptual constructions based upon clichés about the ”other-
ness” of such traditions. A scholar who is deeply committed to
more than one tradition of thinking, who knows enough about
the gropings, the conflicts, the divergent directions and the mul-
tiple levels of thinking that are at work in each of these, learns to
exercise caution about received ideas. To give an example from
my own research, while attempting to situate the various Indian
views about time in an intercultural context, I had to grapple
repeatedly with the misconceptions stemming from the persistent
cliché that the Indian conception of time is cyclic as opposed to
that of Judaism and Christianity, which is described as linear.’ In
wrestling with this issue, I was able to see at first hand how a
misuse of these metaphorical designations for describing the
various cultural experiences of time can be a serious obstacle for
encounters between world religions. In this case, the problem was
intensified by the way in which these metaphors had gotten
associated with the ideas of progress and salvation. Thus, it was
commonplace to stress the ”otherness" of adherents of the so-

l5
 Puma .. ,, %
progress and
called cyclic time by denying them a sense of history,
so forth. Removing this obstacle to serious crosscultural compari-
es
son is only one instance of the work of dismantling old stereotyp
new lines.
that enable us to reengage with one another along
Crosscultural projects badly need such endeavors as these stereo-
types act as barriers that obstruct philosophical understanding
and interreligious communication.
Such work is also vital to a deeper academic involvement with
the question of religious pluralism. Evidently, the nuclear age has
not turned out to be so postreligious an era as some might have
predicted. World religions are still the major sources of ideas
which provide meaning and a sense of direction to millions. They
play a significant role in the constitution of collective identity over
and against the ”otherness” of others, a process which is so
charged that world religions can indeed be considered powerful
determinants of collective behavior. As we know, these religions
not only unify, they also divide. A creative and vigorous conver-
sation on religious pluralism needs to draw on the awareness that
whichever strategies have been tried so far to underplay or elimi-
nate this plurality have not worked. However, to affirm pluralism
while denying the possibility of interreligious communication on
the basis that each religion is impermeably ”other” to the others
also leads to a blind alley. As with philosophy, a deeper acquain-
tance with traditions other than one’s own may be an effective
tool for avoiding some of the clichés and stereotypes that every-
where cause immense social distress. The challenge is how to
expose to our reflective gaze the distinct core of religious meaning
incorporated in the various traditions without rendering them so
opaque to one another that no conversation is possible.
The pursuit of crosscultural philosophical and religious ideas
is, however, complex and it is especially so when these have clear
social and political parameters and imports. One of the anxieties
that beset a scholar engaged in this endeavor is whether the kinds
of interpretive activities that such a task involves does cultural
violence to its methods and objects of study. I am thinking of the
concern that Rorty raises when he asks whether in pursuing this
endeavor we are really ”exchanging ideas or merely courtesies,
whether we are genuinely bickering or just staging the kind of

16
 Preface

ritual characteristic of what Levi-Strauss has called ”UNESCO

cosmopolitanism.” Rorty expresses the anxiety here that the task
of intercultural comparison might be seen as trivial or even point-
less, since there is no way for us to know another’s point of view
with the kind of precision and range of reference that an internal
argument about philosophy and religion can have. The problem
with this concern, which seems so legitimate on first look, is that
it may easily lead to contentions and arguments which amount
to an ethnocentric view of philosophy itself. In this connection, it
is worthwhile to examine a few of Rorty’s own best formulated
forebodings along these lines in order to demonstrate how these
misgivings actually reenforce an ethnocentric slant to the philo-
sophical enterprise as such instead of elucidating the potential for
intellectual adventure that a study of philosophy across the
boundaries of cultures can be.
In his review of Gerald J. Larson and Eliot Deutsch (eds.),
Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), Rorty argues that
there is no ”uncontroversial starting point for comparing forms of
intellectual life.” Hence any attempt to construct such a ”skyhook
which will take us out of this parochialism” is in his view vain.
Thus, we can never be sure while interpreting philosophies, such
as ”when we start imposing the grid of our own needs upon
non-Westerners.” There is no way for us, he maintains, ”to come
up with right or wrong answers . . . [for] we only have right or
wrong answers when we are all agreed about the ’point’ of the
inquiry.” Rorty denies in general, of course, the possibility that ”we
should ever agree on the ’point’ of philosophy." It seems to me,
however, that the same sort of observations can be made about any
particular rendition of philosophical thinking within the frame~
work of any given tradition and that it does not have any special
bearing on crosscultural projects. Thus, such questions as to
whether we are imposing the grid of our own needs in order to
interpret a philosopher or as to whether there is any agreed point
of inquiry in philosophy or not are not the special burdens of the
philosophers involved in crosscultural projects but instead com-
mon problems for us all. There is of course serious disagreement
among philosophers about these problems, and about Rortv's

'l 7
 Prethrc do- , ,
own way of comprehending philosophy as a project of thinking.
Furthermore, I would like to insist in this regard that we need not
confine ourselves to the idea that studying philosophies or relig-
ions as a crosscultural project has the one and only function of
finding similarities and differences in the diverse set of materials
that are available to us. If we get stuck with this sense of the
enterprise, the charge that this kind of intellectual struggle is
nothing more than ”a feat of imaginative recontextualization" as
Rorty puts it, can hardly be dispelled.
There are indeed other ways of pursuing crosscultural conver-
sation. Personally, I have drawn much intellectual nourishment
from working simultaneously in Western and Indian philosophi-
cal traditions. While specializing in the area of Indian philosophy,
it has often seemed to me that an approach, analysis or method
from a tradition of thought that does not owe its origin to the
Indian soil was highly useful for a reinterpretation of Indian
thought. If a genuine involvement with the sources of Indian
thought, its concern, its analytical tools is essential for under-
standing and creative advancement of the indigenous tradition, it
is neither necessary nor advisable to close off the possibilities of
interpretation beyond that tradition’s already achieved self-under-
standing.
In other words, as I construe it, learning about another tradi-
tion of thought is not the same as constructing an effigy of the
otherness of the ”other" through imaginative manipulation or
merely of identifying spotty and isolated cases of similarity and
difference but a matter of letting the ”other” speak and then
attempting to comprehend what is said. This basic process must
proceed whenever a scholar encounters two or more sets of ideas.
A continued effort to focus on the shared as well as diverse
concerns of various intellectual traditions will enrich the partici-
pants who undertake this adventure. Moreover, this exploration
alone can foster a sense of a community among philosophers in
the global context. A philosophical intervention in the depiction
of ”cultural otherness” with regard to a wide range of themes is,
undoubtedly, one important way that philosophers can help
build bridges between cultures that are lacking at present.
One reason for bringing up this discussion is to draw attention

IX
 Preface

to how a limited philosophical self-understanding can account for

the relative failure of decades of efforts to enlarge the content of
the curriculum in the departments of philosophy in the West. Let
me elaborate on this a bit in order to clarify in what way the
self-understanding of the philosophical project that Rorty is de-
picting bears upon this practical situation. The scenario is as
follows: Philosophers in the modern West are more often than not
university professors. Rorty grants Ninian Smart’s claim that
"Modern Western philosophy has been a product of a number of
cultural accidents, one of which is the institutionalization of uni-
versities into a departmental structure.” But can the conspicuous
absence of the intellectual traditions of the East in these depart-
ments be taken as merely another cultural accident? Is it not linked
closely to the question still in the air: ”15 there philosophy in
Asia?”'" Rorty remarks that this question is ”perfectly reasonable
to ask, without condescension and in honest bewilderment. . . .
For this is not the question ’15 Asia intellectually mature?’ but the
question ’Have Asians had any of the needs which have lead
Western universities to teach Seneca, Ockham, Hume, and
Husserl in the same department?” Yet Rorty does not find it
necessary to answer why Heidegger and Quine are taught in the
same department when as he himself says in the same review that
they ”in their professional capacities, felt none of the same needs,
pursued almost none of the same purposes.”
Granted that one needs to be cautious about the cultural
differences which divide philosophical traditions, nevertheless it
is regrettable that, given the present-day organization of the edu-
cational program in academic departments of philosophy, philoso-
phers like Sankara, Nagarjuna, Diganaga, and Uddyotakara—to
mention a few great names at random from the Indian traditions—
are not taught in the same departments where such Western
figures as Hume, Hegel, or Husserl are venerated. This could help
correct some of the asymmetries in crosscultural philosophical
exchanges and create a new intellectual space where philosophers
could get a more concrete grasp of where the themes and con-
cerns of various traditions of thought overlap and where they do
not. This could also give the students of philosophy an opportu-
nity to find out exactly how different the lndian dnrsami tradition
.1 9
 , , Perms
or
is as a thinking project from Greek philosophm. This considerati
we
could lead to a further deepening of the question whether
ing of what the philosophic al enterprise
need a plural understand
amount
is all about. In any case, it could make it evident that no
of a priori argument can decide such questions as where there is
philosophy and where it is nonexistent.
Furthermore, even if we take seriously some of Rorty’s fore-
bodings about intercultural comparison in the context of philoso-
phy, I do not see such a project as dispensable. I-Iow without it
l
could we identify traditional mistakes that hinder intercultura
exchanges? Who can do that job but those who know more than
one tradition? It is indeed difficult to ignore the fact that imagined
differences often provide the stuff of which cliches about the
”otherness” of the others are born.
Thus, in the context of philosophy, and cultural and religious
studies alike (concepts which themselves may be open to plural-
istic interpretation), one needs to reject the hard sense of the
metaphor of boundary that divides intellectual traditions. One
needs to avoid thinking of cultural crossing as trespassing, while
retaining a sensitivity to the lines that do indeed separate tradi-
tions of thought, speech-communities, and social groupings. In
any case, to sum up, it is my view that a scholar engaged in such
an intellectual adventure cannot accept a theory of culture that
lends support to a pernicious form of cultural relativism which
claims that divergent intellectual histories lead to closed concep-
tual worlds among which no communication is possible. This is
also why any attempt by scholars to acquaint themselves with
such projects of thinking—in no matter what cultural soil—is to
be commended as a step toward a veritable intercultural under-
standing. It expresses, at least, a genuine philosophical need
which refuses to limit itself within a single culture, thereby decry-
ing an ethnocentric view of philosophy.
When I pressed this point in my correspondence with Rorty,
he made the following interesting remark: ”My hunch is that our
sense of where to connect up Indian and Western texts will change
dramatically when and if people who have read quite a few of
both begin to write books which are not clearly identifiable as
either Western or Eastern,” and this he thinks will ”help create a

20
 Preface

culture within which intellectuals from both sides may meet and
communicate.” While I appreciate this observation, I take the
project of studying the major philosophical traditions of East and
West as an integral part of crosscultural conversation and think
that this needs to be a part ofa legitimate program in an academic
setting. Not only does it help identify and expose cliches in the
world at large but it may also help to correct some of the oddities
that arise from an imbalance of knowledge and power within
philosophical, religious and cultural studies themselves. It can
perhaps also open up new frontiers and allow us to reconsider
the interpretive strategies on cultures that is reflected in the
inadequate manner in which traditions of thought have been
represented so far, thereby removing the East-West asymmetries
in academic exchanges.
It is even possible to imagine that the novel perceptions of an
international community of philosophers who know more of each
others’ traditions would lead not merely to a harvest of bits and
pieces of ideas from different thought-traditions but make a new
contribution to a genuinely creative philosophy. Who can say that
such endeavors will not, in the long run, falsify the prophecy of
the ”end of philosophy”?
Conscious planning and commitment is, however, badly
needed to foster the kind of crosscultural conversation which will
lead toward these ends. Crosscultural projects of the kind that I
have in mind require the participation not only of professional
comparativists, but also of those who, like Rorty, customarily work
within the bounded space of their own traditional disciplinary
concerns. Only when crosscultural conversation will progress,
will it be meaningful to ask how other cultural, religious or
philosophical traditions can help to regenerate our own and what
techniques and methods are appropriate to understand these
other traditions and their potential.
Finally, while dealing with the story of philosophy or religion,
one must at the outset keep in mind that the state of any academic
discipline—in whatever cultural soil—is by no means free from
the influence of factors that condition its over-all cultural history.
Read in this vein, it is perhaps now time to let intellectual forces
uncover the overlapping contents without underplaying the de-

21
 Preface

viations, the divergences. In this process we will help foster a

partnership that does not get thwarted by the talk of radical
difference or by the thought of the dissolution of distinctness of a
given cultural tradition. Perception of significant but not incom-
mensurable otherness of other traditions of thought, as long as it
is based on knowledge and study rather than on a priori assump-
tion, is a philosophically enriching experience to all concerned,
whereas repetition of clichés, even when cloaked as recognition
of difference, does no one any good.

Notes

1. See Anindita Niyogi Balslev (ed.), Cross-Cultural Conversation (In-

itiation) (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 10.
2. H. von Glasenapp, in his Indienbild Deutscher Denker (Stuttgart:
K. F. Koehler, 1960), pp. 39ff., described Hegel’s reading on India as a
caricature and even said that Hegel ”ventured on a task for which he was
not qualified" (p. 59). Also note the observation of Wilhelm Halbfass in
India And Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1988), p. 286: "Today, it is no longer necessary to argue that there was
philosophy in India in a sense which is fully compatible with what
European philosophers were actually doing.”
3. See various works by Das Gupta, Hiriyanna, Radhakrishnan,
Frauwallner, et al.
4. See my essay ”Cross-Cultural Conversation: Its Scope and Aspira—
tion,” in Balslev (ed.), Cross-Cultural Conversation, pp. 15—27.
5. See p. 42 below. For thoughtful remarks on ”intercultural compari-
sons," see Richard Rorty, ”Philosophy, Literature, and Intercultural Com-
parisons: Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,”in Essays on Heidegger and
Others, Volume 2 of his Philosophical Papers (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), reprinted on pp. 103—25 of this vol-
ume.
6. See Richard J. Bernstein, ”The Hermeneutics of Crosscultural
Understanding," in Balslev (ed.), Cross-Cultural Conversation (Initiation),
pp. 29—41, and Richard Rorty’s review of Gerald J. Larson and Eliot
Deutsch (eds), Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative
Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), in Philosophy
liast and West 3/9 (1989): 332437.
7. See my A Study of Time in Indian Philosophy (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1983), pp. 140—50.
8. See my essay "Time and the Hindu Experience” in Anindita N.

22
 Preface
Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (eds.), Religion and Time (New York and
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 163—81.
9. See Rorty’s review of Larson and Deutsch (eds.), Interpreting Across
Boundaries in Philosophy East and West 3/9 (1939): 332—37.
10. For Smart’s and Staal's papers, see Larson and Deutsch (eds.),
Interpreting Across Boundaries.

23
 Letter 1

Charlottesville
May 6, 1990

Dear Dick,

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of your book

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press,
1989). I am reading it as well as some of your papers carefully,
making notes of the questions that I will eventually like to pose
concerning the theme of ”cultural otherness and philosophy,”
focusing especially on the encounter between India and the West.
Whatever may have been the limitations of the Sixth East-West
Philosophers' Conference held in Hawaii in August 1989, I would
consider the endeavor laudable if it has succeeded in persuading
the philosophers to be seriously concerned with questions that lie
at the boundaries of the intellectual traditions of East and West.
There are evidently various problems, but this is precisely what I
am about to explore in and through this conversation with you.
As I have already told you, this is simply an initial sketch in an
effort to understand what the issues really are and to grasp them
as they spontaneously appear in the horizon, an attempt to catch
a glimpse of in what way one should (or should not) prepare so
that an authentic discourse may gradually emerge. This is perhaps
itself a beginning (that is as we begin to converse), since the
so-called crosscultural dialogue has essentially been so far an
enterprise where one speaks about the other, and at best to the
other, hardly ever it is witnessed as an open conversation. I am
genuinely encouraged by the fact that you are willing to engage
yourself in this question of crosscultural study (philosophy is only
one aspect of this large and complex question). I think, this is one

25
 Letter '1

of the pressing issues of our time and must be attended to in all

seriousness (that does not exclude a sense of humor and the
comic). It has already become glaringly visible in the intellectual
circles as the issue of ”otherness.”
On April 11, as I was getting ready to participate in the seminar
on The Cultural Other organized at the Commonwealth Center of
the University of Virginia, I could not help but thinking loudly
about why this theme has become a recurrent topic for debates
and discussions in our time? Does this reflect our need for achiev-
ing a higher level of critical self-understanding by placing our-
selves in a larger context which today, more than ever, involves
an encounter with the other? What do these frequent meetings
tell us about our time? I would appreciate your comments.
It seems to me that this renewed vigor in the question of the
self and the other, identity and difference, is very much due to a
set of circumstances caused by technological advance which has
turned strangers into neighbors. The situation then is this: tech-
nology has ”killed the distance," the dialectical relationship be-
tween the self and the other, us and them, is no more perceived
only as a purely abstract or theoretical concern. This is the aca-
demic setting in which the intense urge for a deeper under-
standing about what exactly constitutes the ”otherness” of the
other—in no matter which context, religious, social or political—is
to be assessed. The academic zeal for this theme is prompted by
the awareness that no meaningful communication with the other
is feasible without some authentic information, not even a higher
level of self-understanding is possible without it. This would
imply that on practical, pragmatic ground alone (as well as, I
believe, on a theoretical scrutiny) a theory (such as any expression
of extreme relativism) which claims that we are prisoners of our
respective conceptual worlds amongst which no communication
is possible is bound to be rejected. The stand of extreme relativism
is a purely theoretical construct, and has no cash value. Even on
theoretical ground, it is self-defeating. The relevance of a philo-
sophical stand in the contemporary situation would precisely be
seen in its adequacy to explore the ”otherness” in an authentic
manner, taking note of its crosscultural dimension. There would
be no harm, if the responses in this process get polarized.

26
 Letter 1

I was emphasizing these questions simply in order to try to

understand what the theme of ”otherness” is telling us about our
time. After all, the problems of one and the many, identity and
difference are ancient themes of philosophy, in India and the
West. Metaphysicians across cultural boundaries have for centu-
ries wrestled with these questions disputing about which is pri-
mary, which is derived; which is real and which is appearance.
The present concern with the theme of ”otherness,” a theme
which is virtually appearing in a range of disciplines with all its
acute tensions at the conceptual level, is an attempt to understand
and to make sense of difference and pluralism. If at the point of
departure one assumes that there is no possibility whatsoever to
grasp the ”otherness” of the other, one would have not much of
a choice other than to describe the situation with a sense of comic
and recite with Kipling: ”All nice people like Us are We / And
everybody else is They” (quoted in They and We by P I. Rose [New
York, 1964]).
Our awareness of ”we” and ”they” has become so sharpened
that today in a multi-ethnic society we look with suspicion in a
theory or in a practical policy-making what it is that is being
compromised in the process of reorganization of whatever the
issue is in question: is it our differences (which constitute our
identity) that are overlooked at the cost of an abstract, unreal
unity, or is it, as the anticommunitarians would say, that our
common shared bonds are underplayed in order to highlight
differences of all sorts, even those which are utterly irrelevant?
Perhaps now more than ever we are intensely conscious of these
issues or at least more articulate about them. (I recall that Professor
Richard Bernstein also voiced some similar questions at the APA
meeting in 1988.) Why 50? Is there a threat of a loss of identity
which our ancestors were unaware of that makes us so concerned
with this theme?
Again, it is evident that although the theme of otherness is
expressed in singular, it actually stands for a network of multiple,
complex and complicated issues of various dimensions. In this
adventure of a new, creative discourse our hope is that our self-
understanding will grow along with our awareness of how stereo-
types and cliches about the ”otherness" of the other actually

27
 LBW" 1,
reflect back on our self-image. The factors that promote and
thwart communication are gradually getting exposed to our criti-
cal gaze. I guess that ideas stemming from essentialism, relativism
and various theories of interpretation, all provide strategies and
competing paradigms for coping with this situation which is
plural in every sense.
As I reflect on the question of otherness in the general context
of the encounter of India and the West, what strikes me immedi-
ately is that our images of ourselves and views of otherness are
not a set of unchanging thoughts and notions. The members of
any given community are engaged in interpreting and making
sense of these notions and this interpreting is a continuing, devel-
oping historical process (I elaborated some of these ideas in my
paper presented in Hawaii). The perceptions do not remain static,
but keep on changing from era to era. I wholeheartedly agree with
you when you protest, as you did in Hawaii, against talking about
the West not as ”an ongoing, suspenseful adventure in which we
are participating but rather as a structure which we can step back
from, inspect at a distance” and then contrast ”the West as a whole
with the rest of the world as a whole.”
Secondly, when we speak of the encounter between India and
the West, we must note that none of these are names for cultural
traditions that have monolithic structures. It is to be noticed that
there is hardly one, homogeneous interpretation, one unique
mode of self-understanding in any traditional frame, nor is there
only a single, uniform perception of otherness, even if we confine
ourselves to a selected time-period.
To give an example of how conflicting responses can coexist
in a given society at the same time, consider the media-percep-
tions of the ”otherness" of the other. During your frequent travels,
I am sure that you have had plenty of occasions when you have
noticed how responses vary, some completely agree with these
media-perceptions and are influenced by them, whereas to some
others these same projections appear as a blatant distortion of the
”otherness” of the other, almost like a fiasco. It seems to me that
not only there may be, but there actually simultaneously are
several perceptions of the self and the other in any given tradi-
tional society. I am convinced that different groups in the Indian

28
 Letter '1

society have diverse and contrasting images of the West. More-

over, as I was arguing before, these images and perceptions do not
remain static. They keep on changing and along with that our
self-understanding also undergoes significant alterations. The
concerns of one epoch may not remain relevant or even alive in
another. I think that it is very important to take note of this
heterogeneity within what is called one tradition. Evidently, to
the extent that it is legitimate for us to refer to any cultural
tradition as Indian or as Western, it must be possible to identify
some broad and general characteristics of each. It remains, never-
theless, true that if one is to gain a rich, broad and adequate
description of any tradition—whether Indian or Western—one
should not downplay the tensions and oppositions that are inevi-
tably present within each. In the wider context of encounter, these
changes caused by the fusion of one with the other, of the old and
the new, only bear witness to the fact that a tradition is a function-
ing tradition, that it is alive. I feel that the only thing that one has
to be cautious about is whether perceptions of differences are
getting so focused that they block conversation, whether the
”otherness” of the other is projected as being so incommensurable
that there is no more a legitimate basis for an exchange or a
dialogue. That there will be room for a spectrum of views about
these matters seems to me to be perfectly in order. That at different
periods of history responses to ”otherness” of the other culture
vary can be clearly seen as one peruses the reactions of the
prominent Indians, say from the nineteenth century to the last
decade of the twentieth. No matter whose account one reads,
whether Rammohan Roy's, Aurobindo’s, or Nehru’s, the picture
of the nineteenth-century India is not a glorious one. It is invari-
ably described as a stagnant, deteriorated state, when all creativity
seems to have been in a subdued, repressed condition. These
years of Indian history are often described as a dark period, albeit
the darkness which occurs before the rising of the dawn: it was
followed by the reassertion and the resurgence of the Indian spirit
during what is frequently depicted as the Indian renaissance. This
word, however, may not share exactly all the features that it has
when applied to the European context, but some important com-
mon features may be detected. There is a rediscovery of the old

