6. The History of Ideas

I said above that, although I talk about theology and theologians, my essay is not a work in theology. I should like to clarify that statement now. First, the dissertation it is not a work of a contemporary Hindu theologian of the kind that Francis Clooney had described: a believer who allows her “belief to remain an explicit and influential factor in their research, analysis and writing.” My object is, thus, not to articulate a personal interpretation of a tradition, and personal beliefs are intentionally bracketed. Second, my primary concern is not to reconstruct theologies so as to isolate them as phenomena, such as John Carman was doing in his remarkable work on the theology of Rāmānuja.^[1] Third, the dissertation it is not conceived as a work in comparative theology, either of the “soft” kind exemplified by Julius Lipner, a reading of Rāmānuja that relies on categories of Catholic theology, or of the “hard” kind exemplified by Francis Clooney, making one’s beliefs vulnerable to truths of other traditions in a personal hermeneutics project.^[2] Rather, I see this project as an essay in the history of ideas, with the additional clarification that the specific ideas whose history I attempt to track happen to be theological, or belong to a mode of discourse that is best characterized as theological.

The history of ideas, of course, means different things to different historians, and here I have deliberately followed the method of historical interpretation that is concerned specifically with texts as speech acts, articulated by Quentin Skinner and inspired by the philosophy of language of J. L. Austin.^[3] Very briefly, Skinner’s thesis about the method of interpretation in intellectual history, which concerns itself with ideas expressed in texts, is that one ought to approach the study of ideas in a “properly historical style.” Such style attempts not to assume the perspective of our interest in an issue, so far as that is possible, but to “see things” the way that the authors of the texts we study have seen them.^[4]

To bring home what this way of interpretation precisely involves, Skinner contrasts it with ways of reading that approach authors and texts with preconceived expectations of what they should discuss. One such way of reading is the querying of past great philosophers, political theorists, etc., on so-called “perennial issues,” questions universally relevant to man, in an attempt to reconstruct what a past master might teach us about things that are important to us, under the assumptions that, the questions being “perennial,” the past masters must have addressed them. A similar way of reading is through a focus on so-called “unit ideas,” for instance, the idea of progress, social contract, equality, the problems of knowing, etc., that are from the start conceived as a sort of an ideal type—one might even describe them as Platonic—and are part of constituted disciplines. This way of pursuing the history of ideas often comes with a frame of evaluation that takes the vantage point of a formed notion, or of one’s own philosophy—think of Hegel—from which individual authors are judged: they have “failed to develop” the idea, “anticipated” it, “contribute” to it, etc.^[5] In any case, the purpose is to look at and evaluate ideas and beliefs from our own perspective. The problem Skinner has with such readings is that they tend not to notice what was important to the authors of the texts: what precise concerns they had in writing them or in saying what they said.

The “properly historical style,” on the other hand, attempts to situate texts in intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse which would enable us to recognize not what such texts might mean to us, but what they have meant to their authors: this, in fact, is often indispensable even for the bare understanding of their meaning. To put it differently, to understand the meaning of texts as their authors have meant them, to see things their way, intellectual history as history should attempt to approach meaning not from our vantage point, but from the perspective of their authors.

To appreciate this, it is necessary to disambiguate several senses of “meaning” that, in Skinner’s finding, are often conflated.^[6] One may talk about meaning in the sense of “sense” and “reference,” that is, in the sense of the denotative or signification functions of words and sentences in a text. Or, one may look at meaning from the reader-response approach to interpretation, such as that exemplified by the notion of “surplus meaning” of Paul Ricoeur, who recognized that a text might have initially had a “pristine” meaning, but claimed that such meaning over time, and through the polysemic and metaphorical features of language, assumes autonomous and acquired meanings not intended by its author. This way of looking at meaning answers the question, “what does this text mean to me?” Finally, “meaning” may be used in the sense of authorial intention, which answers the question, “what does a writer mean by what he or she says in a given text?”

How does this third sense of “meaning” differ from the first? It is to distinguish the two that Skinner appeals to Austin’s theory of speech acts. Consider the following case. “A policeman sees a skater on a pond and says ‘The ice over there is very thin.’ The policeman says something and the words mean something. To understand the episode, we obviously need to know the meaning of the words. But we also need to know what the policeman was doing in saying what he said.”^[7] The policeman makes a declarative statement, which, nevertheless, has on top of its sense an “intended force” with which it is issued: it is a warning. The policeman not only says something, but does something in saying it. Austin called this feature of language “illocutionary force,” and we need not spend much time on it, except that we must note two things. The illocutionary force that turns speech into an act is a feature solely of speech: whether the policeman does succeed in warning the skater or not is, for the purpose of speech, irrelevant. The point is that the sentence as an act has such force, over and above its denotation. So, let us characterize this sense of meaning as speaker’s intention. Second, the fact that statements are a mode of communication makes this intention public, insofar as it is also intended to be understood.

