Identity as Reasoned Choice

A South Asian Perspective on The Reach and Resources of Public and Practical Reason in Shaping Individual Identities

Jonardon Ganeri

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441143839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In an increasingly multi-religious and multi-ethnic world, identity has become something actively chosen rather than merely acquired at birth. This book essentially analyzes the resources available to make such a choice. Looking into the world of intellectual India, this unique comparative survey focuses on the identity resources offered by India's traditions of reasoning and public debate. Arguing that identity is a formation of reason, it draws on Indian theory to claim that identities are constructed from exercises of reason as derivation from exemplary cases. The book demonstrates that contemporary debates on global governance and cosmopolitan identities can benefit from these Indian resources, which were developed within an intercultural pluralism context with an emphasis on consensual resolution of conflict. This groundbreaking work builds on themes developed by Amartya Sen to provide a creative pursuit of Indian reasoning that will appeal to anyone studying politics, philosophy, and Asian political thought.

PART I

PUBLIC REASON PROMOTED

1

An Ideal of Public Reason

Public acts of reason are a defining characteristic of the intellectual world of ancient India.¹ I begin my study by examining what the ancient world understood to constitute these practices. Debates were held on a great variety of matters – philosophical, scientific and theological – and quite soon the debates become formal affairs, with reputations at stake and socially important issues in the balance. Already in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (c. 7th century BCE), we find the sage Yājñavalkya being quizzed by king Janaka on tricky intellectual puzzles:²

Once, when Janaka, the king of Videha, was formally seated, Yājñvalkya came up to him. Janaka asked him: ‘Yājñvalkya, why have you come? Are you after cows, or subtle disquisitions?’ He replied: ‘Both, your majesty.’

What followed was a question-and-answer dialogue in which Janaka interrogates the sage, not only to solicit information but to test Yājñavalkya’s mettle. The sage had earlier given to Janaka the right to ask him any question. Yājñavalkya can release himself from this obligation to answer only when he has fully satisfied Janaka’s curiosity:

[Janaka] ‘Here, sire, I’ll give you a thousand cows! But you’ll have to tell me more than that to get yourself released!’ At this point Yājñvalkya became alarmed, thinking: ‘The king is really sharp! He has flushed me out of every cover.’³

It is in fact a characteristic of the earliest recorded debates that they take the form of question-and-answer dialogues. As a form of debate, the goal of such a dialogue is not restricted merely to one party soliciting information from another, for there are, as this dialogue shows, elements too of testing one’s opponent and of cross-checking what he or she says.

Public Reason in the Questions of Milinda

A particularly important early question-and-answer dialogue is the Milinda-pañhā, or Questions of Milinda.⁴ It records the encounter between a Buddhist monk, Nāgasena, and Milinda, also known as Menander, an Indo-Bactrian king who ruled the part of India that had fallen under Greek influence at the time of Alexander’s Indian campaign. The document dates from around the first century CE, although Milinda’s reign was earlier, 155–130 BCE. At the outset, Nāgasena insists that their dialogue be conducted as a proper scholarly debate and not merely sycophantically:⁵

Milinda:	Reverend Sir, will you discuss with me again?
Nāgasena:	If your Majesty will discuss (vāda) as a scholar, well, but if you will discuss as a king, no.
Milinda:	How is it then that scholars discuss?
Nāgasena:	When scholars talk a matter over one with another, then is there a winding up, an unravelling, one or other is convicted of error, and he then acknowledges his mistake; distinctions are drawn, and contra-distinctions; and yet thereby they are not angered. Thus do scholars, my king, discuss.
Milinda:	And how do kings discuss?
Nāgasena:	When a king, your majesty, discusses a matter, and he advances a point, if any one differ from him on that point, he is apt to fine him, saying ‘Inflict such and such a punishment upon that fellow!’ Thus, your majesty, do kings discuss.
Milinda:	Very well. It is as a scholar, not as a king, that I will discuss.^6

‘Vāda’, the type of dialogue Nāgasena depicts as that of the scholar, is one in which there are two parties. Each defends a position with regard to the matter in hand, and there is an ‘unravelling’ (nibbeṭhanam: an unwinding, an explanation) and a disambiguation of the positions of both – a process of revealing commitments, presumptions and faulty argument. There is also a ‘winding up’, ending in the censure (niggaho; in Sanskrit, nigraha) of one party, a censure based on reasons the censured will themselves acknowledge. This is a species of the persuasion dialogue, a ‘conversational exchange where one party is trying to persuade the other part that some particular proposition is true, using arguments that show or prove to the respondent that the thesis is true’.⁷ Indeed, it would seem to be the species that has come to be known as the ‘critical discussion,’ a persuasion dialogue in which the conflict is resolved ‘only if somebody retracts his doubt because he has been convinced by the other party’s argumentation or if he withdraws his standpoint because he has realised that his argumentation cannot stand up to the other party’s criticism’.⁸ Not every persuasion dialogue need end in one party recognising defeat, for an important function of the general persuasion dialogue is to be maieutic, helping each side to clarify the nature of their commitments and the presuppositions upon which their positions depend.⁹ In the to-and-fro of such a dialogue, each party is allowed to retract earlier commitments, as it becomes clear what the consequences of such a commitment would be. This maieutic, clarificatory function of dialogue is perhaps what Nāgasena intends when he speaks of an ‘unravelling’, and it seems clearerstill in his characterisation of deliberation or investigation (vikāra) as a ‘threshing-out’:¹⁰