29
 Letterl
roots and a revitalization of art, music, poetry, etc., in both. The
peculiar characteristic of the Indian renaissance is not only a
laborious search into the past of her own culture but also a
conscious struggle in the face ofan alien culture which it resented
on various grounds and admired passionately on certain other
grounds. The leaders who drew public attention and loyalty and
who were caught in this process intellectually were in search of
ways and means to cope with the ”otherness” of the West. It was
seen as an irreversible process. Aurobindo, for example, summa-
rized in 1918 the impact of the European culture on India as: ”It
revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse” and ”awak-
ened the desire of new creation."
As the locution of that time shows, ”Western science and
Indian spirituality” (there are also other pet phrases expressing
the complementaries and the dichotomies) held a grip on the
Indian mind: it could abandon neither of these. In fact, it is
fascinating to read the chain of Indian thinkers from Rammohan
Roy to Radhakrishnan, and notice how they have expressed their
responses to the West. We might examine some of them at a later
time.
What is of immediate interest, however, is to attend to the
responses that an exposure to Western thought has provoked and
is still provoking from philosophers in India. I think that this
provides us with a glaring example of how the state of an aca-
demic discipline is tied to the factors which influence the over-all
cultural history of India. At the beginning the response to Western
thought could be seen in the ensuing of a host of ”comparative
studies." The story is intriguing. At this time, however, I would
only like to observe that whatever the limitations and drawbacks
of such studies, they did express a genuine philosophical need
(whatever other motivations there might have otherwise been)
which refuses to limit itself within a single culture. The value of
this endeavor may itself be questioned and, as a matter of fact, has
been questioned. Over the years the Indian response to Western
thought can be seen as gradually shifting away from that. What
is also interesting to note is that the Indians never shared the
extreme viewsofsueh cultural relativists who claim thatdivergent
intellectual histories lead to closed conceptual worlds amongst

30
 Letter I

which no communication is possible. Anyhow, the enthusiasm for

comparative studies has lessened. Perhaps it gradually turned out
to be an intellectually tedious process that provoked doubts about
its values. It is possible that in the history of the meeting of minds
this was an inevitable phase that now needs to be transcended. It
is felt that a mere comparativist cannot do creative philosophy.
The Indian philosopher recognizes more than ever that whatever
socio-political circumstances were responsible for the introduc-
tion of Western thought to the Indian mind, today it is accepted
as a part of the Indian experience that can no more be expelled.
The Indian philosopher today, perhaps, does not find it sufficient
to relate to Western thought merely as an other but seeks to seize
it in an authentic creative manner. He or she realizes that while a
genuine involvement with the sources of Indian thought, its
concerns, its analytical tools are essential for creative advance-
ment of the tradition, it is not necessary to close off the possibilities
of interpretation beyond the tradition's already achieved self-un-
derstanding. In this process the Indian philosopher also notes that
the mainstream Western philosophy has not made much effort to
understand and appropriate Indian thinking into its own texture.
Some of the attempts to relate to the East on the part of the
Western philosophers have precisely therefore been of the genre
where the East is seen as a ”redemptive force” or as bankrupt so
far as philosophy is concerned. There have been some interesting
discussions about this in recent times.
Now that the Hawaii conference is behind us, let me try to
derive some wisdom from the past experience. Before I proceed,
may I ask you what you exactly had in mind when you said at the
Commonwealth Center in conversation with J. Ree in the fall of
1989 that at the Sixth East-West Philosophers’ Conference in
Hawaii (August, 1989) ”the East did not meet the West"? What did
you expect to happen? In what ways did the meeting not live up
to that expectation? I ask this not in order to get your criticism of
the past conference, which we all enjoyed and appreciated, but
because I think that as you begin to articulate we will have some
indications of what needs to be done in order to have a more
fruitful conference in future. These glimpses, which usually ap-
pear in hindsight (and which conference is ever completely satis-

3'1
 ,LQULU
fying?), may provide us with some interesting clues which could
be incorporated into the next meeting. I hope that it will take place
in India and that it will be followed by a series of other conferences
devoted to the same or similar theme over the years.
I will now begin by recalling some of the comments and
observations which you made in your paper, presented in Hawaii,
entitled ”Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons.”
Here you have pointed out that essentialism has not been fruitful
as ”applied to human affairs, in areas such as history, sociology
and anthropology” and you have noted: ”Despite growing recog-
nition that the essentialistic habits of thought which pay off in the
natural sciences do not assist moral and political reflection, we
Western philosophers still show a distressing tendency to essen-
tialism when we offer intercultural comparisons.” You have also
made the very important claim: ”A society which took its moral
vocabulary from novels rather than from ontico-theological or
ontico-moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human
nature or about the point of human existence or the meaning of
human life. Rather, it would ask itself what we can do so as to get
along with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be
comfortable with one another, how institutions can be changed
so that everyone to be understood has a better chance of being
gratified."
If an essentialistic approach is, as you say, an ”easy way out of
the problem of intercultural comparison,” how do you conceive
a more adequate and fruitful approach? I recall in this connection
that, just after the presentation of your truly stimulating paper in
Hawaii, I asked you in the context of your above comments: ”If
comparative philosophy in making intercultural comparisons has
exhibited essentialistic characteristics and thus far has failed, how
do you envisage a program for philosophy as narrative for pro-
moting such pragmatic virtues as tolerance for diversity, ’comfort-
able togetherness’—virtues you seem to endorse?" Now that
there is more time I would like to dwell on some of the different
ideas that you have put across. I do not see how you can do with
simply not having a program (as far as I can recall you said that
in your reply) and yet make a claim about which are the right
questions to ask and which are not. From your observations, it

32
 Letter 1

seems to me that you have some insights at the level of theory,

just as you have a practical concern, in recommending freedom
and equality as some of the "West’s most important legacy.” You
also record with approval that in its recent history the West has
shown an ”increased ability to tolerate diversity.”
I hope that you will indicate one or two examples of essential-
istic intercultural comparisons and show us precisely in what
sense it is unfruitful and what is the way out. No one, as far as I
can foresee, will question the pertinence of the virtues you rec-
ommend. There is, however, demand that values which are rec-
ommended must be shown to be realizable and hence there must
be a program to cope with this demand both on the theoretical
and the practical level.
Again, although I agree with you that the task of comparative
philosophy does not end with the sorting out of ”only our coun-
terparts, those with tastes similar to our own,” I do not quite see
what is lost even if we keep on discovering what you describe as
" the adaptations of a single transcultural character-type to differ-
ent environments.” Why can we also not consider the latter as an
important part of the crosscultural adventure, as stumbling upon
something where our stereotyped expectations of finding a pris-
tine otherness/difference gets a jolt and we see some of ”our”
culture-types as indistinguishable from ”theirs"—an experience
where the distinction of ”we” and "they" is in jeopardy? In other
words, even if we grant that differences are what is really inter-
esting, to rule out perceptions of similarity may also inflate our
sense of distinctness or, to put it more strongly, our desperate need
to save our sense of uniqueness beyond a point that can be
accepted in good faith. To repeat it once more, I have no doubt
that a keen awareness of conceptual distinctions that various
intellectual traditions provide us is immensely valuable but cau-
tion must be exercised to see that the zeal for finding differences
in the area of crosscultural studies does not get out of proportion
as this can eventually lead to a distorted image of the ”otherness"
of the other culture. Later on I will give you one such example
that I encountered in my work on the theme of time in an
intercultural context.
Now, I would like to ask you a few questions and request you

33
 . ,chtwi 51-, ,.
to elaborate on certain others pertaining to the much-discussed
topic: Heidegger and the destiny of philosophy in the West as well
as his observations about the East.
I will not try to organize the order of questions at this point
but simply place them before you and return to this topic again
adding still other queries.
It will be illuminating for us if you will kindly give a summary
of your reading of the following comments of Heidegger: ”That
the thinking of the future is no longer philosophy, because it aims
at thinking on a level deeper than metaphysics, which term also
means the same"; ”With the end of philosophy, thinking itself does
not also come to an end but passes over to another beginning.”
You have observed in your Hawaii paper that whereas for
Kundera the Western adventure is open-ended, for Heidegger the
West has ”exhausted its possibilities.” This you attribute to the
inherent essentialistic structure of Heidegger’s thinking. Would
you please elaborate on this and show how this is related to a
turning to the East—as something which is ”wholly other” to the
West? And what is wrong with this attitude?
You have obviously resented the observation made by Gra-
ham Parkes (ed., Heidegger and Asian Thought, [Honolulu, 1987])
where he writes:

Heidegger’s claim to be the first Western thinker to have overcome

the tradition should be taken more seriously if his thought can be
brought to resonate deeply with ideas that arose in totally foreign
cultural milieu, couched in more or less alien languages, over two
millennia ago.

You have reacted to it, as I find in the footnote of your paper, by

saying that this ”resonance can also be taken as a sign of regression
rather than of transcendence—as a way of returning to the womb
rather than a way of overcoming.” Please elaborate.
At the end, I will also like to bring to your attention some
comments of an Indian Heideggerian (perhaps you know his
work on Heidegger), J. L. Mehta, to invite your own comment on
them. In a paper entitled ”Heidegger and the Comparison of
Indian and Western Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Religion [Delhiz
l‘he Indian Council of Philosophical Research and Munshiram

34
 Letter 1

Manoharlal Publishers, 1990], pp. 11ff) he has observed that from

the scholarly point of view:

The basic presupposition of the comparative enterprise would

seem to be a history of Indian philosophy, in all the detail and
scholarly refinement which the use of Western methods of phi-
lological and historical research makes possible. Only fragments of
such a history are as yet available, and we in India can take further
steps in this direction only when we shed the deep-seated notion
that in the field of philosophy the historian’s job is less philosophi-
cal than that of the systematic thinker and the dialectician, when
we take a stance in the present and possess the detachment of
inquiry which enables historical questions to be raised and requires
that they be answered. We ask historical questions and seek to
understand our tradition in its particularity when, from the per-
spective of a novel present, we experience a sense of remoteness
from it, but also the urgency of a dialogue with it. The Indian
philosophical tradition, like the Western, has been sustained by this
dialectic of remoteness and creative appropriation all through its
history, besides exhibiting the historical working out of the ’logic’
inherent in different positions and systems; but by the rise of
historical consciousness in the last hundred years must itself now
be seen as marking a novel break in that tradition, demanding, a
radically new kind of relationship to it, a new way of appropriating
it, and thus breaking away from the hold of what is dead in it and
yet being nourished by it.
As a thinker of ’Being’ and of ’Time,’ Heidegger exhibits three
integrally related features from which the Orient can learn: (1) a
full awareness of historicity of understanding and thinking, even
while pushing forward in the attempt to transcend it; (2) an intense
consciousness of the intellectual and spiritual newness of the pre-
sent, leading him to pose new questions to his own philosophical
tradition, and thus to see, more vividly than even Hegel, its precise
relation and relevance to the present as it has been molded by that
tradition; and finally, (3) the radicality of the questioning with
which he has confronted the Western tradition of metaphysical
thinking, not with the intent to reject it, as is sometimes asserted,
but as the only appropriate way in which we today are called upon
to renew ourselves, as thinkers in a time of need, through an active
and dedicated grappling with tradition.
To take only the first as an example, it is well-known how a great
deal of Heidegger’s wrestling with ’the question of Being’ is bound

35
 __Lcllcr 1 ,

up with ’what is’ at present, here and now, with the way Western
man is taken up in a technological mode of being and of being
related to all that is, which for him is an extremity of spiritual
impoverishment, a time of utter need and darkness in which man
has ceased even to be aware of this need. The essence of the
technological, according to Heidegger, is not itself technological,
but is rooted in a destiny of Being (Seinsgeschick) of which the
’metaphysical' tradition of the West, beginning with Plato and
culminating in the nihilism of Nietzsche, is an expression in the
sphere of thought. The question of Being, as he raises it, amounts
at the same time to a quest for a way of thought that can redeem
our humanity by overcoming the ’oblivion way of Being’ and so
enable us to break the omnipotence of technology and live in the
world as truly our home. . . . Further, he is also aware of the fact
that the ’technification’ of life originating in the West has envel-
oped, or threatens to envelop, the whole world. This strange des-
tiny in which the whole world is caught up is described by him as
the consuming Europeanization of the Earth, confirming in a sense
Hegel’s claim about the destiny of the West. For, to the extent that
other cultures adopt the science and technology of the West, they
also have a share in that ’history of Being’ that progressive with-
drawal of Being from man, which is the way Being and man have
been related during the course and career of Western metaphysical
thought, constituting its inner logic and hidden history.
It is this perverse 'triumph’ of the West and in consequence the
spiritual situation of not merely Western man but of men of all
cultures and traditions today that forms the basic challenge to
Heidegger’s thinking, prompting him to attend a new beginning
of thought, and to seek a way of thinking that is no longer parochial,
moving within the charmed circle of concepts originating in the
Western tradition, but planetary, as he calls it, beyond Orient and
Occident, and for the first time truly world-historical.

Your comments on this will be most welcome.

The role of philosophy in relation to a culture as a whole needs
to be closely looked into as the ”ascetic priests” are taken seriously
everywhere. Why have they been hailed across boundaries?
Are
they the pioneer architects of cultures? Can any culture really
do
without them? To whom then we shall turn to learn
what’s really
wrong with us? Who will tell us, as in the context
of the West you
do, that it has turned into a sexist, racist and
imperialist culture?
The novelist? Why then, as you write, it
is ”among the philoso-

36
 .Lctteclcmfi,
phers of the West that Western self-hatred is most prevalent”? (It
will be interesting to get some examples of that.) If this again, as
you insist, is an attitude which belongs to the ”annals of ascetic
priesthood,” what is the way out? It seems to me that the situation
which you describe is something like this: one really does not
want to go back on the diagnosis regarding the state of psyche in
which one is but nevertheless resents an encounter with an ascetic
priest (the philosopher) as it is no more a la mode, one would rather
talk to a secular analyst (the novelist). In other words, the revolt
is against an institution whose function cannot be denied but has
to be demolished (in the name of what?), hence must be per-
formed by another.
It is very likely that I am misinterpreting your stand. It is
precisely in order to avoid such embarrassing situation that the
prevalent custom in the area of ”dialogue” is to speak to the other
or about the other and never with the other—in which case most
of the time the encounter with the other remains some sort of a
fantasy, one hears only one’s own voice. I am happy to take the
risk as years of exposure alternatively to the East and the West has
taught me that nothing can substitute for a conversation; it leads
one along unpredictable lines where a new story presses for
attention. 30, please protest wherever my interpretation does not
tally with your self-understanding.
I intend to continue but for the moment must rush this to you
in order to get the conversation started.
With best wishes and regards,

Sincerely,
Anindita N. Balslev

37
 Letter 2

Santa Cruz, California

August 1, 1990

Dear Anindita,

Let me begin replying to your thoughtful letter of May 6 by

taking up the notion of ”otherness.” It is true that, as you say, ”the
problems of the one and the many, of identity and difference, are
ancient themes of philosophy.” But I doubt that philosophical
discussions of these matters bear on the otherness which sepa-
rates groups of people, and historical traditions, from one another.
The philosophical discussions have largely been about the
rather artificial problem of understanding how the same, self-
identical, thing could have many predicates, or about the equally
artificial problem of which relations which a thing bears to other
things could be taken away while maintaining the thing's self-
identity. I call these problems artificial because they arise only if
one has a doctrine of real essence if one does not, as I would, adopt
the nominalist solution of saying that self-identity is a function of
human interests.
This nominalism is part of my over-all pragmatist outlook. We
pragmatists hope to dissolve traditional philosophical problems
by viewing them as disguised forms of practical problems. Our
slogan is that if it doesn’t make a difference to what we do, it
makes no difference at all. So we see every thing as simply a nexus
of relations, in the sense in which a number is simply a nexus of
relations to other numbers. We regard the question of which of
these relations are internal to the thing (which could not be taken
away while maintaining the thing’s self-identity) as boiling down
to the question ”At what point would it be more convenient to

39
 Lt’l‘h’r 2

stop using the same name or description, and to start using

another one for identificatory purposes?”
Because of my nominalism and pragmatism, I am reluctant to
speak, as you do, of ”exploring the ’otherness’ [between cultures
or traditions] in an authentic manner.” I would prefer to speak of
the practical need of the members of an interdependent global
society to get in touch with each other—figure out why the other
is saying the strange things he or she does. I quite agree that we
can set aside the claim that ”we are prisoners of our respective
conceptual worlds” on pragmatic grounds alone. A concept, on
my nominalist view, is simply the use of a word. We can under-
stand why people use other words than we do by noting the
different environments in which each of us has developed lan-
guages—developed tools for coping with the different practical
problems which their environments (natural and social) present.
I do not see that questions about authenticity arise in regard to
the manner in which we pursue our inquiries into those environ-
ments and those problems.
But perhaps by ”authentic manner” here you simply mean is
a ”non-reductive manner"—one which does not assume that the
other’s words can be straightforwardly translated into words
which we use. In that case, I quite agree with you. As we have
learned from Kuhn and Davidson, the learnability of a language
does not entail that sentences in it can be paired off in any
straightforward way with sentences in another language. But this
lack of pairability is not really very important; if the possibility of
going bilingual exists, then this lack is merely a technical incon-
venience. Davidson has, I think, given us good reason to believe
that there is no such thing as an unlearnable language, so the
possibility of bilingualism is always open, though difficult to
realize in practice.
You raise the question of whether it may be a "threat of a loss
of identity which our ancestors were unaware of” that makes us
so concerned with ”otherness” today. I am inclined to say that
there are two factors which explain this concern. The first is just
the fact you mention earlier— that technological civilization, and
particularly developments in communication and transportation,
make it impossible for us to ignore the existence of others in a way

40
 Letter 2

that was possible to our ancestors. But the second is just the love
of the exotic—a love which has become an important feature of
Western hiin culture since Herder, Humboldt, and the Roman-
tics.
This love of the exotic—the taste for new ways of speaking
and acting—has produced some bad results (those diagnosed in
Edward Said's Orientalism for example) but on the whole it has
been a progressive element in Western culture. For the Romantic
idea that experience is wider than we have yet imagined (trans-
lated by us nominalists into the claim that there are not-readily-
translatable languages to be learned) has helped the West stay
alive to the idea that it doesn’t know it all, and to the possibility
that its own languages, and its own social practices, are relatively
primitive. Romanticism has been linked with historicism, and so
has produced the common Western assumption that our descen-
dants will, with luck, speak a richer and more interesting lan-
guage than the one we speak. In this Hegelian-Deweyan mood,
we are not so much fearing to lose our identity as hoping to lose it.
To my mind, the best and most hopeful element in the high culture
of the West is the Romantic desire to acquire ever new identities—
not to get stuck with the one you started with.
By ”exotic,” in this context, I do not just mean ”characteristic
of different lands,” but rather ”sufficiently different from what
one is accustomed to force one to speak differently, to use different
terms in characterizing oneself.” So a new Western poet or painter
can be as exotic, for the West, as an old Eastern poet or philosopher.
The quest for the exotic is just the attempt to enlarge one’s
imagination. The Romantic-historicist notion of spiritual progress
is not centered around the idea ofunderstanding better and better
something which is waiting out there to be understood, but rather
around the idea of creating a larger, freer, self. The emphasis thus
falls not on getting an ”authentic” understanding of an old tradi-
tion or a new artistic movement but simply on finding something
in that tradition or that movement which one can use for purposes
of self—enlargement. More broadly, the emphasis falls less on
knowing than on imagining, more on freeing oneself up than on
getting something right.
Against this background, let me turn to your question about

4'1
 mm- 2
how I can make do ”with simply not having a program.” You
suggest that I ought to have some theoretical justification for the
claim that freedom and equality are ”the West’s most important
legacy," the things in the West which should be of most interest
to inhabitants of non-Western cultures.
1 do not have any philosophical backup for this claim, and do
not feel the need of any. The claim is little more than a hunch that
the way in which the recent West differs most interestingly from
other cultures that have existed is in the utopian social aspirations
which it has developed. The German historian of ideas Hans
Blumenberg has suggested that at some point in the process of
Europe’s becoming ”modern” the Europeans shifted from think-
ing of their relation to something ahistorical (God, or the Truth,
or the order of the Universe) to thinking in terms of their relation
to their descendants. On Blumenberg’s view, their sense of what
mattered most shifted from an atemporal object to a temporal
one—the future state of humanity.
This shift was, it seems to me, partially the cause and partially
the effect of the hope that science and technology might trans-
form the conditions of human existence—transform them in such
a way that hierarchical distributions of wealth and power might
no longer be necessary for the functioning of society. This egali-
tarian hope flowed together, in the history of modern Europe,
with the romantic hope that human beings might become larger,
freer,'richer beings than they had been in past ages. Taken to-
gether, they produce the idea that human beings can, without
divine assistance, become new beings. They can do so simply by
bringing about the leisure and wealth necessary for a fully egali-
tarian society—one in which basic needs are so well satisfied that
individual differences of talent and opportunity do not arouse the
sort ofjealousy and resentment which has made previous history
a struggle between haves and have-nots.
To sum up this hunch about what the West has been best at:
the modern West has created a culture of social hope, as opposed
to a culture of endurance. By a culture of endurance, I mean one
in which there is a consensus that the conditions of human life are
and always will be frustrating and difficult, and the consequent
assumption that either a religious affiliation with a non-human

42
 Letter .2

power, or a philosophical acceptance of the eternal order of things,

is required to make life bearable. The high culture of a peaceable
society which does not have a future utopia to work for will center
around priests or stoical sages. By contrast, the high culture of a
society permeated by utopian hope will center around sugges-
tions for drastic change in the way things are done—it will be a
culture of permanent revolution.
I doubt that there is any way to show that the values of such
a culture of hope can, as you put it, ”be shown to be reliable.” For
it is a culture of experimentation, and nothing guarantees that the
experiments will succeed. Technology may cause environmental
catastrophe. It may also make possible the use of a secret police to
insure the perpetual rule of a selfish oligarchy; this is the pattern
we saw in the USSR. before Gorbachev came out of nowhere to
change everything. Ever since the initial hopes raised by the
French Revolution were dashed by the snns-culottcs’ Terror, the
unreliability and riskiness of social experimentation has been
clear.
Attempts have been made (notably by Marx and the Marxists)
to combine a culture of hope with philosophical guarantees of
reliability. These attempts consist in treating History as an object
of inquiry, analogous to God or Nature. To my mind, any such
attempt is a mistake, a misguided effort to keep something like
knowledge-as-contemplation alive in a culture which has realized
that theory is useful only insofar as it guides or changes practice.
Philosophies of history which attempt to discern underlying pat-
terns are, in effect, insisting that History is just more Nature— that
humanity is not recreating itself, but merely acting out a role
written for it by something non-human. Dewey was, I think, right
in recognizing that one could usefully tell stories about the course
of past history, but that one had to stop short at the present—that
the future is a matter of hope and luck rather than of knowledge.
Heidegger seems to me an example of a Western thinker who,
unlike Dewey, was unable to resist the temptation to claim a
knowledge of the future. His discussions of technology are fore-
casts of an endlessly spreading desert, a world in which human
happiness, and perhaps even human equality, are attained at the
cost of losing touch with Being. In his use, the term “Being”

43
 Lgfh’r 2

becomes a name for everything most worth being in touch with.