How does this apply to the interpretation of texts and the history of ideas? Well, to understand the meaning of a text, it is not enough just to understand how words are used or what sentences mean; it is, further, required to understand the authorial intention, the illocutionary force of statements in a text. In other words, it is required to understand what specific speech act an author was performing in writing the text or in saying what s/he says. To do that, it is required to identify the context in which something is said—the background, the intended audience, what is intended to be communicated—and once we approach interpretation form such standpoint, we begin asking, on top of what a text means, what specific speech act the author is performing. In the South Asian context, for instance, we may ask whether a text that we study is a case of justification through intertextuality, of overcoading, of an intervention in a preexisting debate or a discourse, etc. Identifying the kinds of speech acts in a text, then, not reconstruction of beliefs, becomes the “specifically historical mode of reading,” or intellectual history, because such reading attempts to track authorial intention.

Two additional notes are apposite. First, Skinner insists that intentions are not motives: an intention does not answer to why an author wrote what s/he wrote, only to what s/he was doing in writing. Insofar as speech acts are forms of communication, they are intended to be understood, and, thus, are public. “[T]he intentions with which anyone performs a successful act of communication must, ex hypothesi, be publicly legible.”^[8] Such reading, then, does not aspire to “get in the head” of anyone, but simply to understand what the illocutionary force of a statement or a text is. In the case of the policeman, the public intention can be known from the tone with which the statement is given, from hand gestures, etc. In reading texts, “we need first of all to grasp the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept, in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time. We need, in short, to be ready to take as our province … the social imaginary, the complete range of the inherited symbols and representations that constitute the subjectivity of an age.”^[9] What one needs, really, is sort of a contextual omniscience.

Second, such reading is often indispensable even if one’s express aim is not historical interpretation, but, say, properly philosophical engagement with a text. This is so because meaning as sense and reference is often impossible to ascertain without appreciating meaning as authorial intention. Let me illustrate this with a case that is closer to home. One of the most puzzling and discussed passages in Śaṅkara’s works is his comment on the statement satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1. This is, obviously, a very important passage because it contains the definition of Brahman and Śaṅkara’s attempt to explain how language and the Upaniṣads reveal Brahman that is outside the domain of language, but it is puzzling for various reasons, some of which involve Śaṅkara’s both affirming and denying that the pertinent statement is a case of co-referentiality such as the famous “blue lotus” illustration; both affirming and denying that the word jñānam stands for the verbal action of “knowing,” bhāva or dhātv-artha; and the use of lakṣaṇā/lakṣaṇa such that it is not clear if he talks about one or two features of language. (All of this I will discuss later.)

Various interpretations have been given of the passage,^[10] none of which makes a significant effort to situate it in the wider context of the contemporary Indian philosophy of language, and all of which fail to see two crucial things: first, that Śaṅkara grapples with two problems relating to Brahman and language, first, that Brahman is not a sentential reference, vākyārtha, and, second, that Brahman is not expressed by the primary signification function of individual words, vācyam—the two are different problems; second, that midway in the comment, the argument changes because the context changes, namely Śaṅkara moves on to discussing the further statement tasmād vā etasmād ātmanaḥ, which he takes to be identical in meaning to the paradigmatic identity statement tat tvam asi, and no longer views Brahman from the perspective of the category of tat, whose domain includes satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma, but shifts to the identity statement perspective, where language operates through the secondary signification function. Śaṅkara, then, returns to satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma from this higher perspective of the identity statement to modify the initial argument.

The whole argument cannot be appreciated without some grasp of the contemporary Indian philosophy of language, particularly Bhartṛhari and Kumārila, and without consulting Śaṅkara’s comment on the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 4.1.2, where he lays down the identity statement doctrine. Further, the argument can hardly be understood without figuring out what Śaṅkara is doing in writing the comment, which is addressing the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna meditation, in which Brahman of the Upaniṣads turned out to be a sentential reference, a definite description. Śaṅkara’s reply to the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna was the notion of the identity statements and of their meaning obtaining through the secondary signification function. Śaṅkara’s authorial intention, then, was to make an intervention in a preexisting discourse on Brahman, scripture, and liberation, that was very close to home for him, but from which it was absolutely necessary to make an exception. We will unfold the details of this in the later chapters, but here the point is that to fail to see these details is to fail to see things Śaṅkara’s way, but it is also to fail to understand the meaning of this all-important passage so that one could engage its philosophy of language, ontology, etc., philosophically, or its notions of scripture and Brahman theologically.

With this in mind, I can now describe the character of my project. First, it is an interpretation of Śaṅkara’s understanding of a set of related ideas—scripture, dharma, the highest good, liberation—that does not attempt to reconstruct Śaṅkara’s understanding of the notions in itself, but looks at his theology as a set of interventions in a preexisting discourse on these ideas; it reads Śaṅkara’s theology as consisting of various speech acts with publicly available authorial intentions. The discourse, then, that takes place in Vedic theology, provides the requisite context without which Śaṅkara’s interventions cannot be appreciated, and eo ipso his understanding cannot be reconstructed, and it is for this reason that half of the dissertation is concerned with laying out the context.^[11]

Second, taking chapters one through nine as another, single context, the dissertation witnesses the appearance of the mahā-vākya idea in the theology of Sarvajñātman and provides, against that context, an interpretation of what mahā-vākya was for him and why he gave that name to the Upaniṣadic identity statements. In other words, the dissertation untangles from the context all the strands that are required to understand Sarvajñātman’s intention in calling the identity statements mahā-vākya, and with that benefit it explains just what was “great” in them: it relies on the meaning of Sarvajñātman’s mahā-vākyas as authorial intention to appreciate their meaning as sense. In doing the second, the essay subscribes to another principle in the study of ideas, expressed by one of the great intellectual historians of our time, Pierre Hadot: “[I]n the words of Aristotle, if one wishes to understand things, one must watch them develop and must catch them at the time of their birth.”^[12]

Footnotes and references:

[back to top]

[1]:

Carman 1974.

[2]:

Lipner 1986; Clooney 1993.

[3]:

Skinner 2002.

[4]:

Skinner 2002:vii.

[5]:

Skinner 2002:1-26, 57-89.

[6]:

Skinner 2002:90-102.

[7]:

Skinner 2002:104.

[8]:

Skinner 2002:97.

[9]:

Skinner 2002:102.

[10]:

For instance, Hirst 2005:154-151; Lipner 1997; Bartley 1986.

[11]:

My essay, then, differs from other scholarly works that treat Advaita soteriology primarily in this method of interpretation, the “properly historical style.” To illustrate, the notion of “scripture” in Advaita Vedānta is prominent in Francis Clooney’s monograph Theology After Vedānta (Clooney 1993). Clooney’s book, however, is primarily concerned with reading texts as a soteriological practice and as a tradition; with committed or transformative reading; with writing commentaries through the need to keep the tradition of reading fresh, etc. It is a project in theology, and in comparative theology at that. Scripture is also important in J. G. Suthren Hirst’s book Śaṃkara’s Advaita Vedānta: A Way of Teaching, but Hirst is concerned with reconstructing modes of teaching in scripture itself and in Śaṅkara, and whereas her reading of Śaṅkara is thorough, her engagement with Śaṅkara’s context is not: there is little in the way of solid intellectual history to be gleaned from the book (Hirst 2005). Anantanand Rambachan’s Accomplishing the Accomplished is, overall, a good intervention in the interpretation of Śaṅkara’s understanding of the respective role of scripture, personal experience, reasoning, and soteriological practice, but his engagement with Śaṅkara’s context is poor. Just to illustrate, he relies on the medieval Advaita Vedānta manuals the Vedānta-Sāra of Sadānanda and Vedānta-Paribhāṣā of Dharmarāja to “explain” what “Advaita Vedānta” as a unit “thinks,” “accepts,” “has a position on”, “finds,” etc.; indeed, the bulk of his book reads like a medieval manual (Rambachan 1991). A. G. Krishna Warrier’s The Concept of Mukti in Advaita Vedānta (Krishna Warrier 1961), Lance E. Nelson’s “Living Liberation in Śaṅkara and Classic Vedānta” (Nelson 1996), and Andrew J. Fort’s Jīvanmukti in Transformation (Fort 1998) are all valuable and insightful studies about liberation in Śaṅkara and Advaita Vedānta more broadly, some more historical than others, but generally exemplifying the “unit idea” approach. So far as I have been able to see, there are no dedicated studies of Śaṅkara’s understanding of dharma except insofar as it was the negative of Brahman as the proper domain of the pūrva-mīmāṃsā, although one could make a strong case that it is precisely the notion of dharma that is the connecting tissue which keeps scripture, liberation, and the highest good together, as we shall see.

[12]:

Hadot 2002:2.