Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought

Youru Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415770163
• eBook ISBN: 9781135988135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

The striking parallels between Derrida's deconstruction and certain strategies eschewing oppositional hierarchies in Asian thought, especially in Buddhism and Daoism, have attracted much attention from scholars of both Western and Asian philosophy. This book contributes to this discussion by focusing on the ethical dimension and function of deconstruction in Asian thought.

Examining different traditions and schools of Asian thought, including Indian Buddhism, Zen, other schools of East Asian Buddhism, the Kyoto School, and Daoism, the contributors explore the central theme from different contexts and different angles. Insights and notions from the contemporary discussion of Derridean deconstruction and its ethic or Derridean-Levinasian ethic as a paradigm for comparison or interpretation are used as a framework.

Furthering our understanding of the relationship between deconstruction and the ethical in Asian traditions, this book also enriches the contemporary ethical discourse from a global perspective by bridging Asia and the West.

Part I
ETHICAL DIMENSIONS AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF NORMATIVE ETHICS IN ASIAN TRADITIONS

1
DISMANTLING NORMATIVITY IN INDIAN ETHICS—FROM VEDIC ALTARITY TO THE GĪTĀ’S ALTERITY*

Purushottama Bilimoria

This chapter begins with moral thinking in early India—the Vedic period—and the normative ethics that was developed then, in fledgling fashion, largely on the imperatives of a ritual cosmology and its aligned rites discourse. In due course of time, as perspectives changed, moral dilemmas and antinomies and irresoluble conflicts came to the surface—with other shifts occurring in the fabric of society. Vedic norms came increasingly into question, undermining the erstwhile normative structuration, confidence, violence, and power that this kind of formative moral plank—supposed to embody the originary and founding insights of Indian ethics and law—made possible or sanctioned. The chapter analyzes the rethinking and deconstruction of this transcendental framework during the classical period—when the Epics and the Bhagavad-Gītā emerged with a stronger social and self-reflexive conscience. The legacy of this period and the texts/textuality therefrom have left a large gap in the more logocentrically gounded Indian ethics—with which philosophers, jurists, ethicists, and political thinkers are still grappling.

I In the beginning…without beginning

I begin with the oft-cited platitude that the early Indian people—perhaps like human beings everywhere in their practical moral judgments—placed on the side of the “good” such values as happiness, health, survival, progeny, pleasure, calmness, friendship, knowledge, and truth. On the side of the “bad” were, more or less, their opposites or disvalues: misery or suffering, sickness and injury, death, barrenness, pain, anger, enmity, ignorance or error, and untruth. These positive and negative qualities are universalized, in principle at least, for all sentient beings, for it was felt that the highest good is possible when the whole world (gods included) can enjoy the good things that the cosmos has to offer. The summum bonum, however, expresses itself in the total harmony or homology of the cosmic and natural order characterized as

this highest good is the telos, the creative purpose and motivation that underpins human behavior. The prescribed pattern of social and moral order is thus conceived as a correlate—the perfect correspondence of the natural order. This is the totality of the ordered course of things, and therefore speaks, linguistically, i.e. in speech (vācya), to the truth of being or reality (sat) and hence underwrites the “Law” (or the “natural law”), transcendentally (

I.123.9; IV.51.5; V.8; X.300.1.2). The preeminent authority for this ontology that grounds the concomitant ethics is the Vedas. Their contents are simply “seen” or “heard” (śruti); the “revealed” speech is authorless, for “in the beginning there was neither being (sat) nor non-being (asat),” and yet “Vāc (Speech) the first-born of Truth (satya) spoke forth.” (Here, it is to be noted, the usual Judeo-Christian idea of a God to whom the source of the scriptures is owed is lacking or absent.¹) Conversely, the principles inscribed in the Vedas are embodied in the gods (the polymorphic pantheon of deities, immortal benign spirits or angelic beings, demonic counterparts as remnants of the first failed sacrifices) who serve as models and exemplary icons for human conduct. But the gods themselves are not in any deep ontological sense the “Other” either, for they are considered, via one preeminent hermeneutic reading of the chants or invocatory hymns (mantras), as emergently effervescent light-beings of pure mantric-effect. The quasi-divine beings, not lacking in consciousness or intentionality, but not necessarily representing transcendental conscience (a Heideggerean requirement) either, are therefore predisposed to being internalized or rendered as superintending agencies who will by dint of the operative autonomous law safeguard, for a deferred delivery, the apūrva or the efficacious traces of the rites of sacrifice performed on the altar-ity of fire as decreed. The authority then rests centrally with the texts or the linguistic “auctor” with an episteme that recedes into immemorial traditions of the hoary past (or of no-time, perhaps).

How far, though, this trope of “authority” unpacks in real moral terms, and impacts on the social lives of people, are issues that cannot be taken up fully in this short treatment, but are taken up in forthcoming work entitled Indian Ethics, Classical and Contemporary (Ashgate). Nevertheless, there are certain larger schemata and their structural impacts that are picked up in later traditions—including Buddhist critiques of the Brāhmanical morality and its excesses—that we need to consider.

