Can A/The History of “World Civilization” Be Re-Written in a Pluralist Ethical Frame?

ABSTRACT

Rewriting a/the History of “World Civilization” in a pluralist ethical frame is proposed as an alternative to the Eurocentricity and cultural imperialism of earlier such attempts, which assumed a single focus. A plural relational focalisation can replace a grand or master narrative with a conversation between different perspectives. More than tolerance, pluralism is an active quest for understanding across differences, making engagement with alterity an ethical and epistemological imperative. Moving beyond homogenizing mind-sets confined to a single perspective, pluralism enables us to perceive difference as a relation with an Other. This relational pluralist perspective stems from the cultural, social and linguistic diversity of Indian civilization and literatures. The Jain philosophy of Anekantavada posits a pluralist theory of being. Epistemologically grounded in Nayavada and Syadvada, Anekantavada advocates willing engagement with alterities and dialogue between different views, making “ahimsa” or non-violence the ethical goal of human interaction. Hence, in the age of global virtual connectivity and uneven technological advancement, a pluralist narrative of world civilisation(s),“rewritten” in this philosophical frame, is proposed.

摘要

多元伦理观下，重写文明史将是对早期假定单一焦点的企图，及其欧洲中心主义和/或文化帝国主义的纠正。若要弥补迄今为止此类历史书写主导叙述的不足，我们需要一种关系性的多视角和多元的聚焦，将不断变化的世界文明的多元、多焦点叙述连接起来，并参与到每一种历史都发挥作用的对话中。要认识到“世界”并非一个单一、同质、中心化的整体，而是一系列相互关系，具有开放的和无定限的多样性。印度文明与文学因文化、社会和语言方面的多样化，在本质上具有多元性，启发我们从多元主义的视角来认知和表达世界。多元主义不仅是包容，而且是积极寻求跨越差异的理解，这意味着不同观点和立场的接触，意味着我们要超越局限于单一视角的同质化思维，在相互关系中看待差异。多元存在论的伦理意义可以追溯到耆那教哲学的“非一端论”，它以观点构成论和或然主义为认识论基础，并指向耆那教最高道德目标“非暴力”，要求我们在与差异接触时，接受观点的多样性。另外，“重写”也需对叙述结构、意向性和聚焦性等方面进行反思，世界文明史的叙述设计，必须考虑知识技术和网络虚拟连接技术的现实发展和地区分布状况。

KEYWORDS:

• Re⁃writing the history of civilizations
• pluralism
• differences
• anekantavad

关键词:

• 重写文明史
• 多元主义
• 差异
• 非一端论

1.

After accepting the kind invitation from the editors of this special issue to share my thoughts on re-writing the history of world civilization, I was struck by the fact that there is no history of the world or of civilization written in Sanskrit or Pali, or in any of the Prakrits, all of which contributed to the formation of the constitutionally recognized modern languages in the geopolitical space that is designated as India. Indians quote the Bhagwad Gita, a discourse on dharma or duty, which occurs in the epic Mahabharata, saying that the world is our family; the emblem of Viswa Bharati, the university founded by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, proclaims that the university welcomes the whole world into one nest, an idea found in the Upanishads. Both of these proclamations indicate a plural world, where one-ness is established by relationship with the other – the neighbor the guest and stranger, who is welcome in our home. The world imagined here is a world made of human relations, a connected humane world, not a geographical or geopolitical category. Kings across the subcontinent have thought of themselves as world conquerors, and required that historians name them as such, but this was rhetorical ceremony, not belief. Was it because some rulers, like Asoka or Akbar, to name only two who controlled large areas of the subcontinent before it became India, found and professed that it was easier to accept difference, and engage with difference and rule by accommodation rather than subjugate it? Is this the reason why the very idea of India interrogates the certainty inherent in the English phrase “history of world civilization”?

For an Indian scholar of literature and teacher of Literary Studies, it is difficult to think of history, civilization and world as unified or homogenous, especially when we are asked about “the Indian view” of things. I will try to explain why this is so by invoking pluralism, and propose that the ideas of world civilization, history and the concept or practice of re-writing, be conceptualized to account for the plurality of culture, language and society, for a relational rather than a categorically definitive view of our shared world. According to Syed Sayeed: “To embrace pluralism is not to approve of practices or expressions of belief that are legitimately unacceptable to others” (“Religious Practices in Public Spaces”). Mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies: “What we must strive to create and sustain is a society in which relations between individuals and communities are structured by the concrete intersubjectivity of active cultural transactions” (“Religious Practices in Public Spaces”).