So his forecast of what will happen if we do not find some new
postmetaphysical way of Thinking is a forecast of disaster. This
forecast seems to me as bad as the Marxists’ forecast of the
inevitable triumph of the proletariat and ofa communist society—
not because either forecast is known to be inaccurate but because
nothing could be adequate evidence for either. Marx hoped for,
and Heidegger dreaded, what Mehta calls (in the passage you
cite) ”the consuming Europeanization of the Earth.” I myself have
no better scenario to write to spell out my hopes for the future
than such Europeanization. But I would not want to justify this
scenario by appeal to philosophical principles, or by any other sort
of claim to knowledge.
I quite agree with Mehta that Heidegger has helped us de-
velop an increased awareness of the historicity of understanding,
but I am less sure that he has helped us to ”an intense conscious-
ness of the intellectual and spiritual newness of the present.” This
is because what seems to me new about the recent European past
is not the increased pragmatism of high culture—what Heidegger
thinks of as its nihilism, its deification ofinstrumental reason—but
rather the increased freedom which has become possible for
previously oppressed groups (e.g., unskilled laborers, women). To
my mind, Heidegger neglects political newness for spiritual new-
ness, and sees the political as merely a pallid reflection of the
spiritual. He is unable to consider the possibility that social hope—
hope for greater equality and less hierarchy—itself has spiritual
significance. To put it another way, he tells a story about the
modern newness which is confined to the newness of
Nietzschean pragmatism in the history of philosophy. He acts as
if an understanding of Nietzsche were automatically an under-
standing of modernity, of modern Europe.
As I see the matter, the pragmatism common to Nietzsche and
to Dewey is a good thing, but only because it clears away some
outdated philosophical assumptions. These assumptions are those
left over from the days when the West had a culture of endurance
rather than one of hope—a culture in which knowledge was
assumed to be more important than imagination, finding more
important than making. Pragmatism is useful for getting such

44
 LL’Ht’I' 2

assumptions out of the path of social progress, but pragmatism is

not of the essence of the modern age, for pragmatism is merely a
philosophical doctrine, and philosophical doctrines are not basic
to historical epochs.
I am dubious about Mehta’s claim—the claim which ends the
passage from him which you cite—that Heidegger's ”new begin-
ning” is ”planetary, beyond Orient and Occident, and for the first
time truly world-historical.” Certainly Heidegger wanted to get
beyond ”merely Western” assumptions, but equally certainly all
he managed to do was to react against Western assumptions, and
to hope that the West was not humanity’s (or, in his terms, Being’s)
last word. I do not see why a highly specific and local reaction
against highly specific and local conditions should claim plane-
tary or world-historical significance. Perhaps Mehta’s view will
turn out to be justified; for all I know, the planetary civilization of
the future will find inspiration in Heidegger and view his reaction
against Nietzsche as a decisive turning-point. I certainly cannot
prove the contrary, but I should be very surprised if the area of
Heidegger’s expertise—the canonical texts of Western philosophy—
actually had the significance for humanity as a whole which
Heidegger attributed to it.
In my ”Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Compari-
sons” paper (the one I read in Hawaii) I admitted that ascetic
priests may well be indispensable to culture. It may be, as you
suggest, that no culture will ever be able to do without them. But
it seems to me that your comments on what I said in that paper
run together two functions—that of imaginatively attaining new
perspectives and that of social protest against cruelty and injus-
tice. In the West, the novelists and journalists seem to me to have
taken over the latter function, though not the former. The West
has been learning about its racism, its sexism and its imperialism
not from philosophers, but from people who give us detailed
accounts of what these social vices have done to individual hu-
man lives. As I see it, social protest is not a matter of what you call
”diagnosis regarding the state of the psyche” but rather of calling
attention to the effects of injustice on the victims. That is a distinct
function from the one I attributed to the ascetic priests—speaking
in new tongues, throwing 0th fresh metaphors, opening up new

45
 VLl'HL‘I' 2
imaginative possibilities. Dickens did not do any of the latter
things, but he did manage to make injustice and cruelty more
visible than it had been previously.
Let me conclude this letter by saying something in response
to your request for clarification of my remark that at the Hawaii
conference we both attended ”the East did not meet the West.”
Certainly East met West with considerable profit, but what I felt
did not happen was that the philosophers from the West and
those from the East found common options to discuss, options
which were, for both, what William James called ”live, immediate
and forced." I suppose what I am really getting at is that the
conference did not give me a sense ofwhat the really hard choices
confronting Eastern intellectuals of the present day are. Nor, I
suspect, did my Eastern colleagues have much of a sense of the
choices confronting their Western counterparts. I did not get the
sense I hoped to attain of what it felt like to be an intellectual in a
country whose native traditions have little to do with the Western
hopes ofa freer and more equal future generation. It seems to me
that this hope is so basic to so much of Western philosophy since
Hegel, that it is hard to get a sense of Eastern reactions to contem-
porary Western philosophical thought without having a sense of
their reactions to current attempts to implement this hope. My
hunch is that this sense might have been easier to attain if the
participants in the conference had discussed philosophy less and
politics (and perhaps novels) more.

With all good wishes,

Dick R.

46
 Letter 3

Charlottesville
1 June, 1990

Dear Dick,

In continuation of my letter of May 6, I wonder how you

would respond to the view that depicting the novelist as the key
spokesman of our time does not necessarily imply a rejection of
philosophical thinking but that it rather reflects a move which can
be described as a form of ”genre mixing,” an idea to which I will
return shortly.
Moreover, a dialogue may be a very adequate and fruitful
medium for conveying a philosophical message and, as a matter
of fact, has been an ancient practice both in India and Greece. 1 do
not see any difficulty in fantasizing that instead of an official
spokesman of philosophy who appears, so to speak, in a well
recognized uniform, now a character from a play or a novel will
ask the questions, another will forward answers and still another
will repudiate and reformulate the questions that today we de-
scribe as philosophical inquiry. I have, however, great difficulty in
imagining that human beings will ever succeed in suppressing the
source from which the torrent of questions have emerged in the
past and are still emerging. After all, the conversation that is called
philosophy, even in its very early days, has been in the form of
questions and answers. Some of the issues which in later days of
Indian thought became favorite topics for intellectual battle can be
traced back to such exchanges between teacher and pupil, hus-
band and wife, or father and son—as recorded in the Upanishads,
and other less authoritative but influential sources. A change of
format is not the end of a certain genre of discourse; it may have

47
 # Letter}

other ways and other modes of self-expression. Myths, dialogues,

debates have all been found to be suitable medium for carrying
out such a project. It is perhaps so, simply because there are many
6 s of lookin at hiloso hy.
W1)l/Vhen thereg is aPmarriaige between philosophy and drama or
novel, what often dominates the narrative is the actual input of
the ideas that guide the decisions, choices and the course of
actions of the different characters. Certainly during my graduate
days in Paris, especially while reading Sartre, I found that. some
of the characters of his plays and novels are superb ex15tent1allsts.
In other words, novels and plays in some ways served better, the
cause of Sartre’s philosophy than his official philosophical trea-
tises, such as Being and Nothingness and others, (and certainly more
effectively spread the message to many more readers).
A mixing of genres, perhaps gives the author the freedom to
cross the rigidity of the boundaries, and may be recognized as a
novel and effective medium for the philosopher of tomorrow.
As you know, Clifford Geertz has spoken eloquently about
”blurred genres” as a phenomenon which is widespread today
(”Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” in The
American Scholar 49 [1980]):

It is difficult to label either authors (What is Foucault—historian,

philosopher, political theorist? What is Thomas Kuhn—historian,
philosopher, sociologist of knowledge?) or to classify works (What
is George Steiner’s After Babel—linguistics, criticism, cultural his-
tory? What is William Gass’s On Being Blue—treatise, causerie,
apologetic?). And thus it is more than a matter of odd sports and
occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact that the innovative is,
by definition, hard to categorize. It is a phenomenon general
enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just
another
redrawing of the cultural map—the moving of a few
disputed
borders, the marking of some more picturesque
mountain lakes but
an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something
is happening
to the way we think about the way we think.

What do you think is happening? Is it

really an event of any
major significance? Since Geertz’s paper
came out, a decade has
passed. Are you convinced that the boundar
ies of
shift to a point where the global ”cultural map” disciplines will
will begin to look

48
 , Letter 3

different, more than a mere minor adaptation here and there? If

so, it is bound to have a profound impact on crosscultural studies.
It seems to me to be so since the criteria for determining the
”otherness” of the other cultures are systematically supplied by
the various disciplines which study cultures such as Geertz's own
discipline—anthropology.
Perhaps this is a question which belongs to that domain which
deals with what is called the power politics of knowledge. It is
evident to anyone that the various disciplines have a deep influ-
ence on and a complex relation with the structures of power and
value around which the society at large organizes its life. It can
also be seen the other way round, by putting it in terms of the
existing power structures that sustain and support the institutions
which cultivate these disciplines and disseminate knowledge
accordingly. Thus, self-criticism on the part of such disciplines—
which avowedly claim it to be their business to study cultures—
should be encouraged if new descriptions/ interpretations are at
all to emerge. These descriptions which are open as well as
camouflaged interpretations of ”we” and ”they” are not only
expressions of the sort of remote from life, pure and simple
theoretical sophistications but embody built-in attitudes and as-
sumptions that eventually come to play a decisive role in the
choices and decisions we make and thereby influence the course
of our actions. In a literate society, the ”common” man, even if he
has not acquired all the theoretical sophistications, has been
trained in institutions which have made sure that he is equipped
with images of the self and the other, based on a so-called objective
study, that shape his attitudes and actions (of which he may not
be always aware) in the transactions of his daily life. Today,
therefore, there is a demand for an analytical and critical scrutiny
of the various disciplines, which is prompted by the need for a
fresh self-understanding and a review of alterity. Recall Edward
W. Said's observations (”Secular Criticism,” in Critical Theory Since
1965, ed. by Adams and Searle [1986], p. 612):
The entire history of nineteenth-century European thought is filled
with such discriminations as these, made between what is fitting
for us and what is fitting for them, the former designated as inside,
in place common, belonging, in a word above, the latter, who are

49
 Letter 3_ _ V 7 7 fi 77

designated as outside, excluded, aberrant, inferior, in a word below.

From these distinctions, which were given their hegemony by the
culture, no one could be free, not even Marx—as a reading of his
articles on India and the Orient will immediately reveal... they are
to be found everywhere in such subjects and quasi-subjects as
linguistics, history, race theory, philosophy, anthropology and even
biology.

In other words, the task that is set by our critical consciousness

is not to let go the official, standard interpretative practices of
these disciplines unquestioned but to unmask their professed
neutrality. With the growth of a keen critical awareness regarding
the importance of learning ”to think globally,” it seems to me, the
demand for an authentic crosscultural study will have to be
seriously taken. It will, most likely, shake the existing frames of
disciplines for which the boundaries of cultures have been the
object of study. There is an acute need for new interpretive
strategies. This will have a direct bearing on the boundaries that
disciplines so far have demarcated in the way they have studied
cultures. Questions will arise such as, how does one define the
boundary today? In what way is it different from that of yester-
day—when the stories of ”otherness” of the other cultures were
a part of the repertoire of humanities’ travelers’ tales? If there is
no significant alteration in these notions, what then is that ”dis-
tance" that technology supposedly has ”killed”? What are the
emerging perceptions regarding ”the fusion of horizons" between
cultures (to borrow an expression of Gadamer)? Is there resistance
to change? If so, how does it express itself?
Some years ago I saw on the television, Margaret Mead sug-
gesting that chairs should be instituted for professors studying the
future since there are already many in the universities for those
studying the past. I recall it as a relevant advice in this context. A
search for a new paradigm, with the view to comprehend identity
and difference in the broad and general area demarcated for
crosscultural studies, has to be carried out in an inter-disciplinary
context. Such a study has to deal with a cluster of problems which
requires, no doubt, familiarity with the past records of our inter-
pretive discourses and of our actions but it also calls for a sense
for the future. To sense that change is inevitable even if it is not

50
 .Lr’ffvrfi
visible in any gigantic scale perhaps is more disturbing to the
thinking mind than is generally admitted. To ask the relevant
questions, let alone to answer them, requires imagination and
skill—about how to draw from the past yet be forward looking.
Recently questions have been raised about the rigidity and fluid-
ity of the boundaries of disciplines, touching upon the issues of
how freely one may move from one discipline to another covering
a range of different but not unconnected areas of inquiry. Is it
possible to guess the changing roles of disciplines in relation to
the rest of the culture? Or, can one even predict the end of some
disciplines (such as the end of philosophy, for example)? Let us
hope that it is so that the time is ripe for something to happen.
What we need, however, is a sense of direction. Where are those
cosmopolitan thinkers who know how ” to think globally” without
demolishing the local differences? We need those who can per-
ceive the encounter-situation as a possibility for greater self-en-
richment in an unexpected manner, opening up unpredictable
avenues of self-development. It of course also involves facing the
tension between the self and the other, risking even the possibility
of having to admit the oversights and blindness of one’s own
tradition.
To approach ”cross cultures” as an intellectual adventure calls
for a resolution to free ourselves (i.e. the participants) of the
indoctrinations to which we have all been subjected. Surely, all
this requires that the participants have more information. The
alien cultural tradition, one has the impression, has been in the
West very largely a subject of interest for the non-philosophers.
The mainstream Western philosophy can hardly be said to have
made much effort in that direction so far. It seems that there is a
genuine need to have conferences and workshops devoted to this
purpose. One of the questions which probably calls for attention
at the outset concerns the very concept of philosophy is it
essentially a Greek concept? ”Is there philosophy in Asia?” Does
danmm or finviksiki in the Sanskritic tradition correspond at all to
what is called philosophia in the West?
It is also essential to probe into the age-old habits of contrast-
ing the Indian and Western thought traditions, saying for example
that Indian thought, as distinct from the Western, is spiritual, that

Sl
 Letter 3

it relies more on intuition than on intellect. I need not go into these

here as I am sure that you have come across such a list of dichoto-
mies over and over again. There is, however, little doubt in my
mind that one of the major tasks that lie before the scholar
involved in crosscultural studies is to identify and eventually
unmask the stereotyped images that have vitiated intercultural
understanding. Changing the world (as they say) involves, at least
to a large extent, changing the construal of the ”otherness” of the
other, which will eventually alter the self-understanding of the
participants as well. In any case, there can be hardly any doubt
that something is bound to happen if the scholars across bounda-
ries take genuine interest in such a project and are willing to seek
novel strategies.
I myself became acutely aware of the problems of crosscultural
studies in the course of working on the theme of time—a theme
which has deservedly drawn the profound attention of the philos-
ophers in the West especially during the last one hundred years.
Along with my passionate interest in the development of the
various ideas on time in the history of Western thinking, I went
through the Sanskritic texts in search of distinct conceptual mod-
els of time that emerged in the history of Indian thought. I found
that the philosophical situation in the Indian context was at
serious variance with what I was given to believe, viz., that time
is not an issue of major importance in Indian thought, that time
is generally considered to be illusory, that time is not linear but
cyclic. The situation is, as is to be expected in a major thought
tradition, a spectacular display of a wide range of contrasting and
conflicting views. If some advocated a view of absolute time,
others questioned this very idea. Again for some, time is discrete
as opposed to continuous and so on and so forth. Being a central
theme, these different views of time were woven into the texture
of various schemes that know of a great variety of notions regard-
ing being, becoming and non-being, space and causality.
For an understanding of the ancient Indian cosmological
speculations, where one comes across the idea of repeated crea-
lion and dissolution, the theme of time comes to play an important
role. The grand cosmological model that is widespread in the
Indian conceptual world, is one where each world cycle is meas-

52.
 7 Letter 37

ured in astronomical terms (cf. my paper on ”Cosmology and

Hindu Thought,” Zygon [March 1990]).
In an intercultural context, however, this vast panorama of
Indian thought with all its variations and contrasts is often ig-
nored and clichés such as that the Indian view of time is cyclic and
other stereotyped ideas have been repeated endlessly. I will not
go into the details here as I have discussed this question, at the
risk of repeating myself, in various talks and papers as in Time,
Science and Society in China and the West, ed. Fraser, Lawrence and
Haber [Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1986]). I became acutely
aware of the pernicious implications and consequences of such
apparently simple metaphorical descriptions which set up the
thought traditions of the world almost as ”diagrammatically op-
posed.” Sometimes this is done in such a manner that to the
participants of a given culture it seems more like a caricature, since
it does not tally with their self-understanding. This has impact on
various facets of crosscultural studies, as time is a theme which is
intertwined with various aspects of the distinct history of our
cultural traditions—covering the wide domains of mythology
and religion, science and philosophy. Many perceptive culture
historians, and concerned theologians who have attempted to
classify and appraise the major views concerning time and history
(cf. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History [New York, 1972] and Paul
Tillich, The Protestant Em [Chicago, 1948]) have been led astray by
such facile generalizations.
The ”bias towards overthematization” is undeniably glaring
when one observes how the expressions of linear and cyclic time
have come to designate distinct cultural experiences of time. As I
have cited elsewhere, the observation made by an anthropologist,
P. Kay, is relevant in this context:
Time is perhaps the favorite thing anthropologists point to so as to
exaggerate the exoticness of other people, they love to say things
like ’time is this’ for us but it is like that for the folk that I studied.

I take this as a specimen of self-criticism of a discipline—

anthropology—regarding how it ascribes a sense of otherness to
the culture which is the object of its study. It is indeed not a trivial
observation. It should be questioned whether the experiences of

53
 Letter 3

irreversibility and recurrence are emphasized in any such abso-

lute and exclusive manner in any culture that such schematiza-
tions of cultural representation of time can be justified, even if one
insists—as does C. Geertz—that ”the question isn’t really whether
everybody has every thing . . . but rather the degree to which
things are elaborated and their power and force.” (Having seen
the pernicious influence of these time-metaphors, one would
wish that Geertz paid more attention to what Kay was saying.)
It is indeed amazing to note how cycles and arrows gradually
cease to be simple time-metaphors and come to get associated
with such concepts as history, progress and even salvation. It also
becomes slowly apparent how the schematizations of time-repre-
sentations of various cultures express what Fabian in his Time and
the Other described as ”denial of coevalness” to the other culture.
As one peruses the relevant literature, one sees that it is not at
all very unusual that the concept of time in one tradition is played
down as contrasted with another. Arnaldo Momigliano, in an
essay entitled ”Time in Ancient Historiography" (in Quarto Con-
tributo [Rome, 1969]) observes: ”In some cases they oppose Indo-
European to Semitic, in other cases Greek to Hebrew, in others
still Greek to Jewish-Christian or Christian alone.” I keep repeat-
ing these citations over and over again as these are all warnings
which must be paid heed to by those interested in crosscultural
conversations. Unfortunately, to set up one tradition against an-
other is nothing uncommon in schemes that are especially
worked out to aid crosscultural and interreligious dialogue. The
presuppositions of such schemes often go unnoticed and there-
fore their untenability is not detected. These cliches, evidently
block our perceptions by giving a simplistic picture of a tradition
or a culture.
As you may recall I presented some of these ideas in an
interdisciplinary symposium (1989) on the theme of Time Meta-
phors: Cycles and Arrows, which I organized with Professor H.
Kelly, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of
Virginia. This symposium was an attempt to review how cycles
and arrows as time metaphors appear in discourses in an inter-
disciplinary (such as biology, physics, cosmology, theology) con-
text. Cycles and arrows, being major metaphors, appear and

54
 Letter 3

reappear not only in our everyday discourse but take on, in the
frame of specific disciplines, technical significance. Since time is a
multidimensional issue, the early formulations of various tradi-
tions are of particular interest for the self-understanding of cul-
tures. Recall St. Augustine’s City of God where he polemicizes
against a certain Greek view of ”circular time" which is derived
from a world view in which ”during countless past ages, at very
prolonged yet definite intervals, the same Plato, the same city and
the same students had existed again and again.” Augustine by
repudiating this view of exact mechanical recurrence, not only of
cosmological processes but also of individual destinies, puts in
relief the Christian contribution to the religious interpretation of
time. It seems to me that one of the vital problems in the area of
crosscultural studies is to see how the interpretation of an ”out-
sider” relates to the historical process of interpretation by the
members of the community themselves, i.e. the ”insiders.” The
problem of understanding then is this second level of interpreta-
tion. The important question is what would be the criterion for
distinguishing an authentic interpretation by an outsider from an
inauthentic one? One could just as well also ask whether the
interpretations of the insiders are always authentic. It is evident
that the distinction between an authentic and an inauthentic
interpretation is not equivalent to the distinction between an
outsider’s and an insider’s interpretation. What would be the
pragmatist’s solution to this? If one says that no matter whether
the interpretation is the insider’s or the outsider’s, that interpre-
tation alone is to be considered to be authentic which is really
grounded in the historical consciousness of a tradition, in that case
what new can at all emerge in the second level of interpretation?
It is, however, certain that an outsider’s interpretation cannot be
deemed to be authentic if the community of the insiders find it
not to tally with their own self-understanding. I am sure that you
will have illuminating comments on these questions.
By the way, I saved your letter which you wrote to me after
reading my paper presented at the symposium on time meta-
phors, precisely because I wished that you further elaborate your
insightful comments on this issue. This seems to me to be a
suitable occasion for requesting you to do so as it has direct

55
fl m. Lt’fft'l' 3 7

relevance for our present exchange. With reference to my paper

you wrote:

I found it very illuminating indeed. . . . I thought your quote from

Momigliano very apt, and I thought your material added a lot of
force to the point he was making. My hunch is that if Kant hadn’t
called space and time "forms of sensibility" we would have heard
much less from anthropologists and cultural historians than we
have about different ”experiences of time.” The Kantian metaphors
have had an extraordinarily wide-ranging and, on the whole,
pernicious effect.

I look forward to reading your observations as time is a

question in which my interest does not seem to fade, so any fresh
insight pertaining to any aspect of this issue is welcome. The
remarks that you make in your letter, it seems to me, when
elaborated, will help to understand some interconnections be-
tween philosophy and other disciplines in the West that directly
deal with crosscultural studies. It will be interesting to hear from
you how you perceive the culture historian and the anthropolo-
gist operating, actually being influenced by the Kantian meta-
phor
It will be also fascinating to see how you employ the idea of
interpretation while describing the encounter situation in the
context of the meeting of philosophical traditions (for the moment
let us lay aside the issue whether philosophy is exclusively a Greek
concept or not) stemming from diverse cultural soils. Here, that
is, the sort of conference we are hoping for, the dialogue partners
are our contemporaries, all of whom carry a heavy burden of the
past without which they will be at a loss to locate themselves in a
philosophical space. Do you agree with the theory of interpreta-
tion of Gadamer on all points when he writes that:
Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical
consciousness involves the experience of the tension between the
text and the present. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering
up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation but consciously
bringing it out. This is why it is part of the hermeneutic approach
to project-an historical horizon that is different from the horizon of
the present. Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness
and hence distinguishes the horizon of tradition from its own. On

56
 Letter 3

the other hand, it is itself, as we are trying to show, only something

laid over a continuing tradition, and hence it immediately recom—
bines what it has distinguished in order, in the unity of the histori—
cal horizon that it thus acquires, to become again one with itself
(p. 273).