Here a particular principle of social ordering is adopted (probably introduced into India by the Aryans around 2000 BCE), according to which society is organized into a fourfold (but originally threefold) functional division or “class” scheme, called

(literally, “colour” or “category.”). These are, with their respective preserves, namely,

, (brahmin), for religious and educational tasks; kşatriya, for sovereign and defence tasks; vaiśya, for agriculture and economic tasks; and śūdra, for menial tasks. (One is reminded here of Plato’s “stations-of-life” division.) Overall, the sources of power get distributed evenly at different places, and ideally differences in function need not entail differences in interests, rights, and privileges; but the outcome in practice shows otherwise. A system of sub-divisions or “castes’ (jātī) further proliferates in the class functions, gradually turning

into a discriminatory, hereditary-based institution. In any event, the brahmins certainly enjoy the better end of the system and they wield enormous power. A life-affirming but rigidly casuistic morality develops. In Max Weber’s judgment, the Vedas “do not contain a rational ethic”—if such an ethic did exist anywhere that far back (Weber, 1958, 261, 337)!

Vedic authority becomes normative in the later periods also; the Vedas are invoked as the source of ethics. To be noted is one other important institution, where three morally significant concepts emerge, namely, āśrama, dharma, and karma (or karman), culminating in the ethical concept of

—kingdom of ends—all of which are central to classical Hindu ethics. But before giving an overview of these concepts, one further point awaits mentioning.

In this Vedic ethical system one’s actions are consistent with that which promotes the good so perceived, and one should desist from doing that which promotes or stimulates the bad so that the

is not unduly disturbed. An act is therefore right if it conforms to this general principle, and an act is wrong if it contravenes it (and so is

or disorder) (

X.87.11; X.125.5). Since to do what is right safeguards the good of all qua

(the factual/descriptive order), it is assumed that it is more or less obligatory to do or perform the right acts (the “ought” or moral/prescriptive order). This convergence of the cosmic and the moral orders is universally commended in due course in the allembracing appellation of dharma (from its earlier sense of “religious ordinances and fixed principles”) (

IV.53.3; VII.89.5).

The “right” or rightness is simply identified with “rite”: it is formalized, taking in varying contexts (i.e. the obligation that is derived from a value, say, survival of the race, becomes the sui generic value itself; e.g., sacrifice, regardless of what is offered in the act). Rite now comes to possess an intrinsic moral worth and it becomes the defining normative frame of just about every moral value valorized.

Thereafter rite tends to assume, as it were, an imperious power all of its own, and people forget the original motivation or rationale underlying the imperative. Herein lies the originary violence in this ethical tradition, for laws are taken advantage of by the nobles (āryas), who form themselves into an elite and dictate the terms of priestly and ritual performatives. It loses its heteronymous imperative. Rites become increasingly pursued by individual wills for egoistic ends, optatively, and are adjudged in respect of their utility.

One group claims knowledge and therefore privilege over others in accordance with the (prescribed) rites, their correct performance, utility, and so on. This leads to the establishment of differential duties and moral codes for the elite and major groups or “classes” in society. Each “class” constitutes a needful functional unit in the larger complex. The stages or lifecycles an individual goes through may entail distinct or differently arranged moral rules, roles, and goals or values for the group or sub-group he or she belongs to. Likewise for kings and rulers, with added responsibilities and privileges. Differentia are superimposed on the organic unity of nature. A kind of oblique distributive justice is assumed, and in time the question of moral choice is categorically left out: one either does it or one does not, and enjoys the rewards or suffers the consequences thereof. Herein lie the rudiments of the idea of karma, which we develop later.

What counts as ethics, then, is largely the normative preoccupations; the justification is usually that this is the “divine” ordering of things (in the sense of locating the order in some transcendental plenum or law, depicted in the imageless and, later, iconic gods, not necessarily in an absolute or supremely existent being, as God). This is akin to the ancient, especially the Stoics’, conception of Natural Law in the Western tradition. This may also provide a basis for belief in the absoluteness of the moral law from which the rules and norms are supposed to have been derived. But virtually no attempt is made, until perhaps much later, or elsewhere in the broad tradition, at self-reflexively analyzing the logic of the ethical concepts and reasoning used. Indeed, questions such as: “What do we mean when we say of an action that it is morally right (or morally wrong)?” can hardly be said to have attracted the kind of critical attention afforded in (meta-)ethical thinking in recent times.

That is not to say, however, that genuine issues, concerns, and paradoxes of ethical relevance are not raised, even if they are couched in religious, mystical, or mythological ideas or terms. To give an illustration: Scriptures proscribe injury to creatures and meateating, but a priest would wrong the gods if he did not partake of the remains of a certain ritual animal sacrifice. With the gods wronged,

can not be maintained: what then should he do (Kane, 1968–9, vol. I.i, 1–3)? It also follows that meat-eating is not unambiguously decried in the Scriptures, as more recent studies have attempted to show. However, that qualification or thinking over paradoxical scenarios merely is not sufficient by itself, for exceptions do not constitute the weight and strength of much of the moral norms that govern the daily lives and affairs of the people...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• DECONSTRUCTION AND THE ETHICAL IN ASIAN THOUGHT
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I: ETHICAL DIMENSIONS AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF NORMATIVE ETHICS IN ASIAN TRADITIONS
• Part II: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DERRIDEAN-LEVINASIAN AND ASIAN ETHICAL THOUGHT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY