The World as Text
Philosophy in the genuine sense of the word or metaphysics as such begins when we take the WHOLE WORLD as a TEXT that needs to be understood.
Because the SEEING the WORLD AS TEXT is textual, the Global, Local and Sequential organizational structures pertain to it. There is also from the communicative point of view the Extentional-Intentional structures as integral components of it. It is this distinction that in traditional metaphysics, both in the East and the West , that goes by the name of Appearance vs Reality, phenomenal vs noumenal, physical vs metaphysical and so forth. It is also with this kind of SEEING presupposed that Meykandar begins his celebrated Civanjaanabotham, quite unique in this not only in India but also the whole world.
BEING is shown as the Ground of WORLD INTENTIONALITY where it is shown to exist as the ordaining principle, the ANai , the presence of which is felt by us in our moral struggles. Our ethical constitution forces us to acknowledge a transpersonal SOURCE for our ethical essence , that which is ABSOLUTELY PURE and which in turn purifies us.
In this he distinguishes himself from the Vedantic where inquiry begins with " Then therefore the enquiry into Brahman" which ALREADY presuposses the TRUTH of Brahman, the reality of which is one of the central questions of genuine philosophical/metaphysical enquiries.
Meykandar avoids this by taking the World as TEXT which is COMMON to all and constitutes THAT which needs to be understood and without anything like Brahman. to begin with at least.
In Civanjaanabootham the presence of BEING itself is shown by taking the WORLD AS TEXT and noting the discontructive (sangkaram) processes there. The reader is taken through a journey where the eyes are opened and through unfailing logical reasoning, is taken towards seeing for himself the presence of BEING, the Primordial as that capable of the disconstructive-disclosive processes, the cangkaara kaaraNaakiya mutal .
The world as a whole has the WHOLE-PART structure for anyone to see who, on seeing it, would NOT dismiss the EXTENTIONAL as mythiya, an illusion, an incomprehensible magic-like reality etc. But in addition to this it has also the Athikaara muRaimai, a sequentiality though at this level it is also cyclic or repetitive. The whole world is WITHDRAWN and reissued, terminated and re-initiated, dissolved and disclosed, disconstructed and renewed. And this episodizing happens at all levels, the Global and Local. The whole world and everything in it, the microscopic and the macroscopic , the psychical and physical are NOT FREE of these episodizing - terminating the ongoing and initiating something else simultaneously as there now and which before was concealed.
A close look at these episodizations disclose the five-fold component processes of : production, sustenance, disconstruction and through these those of REVEALING and HIDING, the Pancakrityas which are also understood as the functions of mantra ci-va-ya-na-ma. The AGENTIVE CAUSE, Nimitta Kaaranan , of these episodizing activities is BEING for which reason HE is also known as Pancha kiruttian, THAT which is the agent of these five fold processes.
Now it is only at this point the difference between Tamil Vaishnavism and Saivism emerges at least in the version of Visistavaita. While Vaishnavism sees and acknowledges the Whole-Part structure of the world and builds its metaphysics, that which goes under the name of Visistatvaitam, on it, it FAILS to see the Sequential Structure, the Athikaara muRaimai, the presence of DYNAMIC MOVEMENT, the Dance that is universally present and which pertains also to the world as a Whole. Nammazvaar noted this but his insight here was NOT developed further by the VaishaNava Acaryas , it would appear. BEING as the world as a whole and thus contains as its bodily parts everything in it is Narayana, the ancient Purusha . Not that it is false but this Narayana does NOT DANCE and hence BEING as Narayana is only a PARTIAL understanding, that which enables us to comprehend the Whole-Part Structure but not the MOVEMENT based Sequential Structure.
Now it is NOT that , to be fair, Vaishnavism does comprehend the Pancakritiyas -BEING , but it appears to see it, within BEING-IN-the-WORLD, as the functions of the antharyaami. But however the point of Meykandar is that to disconstruct the World as a WHOLE , the BEING must be transcendent to it. The BEING IN the whole world as only the IMMANENT reality CANNOT disconstruct the whole world as such.
But why this is important?
It is enormously important for it is the understanding of BEING as the absolutely transcendental to the whole world in addition to being immanent, that we begin to UNDERSTAND the presence of ANAVAM as the metaphysical substance underlying the destructive but NOT the productive and BEING as Siva, HE who SAVES the psychic entities by exerting his POWER over it. In failing to transcend the World as a Whole and remaining fixed to being IN it, Visistatvaitam fails to acknowledge the presence of ANaavam and hence works with a Fundamental Ontology that is quite defective in an important way.
Now Advaita Vedanta, by dismissing the whole world as magical, irreal, dream-like , illusory i.e. aarObitham, addhyaasa and so forth fails to SEE the whole world as a TEXT with a duality of structure. By wrongly interpreting the Neti, the negation of the Upanishads, it DOES NOT SEE the world as whole that points towards an INTENTIONALITY, through its EXTENTIONALITY.. the Deep Structure through the Surface Structure features.
These differences are NOT minor. They mean totally different ways of life and have different kinds of implications not only for the religious but also the personal and social existence.
ULLAGANAR
( 9-2-1998 )
No comments:
Post a Comment