Thinking Between Worlds Meditative Reason

·期刊原文
Thinking Between Worlds Meditative Reason: Toward Universal Grammar
Between Worlds: The Emergence of Global Reason
By Ashok K. Gangadean
Reviewed by Michael G. Barnhart
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2000)
pp. 285-290
Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA

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It is noteworthy at a time when philosophy is often said to be "over" to find such a bold and comprehensive, almost systematic, philosophical vision as Ashok Gangadean offers his readers in these two volumes, Meditative Reason and Between Worlds, part of the Revisioning Philosophy series, edited by David Appelbaum (volumes 14 and 17, respectively). And although many comparative philosophers often suggest profound connections between disparate philosophical and cultural traditions, rarely do they come out with a bold theory seeking to unify such traditions. Professor Gangadean, a familiar figure on the scene of comparative philosophy, attempts just such a task, offering his vision of a kind of unified field theory of human reason, which he variously calls Logos, Meditative Reason, or Universal Grammar and which he associates with a host of philosophical absolutes from Plato's Good to Descartes' cogito and from Shankara's nirguṇa brahman to Nāgārjuna's śūnyatā. In fact, one of Gangadean's major theses is that all names for "What is First" are deeply synonymous despite, or, even more provocatively, in view of, their disparate origins. For Gangadean, because the major philosophical traditions both East and West may have exhausted their respective paradigms, the continued health of philosophy demands a shift to an interparadigmatic perspective that stands between worlds or is "transcategorial" in nature.

Gangadean's two books propose both a diagnosis and a therapeutic prescription for a fundamental intellectual problem that he feels is itself often unrecognized or misunderstood. Between Worlds, although published more recently, deals more particularly with the diagnosis. Meditative Reason represents the therapy, although many of the same themes crop up in both works. Because these are essay collections, such overlap is fairly natural, although at times readers might wish for a more graduated and extended narrative that systematically locates each facet of Gangadean's thinking. Indeed, given the systematic nature of his approach, the disjunctive organization of an essay collection sometimes complicates the business of connecting all his ideas and leaves the reader wandering back and forth between the essays, trying to put it all together. This is profound and ramified philosophizing in the traditional style and deserves a lengthy and highly organized presentation. One improvement that the newer Between Worlds enjoys over the earlier book is the inclusion of an index, a help in cross-referencing the various themes ingredient to Gangadean's view.

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The fundamental philosophical problem Gangadean wrestles with is that of incommensurability. However, he sees incommensurability not as just an intercultural or linguistic phenomenon but as a deep philosophical issue embedded in the very nature of human thinking and therefore cutting across all versions of the self/other relationship and imperiling the very basis of human communication. The reason why Gangadean feels incommensurability is traditionally unrecognized and misunderstood stems from the fact that philosophers have failed to link all the various issues in metaphysics and epistemology to the formal analysis of thought (as opposed to language), thus failing to see that there is a logical basis for incommensurability -- in fact, a kind of logical inevitability to the fragmentation of sense that incommensurability involves.

This point is the linchpin of Gangadean's philosophical analysis, and although it justifiably enjoys prominence in most of his essays, the arguments on which it is based are somewhat buried in a very technical and closely argued presentation on logic and predication in chapter 10 of Between Worlds and a more discursive and informal discussion in chapter 2 of Meditative Reason. The problem Gangadean raises is crucial to appreciating the manner in which he goes about formulating his therapy of Universal Grammar, because otherwise the language of the "meditative voice" seems unduly strained or contrived. Especially as most philosophers approaching this material will assume the background of Russelian or Fregean mathematical logic, given Gangadean's fundamental departure from this view, opportunities for misunderstanding are legion.

Without rehearsing all the arguments and technicalities, Gangadean adopts Fred Sommers' revival of Aristotelian Traditional Formal Logic with its plus/minus calculus of terms and tree theory of categories. [1] Under Gangadean's analysis, while Fregean logic and semantics provide an analysis of truth and reference -- that is, extensionality -- Sommers' logic of terms offers an analysis of sense and predicability -- intensionality. While Gangadean credits Frege with the important and de-psychologizing insight that sense is one thing and judging another, by adopting a truth-functional analysis of language Frege failed to pursue the implications of such a distinction. Namely, sense must be rigorously distinguished from reference, for reference pertains to the conditions for correct judgment in the application of concepts to the real world of objects while sense involves, in an almost transcendental manner, the predicative term relations that determine the intelligible contents of such judgments. Behind every sentential expression of our thoughts there lies a background series of hierarchically organized concepts or terms that follow rules that at least approximate Sommers' calculus of terms. Without such an "intensional semantics" at the root of expression and thinking, Gangadean argues, the very distinction between sense and nonsense would disappear, not to mention the fact that reference, naming, and ostension would lack any satisfactory epistemological explanation.

