It will not be an exaggeration to say that Meykandar’s 'Civajnaana Botham', a philosophic classic that emerged as the critique of the different idealistic and positivistic schools of thought of the Buddhists and Vedanties, is the most profound philosophic treatise that has emerged not only in the Indian soil but also possibly in the whole world.
It is genuinely a Metaphysica Universalis, a philosophical statement of the most primordial in man and because of that the most universal. It delineates and articulates what constitutes the existence of every man, no matter to what culture, religion and nation he belongs to. It is not an argument for Vedism, Buddhism, Agamism or any other cultural tradition of a narrow kind. It is not a romantic going back to a previous, presumably a glorious past and treating that as authoritative and justifying those beliefs presumed to be it’s essence. On the contrary it is a courageous venturing into the most fundamental in all men, an exercise in expounding what makes human existence what it is in fact.
It expounds TRUTHS that all thinking men could agree upon provided they dare to tear themselves away from the cultural, cultic, religious and philosophic prejudices that condition even their philosophic quests. For anyone INCAPABLE of raising themselves to this level of universality, of reasoning without FEAR solely in the pursuit of TRUTH, this text will remain a closed book, forever incomprehensible as Meykandar himself asserts in the preface.
The universality of aim is combined in this text with a rationality of approach. What we have in this text is Metaphysics transformed into the most universal, the most comprehensive Hermeneutic Science, i.e a science proper suited to inquire in a thoroughly rational manner the hidden and the mysterious surrounding even the ordinary human behaviour. The introduction of this magnificent philosophic classic which is simultaneously the most rigorous text in Hermeneutic Science is timely in the present world context where Hermeneutics is emerging again as a methodology most suited to the study of human behaviour.
The vast, monolithic and towering citadels of the positive sciences are crumbling down slowly but surely under the attack of some brilliant hermeneutic philosophers - Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricouer, Derrida - just to name a few. Despite many counter attacks to arrest this rebellion, new concepts of science along with their own methodologies are bursting through the limited and restrictive horizons of the positive sciences and making impressive inroads into the realms of the respectable in academic life. Many practical researchers in the social sciences, unlike the philosophers, are trying to formulate in less airy veins, the rational structure of these sciences to varying degrees of success. Deetz (1973), Gauld & Shotter (1977), Parker (1985) and many others have attempted to work out the guiding rational principles of what have begun to be called Hermeneutic Sciences or Interpretive Social Sciences. More recently Silverman (1993) and many others see this debate as between qualitative and quantitative methodologies, argue in favour of qualitative, interpretive studies of data and work out guidelines to ensure rationality. In the vein of Ricouer and many other hermeneutic philosophers, Deetz for example, argues that hermeneutic sciences are concerned with understanding a phenomena, where to understand is to literally stand-under and to do so is to explicate a particular behaviour’s implicative structure of possibilities (Deetz, 1973, p. 155, italics mine). Something similar can be found in the philosophic rumblings of many other hermeneuts as well.
While those wedded to the positive sciences, adhere to the received models of scientific research, which have been astonishingly successful in the realms of the physical, continue with their conjectures and refutations (Popper,1963 ), there are now a variety of hermeneuts on the scene who have worked out methodologies distinct from the conjectural and constructinistic models where hypothesis testing reigns supreme. We have the ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), Conversation Analysis (Scheggloff & Sacks, 1973 etc), Discourse Analysis (Coulthard & Montgomery, 1981; Hoey 1983 etc), Hermeneutic Analysis of Discourse (K. Loganathan Mutharayan, 1993) and so forth.
It is here that Tamil philosophic tradition from which emerged Civajnaana BOtam can meet the above new developments in the West. It appears that right from ancient times the Tamil folks were essentially hermeneuts and all their great achievements - Tolkappiyam, Tirukkural, Tirumantiram and many others that have withstood the test of time - were essentially treatizes with hermeneutics as their own methodology, the principles of which were already clearly formulated in Marapiyal, an independent text but which has come down to us as an appendix to Tolkappiyam, dated around the 3rd century B.C.
But recent researches in Sumero-Tamil indicates that the hermeneutic orientation of the Tamil folks were very ancient and also something that took firm roots in their mind very early indeed.
Dr Loganathan Krishnan @ Ullaganar
No comments:
Post a Comment