How would you read the significance when transposed in an

intercultural context?
As I was saying earlier, perhaps there are many ways of
looking at philosophy and the description of the encounter-situ-
ation will vary accordingly. I enjoyed reading when you write
(Consequences of Pragmatism, The University of Minnesota Press
[1982], pp. 91—92) that:

Philosophy started off as a confused combination of the love of

wisdom and the love of argument. . . . As philosophical thought
changed and grew. . . both wisdom and argumentation became far
more various than Plato dreamed. . . . Given the nineteenth-cen-
tury complications. . . . One cannot even seek an essence for phi-
losophy as an academic Fach (because one would first have to
choose the country in whose universities' catalogs one was to look).
The philosophers’ own scholastic little definitions of ”philosophy”
are merely polemical devices— intended to exclude from the field
of honor those whose pedigrees are unfamiliar. We can pick out the
"philosophers” in the contemporary intellectual world only by
noting who is commenting on a certain sequence of historical
figures. All that ”philosophy” as a name for a sector of culture
means is ”talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel,
Frege, Russell . . . and that lot.” Philosophy is best seen as a kind of
writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or
matter, but by tradition—a family romance involving, e.g., Father
Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida.

Will you grant that the very concept of philosophy is a generic

concept? As a genre of thinking, as a kind of writing it may retain
a well-recognizable character—and this is no transcultural ab-
straction—in the distinctly different expressions. How do we
recognize art, music or literature in other cultures? If there is no
question of making any special effort in obtaining any intercultu-
ral consensus about these which presupposes a transcultural

57
 , L933”, W ,W W W ,_ WW
"we,” why treat philosophy as an expression which is restricted
to any single culture?
There have been many myths about the East in the West and
vice versa. As an example of a well-articulated description of how
Eastern thought was assessed, consider the following lines which
Husserl wrote in 1935 in his Philosophy and the Crisis of Humanity:
Today we have a plethora of works about Indian philosophy,
Chinese philosophy, etc., in which these are placed on a plane with
Greek philosophy and are taken as merely different historical forms
under one and the same idea of culture. Naturally, common fea-
tures are not lacking. Nevertheless, one must not allow the merely
morphologically general features to hide the intentional depths so
that one becomes blind to the most essential differences of princi-
ple.

Husserl did not stop there but attempted to focus on these

differences, voicing an opinion which is not grounded on any
genuine acquaintance but rather a superficial characterization of
Eastern thought. He points out:
In both cases one may notice a world-encompassing interest that
leads on both sides—thus also in Indian, Chinese, and similar
’philosophies'—to universal knowledge of the world, everywhere
working itself out as a vocation—like life-interest, leading through
understandable motivations to vocational communities in which
the general results are propagated or develop from generation to
generation. But only in the Greels do we have a universal (’cosmo-
logical’) life-interest in the essentially new form of a purely ’theo-
retical’ attitude . . . and the corresponding, essentially new
(community) of philosophies, of scientists (mathematicians, as-
tronomers etc.). These are men who, not in isolation but with one
another and for one another, i.e. in interpersonally bound commu-
nal work, strive for and bring about flicoria and nothing but theoria.

It is indeed interesting that the intellectuals in the West usually

do not seem to have much trouble in discerning Hindu mathe-
matics as mathematics, or astronomy as astronomy, or grammar
as grammar, or even poetry as poetry, why, I wonder, it is espe-
cially difficult to recognize any crosscultural experience and ex-
pression as philosophy.
You write in your review of a book (Interpreting Across Bounda-

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 Letter 3

rics: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Gerald James Larson

and Eliot Deutsch, Princeton, 1988) devoted to various aspects of
comparative philosophy, that:

The attempt to compare ’philosophies' either means comparing

entire intellectual horizons—or it means comparing something
much more narrow and specialized. What we in the West call
’philosophy' became what it is by successively distinguishing itself,
self-consciously and insistently, from theology, natural science,
and literature The sequence of intellectual history was very differ-
ent in the various parts of Asia, so we may well wonder. . . whether
applying the term ’philosophy’ to Asian bools is more than an
empty gesture, a stilted complement that creates more awkward-
ness than collegiality. Unless we fall in with what Ninian Smart calls
”the imperial assumption that somehow there is a clearly well-
defined place in our intellectual firmament for what is called phi-
losophy," we shall have to grant Smart’s claim that ”modern West-
ern philosophy has been the product of a number of cultural
accidents, one of which is institutionalization of universities into a
departmental structure.” It is perfectly reasonable to ask, without
condescension and in honest bewilderment, the question which
forms the title of Staal’s essay ”Is There Philosophy in Asia?” For
this is not the question ”Is Asia intellectually mature?” but the
question ”Have Asians had any of the needs which have led West-
ern universities to teach Seneca, Ockham, Hume, and Husserl in
the same department?”

Perhaps what we need, more than any amount of sophisti-

cated a priori arguments designed to inquire where there is phil-
osophy and where it is nonexistent, is to find devices to make us
familiar with each others’ tradition—as you have said that like
literature philosophy is not a matter of form or matter but that of
a tradition. Any a priori argument (such as insisting on the differ-
ences in intellectual histories or others) need to be postponed until
effort is made by professional philosophers to acquaint them-
selves with the intellectual traditions to which they have been
hitherto closed, and in your case—ifI may say so—until you ”can
sketch a dramatic narrative leading up to ourselves." ”The story
of the making of the modern mind” will then be even thousand-
fold richer.
I am very much inclined to think that the more the philoso-

59
 Letter 3

phers of different parts of the world will become familiar with

each others’ traditions, it will be seen that philosophers need not
fear the vigilant guards waiting at the boundaries. In whatever
way we may think of demarcating human thinking, we need not
be put off by such geographical descriptions as German Idealism,
American Pragmatism, or Indian Vedanta as designation of terri-
tories where only a native can have a proper access and others
can contemplate only from outside. If there is an authentic urge
today for the meeting of minds across boundaries, let us by all
means seize upon this psychological factor as a saving grace.
The aim of such a conversation is not to obliterate differences,
not by any means, but on the contrary to preserve them as they
arouse in us ”a renewed sense of wonder and novelty" (as Daya
Krishna describes it).
On the theoretical level, however, there are problems to be
faced and resolved. Even if there is no difficulty in granting that
diversity is something immensely desirable, the idea of ethnocen-
trism needs to be carefully spelled out. Ethnocentrism, whether
every author actually describes the phenomenon by that term or
not, has found several prominent exponents in our days. Levi-
Strauss spoke strongly against UNESCO cosmopolitanism in his
well-known work, The Views from Afar. He pointed out the impor-
tance of not ”to confuse racism . . . with attitudes that are normal,
even legitimate . . . and unavoidable.” To advocate cosmopolitan-
ism is not to deprive a culture of its right to be understood in its
own terms and its need to resist other cultures from which it
distinguishes itself. Some have argued, against this position, by
pointing out that to support ethnocentrism may lead to abandon
such aspirations of equality, liberty and fraternity on the part of
all those cultures claiming a distinct identity and to foster the wish
that one’s cultural values alone should prevail. This latter position
has a good possibility of being interpreted as a form of cultural
imperialism in disguise.
This could be said, I would imagine, when you claim that ”the
pragmatist attempt to see the history of humanity as the history
of the gradual replacement of force by persuasion, the gradual
spread of certain virtues typical of the democratic West” . . . unless
you disclose the steps of the argument why you think that these

60
 Letter 3

are commendable for the entire world? Which are, specifically, the
virtues you have in mind? Even then, one may still find difficulties
at the theoretical level of intercultural communication. If one
follows the Deweyan idea and thinks of ”rationality not as the
application of criteria (as in a tribunal) but as the achievement of
consensus (as in a town meeting)," how does a politically con-
scious intellectual make any recommendation when the ”other"
has not been present in the meeting? One may insist that in your
frame there cannot be any sense for ”we”—according to you the
pragmatist who has ”given up the Kantian idea of emancipation”
there is no persistent "we,” in the sense of a transhistorical meta-
physical subject, in order to tell stories of progress. The only ”we”
we need is a local and a temporary one: ”we" means something
like ”us twentieth-century Western social democratic intellectu-
als.” At the level of theory what is exactly achieved? Despite the
whole set of ideas—to renounce the idea of a transhistorical
criterion ofjustice or the notion ofa human nature or even insisting
on persuasion rather than of force—the pragmatist seems to have
aroused nothing but suspicion. This is obvious from the writings
of your opponents (think ofTaylor and others). What you describe
to be your position—a form of ”mild ethnocentrism”—has been
seen by others as ”secondary narcissism,” as fascism, even as
cultural imperialism.
If these sort of objections and questions are not infrequent, it
only shows that you are widely read. If this is not a correct
understanding of the pragmatist position that you hold, a direct
response from you is needed. I know that you have answered to
some of these charges raised by your opponents (as in ”C05-
mopolitanism Without Emancipation: A Reply to Lyotard” or in
”Comments On Geertz's ’The Use of Diversity’”). It will be inter-
esting, however, if you deal with these questions here, even if you
cannot go into the detail, as these ideas have direct bearing on
crosscultural studies, which is the principal concern of our con-
versation. I would also like to hear what your vision really is
regarding the ”future cosmopolitan society,” what are the impli-
cations of the idea of the ”ever more inclusive universal histories”
for the non-Western world? After all, in your own admission the
II n
we refers to the ”we twentieth-century Western social demo-

6]
,_,, k A Letter 3 _

cratic intellectuals" and the vocabulary of this ethnic group is

supposed to be ”the best vocabulary the race has come up with
so far."
The pragmatist utopia to build a cosmopolitan world society
will be still suspected. It is just not enough to say: ”The pragmatist
drops the revolutionary rhetoric of emancipation and unmasking
(shared by Voltaire, Julien Benda, and Edward Said) in favor of a
reformist rhetoric about increased tolerance and decreased suf-
fering.” If you think that this observation and the ones from your
opponents do not do justice to the pragmatist ideas that you are
advocating, please say it (as loudly as you can).
I would really appreciate if you elaborate on the pragmatists'
understanding of human solidarity. In your essay entitled ”Post-
modernist Bourgeois Liberalism” (The Journal of Philosophy [1983]:
583—84) you have summarized the basic attitudes that debates in
contemporary social philosophy reflect. You describe

. . . [a] three-cornered debate between Kantians (like John Rawls

and Ronald Dworkin) who want to keep an ahistorical morality-
prudence distinction as a buttress for the institutions and practices
of the surviving democracies, those (like the post-Marxist philo-
sophical left in Europe, Roberto Unger, and Alasdair MacIntyre)
who want to abandon these institutions both because they presup-
pose a discredited philosophy and for other, more concrete, rea-
sons, and those (like Michael Oakshott and John Dewey) who want
to preserve the institutions while abandoning their traditional
backup.

This is an intriguing picture. It will be interesting to know

whether your ”distrust of metanarratives” and your views on
postmodernist bourgeois liberalism will undergo any change if
one places this debate in a wider context than the contemporary
West, in a crosscultural context, for example, which is the backdrop
of this exchange. On a theoretical level how does one proceed to
resolve intersocietal or intrasocietal tensions if the legitimacy of
principles—moral and/0r prudent—which govern our actions are
entirely derived from the practices of the members of a given
society. Let alone the differences between different groups or
societies, even within the so-called same group there are contro-

62
 Letter 3

versies and disputes. To what does one appeal in the absence of a

metanarrative which could, so to speak, provide with norms,
rules (such as the notion of an ahistorical human nature, or a
universal concept of rationality or something else), how does one
cope with the question of any code of human behavior—while
attempting to make a theory—and persuade anyone whose rules
of the game are otherwise? On what basis, for example, can you
recommend certain virtues of the democratic West to the entire
world? Is there not an unrecognized assumption somewhere—
because of which these pragmatic virtues are expected to benefit
all across frontiers? If virtues, i.e., moral attitudes, were ethnocen-
tric, rooted exclusively in the soil of particular cultures and tradi-
tions, how can one advocate (that is, in consistency with this
theory) spreading the same virtues beyond the boundary of a
given tradition or culture? How can one even condemn planned
holocausts, famines that are designed and other similar events
and practices (not easy to obtain a complete list of the variety and
range of suffering that human beings inflict on those whom they
call ”others,” as a token of their loyalty to their own group) which
may even be regarded as perfectly legal in a given historical
context? What is the substitute for a metanarrative? I see that I am
back again to the same point where I was after I heard your paper
at the East-West conference. Does the task of a theoretician end
simply by denouncing the essentialistic story of human affairs?
The pragmatist’s wish and ability to unweave a theory creates a
mood of suspense in the listener’s mind who awaits an yet-untold
story of philosophy, surely not its end, even if the story-teller
wishes to stop there. The story of the end (in no matter whose
version it is), so far as we have heard, is not convincing, it sounds
more like as if philosophy lived ever after, although we do not
know whether it did so happily or unhappily.
It will be interesting to hear what you think about such
readings as sketched above. Perhaps your reading regarding the
destiny of philosophy is much more complex than that. Is it
possible to bring to the surface that which has remained unsaid
about what you exactly wish to see as the destiny of philosophy?
I was wondering about that while I was enjoying your description
of the anti-theorists’ unweaving of a theory. You suggested that:

63
 Lt'fft’l' 3

We should stay on the lookout, when we survey other cultures, for

the rise of new genres— genres which arise in reaction to, and as
an alternative to, the attempt to theorize about human affairs. We
are likely to get more interesting, and more practically useful,
East-West comparisons if we supplement dialogues between our
respective theoretical traditions with dialogues between our re-
spective traditions of anti-theory. In particular, it would help us
Western philosophers get our bearings in the East if we could
identify some Eastern cultural traditions which made fun of East-
ern philosophy. The kind of fun I have in mind is not the in-house
kind which we philosophers make of one another. . . but the kind
made by people who could not follow a philosophical argument if
they tried, and have no wish to try.

It will be of course very enjoyable but I am afraid that even if

the attacks on philosophy come from the quarter of the anti-
theorists, their eventual impact will not be any more destructive
or severe than the ones that come from professional philoso-
phers—perhaps because weaving of theories is a preoccupation
difficult to abandon, perhaps we can attempt to do so only at the
risk of being inconsistent. Thus in the context of a theory of
conversation between nations, especially with reference to the
Vietnam War, when the belief-system of the American community
is questioned by the American intellectuals themselves, one may
imagine a situation where a child who is ”found wandering in the
woods, the remnant of a slaughtered nation whose temples have
been razed and whose books have been burned.” You write that
”this is indeed a consequence, but it does not follow that she may
be treated like an animal. For it is part of the tradition of our
community that the human stranger from whom all dignity has
been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity. This
Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully in-
voked by freeloading atheists like myself.” The question which
still needs to be answered, in order to satisfy our quest for a theory,
is whether this invoking of the Jewish and Christian element does
not show the inadequacy of the postmodernist bourgeois liberal-
ism to support such a course of action without a metanarrative
(which dominates the Judeo-Christian conceptual world and in
accordance with which it recommends and prohibits specific
course of action? To emphasize this as part of ”the tradition of our

64
 Letter 3

community” is only to admit that this ”tradition” cannot be ade-

quately expressed in a consistent ethnocentric telling.
I look forward to hearing from you.

With kind regards,

Anindita N. Balslev

65
 Letter 4

Santa Cruz, California

August 12, 1990

Dear Anindita,

In the continuation of your earlier letter, you raise the question

of whether novelists can be thought of as answering philosophical
questions. You speak of ”the source from which the torrent of
[philosophical?] questions have emerged.” You speak of philoso-
phy as a ”certain genre of discourse,” one which can be conducted
equally well, perhaps, within the format of the novel and the
treatise.
My own view is that philosophy is not a genre of discourse,
but simply a genealogical linkage connecting certain past figures
with certain present figures—not a thread running through the
rope, in Wittgenstein’s figure, but just a way of noting that there
is an ancestral relation of overlapping fibers. That was my point
when I said that philosophy is delimited not by form or maker but
by tradition. However, in the passage from Consequences of Prag-
matism to which you refer, I did refer to philosophy as a ”literary
genre.” That was a mistake, for the word ”genre” suggests format,
and I did not mean to do that.
So my answer to your question ”Will you grant that the very
concept of philosophy is a generic concept?” must, I think be
”No.” In the sense in which I think you intend the term ”generic
concept,” I take it, whether something is instance of that concept
can be established without reference to historical or cultural con-
text. This may be true of pictorial art or of music, in the sense that
these are distinct from written words in obvious, intercultural and
transhistorical ways. But when it comes to distinguishing among

67
 vaft’r 4

written words, I do not think that we have a way of dividing up

texts which meets your requirements.
To get an interesting classification of written texts, one needs
to answer the question: what other texts are relevant to this one?
Answering this question often does help one block out the written
word into areas. Chemical treatises cluster together, for example,
as do love stories. But the most interesting texts, usually, are the
ones which Geertz describes as blurring genre-divisions. Most of
the truly original and history-changing texts are of this sort—they
are texts which were, on their first appearance, rather unlike
anything that had previously been seen. (Think of Plato’s Dia-
logues, for example, or of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit.) The really important texts are the ones
that render our old classifications unsatisfactory and force us to
think up new ones.
I am quite willing to agree that I-Iusserl was, as I am, too
ignorant of Indian texts to know whether they are classifiable with
the help of terms like ”epistemology,” ”metaphysics,” or ”logic.”
But I should confess that I would be disappointed if all of them
were so classifiable. My worry about the effort you suggest be
made ”by professional philosophers to acquaint themselves with
the intellectual traditions to which they have been hitherto
closed” is that professional philosophers are likely to import such
classifications whether they are of any use or not. It is not that I
wish to deny that it would do professional philosophers, or
professionals of any other sort, good to increase their range of
reading. It is rather that I distrust the process by which they decide
what to read.
My hunch is that our sense of where to connect up Indian and
Western texts will change dramatically when and if people who
have read quite a few of both begin to write books which are not
clearly identifiable as belonging to any particular genre, and are
not clearly identifiable as either Western or Eastern. Consider, as
an example, the novels of Salman Rushdie. There is no good
answer to the question of whether he is an English or a Pakistani
novelist, nor to whether Shame is a contribution to political jour-
nalism or to mythology, or The Satanic Verses a contribution to
Islamic thought or to the novel of manners. Rushdie seems to me

68
 Letter-74
the sort of figure who has read a lot ofbooks coming from the two
sides of the world, and is likely to help create a culture within
which intellectuals from both sides may meet and communicate.
I do not have any idea what a Rushdie whose tastes ran more
to philosophy would be like, nor, indeed, whether there may not
have already been such a person. But I am pretty sure that until
such people come along—people who can bounce back and forth,
with verve and irony, between the two sets of texts—that we are
not going to make much progress in figuring out which books are
best suited to be brought together. I agree that we do not need
what you call ”sophisticated a priori arguments designed to in-
quire where there is philosophy and where it is non-existent.” But
I think that the only ”devices which will make us familiar with
each other’s traditions” are surprising, blurry, hard-to-classify
books. These books will be written not as aids to intercultural
understanding, but for special private purposes, by writers who
have special private needs.
Let me turn once again to the question of whether there is an
argument which would show that the virtues typical of the demo-
cra tic West are commendable for the entire world? I can’t imagine
that any argument could ever show anything of the sort, any more
than any argument could show that the West should devote itself
to the study of Khomeini, or of Paramahansa Yogananda, or of
Confucius. To have such an argument would be to have premises
which were neutral between traditions and cultures. I cannot
imagine such premises being found. The only premises common
to all cultures are too banal to be of use—they are exemplified by
the laws of logic, prohibitions against incest or against commercial
fraud, and (to give an example to which I shall recur below) an
insistence on the subordination of women to men.
I quite agree with you that consensus cannot be achieved if
”the ’other’ has not been present in the meeting.” But to get a
meeting going between people from two traditions more than
presence is required. A lot of imagination is required also. My
hunch is that the best vehicle for such imaginative flights will be
texts which are neither comparisons and contrasts between pre-
viously-delimited domains within traditions, nor comparisons
between traditions as a whole, but works of brilliant bricolage—

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,, Lem-r 4 7, is
books which insouciantly bring together bits and pieces of each
tradition in ways which do not fit under any previously formu-
lated generic concept.
I agree that one person's mild ethnocentrism is another’s
secondary narcissism or cultural imperialism. But I see no way to
avoid ethnocentrism except the blurring of ethnic—the sort of
blurring represented by works of bricolage. I am in no position to
write such works, so all I can do is cheer from the sidelines when
somebody seems to have done so. I cannot offer what you call for:
a ”direct response” to charges of cultural imperialism. For such a
response would be what my opponents would see as a confession
of guilt: an admission that I am, like almost everyone else, working
by my own parochial lights.
These lights suggest to me that the vocabulary of the ”twentieth-
century Western social democratic intellectuals” may well be the
best anybody has yet come up with. I assuredly have no argument
for this claim, and have no idea in what vocabulary such an
argument could be phrased. But I think that the intellectuals I
have in mind have had more experience than most other people
at trying to enlarge their imaginations, trying to avoid parochial-
ism, trying to see all sides—more experience, in short, of tolerance.
I may be quite wrong about this. But, until another batch of people
more experienced and skilled at tolerance comes to my attention,
I probably shall not change my mind.
This unavoidable parochialism is going to infect any answer I
could give to your request for more information about what my
”vision really is regarding the ’future cosmopolitan society’.” All
I can offer are familiar Western cliches: e.g., that such a society
would not be riven by tribal or religious or sectional warfare. It
would not be so riven, because larger units (large nations which
encompass many different races and religions, such as India and
the US, or the human species itself) would have become objects
of loyalty in the way in which tribes or races or religions had
previously been objects of loyalty. '
I regard such larger units as semi-deliberate, entirely artificial,
creations. People like Jefferson and Gandhi devoted much of their
lives to trying to create such units. Sometimes they succeeded and
sometimes they failed; in some cases, we do not yet know whether

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 Letter 4

they succeeded or failed. Philosophers have often tried to claim

that the human species is itselfa ”natural" unit, an object ofloyalty
as well as a biological classification. I doubt that philosophy is well
suited to make an object of loyalty out of the species, but I can
vaguely imagine that someday the combined efforts of politicians,
journalists, and novelists might make a single global community
out of us.
One reason why I think that philosophers may not be of much
use in creating such larger objects of loyalty is the one you give
when you say ”it is just not enough to say ’The pragmatist drops
the revolutionary rhetoric of emancipation and unmasking. . . in
favor of a reformist rhetoric of increased tolerance and decreased
suffering’." Certainly it is not enough. This level of abstraction—
talk about comparative rhetorics—is not what the situation de-
mands. But that just shows, it seems to me, that philosophy
professors are not the best people for the job. It doesn’t show that
pragmatism is not much of a philosophy, but only that pragma-
tism—like other philosophical schools—is itself a rather parochial
movement.
You go on to ask whether traditional, non-pragmatic, appeals
to principle will not be more effective if they are received as
derived from something other than ”the practices of the members
of a given society.” This question seems to me to reflect Plato’s
hope that there is something called ”human reason” which tran-
scends acculturation, and appeals to premises which everybody
would acknowledge. To indicate why I distrust this Platonic idea
as much as I do, let me turn to the topic of feminism.
Allan Bloom has suggested that Plato's description of his ideal
state in The Republic—a description which specifies that women
and men are to be given equal roles in governance cannot have
been seriously meant. He takes the inclusion of this proposal for
sexual equality as an indication that the entire scenario is meant
ironically. He is doubtless right that Plato's audience would have
been inclined to wonder whether Plato could seriously have
imagined women sharing in the rule of states. But more impor-
tant, the same wonder would have occurred to any ordinary
person in almost any culture prior to relatively recent decades.
One of the best examples of a truly intercultural universal seems