In fact, this is the very criticism of Frege's "extensional semantics" that inspired Sommers' original turn toward Aristotelian categories of thought. Gangadean labels this tendency to confuse the semantics of sense with those of reference the "exten-

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sionalist fallacy." Building on this point, Gangadean further argues that not only can there be different such intensional systems but that differences in perspective invariably reflect differences in sense or the predicability of terms. Thus, systematically different categorial systems structure entirely different "life-worlds." However, one mustn't think that natural languages and cultures correspond in any simplistic one-to-one fashion to uniquely different systems of thought. Rather, since thought is one thing and cultural and linguistic expression another, different languages may harbor identical thought structures, and the same natural language may divide over systematically different life-worlds. The same holds true of culture and thought as well. Corresponding to the distinction between sense and reference or judgment, Gangadean draws a principled distinction between thought on the one hand and natural language and cultural practice on the other. Thus, the fundamental philosophical challenge to communication for Gangadean is not cultural or linguistic but intensional, the problem of mediating between different sense-worlds or conceptual schemes, whether inter- or intra-culturally.

Gangadean labels the analysis of different systems of predication, and thus of sense, "formal ontology." The insistence that all categories of thought are relative to a formal ontological scheme he calls the thesis of "ontological relativity." Because different ontological schemes are systematically different, they are radically incommensurable.

Thus, it becomes clear that reference and truth are ontologically relative because of the relativity of sense. So, there can be no common or identical sense, reference or truth between different worlds. Relations are constituted within a given world... Worlds are radically incommensurable. (Between Worlds, p. 126)

Furthermore, such incommensurability need not apply only to cultures and languages. Different life-worlds appear at any level: between the individual and the society, between different individuals, or between the different role-playing identities that each individual harbors. For example, allegiances to both the practice of science and a deep religious faith can fragment an individual's own identity into radically incompatible life-worlds of experience. In other words, no form of mediation between opposites is secure from the threat of incommensurability.

It is the pervasiveness of this threat that determines the nature of Gangadean's philosophical therapy. If different life-worlds are formally incommensurable, then any kind of meaningful communication cannot be on the pattern of more system building, more life-world construction. Any such overarching system of meaning would replace rather than incorporate each mutually opposing life-world and so eclipse communication as surely as incommensurability challenges it. A "Universal Grammar" will have to confer the ability creatively to transform one's mind or consciousness to the radically different molds of such life-worlds. In other words, any kind of mediating consciousness will have to be so radically transformational that it is effectively empty or formless in a manner reminiscent of Buddhist śūnyatā. Because such a formless kind of rationality must be thoroughly non-predicational in nature, Gangadean suggests the term "meditative."

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However, he has another and perhaps even better reason for calling such a mediational "voice" meditative. Although as natural beings who occupy many and opposite roles, speak natural languages, and live culturally specific lives, we therefore simultaneously inhabit mutually incommensurable languages of thought, Gangadean argues that we are afflicted with egocentric tendencies that lead us into "identity thinking." That is, we apply the logical principle of noncontradiction to the search for metaphysical substance, in order to cope with the inevitable fragmentation of everyday life. We try to stake our existence on a fixed identity, which, of course, requires a system of predications to substantialize it. We attempt to fix ourselves in a web of meaning, as it were. The futility of such a move then leads to existential despair and suffering. Application of more such identity thinking simply intensifies the suffering of the existential ego and cuts us off from our ability to move between worlds and communicate across incommensurable differences.

The only antidote, in Gangadean's view, is to confront and transcend such egological identity thinking that clings to incommensurable differences to assure fixity and substance. Drawing an explicit parallel with Arjuna's predicament in the Bhagavad Gītā, Gangadean insists on the transformative power of distinguishing between the ego and a true self that is identical to the universal in the manner of Ātman and Brahman. That is, as Arjuna leaves behind his own ego-identity in realizing that he is but the witness self beyond all action, so the only effective therapy for the existential suffering of incommensurability is a similarly meditative departure from identifying oneself with any fixed life-world. Therefore, individual psychotherapy and religious identification of the self with the "Unitive Force" or primal origin of sense and meaning, "What is First," become one and the same process. And only under the conditions of such a "paradigm shift" can reason, morality, and law prevail within human consciousness.

No doubt much of this will appear highly speculative and unargued to many philosophers, although Gangadean's discussions of metaphor (which he makes the basis for literal meaning), Descartes' cogito (which becomes a pattern for the "meditative voice"), and intensional semantics should intrigue and challenge no matter what one's philosophical persuasion may be. Indeed, in Meditative Reason, Gangadean himself adopts the language of "experiment" and "hypothesis" in discussing the results of this "research." However, in all fairness, to require either a proof of the existence of a Universal Grammar or some sort of analytical discussion of its properties would be to miss the point. Insofar as such a concept represents the absolute limit of human thinking, it defies any possible proof of its existence, and insofar as it is "transcategorial," it cannot be expressed in subject/predicate form. Rather, what Gangadean seems to be suggesting is that once the nature of "identity thinking" is thoroughly deconstructed, once one attempts such an "experiment," the "meditative voice" naturally and experientially emerges for the practitioner. Thus, much of what he argues in these books can be seen as an invitation to participate in such a process, and that is the most one can hope for in a philosophical venue.