Can this be a guiding principle for conceptualizing a plural world where civilizations become and remain what they are, alive and active, through chosen or forced interaction with “other” civilizations? The Indian scholar of Humanities inhabits such a space, physically and metaphysically: a nation where culture, society and language are plural. But the standard view imposed by the bipolar and the multipolar world still operates in terms of assumed centers and homogenized oppositions of fixed self and fixed other. A critical and reflective apparatus arising out of the pluralist perspective will start from fundamental assumptions that are different from a view contextualized in a monolingual, monocultural society. The pluralist viewpoint prompts us to see reality as constituted by interaction between many subject positions. Thus, relations between beings originate in and are sustained by the human will, and directed by the human’s ethical sense, i.e., how he or she is socialized to relate to an Other. Unity is thus not imposed, given or decreed – rather solidarity, relations and active engagement, create collectives, which form the plurally perceived world.

As the French philosopher of existentialist phenomenology Merleau-Ponty says, the world is “an indefinite and open multiplicity,” in which relations are “relations of reciprocal implication … ” (82). Can this be the world of whose civilization we are trying to write the history? In asking this question, I hope to underline that the definite article in many European languages need not constrain the thinking of those who function in other languages as well. Is it not possible to imagine such a world – where languages, histories, environments, other than European, have co-existed with their European manifestations across time? Contemplating why we need to re-write the history of world civilization, contributors to our ongoing conversation have opined that rewriting will be a corrective to the Eurocentricity and/or cultural imperialism of earlier such attempts which assumed a single focus, whether from the vantage point of a single culture, or in the case of literary history a single language-literature system, treating “history” and “civilization” in the singular. Even when European imperialism itself was confronted by visible, irreducible difference both across the colonized world and between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizer, its response was to posit a standard of civilization, (or literary excellence) which proved to be classical European. Goethe, the German poet who straddled Romanticism and Classicism in German literary history, and lived through Napoleon’s aggressive imperialism across Europe and Egypt, defended humanism against the impositions of an imperialist, a foreign sing influence. But he too advised, “if we really want a pattern we must always return to the Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented”¹ (qtd. in Damrosch 12).

However, Goethe also attempted to fashion a literary antidote to the hegemonzing, homogenizing idea of a monolingual, monocultural 19^th century nation. Instead of exclusionary nationalism, he imagined a “world” of relations between difference: “There can be no question of nations thinking alike, the aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, understand each other and even when they may not be able to love, may at least tolerate one another” (Fritz Strich 350). The east would not merge into a single historical narrative of civilization through the civilizing mission of the west, nor would it return to the innocence of an ancient imagined glorious past of which decadent, industrializing Europe was the horrific present. Rather, as a poet, Goethe tasked literature with establishing human relations regardless of boundaries and centers. A similar view was adopted by Rabindranath Tagore,² almost a century after Goethe, also in the face of cultural and economic imperialism in the backdrop of the first partition of Bengal, a province of undivided India along communal lines into East and West Bengal, the former predominantly populated by Muslims and the latter predominantly Hindu. The partition came into effect on the 16th of October 1905 under Viceroy Curzon, exacerbating communal tensions in Bengal and elsewhere. Against this backdrop of identity-based violence, at several points in his lecture on Viswa Sahitya, (World Literature, 1905) Tagore urged his audience to think beyond the immediate, the individual and the local (ibid.). He was addressing the very real crisis of growing communal disharmony in the country, countering it with the realization of harmony in the expression of the universal human spirit. Tagore rejected inter-group conflicts and local discords and criticized the parochial idea of a nation reduced to “territorial sovereignty.” This harmony could begin in a contemplation of the “world” as a set of inter-relations. Tagore compares literature to an ongoing work, a construction in which every great builder from all over the world makes his contribution: some parts are built anew by each age, while some parts survive, juxtaposing differences with the unifying quality of humanity.

The irony was that the nation that Goethe criticized became in Tagore’s colonized location a model of progress and civilization imported from Europe, a symbol of freedom and sovereignty for the decolonizing political movements to emulate. Tagore posited a different idea of nation, for which literature served as an emblem. The word he used for literature had no relation to writing – its root was “sahitatva” or being-together, sahit meaning being “with.” This is a relational view of literature as creating a community – the affective community, which is more humane and should be more powerful in a human world than a geopolitical entity defending and asserting territorial rights. Thus literature, given its “exterior plurality and inner singularity,”³ (“Notes on Comparative Literature”)can be a shield against the cultural impositions of nationalism and imperialist nations. In imagining relation as a state of being, the interaction between perspectives in concrete situations can be seen as the generator of actual – historical – events. Can this relational perspective act as a corrective to a center-periphery value-added approach, an example of which is Eurocentrism? Can we instead propose a conceptual framework that is not limited by an absolutist perspective? Can the world and civilization be viewed from a pluralist perspective? Can our engagement with it be dialogic rather than conflicted or hostile by approaching the Other as a subject like ourselves, rather than demonizing the Other?