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 ,Lé’ff014, ,
to be the subordination of women; this seems to be one conviction
which emanates, if any conviction does, from what philosophers
like to call ”human reason,” rather than from any particular
historical tradition or cultural background.
Nevertheless, my notion of an egalitarian and cosmopolitan
utopia includes the realization of the feminists’ dreams. In such a
utopia, gender would be as irrelevant to status and self-image as
race. 50 when I ask myself what philosophers might do to help
bring about such a utopia, I often ask myself whether there is
anything in particular they could do for feminism.
It is not clear to me that there is. More particularly, it is not
clear to me that the rhetoric of universal human rights, which you
prefer to that of pragmatism, is of any use here. This rhetoric has
been in the air for two hundred years or so, and very few of its
exponents have thought that ”humans” in the relevant sense
included females. Contemporary feminists seem to me right in
saying that ”person” in the Western philosophical tradition has
meant ”male person.” (Before women were given the right to be
elected to the federal legislature in Canada, the relevant clause in
the constitution read ”all persons.” When feminists pointed out
that women were persons, the courts were able to say that they
had never been taken to be such, in the relevant sense, so presum-
ably they were not). In this situation, it seems to me that both
pragmatist and non-pragmatist philosophers would have been
stymied for arguments. They could appeal neither to the inten-
tions of the framers of the document nor to consensus of the
electorate, nor to the history of humanity.
What might help, it seems to me, is being able to point to
particular subcultures in which women were treated as well as
men. There are not many examples to point to, but there have
been more and more in the course of the twentieth century. If one
asks why these subcultures should be imitated, one is in the same
position as when asked why non-Western cultures should take
their lead from Western ones. No non-question-begging answer
seems available—no neutral ground on which to debate the issue.
lf one asks how these subcultures have come into existence, I think
the only answer is: by chance, by hook and crook, by certain
groups being influenced by all sorts of odd considerations. Nev-

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ertheless, if one asks what sort of intellectuals have done most to

bring such subcultures into existence, I think the answer would
be the journalists and the novelists, rather than the theorists.
To suggest, as you do, that we need meta-narratives, and
universalistic philosophical theories, as a platform to condemn,
e.g., patriarchy, suggests that such metanarratives or such theories
have some intrinsic appeal—some appeal apart from those as-
pects of some community's practice which they abstract from and
generalize. I cannot see what such an intrinsic appeal might
consist in. That is why I am a pragmatist—why I think that moral
and political progress is a matter of playing one part of a commu-
nity’s practice off against other parts, rather than of comparing
the practice as a whole with an ideal which is currently reflected
by no practices. The slow and partial progress which women have
made toward being thought of as persons by males has, it seems
to me, been achieved by playing off internal tensions within
patriarchal practice against one another, rather than by opening
the eyes of the patriarchy to truths unreflected in practice. 50 I
think that as long as we philosophers persist in thinking that our
skill is in detecting universals, rather than simply in winking at
tensions, we shall be less useful than we might otherwise be.
This is also why I think that the task of a philosophical theo-
retician at the present time may, in fact, consist largely in what
you call ”denouncing the essentialistic story of human affairs”—in
denouncing, in Deweyan tones, the idea that there are moral
universals out there to be appealed to, as opposed to social inno-
vations to be recommended. At least such denunciation would
help feminists say ”We grant that 99.99% of all the human com-
munities that have ever existed have refused to consider women
as full-fledged persons. But look at the few which have, and
consider whether you do not wish to imitate them. Forget about
what is essentially human, and recognize that humanity is what
it will make of itself, and that it just might choose to include the
other 50% of the species, the 50% who have been ignored so far.”
To sum up, I agree that ethnocentrism is a ladder which we
eventually hope to throw away. But, unless one is a full-fledged
Platonist essentialist, there is no other ladder available to use. So,
as a good pragmatist, I think that we should use it—should play

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>______ WfiiA _ A 7,, "L‘gttcr 4

off our preferred ethnic against others, rather than comparing

them all with something that is not a set of actual, or at least
concretely imagined, human practices.

With all good wishes,

Dick R.

74
 Letter 5

Charlottesville
October 14, 1990

Dear Dick,

Thank you very much for your letter, which I received while
I was in Shimla, India. I was delighted to read your analysis of the
contemporary situation pertaining to the question ”why the theme
of otherness has drawn so much attention from the academicians
today.” You agree with me about the vital contribution that is
made by the technological civilization in setting up the academic
stage—by bringing people together in a manner that was un-
thinkable by our ancestors. This in turn is provoking an intellec-
tual challenge, which is currently expressed as the theme of
cultural otherness. The subject, however, is a sensitive and a
complex one. We are becoming aware of the many intricate issues
pertaining to the dialogue of cultures. The discussions of these
issues seem still to be at an early stage. The awareness, however,
has dawned that a monologue, however erudite, will not do. It is
evident that we need to create an intellectual space precisely to
give us, what you describe as, ”a sense of the really hard choices”
that we have before us today. This need is reflected in your remark
that in the Hawaii conference you felt that neither the Eastern nor
the Western intellectuals quite got to see what are the ”really hard
choices” that are confronting their colleagues.
You have indicated that ”an important feature of Western high
culture” is ”the love of the exotic," which since the time of the
Romantics has played a decisive role in promoting the zest for
”otherness.” You also maintain that this love of the exotic is to be
appreciated more as an ”attempt to enlarge one's imagination"

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 Utter b

than that of ”getting an authentic understanding of an old tradi-

tion or a new artistic movement.” I will certainly agree with you
that self-enlargement is one of the most important outcomes of
our encounter with the other, yet I would like to insist on the need
which, it seems to me, you are somewhat underemphasizing, that
of an authentic understanding based on information. By this,
however, I do not wish to imply that the outsider has merely ”to
get something right which is out there," or that the insiders of a
given community have a set of unchanging thoughts or notions
that simply can be handed over. However, every culture has a
story of its own. An honest and genuine effort to acquaint our-
selves with the central and the sub-plots of the story of those
whom we seek to comprehend seems indispensable to me. This
is especially so if it is an encounter with an old tradition, as it is
likely to contain critiques within critiques. The story is perhaps
relatively less complex when we confront a new movement, since
its genesis can be traced back perhaps with greater ease, and its
language is likely to be not so different from our own. How can
one comprehend the concerns that the insiders’ ongoing conver-
sation reflects, unless we know how an influential text—an instru-
ment of socialization, has been interpreted and reinterpreted,
how a theme has been developed, to use your words, without
”piling up information”? How can one hope to find, as you seem
to do, ”something in that tradition . . . which one can use for
purposes of self-enlargement”?
In the case of a highly articulate culture like that of India or
the West, I do not quite see that it is possible to enlarge our
imagination without making this sort of an effort. In the context
of such exchanges one is provoked to ask whether our educational
institutions could not be more effective in providing us with more
information. The West is in this matter sometimes rather paro-
chial, it tends to ignore the discourses of other cultures (think of
the philosophy departments). This is an area where, it seems,
there is acute need for more critical thinking on the part of those
who are involved in the actual policymaking that affects the
programs of educational institutions. In your paper ”Education,
Socialization, and Individuation" (1989) you have strongly sup-
ported the idea of ”piling up information” and have expressed, as

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your reply to your critics show, that you do not think that one ”can
encourage imagination without a preparation in memorized in-
formation, or encourage individual talent without imparting a
shared tradition.” It seems to me that this holds true also of such
situations when one wishes to educate oneself about others.
Moreover, a superficial attraction for the exotic (often miscon-
strued as love) may be even ”a dangerous thing" (just like ”a little
learning”). There are many devastating examples of how such
love of the exotic, without any attempt at an ”authentic under-
standing," have lead to disasters. The sort of creative appropria-
tion that you have in mind rarely happens without labor.
Although I agree with you that a successful encounter enables one
"to speak differently, to use different terms in characterizing
oneself,” I would like to emphasize that it leads one to do so also
about the other. It is a game in which the players learn to question
the stereotypes and clichés that vitiate our descriptions—not only
about the self but about the other as well.
Imaginary difference, it seems to me, has often been the
breeding ground of hostility whereas a real informed encounter
with the other is enriching—an experience which lays bare before
us alternative perspectives to things. By authentic understanding,
I simply meant this sort of an involvement which discloses to us
what ”really the hard choices” are and that I believe is not to be
taken as a task which can be left to the faculty of imagination
alone. It is a game (and as is the rule in all games, the players need
to be prepared even when they know that the outcome is unpre-
dictable) in which there are unexpected moments when percep-
tions of new horizons impress upon one in such a manner that
one cannot but leave behind the customary practices of speaking
about "otherness” and feel ”forced to speak differently.” Perhaps
there is no impasse between knowledge and imagination, be-
tween finding and making— could it be that it is only in the
interest of theory-making that we are inclined to say so? The
contending theories of truth block our way, constrain our lan-
guage, persuade us to deny at all cost the illuminating insights
contained in a rival theory.
Cosmopolitanism is perhaps an awareness which lets thrive
the ethnic differences for the benefit of an interdependent global

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 Lcl‘ lt’l' 5

community, an awareness that such a society is not what we can

hope tofind but which we together have to make and that it is an
enterprise which requires a genuine effort to know each other
a process which requires, as you have said, ”a lot of imagination."
Sometimes I wonder whether something important could be
achieved if philosophers join forces with the politicians the nov-
elists and the journalists, whom you consider (rightly, I think), to
be effective agents for trying ”to make an object of loyalty out of
the species.” You have expressed your doubts about the useful-
ness of the role of philosophers in this game. I, however, am
inclined to believe that they can make a valuable contribution to
this endeavor in bringing about a change, in persuading us to
abandon, for example, the customary habits of speaking about
gender, race, nationalities—about all who have been marginal-
ized, who have never occupied the central space in the dominant
discourse. If this could be achieved through the combined efforts
of all concerned, the consequences will be radical. The ”global
interdependent society”—a phrase which the twentieth-century
philosophers incessantly use—is a state of affair of utterly unequal
opportunities. Whatever may be the way to social progress, one of
the initial tasks lies in radically changing the modes ofdescriptions,
especially while depicting the ”otherness” of those whom we
today, at last, publicly acknowledge as ”oppressed,” such as
women everywhere, the blacks in US. or the large masses of
humankind who inhabit those parts of the globe which is euphem-
istically called ”the third world.” To declare the ineffectivity of
philosophers may be thought to be, and some have openly said so,
a complicity with the status quo. Perhaps the involvement and
active support of the pragmatists will be of help in making mani-
fest the social constraints which dampen the political fervor that
is needed to put egalitarian ideas into action, in pointing out
which descriptions of the self and the other are no more useful
for the day to day business of humankind. I felt encouraged to
read that philosophical problems are ”disguised forms of practical
problems” and that your slogan is ”if it doesn’t make a difference
to our practices, it makes no difference at all.” If the pragmatists
know that ”we face a range of choices,” it is incumbent upon them
to show what these choices are in the context of a dialogue of

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cultures as well. This is precisely why I cannot accept that philoso-

phers are not important agents in our plural world.
Philosophical doctrines have been seen, not for nothing, as
vestiges of ”discourses of power”— Nietzsche was seen as the
philosopher of German Nazism, Dewey was perceived as the
philosopher of American imperialism and the pragmatists are
sometimes seen, for example by the American cultural left, as
socially irresponsible. Regardless of whether these readings are
correct or not, the point to note is that philosophers matter; their
ideas are of consequence. The more of them will dare to cross the
boundaries, the better for the intellectual life of the future genera-
tion. The least I hope is that we will hear a new set of questions
from those who have encountered others and have not merely
tried to leave it to their imagination what they are like. Perhaps
our conversations about such notions as ”common good,” ”better
world,” and ”global village” would make more sense when we
will know adequately what others’ narratives are, when we will
pile up some more information about how others live, how they
go about doing what is called ”thinking.”
I am indeed very pleased to know what you thought was
missing in the Hawaii conference as that gives me the clue to not
only what you were seeking but also what you think needs to be
achieved, viz., how do ”philosophers from the West and those
from the East” gradually find ”common options to discuss, op-
tions . . . what William James called ’live, immediate and forced’."
Evidently, I do not dream of seeing such a task being accom-
plished in one or several conferences, yet looking forward to our
next conference to be held in India, I rejoice thinking that it is at
least a step forward in this direction. Any imaginative effort to
make the academicians conscious (especially because they are
involved in activities that are designed to influence the young
minds) of the demand of social engagement, of the need to take
into consideration the intellectual life of the interdependent global
community is to be welcomed. This seems to be sometimes con-
spicuously absent as recent discussions on various issues related
to the general theme of cultural otherness have made us aware.
It is amazing to take note of the lack of balance in the intellectual
exchange in the scholarly life of the global community. Perhaps

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the following comment of Alisdaire McIntyre is of interest in this

connection (from his review of Beyond Marxism by Vrajendra Raj
Mehta [New Delhi, '1978], in Political Theory 2/4 [November 1983]:
623):
The Indian political theorist has a harder task than his Western
counterpart. He first of all has to be a good deal more learned, for
he is required to know the history of Western political thought as
well as the history of Asian thought. . . . He has to possess an array
of linguistic skills that are uncharacteristic nowadays of Western
political theories.
Second, he has to sustain a relationship with his Western col-
leagues in which he takes their concerns with a seriousness that
they rarely, unless they are among the very few Western specialists
in Indian politics, reciprocate. Thus, a genuine dialogue is for the
most part lacking. It is we in the West who are impoverished by our
failure to sustain our part in this dialogue.

It will be interesting to hear your comments.

The philosophical stage always had and will have different
kinds of people; a perusal of history of ideas, whether in India or
in the West bears witness to that. To deny difference is a move
which is decidedly antiphilosophy. There are fascinating records
of competing paradigms for understanding the human situation
even in pre-Buddhist India. The scene in the West is equally
complex. I suppose that there are bound to be different readings
about what the philosophical enterprise really is about. The es-
sentialists, the pragmatists as well as those who are seen as both
antiessentialist and antipragmatist (cf. M. Okrent’s Heidegger’s
Pragmatism [Cornell University Press, 1988]) are all philosophers
who will have different stories to tell about the complex relation
between knowledge and power. I come to this question perhaps
a little abruptly, and that is because, I think, this is not by any
means unrelated to the question what role philosophers can play
in ”making an object of loyalty out of the species.” I will appreciate
if you would please elaborate what you see entailed in the idea
that ”knowledge is power” and what is gained when this is
replaced by ”power is all that there is to knowledge.” This query
is also not unrelated to the demand that a sustained critique of the
role of the university and by implication of the role of knowledge

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in society is essential. In what ways are universities institutions of

emancipation or domination of human beings?
I agree with you that there are not quite that many adequate
books which can lend valuable insights into relevant issues of
intercultural dimension. You have observed that such books,
which ”are not clearly identifiable as either Western or Eastern”
are specially suited to stimulate and promote such awareness and
have also indicated that only those who have read ”a lot of books
coming from the two sides of the world” are ”likely to help create
a culture within which intellectuals from both sides may meet and
communicate.” I am very pleased with this description, but I wish
you would analyze further an example of such a book and illumi-
nate us about the configuration of emotional, intellectual compo-
nents that make the work appear that way. The fact that it is
difficult to see whether a work is ”Western” or ”Eastern,” I wonder
how you accommodate that in your ethnocentric frame, and what
it implies for what has happened to the sense of ethnic identity of
the author. If you grant that boundaries can be crossed, how far
are we—in theory—from some form of universalism?
Is there any hope that such works will be written oftener if our
educational systems made works of other traditions more easily
accessible to us instead of leaving the matter entirely to the
personal idiosyncracy and private need of an individual deter-
mined to leave the beaten track? After all, if books of a certain kind
are created all the time and others, desirable as they may be, are
admittedly rare, there is a story which is pressing for attention. I
cannot guess it but I have a hunch that somehow it is because our
educational institutions, very largely, are preoccupied with ”na-
tional narratives” and projecting a story of ”otherness" which is
not fostering the sense of ”global interdependent society” in any
honest sense. To say this is not to imply what ultimate purpose
educational institutions should serve—I agree with you whole-
heartedly that it is not possible to give a criterion of growth even
when we acknowledge that growth is the ideal of education, and
that ”Hope—the ability to believe that the future will be unspeci-
fiably different from, and unspecifiably freer than, the past—is
the condition of growth.” However, I cannot quite see how sociali-
zation, which is admittedly one of the goals of our education, stop

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at the threshold of just one nation or a tradition and occasionally

pay lip—service to the so-called ”global community.” The theme of
"cultural otherness" needs to be given more attention, if the next
generation is to be ”socialized in a somewhat different way” than
we ourselves were socialized.
Speaking about growth brings me to another important aspect
of this complex and difficult question. You seem to be enthusiastic
about the Western model of growth and think that it has created
"a culture of social hope.” You dream of a future ”egalitarian
society—one in which basic needs are so well satisfied that indi-
vidual differences of talent and opportunity do not arouse the sort
of jealousy and resentment which made previous history a strug-
gle between haves and have-nots.”
In your letter to me, you have indicated that for you ”the hope
for the future” lies in the ”Europeanization” of the globe. I wish
to understand the idea clearly: What is in it that ”Marx hoped for
and Heidegger dreaded”? What is it that you see in this that
although you cannot ”justify this scenario by appeal to philo-
sophical principles or to any other claim to knowledge” yet you
feel that you ”have no better scenario to write"?
Many in the ”third world” look forward to social change yet
do not wish it to be in the direction of Westernization. Despite
their profound admiration for much of what the West has
achieved, they sense the built-in pitfalls of the system. They see
colonialism (which can be also of various kinds), war and exploi-
tation of the oppressed groups—all as parts of it. Think of Gandhi,
or Aurobindo—who in many ways are otherwise different kind
of people—who saw the inevitable and the inescapable crisis in
the Western model of growth. Is this distrust unfounded?
Although I do not think that his metaphors of ”sick and
deceived” are the most effective ones to portray the relation
between the so-called developed and the developing nations, yet
l think that serious attention should be paid when some ob-
servers, like Roger Garaudy (in his foreword to Ashis Nandy’s
book cited below), claim that much of the poverty of the third
world is ”created by the growth of the West . . . [that] the growth
of some countries and the underdevelopment of others are the
two faces of the same planetary maldevelopment. . . .[that] there

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cannot be a new world economic order without a new world

cultural order.” There are many critics of this Western model of
growth, and of its implications for the interrelationship between
power and prosperity. This, however, does not mean that there is
an ideal model elsewhere. Even if we admit that the global
socio-economic situation is an exceedingly complex affair, never-
theless it is evident that a philosophy of culture cannot be com-
mended which supports such a ”successful" system of production
whose failures are charted at length both by keenly observant
outsiders and insiders. There is a need for a conversation between
philosophers and those who deal with the intricacies of political
economy. I am well aware how difficult the task is, yet a search
for alternatives must proceed and in that agenda the non-Western
utopias cannot be simply ignored.
Some scholars are as a matter of fact striving to express an
alternative perspective to the dominant visions of the future and
even to work out an alternative narrative of past history. I am
thinking of the group of intellectuals who contribute to the Sub-
nltern Studies (edited by Ranajit Cuba and Gavatri Spivak Chak-
ravorty [Delhi 8: New York: Oxford University Press, 1982—1989]).
I am also reminded of, in this connection, works which are sort
of combined political-psychological analysis of various forms of
man-made suffering, such as attempted by Ashis Nandy. In his
book entitled deitions, Tyranny, and Utopias (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), while evaluating ”utopias,” he writes:

No dialogue is possible with a utopia claiming a monopoly on

compassion and social realism, or presuming itself to be holding
the final key to social ethics and experience. Such a vision not
merely devalues all heretics and outsiders as morally and cogni-
tively inferior, it defines them as throwbacks to an earlier stage of
culture and history, fit to be judged exclusively by the norms of
the vision. . . . Implicitly some visions see other visions not merely
as competing ideologies but as conspiracies against human reason
and values. A dialogue with such hegemonic, parochial visions
may become an invitation to ethnic suicide. The proselytizing
visions especially, even when they are secular, have a tendency to
devour other utopias, paradoxically by rejecting the otherness of
the latter and by ’accepting’ them as earlier stages of the evolution
of the self.