In fact, and this may be the value of comparative philosophy, it may be that one can only see the purpose and pedigree of such a philosophical strategy from a

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comparative standpoint. Both Nāgārjuna and Shankara, each in their separate fashions, may be seen in this light. And the familiar Buddhist metaphor of the boat, symbolizing convention and logic, that one abandons on crossing the stream to enlightenment and Buddha-nature seems particularly apposite. That is, the transformation of one's consciousness or mentality is necessary for insight into that which is truly essential and universal. However, I do think there are important and critical issues that can be raised in the context of this sort of thinking. I will confine myself to two basic concerns, one logical and the other more general and metaphysical.

No doubt some philosophers will object to the adoption of Sommers' logical calculus as an adequate account of natural language. While this is not my concern, the reason behind the objection is, I think, important. In discussing the extensionalist fallacy, Gangadean criticizes Frege for confusing sense and reference by adopting a truth-functional semantics. The idea is that because truth-functionality has to do with what makes an expression true or factual it applies to judgment and not meaning or sense. Behind every judgment there must be intelligible contents about which such judging takes place. Truth-functionality tells us when the conditions of correct judgment are satisfied, not what makes one expression sensible and another not. Thus, sense requires a different sort of logical account than judgment and reference. Furthermore, since sense is primarily cognitive and an element of thought, it must also be distinguished from expression, in other words, anything that can be thought of in "pictorial" terms as the early Wittgenstein attempted to do. Equally, Gangadean criticizes "ordinary language" philosophers who follow the later Wittgenstein in amalgamating thought and expression through rules of use. Again, this is putting use ahead of meaning or sense and attempts to substitute linguistic behavior, something visible and public, for thought. The point leads Gangadean to postulate a kind of atomic sense element corresponding to every possible predication. As he remarks:

However helpful these pictures, diagrams, models, "interpretations" may be they are not replacements for the immediate intensional relation. "Man being mortal" means Man being mortal. This is the best that can be done. It cannot be improved upon. Sense connections cannot be pictured, they can only be thought. (Between Worlds, p. 323)

Given that Gangadean stresses the relational nature of all distinctions, adopting Buddhism's "dependent co-arising" as more or less a logical principle -- what he sometimes calls the "law of relativity" -- the seemingly independent existence of such sense elements seems counterintuitive. Or, to put the point differently, if sense and reference or sense and expression are distinguishable, then wouldn't the law of relativity suggest that they dependently co-arise in such a way that sense, reference, and truth cannot exist independently? A possible response, I suppose, would be that here, again, incommensurability can strike, and sense implies one sort of categorial structure and reference another; each sports a separate logic incommensurable with the other.

The other possible concern or challenge is more metaphysical in nature but it also raises issues of psychotherapy. The ever-present danger of egological thinking or "egocentric minding" sounds a leitmotif throughout both books, but particularly

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Meditative Reason. But why is this a danger? And what "logic" governs the move from within one's categorial scheme to the Universal Grammar without? What accounts for the presence of the egological element in human consciousness? Why is "identity thinking" itself such a force in human mentality? And how is it that we come to an acknowledgment of the fragmentary aspect of conventional and categorially bound thinking? Do categorial schemes of meaning manifest any logical instability of themselves?

In part, there is an answer to this last question in that Gangadean suggests that identity thinking, at any level but certainly at that of categorial scheme, is inherently unstable in that the principle of noncontradiction itself violates the relativity that the systematic nature of sense and meaning requires. Hence, one cannot predicate without implicitly invoking a relativity, which, because it is universal in scope, invariably leads the mind outside the confines of a categorial scheme. This is a typically Mādhyamika Buddhist move, again reminiscent of Nāgārjuna. And perhaps the response to my other questions lies in a similar direction in the sense that just as enlightenment dispels delusion, one cannot answer questions regarding the origin of the egocentric without slipping into "identity thinking." Or perhaps as the "Unified Field of Relativity" suggests, any universal will have to be an "empty" absolute, pouring itself out as a dialectically unified set of opposing categorial fields of meaning. However, just why we humans seem inevitably to get stuck in our own little solipsistic universes of discourse, especially when they are in reality one, remains a question.

To be sure, both books are exciting intellectual journeys and demonstrate the potential that an increasingly global awareness of philosophical tradition offers.

Note
1. See Fred Sommers' book The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) for a detailed account of this approach.