These questions form the context of re-writing – we begin to contemplate re-textualization when we see a lack in the existing master narrative. This view causes us to see the world we inhabit in a particular way, which in narratology, is known as the technique of focalization. In writing a history of world civilization, the ideas of history and civilization are formed through a perspective. So given the location of my remarks, the idea of a single world history or civilization is unrealistic or idealistic. When our subject is the “world,” the use of Eurocentric form and content limits the narrative framework of history, whether we consider the world as geographical or as phenomenal, in the way Merleau-Ponty describes it. And the same principle of reductionism questions the relocation of the center in the margin. In calling for moving the center, the Kenyan writer in English and Gikuyu, Ngugi wa thiong’o (1993) does not imply that the center moves elsewhere, and a new center is created out of any geopolitical location or region. This would replicate the center-margin binary, by acknowledging and reinforcing the idea of exclusive polar opposites. Ngugi wanted to interrogate the very idea of a centered world, whether in Europe or elsewhere. Colonization, or the violent encounter with the other, is testimony to a world that is the interplay of many possibilities rather than a fixed antagonistic, conflicted relation between binary opposites. It would thus not serve the purpose to imagine a centered, continuous, uni-directional narrative as a history of world civilization, as much as it would be futile to imagine the world as a homogenous whole.

If we conceptualize the world as made up of a set of situated relations, what kind of narrative framework would be adequate to record its plural history? Suggestions of co-writing and variation theory have been proposed by Chinese colleagues, which can be considered to address this requirement of location, situation, speaking voice and addressee. As an ancient example we learn of the plural authorship of the Shah Namah, known as a chronicle of the kings who ruled Persia connecting the creation of man, the establishment of kingship on earth by divine sanction and the ancient rulers of Persia to the coming of Islam, the establishment of a new religion and a new political structure. The Baysonghari manuscript of the Shah namah, dated 1426, according to Davidson (“Persian/Iranian Epic” 264) contains the maximum number of variations. In the preface to this manuscript, it is recorded that Khoshraw Anoshirwan, who ruled up to 579CE, decreed that popular stories of ancient kings from all parts of the realm be collected. His successor Yazdgard asked Daneshvar, a dehqan, to write down all these stories. The dehqans were local landowners, who could recount local histories. But in the Baysonghari Preface, a dehqan is presented as the first writer. This is drawn from the Preface to an older manuscript, known in Shah Namah scholarship as the Old Preface and dated to the middle of the 10^th century. Ferdawsi also refers to multiple sources when he recounts the writing of the Shah Namah ascribed to him. He says each priest or mobed also recited the story of the area and the ruler he was familiar with. Thus the foundation of a Book of Kings was laid in the collection of stories about past kings from the oral traditions preserved by the mobeds i.e., the priests and sages and the local dehqans i.e., learned men and landowners, who recorded them in written form.

Can a historical narrative demanding multiple focalizers be described with a definite article? This methodological and practical question was brought up by Sisir Kumar Das (1991) when writing a history (not the history) of Indian literature in the singular. Das proposed an integrated model for the historical narrative of a plural literary culture that is common to all Indian language literatures. The volumes of “A History of Indian Literature” VI and VIII, which Das planned and edited, contain the literary events in every one of the 23 recognized Indian languages, for the period under consideration in the volume. Literary events, and events relating literature to societies and cultures they were contexted in were provided for each Indian language on an annual basis for each year that the particular volume covered, eg 1856–1917 etc. The reader was free to construct out of the facts provided, a historical narrative centered on any one language, or relations between languages, with a different focus and outcome from the one that Das himself has constructed in the first part of the book. The connections between events are distinct from a chronology of events and show their impact and genesis. From both a diachronic and synchronic point of view, they comprise the entire range of literature in Indian languages within the period, and reveal patterns of interliterary and intraliterary relations. Das sought to integrate the literatures written in Indian languages into a historical narrative of plural India, through the highlighting of these relations. In Das’ conceptual framework, the indefinite article (a history) and the singular “Indian literature” (not literatures) which have occasioned so much debate are, as Amiya Dev (2004 113–8 and 1987) suggests, the indication of a proposed method. By not using the definite article (the history) Das has, as Dev points out, left the discussion open, to plural views, as it were. Many kinds of historical narratives are made possible using the vast material collected. Material to study movements of theme and generic conceptions across time and space, the reception of one language in another region through translation and adaptation, the results of various kinds of contact between language cultures can be studied from the vast collection in Das’s volumes. That we will necessarily infer the plurality of Indian language literatures from this material cannot be guaranteed. But the panchronic arrangement of the material itself offers the possibility of an integrated view as it demarcates the outlines of a plural literary – as distinct from linguistic – field. Since this literary field is common to all Indian language literatures, Das held it to be a singular trait shared by all Indian language literatures. The singularity of Indian literature, though written in many languages results from the integration of the literary system of each language into the “Indian” literary field, making it plural in nature. This integration is achieved through investigating and elucidating the interliterary connections within the larger framework of cultural contact. Interliterary relations thus form the core of the history of “Indian” literature, and it is impossible to study interliterary relations without acknowledging a plurality of sources and values characteristic of the literary field.