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7» ‘ Lt’ffLr’rl'VSi fl WWW ,, fl _

In brief, the intellectual struggle to redefine, redescribe human

relationships in this narrative of progress and power-sharing
must continue. I would like to believe that the voice of the
intellectuals who have dared to cross the b0undaries, whose
concern for the well-being of the interdependent global commu-
nity is authentic (a word, the simple meaning of which is, as
indicated in the Oxford Dictionary, not false, not counterfeit) will
be heard. But that is precisely what is missing—we are missing a
genuinely involved conversation among intellectuals of the East
and the West about an important area of beliefs and concerns that
touch upon the wide range of possibilities of our lives, which
again is an interplay of choice and circumstance. We are not
actively participating but are blindly following a path which is
unable to cope with political complacency about issues that matter
to us all but which are simply marginalized in the name of
something or other. Feminism is also such a theme.
Please allow me to make a digression. I cannot recall any more
which French newspaper it was that in the late 19605 used to
advertise its own political analysis to its potential readers by
saying: Si vous nc 1c suivcz conscicmment, vous 1c suivez nveuglemcnt.
As I used to see this ad almost every evening on my way back
home from the Sorbonne, I often wondered which is the largest
groups of people who are in a sense politically blind-folded in a
manner so that they will follow a course, laid out by nature and
culture, with the least resistance? I do not need to tell you the
answer that flashed in my mind. Two decades have passed since
then. While I regret that gender is still a relevant factor in every
step of our struggle for survival, I acknowledge that something
has been achieved regarding the situation of women, the most
important event being that the silence is broken. There is, as it is
evident, still a long and difficult way in front of us— from thought
to speech to action, from the private to the public realm of our
existence.
I appreciate your concern when you say that you often ask
yourself ”whether there is anything in particular that [philoso-
phers] might do for feminism?” However, it seems to me that you
are not asking it as adamantly as is needed. This perhaps holds
true of most of them who are otherwise concerned. It is just not

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enough to come up with, as you do, ”It is not clear to me that there
is”—this is not an acceptable answer.
We have to be able to say that we cannot ”take no for an
answer,” like Gandhi did facing the mighty oppressors. In fact, I
wish that we could imitate him and acquire the ability to put the
oppressor to shame, even in his own eyes, to make the oppressed
aware of her strength and proceed with the Himalayan stubborn-
ness to achieve what we have set ourselves to do. The opposition
to a state of affair where ”gender will be . . . irrelevant to status
and self-image” is perhaps more formidable than what Gandhi
was facing. In his struggle, however, he recognized at least some
vital aspects of the feminist aspiration. I recall in this connection
his message sent to the All India Women’s Conference in 1936
where he said that ”When woman, whom we call nbnln, becomes
sabnln, all those who are helpless will become powerful” (bnla
means strength, the prefixes a and 517 carry respectively the senses
”without” and ”with”).
It seems to me that despite all the harm that the dominant
male discourse has done to the image and self-image of women,
I do not think that anything will be gained by turning the issue
into a battle between the sexes. I think that the war that needs to
be waged is against a system, a system in which if women are the
victims, men also pay a heavy price; a system that was impossible
to fight in those days when technological civilization did not open
up the possibilities of colossal changes that are present today:
improved transportation, communication, and most important—
in a woman's life—improved means for intervening in nature’s
design for reproduction.
Nothing much will be gained simply by replacing the rhetoric
of ”human rights” by that of pragmatism—it seems to me that you
are getting too fond of labels. If idioms of modern theories of
interpretation are all that were necessary (I am not saying that it
is of no help—as a matter of fact I am sensitive to the misleading
use of certain idioms and metaphors, specifically when they are
loaded with implications of which we are not fully aware. May I
remind you, in this connection that I am very curious to hear your
comments on how the Kantian metaphor has influenced Western
culture theorists—a remark that you made in a letter to me in the

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context of discussion about cyclic and linear time) to bring about

the desired state of affair (a goal about which we are in perfect
agreement) why do you sound so pessimistic even at the thought
of bringing about the feminist utopia? The point is to detect why
the society is not moving faster to implement the changes that are
needed and about which there is today a general consensus (is
there?). It is immaterial to me whether it is a reiteration of human
rights or that of the pragmatic idioms that will persuade the
society to perceive a woman as a person—if any of these sepa-
rately or combined or even some new innovations can make a
headway in doing the job—I will say ”Bravo.” If you are disillu-
sioned with the idioms of human rights in getting the society to
see the woman as fully ”human,” show us how the pragmatist can
be truly effective in bringing about his egalitarian dream come
true, at least in the academic world where he is heard. How can
a ”good pragmatist”——as you say you are—allow himself to re-
main ineffective in the face of the most important task of our time
and simply give up by saying that ”it does not seem” that there is
much that philosophers can do to help bring about the feminist
utopia! I hope that you will be able to get your pen to flow (they
say that the pen is mightier than the sword), reminding all those
who specially need to be reminded that you do not ”take no for
an answer.”
There are narratives of domination and exploitation in every
society, whether in the past or now, whether in the East or in the
West. This web of human relationships gives rise to institutions,
which in turn legitimizes, sanctions such practices that are current
in a given society. The job of the insider critics is precisely to point
out where the system is failing and what possibilities the future
holds for us. The East is no exception to that. ”Hopes of a freer and
more equal future generation” is perhaps not only Western, as you
seem to think. Obviously we need to spell out more clearly what
are the shared visions, the shared commitments of the East and
the West today. The network of exchanges will surely decide how
the question of global unity will be treated, how we will handle
the threat and the hope created by the technological civilization.
The shrewder we will become in the management of conflicts, the
more we will learn how to use nonviolent tactics in all forms of

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negotiations, whether we will acknowledge persuasion rather

than force in the name of an eternal order or god or on simple
pragmatic grounds matters little. I admit that each one of these
options has the power of persuasion—not every idiom works on
everyone, even when what each one is striving to achieve is not
pronouncedly different from the other.
At the end of your second letter to me, you write that ”Ethno-
centrism is a ladder which we eventually hope to throw away." If
we can hope to do away with it, is ethnocentrism then a descrip-
tion of a provisional state of human inter-relationship or is it an
idiom one clings to for want of a more adequate one? May I
request you again to elaborate on your view of ”mild ethnocen-
trism”—an idea which some have interpreted as a form of cultural
imperialism (obviously a highly exaggerated remark which is
evident from what you write at the end of your second letter; but
your answer to this serious objection in your previous letter was
too brief).
The relationship between East and West has had several phases—
we have heard of the dichotomies, we have heard of the need of
a synthesis. Some have wondered whether a ”fusion of horizons”
will take place, some claim it to be an accomplished fact. In any
case the need for a fresh self-understanding and a review of
alterity are still awaiting subtler and more powerful formulations.
The success of technological civilization has increased the urge
and the possibility for meeting of minds across boundaries than
ever before. The Indian soil, where the next meeting of Philoso-
phy East-West is scheduled to take place under the auspices of the
Indian Council of Philosophical Research, is traditionally consid-
ered fertile for questioning the assumption that ”never the twain
shall meet.” Welcome to India.
With best wishes,

Sincerely,
Anindita N. Balslev

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Charlotesville
November 28, 1990

Dear Anindita,

Thanks for your letter of October 14. You raise a great many
issues, and I shall try to take up under separate headings.
I. East-West Asymmetry: I quite agree with Maclntyre, in the
passage you quote, that Eastern writers and thinkers have done
much more work than Western ones to find out what goes on the
other side of the world. I also agree with him that ”It is we in the
West who are impoverished by our failure to sustain our part in
this dialogue.” So I agree with those who urge that we in the West
should try to make higher (and perhaps secondary) education
more multicultural. I agree that imagination without information
is empty, and that we in the West have not exerted ourselves
enough to get relevant information.
On the other hand, there are practical questions for the West
which need to be thought about, and which I haven’t seen any
good answers to. Suppose you are designing a multicultural
curriculum for Western students (ages 18—20, say) a curriculum in
which the Plato-the Christian Scriptures-Shakespeare-Newton-
Goethe-Marx-Darwin canon is to be supplemented in such a way
as to make a global community more attainable. The two principal
questions you face, I think, are: How do you get the additions to
the canon to seem more than pointless hurdles to be leaped? How
much territory do you try to take in?
On the first question: I take it that lots of students in India and
Africa around 1900 were made to pass examinations on Hamlet
and Plato's Republic without any clear sense of why they were

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reading these books, what they were supposed to do with them,

or why they were supposed to be important. All they knew was
that if they didn't pass the exams, they wouldn't get good posi-
tions. It you simply stick some Upanishads and some Analects into
contemporary Western curricula, the same problem will arise.
These texts will be seen in the way in which the Analects were
seen by most candidates for the Chinese imperial civil service, or
Greek prosody by most candidates for the nineteenth-century
British Foreign Service. The only way in which these texts might
come to mean something to the students would be if they were
taught by people who have some sense of the social institutions
within which these texts were composed, of the traditions of
interpretation to which they have given rise, and the uses to
which they have been put—the sort of sense which some British
teachers in India and Africa had in regard to Shakespeare and
Plato.
The only way around this impasse for the foreseeable future,
as far as I can see, is for the West to import large numbers of people
from other cultures to teach the texts of those cultures by filling
in the backgrounds of those texts. I should certainly like to see this
happen, but I can foresee a lot of problems. One is brain drain;
one doesn’t want the best minds of the non-West going off to
spend their lives teaching in other countries. It is not clear that the
non-West has, as yet, enough intellectuals to engage in a large-scale
mission civilizntrice. Another, and perhaps greater, problem is the
one I posed above: Which cultures, and how many cultures?
This is more of a problem for the West than it has been for the
East, because the Christian-scientitic-technological West of the
nineteenth century—the great period of imperialism and thus of
indoctrination of non-Westerners with Western ideas—was com-
paratively homogeneous and monolithic when compared with
the diversity of alternatives to it. When the contemporary West
looks outside itself, it sees an Islamic tradition, two great Indian
traditions (Hinduism and Buddhism), a Chinese tradition, and a
Japanese tradition, each of which has at least as much coherence,
and requires as much study to grasp, as does the West. (This is to
ignore entirely, for the sake of simplicity, native African traditions
or native American traditions.) I find it hard to imagine that any

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single person is going to assimilate the information necessary to

grasp imaginatively how the West has managed to patch up a
synthesis between the Epistles of Paul and the Darwinian account
of the descent of man, why Islam thinks the Koran so beautiful,
why Hindus think the caste system something more than an
outdated moral abomination, how a Buddhist who is also a social
democrat can reconcile the struggle for social reform with a belief
in the desirability of attaining Nirvana, why the Chinese still find
it profitable to go on and on about Confucius, and why the
Japanese find Western individualism so peculiarly repellent.
These are all things I should like to understand myself. But I
despair of doing so—not just because I am now almost sixty, but
because I have never met anybody who even claimed to under-
stand all six of these things. So I suspect that the best we can hope
for, in a multicultural curriculum for the West, is to tell students
to learn something about one, or at the most two, non-Western
cultures, while blithely ignoring the others. This awkward result
seems to me obscured by loose talk, fairly common in the West
these days, about ”non-Western ideas”—as if there were one great
big source of ideas called the non-West.
How did this asymmetry come to be? That is, how did the West
come to be a more or less compulsory subject for people in the
East, but not vice versa? The simple, and largely correct, answer
is: Because the West was where the money and the power were
coming from. This suggests that until the money and the power
begin to flow the other way we are going to have a hard time
persuading Western youth to look beyond the West—a situation
which may be partially remedied by Japan becoming the primary
source of preferment for ambitious yOung Americans, and the
Arab world becoming the primary source for ambitious young
Europeans.
But there is a further, more complicated, answer to the ques-
tion about the source of the present asymmetry. This is that the
West itself provides most of the promising tools for undoing what
the West has been doing to the non-West. If you were, during the
first sixty years of this century, an Arab or an African or an Indian
impatient to get out from under the colonialist yoke, what you
used were (except in the case of Gandhi and his movement)

9'l
 Lt'llt'r 6

Western guns, Western political and socio-economic categories,

Western ideas for social reform, Western means of communication
(printing presses or telephones) and so on. This was because the
devices and categories inherited from your previous traditions
just weren't of much use in anti-colonialist struggles. (Whether
the case of Gandhi forms the exception that disproves the rule, I
just don't know. I doubt it, but here I have to confess a lot of
ignorance.)
My hunch is that more Western science and technology is
about the only thing that can cope with the results of prior
Western science and technology. For example: only condoms and
pills (made ever cheaper by technological ingenuity) can cope
with the effects of Western medicine on the death rate in various
places; only Western bureaucratic rationality can cope with the
famines caused by the colonialists’ elimination of earlier agricul-
tural methods; only institutions of the sort Foucault condemned
as ”panoptic” can prevent the exploitation of the peasants by the
landowners. If this hunch is right, then the asymmetry which
Maclntyre notes is bound to persist, unless and until some non-
Western nation or community can make a go of a general abjura-
tion of Western science and technology.
This brings me to the point you make about Gandhi, Auro-
bindo, and others having ”seen the inevitable and inescapable
crisis in the Western model of growth.” I’m inclined to ask: What’s
so Western about it? All big powerful empires—East and West—
have gone in for economic growth and political expansion, and
most have eventually fallen of their own weight when they ran
out of steam. If one views the former colonial powers as still
constituting an economic empire, then it is quite likely, I agree,
that this empire too will fall—if not because it runs out of sources
of energy and raw materials, then because of environmental
catastrophe, or because of bloody revolution caused by the im-
miseration of the oppressed (in the form, say, of an Iraqi or
Argentine nuclear attack on Europe and America). But that just
brings us back to the question: are there cultural resources in the
non-West that can help stave off the catastrophes westernization
is likely to bring about? Maybe there are, but I don’t know where,
and I haven’t seen any very helpful suggestions about where we

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might locate them. Maybe it is true that, as Susan Sontag, once

said, ”The white race is the cancer of the planet.” But the analogy
suggests that to fend off, defeat or reverse the spread of this cancer,
something different is needed from the traditional ways of living
which the non-cancerous cells were pursuing before being at-
tacked.
This makes me suspicious of Roger Garaudy’s claim (which
you quote) that ”There cannot be a new world economic order
without a new world cultural order.” I could see the point ifit were
reversed: if one said that a new cultural order presupposed a new
economic order—one in which all the money and power weren't
concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, for example. But I
have no idea what sort of new ’cultural order’ would be the basis
for a redistribution of money and power. The West’s best guess
about what such an order might be is something like ”a universal
and sincere acceptance of the ideals common to the French Revo-
lution and the early Christians.” I doubt that this is the sort of thing
Garaudy has in mind. But unless the non-West can lay sketch of
a different new cultural order, I doubt that the West will give up
its belief that only the as-yet-unrealized ideals of the West stand
between the global community and its destruction at the hands
of the West. As with technology, so with Western ideals—they
themselves may be the best medicine for the ills they cause. Or
they may not be. But it is not a reason for doubting their efficacy
that they came from the same part of the world as the evils they
hope to defeat.
II. The Efficacy of Philosophy: Let me now switch topics to the
issue about which, I suspect, our disagreement is most intractable.
When I say that it is not clear to me that there is much that
philosophy can do for feminism, you say that this ”is not an
acceptable answer.” It is as if we had utterly different pictures of
what sort of thing philosophy is. I regard it as one of the more
peripheral of the academic disciplines—one which once had a
considerable importance, but has been declining in efficacy and
status in recent centuries thanks to the rise of other disciplines.
You, I gather, regard it as the repository of an awesome moral
responsibility. I am not sure how to get out of this impasse.
You say at one point that ”philosophical doctrines have been

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seen, not for nothing, as vestiges of ’discourses of power’.” That

seems to me merely to say that philosophers, like religious proph-
ets, scientists, novelists, and everybody else, have often been
made use of by people who had power and wanted more power.
Sure, what else would one expect? I would be bothered by this
only if I thought there was some kind of discourse that was not a
”discourse of power.” I see all discourse as ways of communicating
beliefs and desires, and all human beliefs (artistic as much as
scientific beliefs, philosophical as much as theological beliefs,
Buddhist as much as Nietzschean beliefs) as tools for fulfilling
human desires. What I mean by saying ”power is all there is to
knowledge” (a question you raise elsewhere) is just that knowl-
edge is justified true belief, and that the true belief is the one
(among the available alternatives) which gets you what you want.
In the neutral and vegetarian sense in which I am using ”power,”
everybody always wants power and always will, for power is just
the ability to gratify your desires (for food, sex, Nirvana, domina-
tion, humility, or whatever).
From the fact that all knowledge is an instrument of power it
does not follow that, as you claim, ”philosophers matter; their
ideas are of consequence.” Nor does this follow from the fact that
Mussolini used Nietzsche,]efferson used Locke, Stalin used Marx,
or Roosevelt used Dewey. Sure, philosophers have often mat-
tered, but then so have astrologers and shamans. The question is
how much they matter—of what consequence their ideas are—for
the issue at hand: how to establish a global community.
You say that ”to declare the ineffectivity of philosophers may
be thought to be, and some have openly said so, a complicity with
the status quo.” That charge would be sensible if it were the case
that status quos only got changed by philosophers coming up
with some effective ideas. But nobody really believes that, do
they? Why might there not be a bad status quo which philosophy
could not help with but which some other discipline could (e.g.,
medicine, economics, engineering, architecture)? What is so spe-
cial about philosophy, why is it that when an engineer or a
mathematician says “sorry, but at the moment I have nothing on
hand useful for your purposes” he or she is not betraying civili-
zation, but when a philosopher says it he or she is?

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There is of course a broad, etymological sense of ”philosophy”

in which it means ”the love, or pursuit, of wisdom.” Used in that
broad sense, I suppose, to say that philosophy can’t help is to say
that thought, reflection, deliberation, can’t help. That would,
indeed, be a bad thing to say. But who uses ”philosophy” in this
sense these days? Who thinks that you and 1, people who special-
ized in the study of philosophy in our youth, are more engaged
in, or more likely to succeed in, the pursuit of wisdom than our
contemporaries who specialized in medicine, law, politics, or the
arts? Who thinks that we philosophy professors are better at
thinking, deliberating, and reflecting than the rest of the educated
public?
You say that ”If the pragmatists know that ’we face a range of
choices,’ it is incumbent upon them to show what these choices
are in the context of a dialogue of cultures as well.” Why? It isn’t
just pragmatists who know we face a range of choices. Everybody
knows that. Everybody hopes that cultures other than their own
will help with choices which seem beyond the resources of their
own culture. But why think that pragmatist philosophers have
some special responsibility here? Qua pragmatists, they are merely
making the negative point that we needn’t bother with Platonic
and Cartesian questions about foundations for knowledge, or
Kantian questions about unconditional moral obligations, or vari-
ous other bad questions (that is, questions the answers to which
didn’t make any difference to practice) which are familiar from
the philosophical tradition. This rubbish-removing, or ground-
clearing, job is all that pragmatism is, as far as I can see, good for.
It gets some of the debris of the Western philosophical tradition
out of the way. Perhaps, for all I know, it might be useful in getting
some of the debris of some non-Western traditions out of the way.
But when it is asked to do something for the organization of a
global community other than this rubbish-removing task, I doubt
that it has much to offer.
111. Feminism and Philosophy: Perhaps this is the point to move
on to something you say later in your letter: ”It is immaterial to
me whether it is a reiteration of human rights or that of the
pragmatic idioms that will persuade the society to perceive a
woman as a person. lfany of these separately or combined or even

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some new innovations can make headway in doing the job, I shall
say ’Bravo'." Me too. But that's just the sort of reason I have for
not expecting as much of philosophy professors as you seem to.
Lots of different sorts of philosophy professors, holding wildly
different philosophical views, can and do unite in support of
feminism. Which philosophical view is going to be most useful to
the feminist cause depends upon what rhetoric is most effective
in raising feminist consciousness, and what rhetoric is most effec-
tive in getting the patriarchs to see a bit of the light.
In the US, there are large numbers of philosophers who
identify themselves as ”feminist philosophers”; feminist philoso-
phy is now a recognized sub-area of philosophical inquiry. But
the feminist philosophers disagree widely among themselves
about almost all the traditional philosophical issues. They do not
possess a tool, or a weapon, called ”philosophy” to put at the
service of feminism—for there is no unitary thing to bear this
name. They just put whatever dialectical skill they may have in
the service of working out defenses (sometimes on the basis of
theories of natural right, sometimes on the basis of Derridean
theories of language, using whatever ammunition comes to hand)
of feminist political measures. 80 it seems to me pointless to ask
that pragmatist philosophy professors be, in your phrase, ”truly
effective in making the egalitarian dream come true.” That’s like
asking that the people who repair the treads on the tanks be ”truly
effective in winning the war”; such people do their bit, but a bit
is all they can do. Philosophy is not a magic wand which can make
dreams come true, and a set of philosophical doctrines (such as
pragmatism) is not to be judged on the basis of its efficacy in doing
so. To make this sort of demand on a philosophical view is to treat
the philosophers of different schools as if they were the priests of
different religions, priests each of whom claimed special access to
a divine Being whose wrath and power they could call down on
the enemy army, and whose claims to serve the One True God are
to be judged on the basis of our own army’s success.
As it happens, I have recently been writing about what
pragmatism might do for feminism. All I came up with was the
possibility that one line of thought associated with pragmatism,
Deweyan historicism, might be of some use in providing feminists

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with a little extra rhetorical ammunition. Dewey’s historicism

might, I think, be useful in helping us see the point of the femi-
nists’ frequent anger and frustration over the ”common sense”
quality of patriarchal customs. By synthesizing Hegel and Dar-
win, Dewey helped give us a sense of how moral progress is made
not by appealing to ”eternal truths” but by the rise of new ways
of speaking—new vocabularies which permit things to sound
plausible which previously sounded so un-common-sensical as to
be simply whacky. So when feminists like Catherine MacKinnon
and Marilyn Frye speak of ”a new voice" and a ”struggle with
meaninglessness,” of the need to extend logical space beyond what
the language of a patriarchal society has envisaged, a Deweyan
historicist can offer a useful metatheory which brings out the
analogy between the rise of feminism, the rise of Christianity, the
rise of Galilean science, the Romantic Movement, and the like.
Supplying such a meta-theory—showing how feminism fits into
an Hegelian, if not into a Kantian, account of moral progress—is
not much, but it may be all pragmatism can do in this area.
Still, there is one other suggestion which, I think, pragmatists
might usefully make to feminists: that they drop the quasi-Kantian
notion of ”women’s experience” or ”women’s perspective” or
”women’s standpoint.” There has been much criticism recently,
in the literature of feminist philosophy in the U.S., of ”feminist
essentialism”—of attempts to specify what is distinctively female,
what the distinctive ”otherness” of the feminine is. As a pragma-
tist, I am sympathetic to this criticism, as I am to all forms of
anti-essentialism. I am also sympathetic to what Sellars calls ”psy-
chological nominalism”——the doctrine that all awareness is a lin-
guistic affair. On this view, there is no such thing as ”inarticulate
experience” which is then expressed in language. For such phi-
losophers of language as Davidson and Sellars, language is not a
medium of expression for something prior called ”experience.”
So, nfortiori, there is no pre-linguistic state called "feminine expe-
rience” which needs to be articulated in language.
From this perspective, the task of feminist intellectuals is not
to express what women have timelessly, ahistorically, been to
spell out their previously unknown inner essence but to find ways
of describing their public situation, their constant oppression,

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which makes it easier and easier for women to see that oppression
as evitable, as not part of the nature of things. The point is not to
make audible or visible what has been hidden—to bring reality to
light and displace mere appearance, or to make inarticulate expe-
rience articulate—but rather to bring something into existence
which has not previously existed. What is to be created is a strong,
autonomous, vociferous, sort of woman, one who will pay no
attention whatever to the traditional gender-distinctions built
into the language and customs of her time. Such a woman might
or might not find some use for philosophy, but philosophers
might make some minor contribution to her emergence by replac-
ing the traditional from-appearance-by-reality philosophical
model of social progress with a pragmatist, evolutionary, model.
[See my ”Feminism and Pragmatism,” Michigan Quarterly Review
(Spring 1991), for more on these matters]
IV. Otherness: This brings me back to the topic with which I
began my first letter to you: otherness. I find this topic a bit
baffling. This is because, as a good pragmatist, I am uncomfortable
with notions of uncommunicability, with the idea that some
special sorts of things (God, the inside of another human being,
the experience of the oppressed) are impossible, or at least very
difficult, to put into language. When I am told that the oppressed
are very different from me, a white male inhabitant of the richest
part of the globe, I am inclined to say ”Of course they are. They
have a lot less money and power, they are always on the edge of
starvation and always threatened by brutality, and I’m not. That
makes them very different all right, but it doesn’t raise any deep
philosophical question about our relations, or our knowledge of
each other. It just raises practical questions of how to redistribute
money and power—how to get a global socio-economic system
going that will level things off.”
I think there will seem to be a philosophically interesting differ-
ence between the experience of the oppressed and mine only if
one adopts a Kantian notion of "conditions of experience” and
thinks that the weak and the strong, or the women and the men,
or the West and the East, have something like different Kantian
”forms of intuition” or ”categories of understanding”—so differ-
ent that people whose experiences are conditioned by one set of