Milinda:	What is the distinguishing characteristic, Nāgasena, of reflection (vitakka)?
Nāgasena:	The effecting of an aim.
Milinda:	Give me an illustration.
Nāgasena:	It is like the case of a carpenter, great king, who fixes in a joint a well-fashioned piece of wood. Thus it is that the effecting of an aim is the mark of reflection.
Milinda:	What is the distinguishing characteristic, Nāgasena, of investigation (vikāra)?
Nāgasena:	Threshing out again and again.
Milinda:	Give me an illustration.
Nāgasena:	It is like the case of the copper vessel, which, when it is beaten into shape, makes a sound again and again as it gradually gathers shape. The beating into shape is to be regarded as reflection and the sounding again and again as investigation. Thus it is, great king, that threshing out again and again is the mark of investigation.
Milinda:	Very good, Nāgasena.

So it is through reflection and deliberation that the parties to an investigation together thrash out a position. Nāgasena tells us very little about the sort of argumentation that is appropriate, and we can learn little more about argument within persuasion dialogues from the Questions of Milinda, although Milinda’s repeated request to be given an illustration is suggestive of the importance that would later be attached to the citation of examples in good argumentation.¹¹

And yet there is still something to learn. For the dialogue of the Questions of Milinda is not, contrary to Nāgasena’s initial statement, a straightforwardly scholarly debate, but proceeds instead with his being interrogated at the hands of Milinda. Ostensibly Milinda wishes to be informed as to the answer to a range of thorny ethical and metaphysical questions, but his questioning is not so innocent, and at times he seems intent on entrapping Nāgasena in false dichotomies and leading questions. So it is said of him:

Master of words and sophistry, clever and wise

Milinda tried to test great Nāgasena’s skill.

Leaving him not, again and yet again,

He questioned and cross-questioned him, until

His own skill was proved foolishness.¹²

Milinda is here significantly described as a ‘master of sophistry’ or vetaṇḍī, a practitioner of the dialogue form known as viṭaṇḍā, a ‘refutation-only’ dialogue in which the opponent defends no thesis of his own but is set only on refuting that of the proponent. The implication here is that such dialogues are essentially eristic. And it is, in particular, the eristic use of questioning that Milinda is a master of. Questions need not be innocent requests for information; they can also be disguised arguments. To reply to the question ‘When did you stop lying?’ at all, affirmatively or negatively, is already to commit oneself to the ‘premise’ of the question, that one has indeed been lying.

In the intellectual environment of ancient India, when interrogative dialogue was commonplace, it was very well known that questions can be used to entrap the unwitting, and counter-strategies are invented to avoid entrapment. The Buddha himself is well aware that replying to a yes–no question can commit one to a proposition, whatever answer one gives, and his solution, famously, is to refuse to answer at all. So when asked a series of ten leading questions – Is the soul eternal? Is it non-eternal? and so forth – the Buddha declines to offer a reply, for any reply would commit him, against his wish, to the existence of souls. In the Questions of Milinda, we see Nāgasena experimenting with a different technique to avoid entrapment. To some of Milinda’s more devious yes–no questions, instead of simply refusing to reply at all, Nāgasena replies, ‘Neither yes nor no’! For example:

Milinda:	He who is born, Nāgasena, does he remain the same or become another?
Nāgasena:	Neither the same nor another.
Milinda:	Give me an illustration.
Nāgasena:	Now what do you think, O king? You were once a baby, a tender thing, and small in size, lying flat on your back. Was that the same as you who are now grown up?
Milinda:	No. That child was one, I am another.
Nāgasena:	If you are not that child, it will follow that you have had neither mother nor father, no! nor teacher. You cannot have been taught either learning, or behaviour, or wisdom. . . . Suppose a man, O king, were to light a lamp, would it burn the night through?
Milinda:	Yes, it might do so.
Nāgasena:	Now, is it the same flame that burns in the first watch of the night, Sir, and in the second?
Milinda:	No.
Nāgasena:	Or the same that burns in the second watch and the third?
Milinda:	No.
Nāgasena:	Then there is one lamp in the first watch, and another in the second, and another in the third?
Milinda:	No. The light comes from the same lamp all the night through.
Nāgasena:	Just so, O king, is the continuity of a person or thing maintained. One comes into being, another passes away; an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction:   The Reach and Resources of Reason
• PART I  PUBLIC REASON PROMOTED
• PART II  PRACTICAL REASON RESOURCED
• PART III  DISSENT
• PART IV  IDENTITY: FOUND OR FASHIONED ?
• PART V IDENTITY AND THE MODERN INTELLECTUAL
• Concluding Summary
• Bibliography
• Index