So if a history of world civilization is to be written, in order to fulfill the gaps that such histories have had hitherto, we require a plural focalization because we see that history, a narrative of events themselves as they occur in human life and affect many human beings, cannot be a monoperspectival narrative, from a single centered perspective but has to be relational, whether in the global or in the local sense. Neither of these are completely disjunct from the other. According to Adorno, “dialectic is reason’s critical consciousness of itself combined with critical experience of objects; belief that a person is a person because of its relation with another – that is the dialectical quality of things and beings … ” (2002). For example, culture is regulated by power relations which hierarchize and evaluate languages, literatures and translation through the publication and circulation industry. Marx’s idea of world literature made way for commercialization, showing how culture commoditized in the service of capital. He warned of globalization, a newer name for world civilization by the spread of capital and market, financial as well as cultural. Thus, the idea of world literature as relations of circulation emerges in academia as a way of understanding literature as a universal phenomenon through the attempt to understand the formation of the market. Neither poiesis, the making of the text, the processes of textualization, nor the intentionality of the maker or the ethics of the reader, come into the conceptual framework for understanding “world” literature as the history of a set of relations between difference, and the world, therefore, as plural.

This indicates an intellectual and ethical shift in how we perceive and express the world. Can we take into consideration not a single unified homogenous-centered world, but the plurality of the world in its multiple aspects? Focalization of a narrative implies how we express this, through some medium, and with a particular intentionality, to an audience who will know how to read and understand the language in which this expression is written. The construction of a narrative – any narrative – involves a narrator, in the vocabulary of narratology, a focaliser – the ethical implications of narrative focus especially in the context of a narrative that presents a history of relations, as called for by Theo d’Haen in an earlier column in this journal where he succinctly summed up the procedure and experience of editing Literature: A World History. Taking on board his astute critique of the framework which raises the questions of emphasis, location, poetics, philosophy and ideology in the framing of critical scholarly paradigms and positions, I suggest that they be addressed from within the pluralist framework and dialogic perspective, in which a single standard cannot be posited from an Eurocentric perspective but as a conversation.

Perspective informs the choice and structure, the form and tone of the narrative, and the idea of plurality can give it a particular structure. As Sayeed points out, Pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, which implies engagement with different points of view and positions. It is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments (“Salvaging Incommensurability”). It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another. The ethical implications of a pluralist theory of being can be traced to the Jain philosophy of anekantavad⁴ - Anek (many) and anta (qualities, attributes or ends) – which explains the complex and multiple nature of reality, as the name suggests. This philosophy is derived from the conversations of Mahavira on the nature of jiva (the soul) and the ajiva (matter), collected in the Bhagvati Sutra. Siddhasena Divakara introduced the term “anekantvad” or non-absolutism as a theory of knowledge, or epistemology, to remove the dogmatism of ekantavad. Ekantika or one-sidedness of a single perspective is established as dogmatic. The nature of reality is anekantik, i.e., plural, and the quest for this is possible only through dialogue with various standpoints and reconciliation of various points of view. If perceived from a combination of standpoints, we perceive an object as it really is. For example, anekantvad rejects the view that truth is either single and constant or that it is manifold and constantly changing – both these are one-sided views and hence only partially true. If these views are combined, then the truth of each point of view is preserved and enables us to understand the whole.

