What destiny of being lies behind Indian thought

Heidegger and Indian Philosophy I: IS THE QUESTION OF BEING UNIQUE TO THE WEST?

The Greek question of being is foreign even to Western ears. It points to what is nearest at hand yet farthest from our reflective grasp. The question is doubly foreign to Indian ears. The Parmenidean wonder at being was not a foundational event in Indian thought, and so the subsequent Aristotelian question "What is being?" was never posed in the same sense, nor did India produce a metaphysics in the sense of a science of being qua being. There is a fit between the being-question and the history of Western metaphysics which makes its illumination central and foundational; the light it can shed on Indian thought may introduce distorting emphases. To ask what destiny of being lies behind Indian thought, as J.L. Mehta does, is to risk forcing it into shapes suggested by the Western story (while drawing on questionable reaches of Heidegger's thought).

Heidegger would probably agree that blindness to being is universal- and not only because of the Westernization of the earth through technology. Attention to being must then be equally universal. But it is only in the West that such attention has been thematized as a central concern, by a rare handful of powerful thinkers. The other traditions have different languages for awakening to the reality of the things themselves. As a distinctive thematization of a universally latent problematic - a thematization which in its concrete elaboration has of course many parochial, non-universal features - Western philosophy has an irreducible identity. Thus Heidegger writes, as early as 1939:

“Philosophy is _Western_ philosophy; there is no other, for the essence of the West and Western history has been determined through what is called philosophy. Ignoring all academic notions and historical accounts of philosophy as a cultural phenomenon, we should understand it as: reflection on what there is as such as a whole; in short - though this too is indeterminate because polyvalent - _asking the question of being_. "Being" is the _ground-word_ of philosophy” ((GA 68:9).

It could not be said that "being" is the Grundwort of any Indian philosophy. Some of Heidegger's strongest pronouncements on the specificity of metaphysics date from the mid-fifties:

“The style of all Western/European philosophy - there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian - is determined from the twofold, "beings-being." Its dealings with this twofold take their normative shape from the Platonic account of this twofold” (Was heisst Denken?, 1954, p. 136).

The word "style" here suggests that there is a contingency to the development of philosophical and religious traditions comparable to that of artistic styles, so that what seems normative and natural within one culture may remain unthought of in another. The concept of being is a cultural construction just as much as is that of moksa or karman. Our present insight into cultural pluralism (as Dilthey understood) forces us to renounce the illusion that these great words are transparent namings of the real...Joseph S. O’Leary From: Beyond Orientalism, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz. (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities vol. 59). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. October 25, 2006 in Heidegger Permalink Articles of J. S. O'Leary online