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structures cannot have any sense of what it is like to have experi-

ences conditioned by another set. (This is the sort of suggestion
which you have taken up, in regard to Western and Indian
conceptions of time, in your own work). Such Kantian metaphors
of structure and content (and the consequent talk about the space,
or the time, or the cosmos of different cultures being incommen-
surably different) seems to me not only optional, but, in its effects,
mischievous. Its only function is to inspire scepticism, or a kind of
sentimental longing for the unknowable. If we are psychological
nominalists, dispensing with ”experience” in favor of language,
and if we follow Davidson in saying that there is no such thing as
an unlearnable language, then we can say that all that ”otherness”
comes down to is the fact that practices (including linguistic
practices) suitable for dealing with one (human and social) envi-
ronment are often ill-adapted for other environments. So the
interesting difference between sets of practices is not that between
those developed for dealing with environment A (e.g., the back-
woods of Nagaland, the slums of Calcutta, the interior of the
Sahel) and environment B (e.g., the middle-class suburbs of the
Northern Hemisphere), but between those that presently exist
and those that are just a gleam in somebody’s eye.
As examples of those which are still just a gleam in somebody’s
eye, consider those suggested by Christ or the Buddha to the first
generations of their disciples, or, once again, those gradually
being developed by contemporary feminists. These are practices
which are not yet in place, practices which, if they some day
become widespread, might help change the environment in which
people live. Many contemporary leftist intellectuals suggest that
in order to end the oppression of women and of the weak and the
poor we must develop such new practices. (They often suggest
also—though, for reasons given above, I cannot see why— that it
is the special responsibility of philosophy professors to invent
such new practices). But there seems to me an enormous differ-
ence between the contemporary situation of women and the
contemporary situation of the weak and poor.
Women have been conditioned throughout the centuries to
believe that they are naturally subordinate, that God or Nature
has unfortunately made them incapable of autonomy, of taking

99
 Lt'lli’r 6

part in political deliberation, of wisdom, etc. Large numbers of

women in our times still, alas, believe something like this. The
weak and the poor have often, in the past (as in the Hindu or
Japanese caste systems, or in Calvinist doctrines of salvation),
been conditioned to believe that they are somehow singled out
by nature for misery. But I do not think that now in most parts of
the world, they any longer believe anything of the sort. Thanks
to the secularizing influences of the recent West, it has become
increasingly difficult to use religion to sanctity oppression. (This
seems to me one almost entirely good thing which Westernization
has done for the East, though I admit that the Western colonialists
tried to use Christianity to legitimize their own oppression when
they first arrived.) It has become increasingly easier for the weak
and the poor to see themselves as victims of the greed of their
fellow-humans rather than of Destiny, or the gods, or of the sins
of their ancestors.
So, though I think that women still are in the process 'of
working out a new set of practices, the weak and the poor are
already enmeshed in a practice of calculating who gets what out
of their labor and suffering. Their problem is not how to conceive
of themselves, how to create themselves (as it still is for women)
but simply of how to wrest control of a greater share of wealth
and power without making things still worse in the process—how
to create a social revolution which is not a worse remedy than the
disease it was fomented to cure.
I hope that you will not tell me that it is my duty, as a
pragmatist, or as a philosopher, to come up with a solution to this
problem. Whether it’s my duty or not, I in fact have nothing to
offer. Though I was brought up to be a socialist, I no longer want
to nationalize the means of production (because the experience
of Central and Eastern Europe suggests that nationalization is, to
put it mildly, no help in redistributing wealth and power). I
suspect we are stuck with market economies—which means with
private property for the foreseeable future. I should love to sug-
gest ways of reconciling market economies with social justice, but
all I can come up with is the standard European-model welfare
state—a solution which seems to have no clear relevance to the
choices presently before the electorates of, e.g., India or Brazil. I

'l ()0
 LL’HL’I' 6
hope that in the next century new alternatives appear—ones of
the sort suggested by, for example, Roberto Unger in his Politics,
ones which try to work out alternatives to both socialism and
capitalism. But I do not think that my pragmatism, or my philo-
sophical expertise, are of any particular use to the construction of
such alternatives.
To sum up: lam not sure that either what you call ”the theme
of cultural otherness,” or philosophy, has much relevance to the
question of how to get wealth and power more evenly redistrib-
uted. For purposes of such redistribution, the differences between
cultural traditions may just not matter very much. Economic and
bureaucratic rationality—the sort which, as far as I can see, we are
going to have to use to solve problems of redistribution—will, I
hope, just slide over cultural divisions, leaving as many of them
in place as possible. My ideal world is one in which there is
enough equality in wealth and power so that people are more or
less free to continue or change cultural traditions as it suits them.
The only alternative that I can see is the kind of isolation which,
e.g., China and Japan imposed upon themselves until the nine-
teenth century— but that isolation was a result of the rich and
powerful within the society using cultural otherness as a device
for perpetuating their own oppressive rule.
There is a tendency in contemporary political discussion to
treat ”the West” as a name for the source of every imaginable
oppression—t0 lump bureaucratic rationality, patriarchy, coloni-
alism, capitalism, technology, and every other oppressive institu-
tion one can think of together and call the result ”the West.” This
lumping serves no good purpose. The West did not invent op-
pression, and it is, like every other culture, a polychrome tangle
of institutions and traditions—some of which may be useful only
to the oppressors, some only to the oppressed, but most to both.
If there is any general lesson which pragmatism preaches, it is to
deessentialize, to break up the lump, to pick over these traditions
and institutions one by one, and see what use they have for our
present purposes.

With all good wishes,

Dick R.

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 Appendix

Philosophers, Novelists, and

Intercultural Comparisons:
Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens

Richard Rorty

Suppose that the nations which make up what we call ”the

West” vanish tomorrow, wiped out by thermonuclear bombs.
Suppose that only Eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa remain
inhabitable, and that in these regions the reaction to the catastro-
phe is a ruthless campaign of de-Westernization—a fairly success-
ful attempt to obliterate the memory of the last three hundred
years. But imagine also that, in the midst of this de-Westernizing
campaign, a few people, mostly in the universities, squirrel away
as many souvenirs of the West—books, magazines, small artifacts,
reproductions of works of art, movie films, videotapes, and so
on—as they can conceal.
Now imagine that, around the year 2500, memory of the
catastrophe fades, the sealed-off cellars are uncovered, and artists
and scholars begin to tell stories about the West. There will be
many different stories, with many different morals. One such
story might center on increasing technological mastery, another
on the development of artistic forms, another on changes in
sociopolitical institutions, and another on the lifting of sexual
taboos. There would be dozens of other guiding threads which
storytellers might seize upon. The relative interest and usefulness

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of each will depend upon the particular needs of the various

African and Asian societies within which they are disseminated.
If, however, there are philosophers among the people who write
such stories, we can imagine controversies arising about what was
”paradigmatically” Western, about the essence of the West. We can
imagine attempts to tie all these stories together, and to reduce
them to one—the one true account of the West, pointing out the
one true moral of its career. We think of philosophers as prone to
make such attempts because we tend to identify an area of a
culture as ”philosophy” when we note an attempt to substitute
theory for narrative, a tendency toward essentialism. Essentialism
has been fruitful in many areas—most notably in helping us to
see elegant mathematical relationships behind complex motions,
and perspicuous microstructures behind confusing macro-struc-
tures. But we have gradually become suspicious of essentialism
as applied to human affairs, in areas such as history, sociology, and
anthropology. The attempt to find laws of history or essences of
cultures—to substitute theory for narrative as an aid to under-
standing ourselves, others, and the options which we present to
one another—has been notoriously unfruitful. Writings as diverse
as Karl Popper’s on Hegel and Marx, Charles Taylor's on positiv-
istic social science, and Alasdair Maclntyre’s or Michael Oake-
shott’s on the importance of traditions have helped us realize this
unfruitfulness.
Despite growing recognition that the essentialistic habits of
thought which pay off in the natural sciences do not assist moral
and political reflection, we Western philosophers still show a
distressing tendency to essentialism when we offer intercultural
comparisons. This comes out most clearly in our recent willing-
ness to talk about ”the West” not as an ongoing, suspenseful
adventure in which we are participating but rather as a structure
which we can step back from, inspect at a distance. This willing-
ness is partly the cause, and partly the effect, of the profound
influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger on contemporary Western
intellectual life. It reflects the sociopolitical pessimism which has
afflicted European and American intellectuals ever since we gave
up on socialism without becoming any fonder of capitalism—ever
since Marx ceased to present an alternative to Nietzsche and

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Heidegger. This pessimism, which often calls itself ”postmod-

ernism,” is a rueful sense that the hopes for greater freedom and
equality which mark the recent history of the West were somehow
deeply self-deceptive. Postmodernist attempts to encapsulate and
sum up the West have made it increasingly tempting to contrast
the West as a whole with the rest of the world as a whole. Such
attempts make it easy to start using ”the East” or ”non-Western
modes of thought” as the names ofa mysterious redemptive force,
as something which may still offer hope.
In this essay, I shall be protesting against this recent tendency
to encapsulate the West, to treat it as a finished-off object which
we are now in a position to subject to structural analysis. In
particular, I want to protest against the tendency to take Heideg-
ger’s account of the West for granted. There is, it seems to me, a
growing willingness to read Heidegger as the West’s final mes-
sage to the world. This message consists largely of the claim that
the West has, to use one of Heidegger’s favorite phrases, ”ex-
hausted its possibilities.” Heidegger was one of the great synoptic
imaginations of our century, but his extraordinary gifts make his
message sound more plausible than I think it is. We need to
remember that the scope of Heidegger’s imagination, great as it
was, was largely restricted to philosophy and lyric poetry, to the
writings of those to whom he awarded the title of ”Thinker” or of
”Poet.” Heidegger thought that the essence of a historical epoch
could be discovered by reading the works of the characteristic
philosopher of that epoch and identifying his ”Understanding of
Being.” He thought that the history of the West could best be
understood by finding a dialectical progression connecting the
works of successive great philosophical thinkers. Philosophers by
trade are especially susceptible to the persuasive power of
Heidegger’s account of the West’s history and prospects. But I
think that this susceptibility is a professional deformation which
we should struggle to overcome.
As a way of counteracting Heidegger and, more generally, the
kind of post-Heideggerian thinking which refuses to see the West
as a continuing adventure, I want to put forward Dickens as a sort
of anti-Heidegger. I can sum up my sense of the respective impor-
tance of Dickens and Heidegger by saying that, if my imaginary

105
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Asians and Africans were, for some reason, unable to preserve the
works of both men, I should much prefer that they preserve
Dickens’. For Dickens could help them grasp a complex of atti-
tudes that was important to the West, and perhaps unique to the
West, in a way that neither Heidegger nor any other philosopher
could. The example of Dickens could help them think of the novel,
and particularly the novel of moral protest, rather than of the
philosophical treatise, as the genre in which the West excelled.
Focusing on this genre would help them to see not technology,
but rather the hope of freedom and equality as the West’s most
important legacy. From the point of view I shall be adopting, the
interaction of West and East is better exemplified by the playing
of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Tienanmen Square than by
the steel mills of Korea or the influence of Japanese prints on Van
Gogh.l
To lay out this point of view, I shall do three things in the
remainder of this essay. First, I shall offer an account of Heidegger
as one more example of what Nietzsche called ”the ascetic priest.”
Second, I shall summarize and gloss Milan Kundera’s account of
the novel as the vehicle of a revolt against the ontotheological
treatise, of an anticlerical reaction against the cultural dominance
of the ascetic priests. Third, I shall use Dickens to illustrate Kun-
dera’s suggestion that the novel is the characteristic genre of
democracy, the genre most closely associated with the struggle
for freedom and equality.
Heidegger’s later work was an attempt to provide the one
right answer to the question asked by my imaginary African and
Asian philosophers of the future. Heidegger would advise these
philosophers to start thinking about the West by thinking about
what killed it—technology— and to work backward from there.
With a bit of luck, they could then recreate the story which
Heidegger himself told, the story he called ”the history of Being.”
For Heidegger, the West begins with the pre-Socratics, with what
he calls the separation between the ”what” and the ”that.” This
separation between what a thing is in itself and the relations
which it has to other things engenders distinctions between es-
sence and accident, reality and appearance, objective and subjec-
tive, rational and irrational, scientific and unscientific, and the

106
 Appendix

like—all the dualisms which mark off epochs in the history of an

increasing lust for power, an increased inability to let beings be.
This is the history which Heidegger summarizes in Nietzsche’s
phrase die Wl'iste wfichst, the wasteland spreads.2
As Heidegger tells this story, it culminates in what he calls the
"age of the world-picture,” the age in which everything is Enfra-
med, seen as providing an occasion either for manipulation or for
aesthetic delectation. It is an age of giantism, of aesthetico-tech-
nological frenzy. It is the age in which people build 100-megaton
bombs, slash down rain forests, try to create art more thoroughly
postmodern than last year’s, and bring hundreds of philosophers
together to compare their respective world pictures. Heidegger
sees all these activities as aspects of a single phenomenon: the age
of the world picture is the age in which human beings become
entirely forgetful of Being, entirely oblivious to the possibility that
anything can stand outside a means-end relationship.
Seeing matters in this way is an instance of what Habermas
describes as Heidegger’s characteristic ”abstraction by essentiali-
zation.” In 1935 Heidegger saw Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s
America as ”metaphysically speaking, the same.” In 1945 he saw
the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern
Europe as two instances of the same phenomenon. As Habermas
puts it, ”under the leveling gaze of the philosopher of Being even
the extermination of the Jews seems merely an event equivalent
to many others.“ Heidegger specializes in rising above the need
to calculate relative quantities of human happiness, in taking a
larger view. For him successful and unsuccessful adventures—
Ghandi’s success and Dubéek’s failure, for example—are just
surface perturbations, distractions from essence by accidents,
hindrances to an understanding of what is really going on.
Heidegger’s refusal to take much interest in the Holocaust
typifies the urge to look beneath or behind the narrative of the
West for the essence of the West, the urge which separates the
philosophers from the novelists. Someone dominated by this urge
will tell a story only as part of the process of clearing away
appearance in order to reveal reality. Narrative is, for Heidegger,
always a second-rate genre—a tempting but dangerous one. At
the beginning of Sein mid Zeit, Heidegger warned against the

107
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temptation to confuse ontology with the attempt to tell a story

that relates beings to other beings, mython Hm: dicgcistlmi.4 At the
end of his career he takes back his earlier suggestion that what he
called ”the task of thinking" might be accomplished by Seins-
gcschichtc, by telling a story about how metaphysics and the West
exhausted their possibilities. Now he realizes that he must cease
to tell stories about metaphysics, must leave metaphysics to itself,
if he is ever to undertake this task.5
Despite this suspicion of epic and preference for lyric, the
ability to spin a dramatic tale was Heidegger’s greatest gift. What
is most memorable and original in his writings, it seems to me, is
the new dialectical pattern he finds in the sequence of canonical
Western philosophical texts. His clue to this pattern was, I think,
Nietzsche’s construal of the ascetic priests’ attempts at wisdom,
contemplation, and imperturbability as furtive and resentful ex-
pressions of those priests’ will to power.
Heidegger, however, tried to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche by read-
ing Nietzsche himself as the last of the metaphysicians. He hoped
thereby to free himself from the resentment which, despite him-
self, Nietzsche displayed so conspicuously. Heidegger thought
that if he could free himself from this resentment, and from the
urge to dominate, he could free himself from the West and so, as
he said, quoting Holderlin, ”sing a new song.” He thought that he
could become free of the will to power as a result of having seen
through its last disguise. He thought that by leaving metaphysics
to itself, turning from Scinsgcschichte to Dcnken, from Scin to Ereig—
m's, he could accomplish the transition from epic to lyric, turn from
the West to something Wholly Other than the West.
But on my reading, Heidegger was simply one more ascetic
priest and his attempt to encapsulate the West, to sum it up and
distance himself from it, was one more power play. Heidegger
was intensely aware of the danger that he was making such a play.
But to be intensely aware of the danger is not necessarily to escape
it. On my reading, Heidegger is still doing the same sort of thing
that Plato tried to do when he created a supersensible world from
which to look down on Athens, or Augustine when he imagined
a City of God from which to look down on the Dark Ages. He is
opting out of the struggles of his fellow humans by making his

108
 Appendix

mind its own place, his own story the only story that counts,
making himself the redeemer of his time precisely by his absten-
tion from action. All that Heidegger manages to do is to historicize
the Platonic divided line. He tips it over on its side. The Heideg-
gerian counterpart of Plato’s world of appearance seen from
above is the West seen from beyond metaphysics. Whereas Plato
looks down, Heidegger looks back. But both are hoping to dis-
tance themselves from, cleanse themselves of, what they are
looking at.
This hope leads both men to the thought that there must be
some purificatory askesis which can render them fit for inter-
course with something Wholly Other—for impregnation by the
Form of the Good, for example, or for Openness to Being. This
thought is obviously an important part of the Western tradition,
and it has obvious analogues (and perhaps sources) in the East.
That is why Heidegger is the twentieth-century Western thinker
most frequently ”put into dialogue” with Eastern philosophy."
Such Heideggerian themes as the need to put aside the relations
between beings and beings, to escape from busy-ness, to become
receptive to the splendor of the simple, are easy to find in the East.
But there are other elements in Western thought, the elements
which Heidegger despised, which are much harder to put into
dialogue with anything in the East. In particular, as I shall be
saying in more detail shortly, there is the novel—a Rabelaisian
response to the ascetic priests. So, insofar as we philosophers
become content either with a dialogue between Plato and the East
or with one between Heidegger and the East, we may be taking
the easy way out of the problems of intercultural comparison.
Insofar as we concentrate on philosophy, we may find ourselves
concentrating on a certain specific human type which can be
counted upon to appear in (my culture—the ascetic priest, the
person who wants to set himself apart from his fellow humans by
making contact with what he calls his ”true self” or ”Being” or
”Brahman” or ”Nothingness.”
All of us philosophers have at least a bit of the ascetic priest in
us. We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as
opposed to narrative. If we did not, we should probably have
gone into some other line of work. So we have to be careful not

109
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to let this taste seduce us into the presumption that, when it comes
to other cultures, only our counterparts, those with tastes similar
to our own, are reliable sources of information. We should stay
alert to the possibility that comparative philosophy not only is not
a royal road to intercultural comparison, but may even be a
distraction from such comparison. For it may turn out that we are
really comparing nothing more than the adaptations of a single
transcultural character type to different environments.
Those who embody this character type are always trying to
wash the language of their respective tribes off their tongues. The
ascetic priest finds this language vicious, in Sartre’s sense. His
ambition is to get above, or past, or out of, what can be said in
language. His goal is always the ineffable. Insofar as he is forced
to use language, he wants a language which either gives a purer
sense to the words of the tribe or, better yet, a language entirely
disengaged from the business of the tribe, irrelevant to the mere
pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Only such a person can
share Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s contempt for the people
whom Nietzsche called ”the last men.” Only he can see the point
of Heidegger’s disdainful remark that the greatest disaster—the
spread of the wasteland, die Vcrwiistung dcr Erdc, understood as
the forgetfulness of Being—may ”easily go hand in hand with a
guaranteed living standard for all men, and with a uniform state
of happiness for all men.”’ Ascetic priests have no patience with
people who think that mere happiness or mere decrease of suf-
fering might compensate for Scinvcrgcsscnhcit, for an inability to
be in touch with something Wholly Other.
My description of the ascetic priest is deliberately pejorative
and gendered. I am sketching a portrait of a phallocentric obses-
sive, someone whose attitude toward women typically resembles
Socrates’ attitude when he was asked whether there are Forms of
hair and mud. Such a person shares Nietzsche's endlessly re-
peated desire for, above all else cleanliness. He also shares Heideg-
ger's endlessly repeated desire for simplicity. He has the same
attitude toward sexual as to economic commerce: he finds it
messy. So he is inclined both to keep women in their traditional
subordinate place, out of sight and out of mind, and to favor a
caste system which ranks the manly warriors, who bathe fre-

ll()
 Appendix

quently, above the smelly traders in the bazaar. But the warrior is,
of course, outranked by the priest—who bathes even more fre—
quently and is still manlier. The priest is manlier because what is
important is not the fleshly phallus but the immaterial one—the
one which penetrates through the veil of appearances and makes
contact with true reality, reaches the light at the end of the tunnel
in a way that the warrior never can.
It is easy, with the help of people like Rabelais, Nietzsche,
Freud, and Derrida, to make such seekers after ineffability and
immateriality sound obnoxious. But to do them justice, we should
remind ourselves that ascetic priests are very useful people. It is
unlikely that there would have been much high culture in either
West or East if there had not been a lot of ascetic priests in each
place. For the result of trying to find a language different from the
tribe’s is to enrich the language of later generations of the tribe.
The more ascetic priests a society can afford to support, the more
surplus value is available to provide these priests with the leisure
to fantasize, the richer and more diverse the language and pro-
jects of that society are likely to become. The spin-offs from private
projects of purification turn out to have enormous social utility.
Ascetic priests are often not much fun to be around, and usually
are useless if what you are interested in is happiness, but they
have been the traditional vehicles of linguistic novelty, the means
by which a culture is able to have a future interestingly different
from its past. They have enabled cultures to change themselves,
to break out of tradition into a previously unimagined future.
My purpose in this essay, however, is not to arrive at a final,
just evaluation either of Heidegger in particular or of ascetic
priests in general. Instead, it is to develop an antithesis between
the ascetic taste for theory, simplicity, structure, abstraction, and
essence and the novelist’s taste for narrative, detail, diversity, and
accident. From now on, I shall be preaching a sermon on the
following text from Kundera’s The Art of the Novel:
The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel
is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor. One
of Europe's major failures is that it never understood the most
European of the arts—the novel; neither its spirit, nor its great
knowledge and discoveries, or the autonomy of its history. The art

111
 Appendix
inspired by God's laughter does not by nature serve ideological
certitudes, it contradicts them. Like Penelope, it undoes each night
the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers and learned men
have woven the day before.
. . . I do not feel qualified to debate those who blame Voltaire for the
gulag. But I do feel qualified to say: The eighteenth century is not only
the century of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Holbach; it is also (perhaps
above all!) the age of Fielding, Sterne, Goethe, Laclos.H

The first moral I draw from this passage is that we should stay
on the lookout, when we survey other cultures, for the rise of new
genres—genres which arise in reaction to, and as an alternative
to, the attempt to theorize about human affairs. We are likely to get
more interesting, and more practically useful, East-West compari-
sons if we supplement dialogues between our respective theoreti-
cal traditions with dialogues between our respective traditions of
antitheory. In particular, it would help us Western philosophers
get our bearings in the East if we could identify some Eastern
cultural traditions which made fun of Eastern philosophy. The
kind of fun I have in mind is not the in-house kind which we
philosophers make of one another (for example, the kind of fun
which Plato makes of Protagoras, Hume of natural theology,
Kierkegaard of Hegel, or Derrida of Heidegger). It is rather that
made by people who either could not follow a philosophical
argument if they tried, or by people who have no wish to try. We
need to be on the lookout not just forJapanese Heideggers, Indian
Platos, and Chinese Humes, but for Chinese Sternes and Indone-
sian Rabelaises. I am too ignorant to know whether there are any
people of the latter sort, but I hope and trust that there are.
Somewhere in the East there must have been people who enjoyed
unweaving the tapestries which the saints and sages had woven.
The need to unweave these tapestries can be thought of as the
revenge of the vulgar upon the priests’ indifference to the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. This indifference is illustrated
by the way in which Horkheimer and Adorno look for a dialectic
of Enlightenment which will permit them to weave Candide into
the same pattern as Auschwitz, the way in which they allow
contemplation of that pattern to convince them that Enlighten-
ment hopes were vain. It is also illustrated by the way in which