Nayavad (Tara Sethia 75–113) and Syadvad are the epistemological theories that underlie the philosophy of anekantavad, which itself is the ground for ahimsa, the highest moral goal of Jainism. Nayavada, or the epistemological theory of viewpoints professes the partial expression of truth from any particular viewpoint, claiming that reality can only be understood by integrating the many parts of which a whole is made. These conversations indicate Mahavira’s belief that the simple binary of “either/or” cannot encapsulate or express the complex and multiple nature of reality. Truth is complex, qualified by perspective, or different nayas or positions. Each point of view expresses the truth partially – taken together, they can give us a complete account of reality. Nayavada also encourages the individual to assume other perspectives, especially the perspective of the other as a constantly changing, yet persisting point of view which demands the same respect and bears the same right to happiness as oneself. This is seen as the root of the ethical imperative of ahimsa pronounced in Mahavira’s philosophy. The theory of viewpoints works through Syadvada, or the theory of qualified predication. The Sanskrit word “syat” means “maybe.” But in the philosophy of Jainism, this conditional term has a specific purpose: to indicate the many-sided nature of a proposition. “syat” in this usage, indicates the conditions that qualify any statement: thus the truth-value of a categorical statement is determined by the conditions under which it is really the case. Syadvad thus recognizes not only what is, i.e., being, and what is not yet, i.e., what will become, but also the process from one to another which is inexpressible and combines both. Accepting a multiplicity of perspectives rather than a dogmatic absolutism is thus the ethical attitude or intention that underlies our engagement with difference.

Pluralism enables us to think beyond homogenization, which limits us to a single perspective. Such a perspective privileges a single, often majoritarian culture, language or worldview instead of taking cognizance of the immense diversity that characterizes our world. If we reject this limited view, it will be clear that difference is a condition of our lives and negotiating that difference underlies our daily life practices. The human being’s life involves his or her meeting with the world. Through our daily encounters we realize that we share the world with “others” who are “different” from us. Difference makes each of us unique even while we share universal characteristics that make us human. Our relations with others depend on our ability to understand, accept and negotiate the difference that we encounter, whether it is through practical/physical or literary/imaginative contact. This is the ethical focus of the comparative approach, equipping us to understand, negotiate and appreciate difference in our relations with the world of people and things. The dhamma of tolerance of all religions and ahimsa prescribed for the ruler by Asoka in his edicts in 3 BCE, the communities of devotees believing in the idea of one god, in whom all differences, social, economic and even religious, would be surrendered, across the Indian languages between the 9^th and the 17^th centuries, the experiment of peace between all religions as an administrative strategy by Akbar the Mughal ruler in the 16^th century, and the attempts to wipe out stratification and inequality of difference by Gandhi and Ambedkar in the 20^th—these form strands in the history of relations between difference that constructs the plural fabric of India. Thus it is difficult to imagine, from the “Indian” point of view, a single seamless narrative of the history of a unified homogenous “world” “civilization.”

This is not to oppose rewriting, but a suggestion to reflect upon the terms of narrative construction, intentionality and focalization. The technology of writing itself made record preservation, documentation as well as further research possible – without it, rewriting would not have been conceivable. So technology itself brought changes to perspective and structures of feeling, whose distribution across the world was neither uniform nor equal, but contested and leveraged for power, concretized by difference which is a result of incommensurability arising from situatedness and cultural embodiment. Thus the framing of a/the narrative of “history” of “world” “civilization,” must take into account the uneven distribution of technology, especially knowledge technology and virtual connectivity, which capital is gradually institutionalizing as systemic inequalities: “We cannot achieve much harmony in the world by just pretending to ‘celebrate’ difference unless we are alert to the implications of that difference and develop the discursive tools to engage with them” (“Salvaging Incommensurability” 123). Rewriting now implies differential access to electronic resources and to the virtual world, which inaugurates new questions regarding human interventions in the use and interface with artificial intelligence, objectification and the ethics of engagement with difference in this changed and potentially changing world. It is in reaching out across difference that we can interlink the plural multifocal narratives of a changing world civilization and participate in a conversation in which every history plays a part.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Eckermann, J. P. Conversations with Goethe, 1835.

2. Tagore’s lecture to the National Council of Education, 1905, was entitled Viswa sahitya, World Literature. Trans. Das, D, Das, A and Kamal, N in The Efl Journal 12.1(2021): 29–42.

3. “Notes on Comparative Literature” Response to Dorothy Figueira, Papers in Comparative Literature Vol 1, CAS Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

4. Sethia, Tara. Ahimsa, Anekanta and Jainism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Pvt Ltd, 2004. All further references to this work are in the text.