Milinda’s Questions

For the past several months, a copy of Paul Griffiths’ On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem has been sitting on my desk, and a half-written review thereof has been fermenting on my harddrive. I hope to bring that review into the light of day reasonably soon; as a first step towards that goal, I’d like to reproduce a fairly lengthy passage from the Introduction of the book. It’s a manifesto of sorts, and one with which I wholeheartedly concur.

The philosophizing found in this work both rests upon and illustrates an important general thesis about rationality. Briefly stated, this thesis is that philosophy is a trans-cultural human activity, which in all essentials operates within the same conventions and by the same norms in all cultures. These are, broadly speaking, the conventions and norms which demarcate what in the West has sometimes been called ‘rationality.’
This is not an uncontroversial view; it is probably true that the current intellectual orthodoxy in the Western academic disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history (especially history of religions) and literary criticism is opposed to it. The development of a sociology of knowledge, superficial understandings (and misunderstandings) of the late Wittgenstein and the classical Quine, the pervasive adherence to varieties of relativism in the work of important anthropological theorists, the fuss in philosophy of science over the early Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis and Feyerabend’s fulminations against method, and the vogue for deconstructionist readings of any and all genres of text – all these have combined to create an intellectual climate in which it is problematic even to suggest that rational discourse may be a phenomenon which operates by recognizably similar rules and with effectively identical goals cross-culturally, and is thus a tool available in a relatively straightforward manner for cross-cultural communication and assessment.

The view that the functions, nature, and limits of rationality are conceived similarly in all cultures has as its corollary the idea that cross-cultural assessment of philosophical views and arguments is possible. It suggests that I, as a 20th-century English-speaking Westerner, am theoretically capable of both understanding and passing judgment upon philosophical arguments and conclusions presented by 5th-century Indian Buddhists writing and thinking in Sanskrit. This too is problematic, given the current intellectual climate in which terms such as “pluralism” and “dialogue” have become almost numinous, denoting an orthodoxy in the direction of which it is necessary to make at least a ritual obeisance. Even if such cross-cultural attempts at normative judgement can avoid offending against one or more of the intellectual orthodoxies just mentioned, they tend to be regarded as symptoms of cultural imperialism and intellectual triumphalism.

Clearly, then, there are important systematic problems involved with the view that it is legitimate to move from historical and expository writing about philosophical debates located in a culture distant in space and time from one’s own, to an analytical and critical study of such debates which is in part concerned to pass judgement upon them. Among these systematic problems are the questions of whether the functions, goals and limits of rationality are understood in essentially similar ways cross-culturally; whether cross-cultural assessments of truth (in propositions) and validity (in arguments) can escape the pitfalls of parochialism and arrogance; and whether, pace the sociologists of knowledge, there are distinctions to be made between the contingent causes for the holding of a particular belief, and the non-contingent grounds for holding that belief. Ideally, such systematic problems should be resolved systematically; only thus can the objections of the adherents of the pluralistic view be properly answered. Such a systematic enterprise is possible, I think, but is a task too large for this study. Instead, the presence of attempts at critical assessment of the arguments and conclusions of the sources with which I deal in this work, are best understood as an attempt to provide some indirect evidence for the truth of the thesis that rationally grounded normative discourse is an appropriate tool for undertaking the activity of cross-cultural philosophizing.

continued here