Truth, belief, intentionality, eudaimonia, ought
I want to respond to three of your points Claus. First you are not talking only about the Greeks and the Romans because all the problems arising with respect to the phenomena of non-Western societies and culture are/were equally the problems in the frameworks of different varieties of culture. You not only talk about the Greeks and the Romans, you gave examples about the French and the English as well.
The second point is: you talk about the fact that people face the same problem in Europe of today when they talk about the Greeks and the Romans. You are absolutely right. But that confirms my point, namely, that the Greeks and the Romans had no religion. They were Pagan cultures and this is exactly the problem with India. The Christian culture doesn’t understand Greek — the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy is an example of that. He says we cannot think Greek. And his whole attempt to speak about what thinking is, what truth is, etc. — is an attempt to rescue the Greek language from what he called the Christianization of Latin. I am aware that contemporary European languages and modern Europe do have problems with the Greeks and Romans. But just because of the fact that Ancient Greece and Rome are located in the Western hemisphere does not make them part of Western culture. In an earlier publication, I showed that neither Greece nor Rome were cradles of Western civilization. Western Civilization is Christian Civilization, although you might not agree with that. Greece and Rome do not belong to it. That is why we Indians can understand them. Let me give you a small example — One of the most fundamental notions of Aristotle is eudaimonia, which gets translated with great difficulty as ‘well-being’, ‘feeling good’, ‘happiness’ and so on. It is a very difficult word to translate. This is not merely a translation problem because I have had discussions with Greek scholars. Aristotle asks: what is eudaimonia? It is very difficult to achieve of course but he says once you have it you cannot lose it. I told a Greek Specialist once ‘you know nothing about Greek language’, He responded: ‘how dare you say that’! So, I said: ‘here is a simple thing, forget the translation of eudaimonia, give me one example of a human property which once you possess, you do not lose.’ I said: ‘I do not have to understand Greek to understand what eudaimonia means.’ And of course to this day, no Greek scholar could help me in giving one example of one human property which if once you possess you do not lose–this is a fundamental property of eudaimonia. For the Indians here is my answer. Eudaimonia is aananda. Once you have aananda you do not lose it. It is equivalent in some conditions to brahma-gyaana. And that is happiness indeed, beyond sukha and duhkha. So when Aristotle is talking about eudaimonia I understand him and I read him carefully. Of course, there is no translation equivalent of eudaimonia in any of the European languages but that is because they have no access to that world, that conceptual framework like we Indians have. So indeed, I understand you have a problem with Greece and Rome: we understand them much better.
Two other points — one on Galileo. I am not conflating the community of Christians with a community of non-Christians because one of the claims I have substantiated to which in the last fifteen years I have found no counter argument, is the following: My claim is that free thinkers and atheists, even the Communists of Europe, are actually disguised theists. That is to say that Christianity has secularized itself in political theory, in social theory, in rational choice theory; a number of theories. I can show you how assumptions from the Bible have taken secular forms. So by saying for instance, ‘look I don’t have a religious background’, it makes no difference. I know people, who do not have a religious background for generations, are atheists but they continue to have the same excuse for speaking as Christians do. For example, your ethics will be absolutely no different from Christian ethics because there is no such thing as non-Christian secular ethics present today. ‘You ought not to kill’. Don’t tell me that is an example of secular ethics. Even the notion of ‘ought not’, the normative notion itself, does not come from English: it comes from Christianity, from the Bible.
Aristotle, for example, does not have an ‘ought’. Indian languages do not have a ‘moral ought’ nor do the Chinese in their language in which Confucius wrote. These are not linguistic issues, Claus, these are problems of conceptual apparatuses that are culturally developed. So, it is in that sense that I speak about Galileo and say he made sense to the Europeans. They used his findings to investigate nature because they believed fundamentally that nature has a structure and pattern and a law which has to be discovered by human investigation. They would say that without such a structure the universe should be chaos. The whole of 2,000 years of European culture believes that, and that was Galileo’s idea as well. It is a background belief, of course, but it is a background belief of that culture and we are talking about difference between cultures. Translation is always a translation between people who use sentences, who use natural languages. So, I am shifting the level of the problem.
Last point, there is something to be said for your claim regarding the notion of belief–that you can have a concept, but do not have a word–that is absolutely true. That is our daily experience. I feel like saying something but I don’t know how to say it. So, you can have some sense of a concept but defined psychologically not linguistically or so cognitively. I do not know how to put it in a natural sentence. Right. But you are making out of it logical and philosophical points.
Let me put it very sharply. The notion of having a belief and the belief is always about something; this is a specific conception of man, of human beings–there is philosophical anthropology which attributes some notion of intention to human beings. One of the extraordinary things about the Indian tradition is the absence of this notion of intentionality: agyana. They call it maaya and many different things. So the nature of human being in the Indian tradition is that we are non-intentional creatures, which is completely incomprehensible within the framework of Christian culture. So, entertaining having a belief is not a linguistic, psychological, epistemological fact which is applicable to all human beings but is a specific assumption about the nature of human beings that comes from the Bible. So when saying that Indians have beliefs, you are not making use of any understanding of language – you are making use of a religious concept/understanding of man and saying that is what Indians have. Of course, you can say that; people have been saying that for 500 years. That is not the issue.
The issue is: is this how Indians understand themselves? In fact, if you look at the languages you find there is greater affinity when you talk of using work-words. They do not say ‘I got angry’ but ‘anger came upon me’ — this is a very typical old classical Greek way of talking. ‘Why did you say that?’ ‘I do not know, my tongue moved that way’. I am literally translating local Indian languages into English–this is the way we talk. In fact, even the subject notion, is not simply a linguistic subject or verb subject in action, the fundamental ontological notion of subject itself is missing in India as also the notion of agency.
Take the problem about truth: the notion of truth for applying to sentences, to propositions by some other philosophers is a very philosophical disease. If you look at the middle-ages, take Aquinas for example, he had two notions of truth: adeequatio re and adequatio intellectus. One is which is adequate to the object; the other which is adequate to thoughts. Hegel used the same notion. Tarski also says there are multiple notions of truth. That notion of truth — adaquatio intellectus as it prevailed for 1,900 years in Western culture referred to the fact that objects are adequate to how God conceives them. That is adequatio intellectus–adequate not to human intellects, to God’s intellect. Adequatio re had to do with how one related the word to both these notions and emerged, not from any understanding of language, truth, philosophy, or logic, it arose from commenting on theologies and commenting the Bible. (pp 162-166 “Classical Indian Thought and the English Language” edited by Mullick, et al.)