112
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Heidegger blurs the distinction between automobile factories and

death camps. We philosophers not only want to see dialectical
patterns invisible to the vulgar, we want these patterns to be clues
to the outcomes of world-historical dramas. For all our ascetism,
we want to see ourselves, and people like ourselves, as engaged
in something more than merely private projects. We want to relate
our private obsessions, our private fantasies of purity, novelty, and
autonomy, to something larger than ourselves, something with
causal power, something hidden and underlying which secretly
determines the course of human affairs.0
From Kundera’s point of view, the philosopher’s essentialistic
approach to human affairs, his attempt to substitute contempla-
tion, dialectic, and destiny for adventure, narrative, and change,
is a disingenuous way of saying: what matters for me takes
precedence over what matters for you, entitles me to ignore what
matters to you, because I am in touch with something—reality—
with which you are not. The novelist’s rejoinder to this is: it is
comical to believe that one human being is more in touch with
something nonhuman than another human being. It is comical to
use one’s quest for the ineffable Other as an excuse for ignoring
other people's quite different quests. It is comical to think that
anyone could transcend the quest for happiness, to think that any
theory could be more than a means to happiness, that there is
something called Truth which transcends pleasure and pain. The
novelist sees us as Voltaire saw Leibniz, as Swift saw the scientists
of Laputa, and as Orwell saw Marxist theoreticians—as comic
figures. What is comic about us is that we make ourselves unable
to see things which everybody else can see—things like decreased
suffering and increased happiness—by convincing ourselves that
these things are ”mere appearance.”
The novelist’s substitute for the appearance—reality distinc-
tion is a display of diversity of points of view, a plurality of
descriptions of the same events. What the novelist finds especially
comic is the attempt to privilege one of these descriptions, to take
it as an excuse for ignoring all the others. What he or she finds
most heroic is not the ability sternly to reject all descriptions save
one, but rather the ability to move back and forth between them.
I take this to be the point Kundera is making when he says:

113
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It is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous
agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is
the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no
one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where
everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.'°

Kundera is here making the term ”the novel” roughly synony-

mous with ”the democratic utopia”—with an imaginary future
society in which nobody dreams of thinking that God, or the
Truth, or the Nature of Things, is on her or his side. In such a
utopia nobody would dream of thinking that there is something
more real than pleasure or pain, or that there is a duty laid upon
us which transcends the search for happiness. A democratic uto-
pia would be a community in which tolerance and curiosity,
rather than truth-seeking, are the chief intellectual virtues. It
would be one in which there is nothing remotely approximating
a state religion or a state philosophy. In such a community, all that
is left of philosophy is the maxim of Mill’s On Liberty, or of a
Rabelaisian carnival: everybody can do what they want if they
don’t hurt anybody else while doing it. As Kundera says, ”The
world of one single Truth and the relative ambiguous world of the
novel are molded of entirely different substances.”
One can, if one likes, see Kundera and Heidegger as trying to
overcome a common enemy: the tradition of Western metaphys-
ics, the tradition which hints at the One True Description that
exhibits the underlying pattern behind apparent diversity. But
there is a big difference between what the two men propose as an
alternative to this tradition. For Heidegger the opposite of meta-
physics is Openness to Being, something most easily achieved in
a pretechnological peasant community with unchanging cus—
toms. Heidegger's utopia is pastoral, a sparsely populated valley
in the mountains, a valley in which life is given shape by its
relationship to the primordial Fourfold—earth, sky, man, and
gods. Kundera's utopia is carnivalesque, Dickensian, a crowd of
eccentrics rejoicing in each other’s idiosyncracies, curious for
novelty rather nostalgic for primordiality. The bigger, more var-
ied, and more boisterous the crowd the better. For Heidegger, the
way to overcome the urge to domination is to take a step back and
to see the West and its history of power plays from afar, as the sage

114
 Appendix

sees the Wheel of Life from afar. For Kundera the way to overcome
the urge to domination is to realize that everybody has and always
will have this urge, but to insist that nobody is more or less
justified in having it than anybody else. Nobody stands for the
truth, or for Being, or for Thinking. Nobody stands for anything
Other or Higher. We all just stand for ourselves, equal inhabitants
of a paradise, of individuals in which everybody has the right to
be understood but nobody has the right to rule.
Kundera summarizes his attitude toward the ascetic priest
when he says:
Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distin-
guished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge
before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on
this desire. . . . They require that somebody be right: either Anna
Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the
victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed
by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is
guilty.
This "either-or” encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential
relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the
absence of the Supreme Judge.”
Kundera, in a brief allusion to Heidegger, politely interprets
his term ”forgetfulness of Being” as forgetfulness of this essential
relativity.” But Heidegger never, even in his early ”pragmatist”
phase,” believed in essential relativity in Kundera’s sense of the
term. Heidegger’s genre is the lyric, not the novel; his hero is
H61derlin, not Rabelais or Cervantes. For Heidegger the other
human beings exist for the sake of the Thinker and the Poet.
Where there is a Thinker or a Poet, there human life is justified,
for there something Wholly Other touches and is touched. Where
there is not, the wasteland spreads.
Whereas for Heidegger there are certain moments in certain
lives which both redeem history and permit history to be encap-
sulated, for Kundera the thing to do with history is to keep it
going, to throw oneself into it. But this throwing oneself into
history is not the sort which is recommended by the ideological
revolutionary. It is not a matter of replacing Tradition with Reason
or Error with Truth. Kundera thinks that if we want to know what

115
_fi______fi_ Appendix _

went wrong with the expectations of the Enlightenment we

should read Flaubert rather than Horkheimer and Adorno. He
savs:
Flaubert discovered stupidity. l daresay that is the greatest discov-
ery of a century so proud of its scientific thought. Of course, even
before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they under-
stood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence
of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. Flaubert’s vision
of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technol-
ogy, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along
with progress!1

I take Kundera to be saying that the Enlightenment was wrong

in hoping for an age without stupidity. The thing to hope for is,
instead, an age in which the prevalent varieties of stupidity will
cause less unnecessary pain than is caused in our age by our
varieties of stupidity. To every age its own glory and its own
stupidity. The job of the novelist is to keep us up to date on both.
Because there is no Supreme Judge and no One Right Description,
because there is no escape to a Wholly Other, this is the most
important possible job. But it is a job which can only be under-
taken with a whole heart by someone who is untroubled by
dreams of an ahistorical framework within which human history
is enacted, a universal human nature by reference to which
history can be explained, or a far-off divine event toward which
history moves. To appreciate the essential relativity of human
affairs, in Kundera’s sense, is to give up the last traces of the ascetic
priest’s attempt to escape from time and change, the last traces of
the attempt to see us as actors in a drama already written before
we came on the scene. Heidegger thought that he could escape
from metaphysics, from the idea of a Single Truth, by historicizing
Being and Truth. He thought that he could escape Platonic escap-
ism by telling a story about the Ereignis which was the West, rather
than about Sein. But from Kundera’s point of view Heidegger's
attempt was just one more attempt to escape from time and
chance, though this time an escape into historicity rather than into
eternity. For Kundera, eternity and historicity are equally comic,
equally essentialist, notions.
The difference between Kundera’s and Heidegger’s reaction

l|6
 Appendix

to the Western metaphysical tradition comes out best in their

attitude toward closure. It is as important for Kundera to see the
Western adventure as open-ended—to envisage forever new
sorts of novels, recording strange new joys and ingenious new
stupidities—as it is for Heidegger to insist that the West has
exhausted its possibilities. This comes out in Kundera's insistence
that the novel does not have a nature, but only a history, that the
novel is a ”sequence of discoveries/”5 There is no Platonic Form
for the novel as a genre to live up to, no essential structure which
some novels exhibit better than others, any more than there exists
such a Form or such a structure for human beings. The novel can
no more exhaust its possibilities than human beings can exhaust
their hope for happiness. As Kundera says, ”The only context for
grasping the novel’s worth is the history of the European novel.
The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes.""‘
The same point emerges when Kundera insists that the history
of the novel and of Europe cannot be judged by the actual political
future of Europe—or by the actual fate, whatever it may be, of the
West. In particular, the West blowing itself up with its own bombs
should not be read as a judgment on the novel, or on Europe—nor
should the coming of an endless totalitarian night. To do so would
be like judging a human life by reference to some ludicrous
accident which ends it violently, or like judging Western technol-
ogy by reference to Auschwitz. As Kundera says:
Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only
competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood
that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven
flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the
present. It will pass judgment upon us, of course. But without any
competence.

Kundera continues:
But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am 1 attached?
To God? Country? The people? The individual? My answer is as
ridiculous as it is sincere. I am attached to nothing but the depreci-
ated legacy of Cervantes.”
Kundera’s phrase "paradise of individuals" has an obvious
application to Dickens, because the most celebrated and memo-

l'l7
 Appendix

rable feature of his novels is the unsubsumable, uncategorizable

idiosyncracy of the characters. Dickens' characters resist being
subsumed under moral typologies, being described as exhibiting
these virtues and those vices. Instead, the names of Dickens’
characters lake the place of moral principles and of lists of virtues
and vices. They do so by permitting us to describe each other as
”a Skimpole," ”a Mr. Pickwick," ”a Gradgrind,” ”a Mrs. Jellaby,” ”a
Florence Dombey.” In a moral world based on what Kundera calls
”the wisdom of the novel” moral comparisons and judgments
would be made with the help of proper names rather than general
terms or general principles. A society which took its moral vocabu-
lary from novels rather than from ontico-theological or ontico-
moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human
nature, the point of human existence, or the meaning of human
life. Rather, it would ask itself what we can do so as to get along
with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be comfort-
able with one another, how institutions can be changed so that
everyone’s right to be understood has a better chance of being
gratified.
To those who share Nietzsche’s sense that the ”last men” give
off a bad smell, it will be ludicrous to suggest that comfort is the
goal of human social organization and moral reflection. But this
suggestion would not have seemed ludicrous to Dickens. That is
why Dickens has been anathematized by Marxists and other
ascetic priests as a ”bourgeois reformer.” The term ”bourgeois” is
the Marxist equivalent of Nietzsche’s term ”last man”—it stands
for everything which the ascetic priest wants to wash off. For
Marxism, like Platonism and Heideggerianism, wants more for
human beings than comfort. It wants transformation, transforma-
tion according to a single universal plan; Marxists are continually
envisaging what they call ”new socialist man.” Dickens did not
want anybody to be transformed, except in one respect: he wanted
everyone to notice and understand the people he or she passed on
the street. He wanted people not to make each other uncomfort-
able by applying moral labels, but to recognize that all their fellow
humans—Dombey and Mrs. Dombey, Anna and Karenin, K. and
the Lord Chancellor—had a right to be understood.
Despite having no higher goal than comfortableness of hu-

118
 Appendix

man association, Dickens did an enormous amount for equality

and freedom. The last line of Swift’s self-written epitaph—”Imi-
tate him if you dare: he served human liberty”"‘—would do for
Dickens' tablet as well. But Dickens performed his services to
human liberty not with the help of the ”savage indignation"
which Swift rightly ascribed to himself but with something more
bourgeois— sentimental tears and what Orwell called ”generous
anger." Dickens strikes us as a more bourgeois writer than the man
who described the Yahoos because he is more comfortable with,
and hopeful for, human beings. One indication of this comfort-
ableness is the fact on which Orwell remarked in the following
passage:

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorril, Dickens at-
tacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been
approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself
hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have
swallowed him so completely that he has become a national insti-
tution himself.”

The important point is that Dickens did not make himself

hated. I take it that this was partly because he did not attack
anything as abstract as ”humanity as such,” or the age or the
society in which he lived, but rather concrete cases of particular
people ignoring the suffering of other particular people. He was
thus able to speak as ”one of us”—as the voice of one who
happened to notice something to which the rest of us could be
counted upon to react with similar indignation as soon as we
notice it.”
Dickens was, as Orwell says, ”a good-tempered antinomian,”
a phrase which would apply equally to Rabelais, Montaigne, or
Cervantes, but hardly to Luther or Voltaire or Marx. So I take
”generous anger” to mean something like ”anger which is without
malignity because it assumes that the evil has merely to be noticed
to be remedied.” This was the kind of anger later found in Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Martin Luther King, but not the kind of anger
found in the ascetic priests. For the latter believe that social change
is not a matter of mutual adjustment but of re-creation—that to
make things better we must create a new kind of human being,

119
 Appendix

one who is aware of reality rather than appearance. Their anger

is imgenerous in the sense that it is aimed not at a lack of under-
standing of particular people by other particular people but rather
at an ontological deficit common either to people in general or, at
least, to all those of the present age. The generosity of Dickens’,
Stowe's, and King's anger comes out in their assumption that
people merely need to turn their eyes toward those who are
getting hurt and notice the details of the pain being suffered, rather
than need to have their entire cognitive apparatus restructured.
As an empirical claim, this assumption is often falsified. As a
moral attitude, it marks the difference between people who tell
stories and people who construct theories about that which lies
beyond our present imagination, because beyond our present
language. I think that when Orwell identified a capacity for
generous anger as the mark of ”a free intelligence,” he was adum-
brating the same sort of opposition between the theorist and the
novelist which I am trying to develop in this essay. Earlier I said
that theorists like Heidegger saw narrative as always a second-
best, a propaedeutic, to a grasp of something deeper than the
visible detail, the true meaning behind the familiar and common-
place one. Novelists like Orwell and Dickens are inclined to see
theory as always a second-best, never more than a reminder for
a particular purpose, the purpose of telling a story better. I suggest
that the history of social change in the modern West shows that
the latter conception of the relation between narrative and theory
is the more fruitful.
To say that it is more fruitful isjust to say that, when you weigh
the good and the bad that the social novelists have done against
the good and the bad that the social theorists have done, you find
yourself wishing that there had been more novels and fewer
theories. You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had
read fewer books which gave them general ideas and more books
which gave them an ability to identify imaginatively with those
whom they were to rule. When you read books like Kolakowski’s
history of Marxism, you understand why the Party theoretician,
the man responsible for the "correct ideological line,” has always
been, apart from the maximum leader himself, the most feared
and hated member of the Central Committee. This may remind

IZO
 Appendix

you that Guzman, the leader of the quasi-Maoist Sendero Lumi-

noso movement in Peru, wrote his dissertation on Kant. It may
also remind you that Heidegger's response to the imprisonment
of his Social Democratic colleagues in 1933 came down to ”Don't
bother me with petty details.”
The important thing about novelists as compared with theo-
rists is that they are good at details. This is another reason why
Dickens is a useful paradigm of the novel. To quote Orwell again,
”The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’ writing is the
unnecessary detail”; ”He is all fragments, all details—rotten archi-
tecture, but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when
he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act
inconsistently.”2' If we make Dickens paradigmatic of the West, as
I hope my fantasized Africans and Asians would, then we shall
see what was most instructive about the recent history of the West
in its increased ability to tolerate diversity. Viewed another way,
this is an increased ability to treat apparent inconsistency not as
something to be rejected as unreal or as evil, but as a mark of the
inadequacy of our current vocabularies of explanation and adju-
dication.2 This change in our treatment of apparent inconsistency
is correlated with an increasing ability to be comfortable with a
variety of different sorts of people, and therefore with an increas-
ing ability to leave people alone to follow their own lights. This
willingness is reflected in the rise of pluralistic bourgeois democ-
racies, societies in which politics becomes a matter of sentimental
calls for alleviation of suffering rather than of moral calls to
greatness.
It may seem strange to attribute this sort of willingness to the
recent West—a culture often said, with excellent reason, to be
racist, sexist, and imperialist. But it is of course also a culture which
is very worried about being racist, sexist, and imperialist, as well
as about being Eurocentric, parochial, and intellectually intoler-
ant. It is a culture which has become very conscious of its capacity
for murderous intolerance and thereby perhaps more wary of
intolerance, more sensitive to the desirability of diversity, than
any other of which we have record. I have been suggesting that
we Westerners owe this consciousness and this sensitivity more
to our novelists than to our philosophers or to our poets.

121
 Appendix

When tolerance and comfortable togetherness become the

watchwords of a society, one should no longer hope for world-
historical greatness. If such greatness—radical difference from the
past, a dazzlingly unimaginable future—is what one wants, as-
cetic priests like Plato, Heidegger, and Suslov will fill the bill. But
if it is not, novelists like Cervantes, Dickens, and Kundera may
suffice?“ Because philosophy as a genre is closely associated with
the quest for such greatness—with the attempt to focus all one’s
thoughts into a single narrow beam and send them out beyond
the bounds of all that has been previously thought—it is among
the philosophers of the West that contemporary Western self-hatred
is most prevalent. It must be tempting for Africans and Asians—
the principal victims of Western imperialism and racism—to see
this self-hatred as about what the West deserves. But I would
suggest that we take this self-hatred as just one more symptom of
the old familiar quest for purity which runs through the annals of
the ascetic priesthood in both East and West. If we set these annals
to one side, we may have a better chance of finding something
distinctive in the West which the East can use, and conversely.

Notes

1. The students were reported to have played a recording of this

symphony as the troops were being held up by masses of people jam-
ming the highways leading into the square. The same point about the
impact of the West could be made by reference to the student speakers’
repeated invocations of Thoreau and of Martin Luther King.
2. See Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. by J. Glenn
Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 29 ff. (Was Heissl Dcnkcn?
[Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1954], pp. 11 ff.).
3.]. Habermas, ”Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Contro-
versy from a German Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989):
p. 453.
4. Heidegger, Sl’fll and Zcil, 10th ed. (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1963), p 6.
5. See Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 24, 41 (an Sacha dL’S Denkcns [Tubingenz
Niemeyer, 1969], pp. 25, 44).
6. See, for example, Graham Parkes, ed., Heideggerand Asian Thought
(l-lonolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987). As what I say below makes

122
 Appendix

clear, I have doubts about Parkes’ claim (p. 2) that ”Heidegger's claim to
be the first Western thinker to have overcome the tradition should be
taken more seriously if his thought can be brought to resonate deeply
with ideas that arose in totally foreign cultural milieux, couched in more
or less alien languages, over two millennia ago." This resonance can also
be taken as a sign of regression rather than of transcendence—as a way
of returning to the womb rather than a way of overcoming.
7. See Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? p. 30 (Was Heisst Dcnken?
p. 11). Heidegger goes on to say that Nietzsche’s words die Waste witchst
”come from another realm than the appraisals of our age” (ays cinem
andcrcn Ort als diegaengigcn Bvurtcilnngen ansercr Zcit). For another pas-
sage which brushes aside happiness as beneath the Thinker's considera-
tion, see The Question Concerning "Technology, trans. by W. Lovitt (New
York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 65 (Holzwegc [Frankfurt Klustermann,
1972], p. 204): ”Metaphysics is history's open space wherein it becomes
a destining that the suprasensory world, the Ideas, God, the moral law,
the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number,
culture, civilization, suffer the loss of their constructive force and become
void."
8. Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. by Linda Asher (New York:
Grove Press, 1986), p. 160.
9. I discuss this urge, with reference to Heidegger, on pp. 107 f. and
119 f. of my Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
10. Kundera, The Art ofthc Novel, p. 159.
11. lbid., p. 7
12. lbid., p. 5. Here, at the beginning of his book, Kundera thinks of
Husserl’s chcnswelt and Heidegger’s In-dcr-Wclt-Scin as standing over
against ”the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced
the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation,”
and casually assimilates both to his own notion of ”the essential relativity
of human affairs.” But this assimilation is overly polite, and misleading.
Husserl and Heidegger were insistent on getting down to the basic,
underlying structure of the chcnswclt, or of In-dcr-l/Vclt-Scin. For Kun-
dera, we make up this structure as we go along.
13. See Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1988), for an account of Heidegger’s career that distinguishes
the pragmatism, the emphasis on Vorwm'f and Bczaglichkeit, in Scin and
lot! from the post-Kchrc quietism.
14. lbid., p. 162.
'15. lbid., p. 14.
16. lbid., p. 144.
17. lbid., p.20.
 Apevnflix,
18. Yeats’ translation ofSwift’s . . imitaresipoteris, slremmm pro virili
libertatis vindicem.”
19. George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 414—415. In his illuminating The
Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), John Rodden has noted both
that Orwell in this essay ”directly identified himself with Dickens” (p.
181) and that the identification worked, in the sense that ”What Orwell
wrote of Dickens [in the last sentence of the passage 1 have quoted] soon
applied to himself” (p. 22). One facet of the identification was the
patriotism common to the two men—a sense of identification with
England and its history which trumped any theory about the place of
England in universal history. From the theorist’s point of view, patriot-
ism is invariably suspicious, as is any loyalty to a mere sector of space-
time. But for people like Orwell, Dickens, and Kundera, the only
substitute for patriotism is attachment to some other spatiotemporal
sector, to the history of something which is not a country—e.g., the
history of the European novel, ”the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.”
20. Orwell, in Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 460, says that ”Even the
millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen
leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, regardless of what his conduct may be,
responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced
a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people
who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both
read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist
of his stature) and buried in Westminister Abbey.” If one had asked
Dickens whether he had thought that ideal and that code inherent in
human nature, or rather an historically contingent development, he
would presumably have replied that he neither knew nor cared. That is
the kind of question which ”the wisdom of the novel” rejects as without
interest or point.
21. These two quotes are from Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 1, pp. 450
and 454, respectively.
22. l have argued elsewhere (”Freud and Moral Deliberation,” in The
Pragmatist’s Freud, ed. Smith and Kerrigan [Baltimorez Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986]) that the increased popularity of Freudian expla-
nations of untoward actions is an example of this changed attitude
toward apparent inconsistency.
23. Byron is a good example of someone who saw the rising stock of
tolerance and comfortableness as endangering the possibility of great-
ness. As my colleague Jerome McGann has pointed out to me, he took
out this exasperation on, among other people, Cervantes: ”Cervantes
smiled Spain’s chivalry away; / A single laugh demolished the right arm/

124
 Appendix
Of his own country;—seldom since that day/Has Spain had heroes”
(Don 1mm, X111, 11). I have not said much about the poetry-novel contrast
(as opposed to the philosophy-novel contrast) in this essay, but I would
suggest that there is as much difference between Byron and Dickens as
between either and Heidegger. That is why literature-vs.-philosophy is
too coarse-grained a contrast to be useful. Mill and Dickens, or Farrell
and Dewey, are closer to each other than Dickens is to Proust, or Byron
to Holderlin.

125
 K

“In the prq‘lzce to this candid and unfit! exchange ofletter: with
Richard Ron} Anindita Baltleo makes cogent and well—observed ,
‘nitieir’m ofEurocentricphilosophical institutions, suggesting
way: ofmoving beyond them withoutfalling into a politics of
identity. The letter: thatfillow are afine example ofwhat they
advocate, genuine dialogue between real interlocutorr, and not ,
fantasiesofwhat some ‘other’ might say. ”
iCleo McNelly Karim, Rutgers University

' iThis workconsiSts of a number of letters between the author

';and philosopher Richard Rorty, and an essay of Rorty’s to
which-the letters refer. The theme of cultural otherness has,
. contemporary relevance, and the worldwide persistence of
religious beliefs and traditions highlights the importance of a
genuine encounter ofworld teligidns. The letters explore how
> to generate a creative and critical crosscultural discourse not
only by challenging stereotypes about cultures and subcultures
in general and traditions of thought in particular, but also by -
being careful not to abolish the common ground on which
stereotypes can be addressed. '

Wuuu ' I I
I