December: Festivals and the Carnivalesque – Part One*

If the month of December ushers in the festive season for a large proportion of the human population, namely, Secularists and Christians, ancient Romans and other people groups, then it is indeed appropriate to pause, even if briefly, to reflect and think about ‘festivals’ in general – What are festivals? Why are festivals important to humans? How can we make the most of festivals?

I am tempted to stop right here, with just raising these questions and throw the ball to the reader, saying, ‘pray, answer these questions, please?’ Even as I pause to ponder as to whether that is fair at all, I hear your quick reply, ‘sure, but why don’t you begin with your answers, after all they are your questions!’ The implicit logic in your rejoinder – of questioners having to answer their questions first, can be definitely questioned, but conversationally speaking, you have indeed thrown the ball back into my court and to question your logic would take the focus elsewhere. ‘You have forced my hand,’ I retort, slightly irritated by the wicked grin covering your face. Here I was, thinking of a nice dialogue, which in my view was, of course, me with the questions and you with the answers, but now I am being forced to answer my own questions, which would indeed make me more vulnerable than I would want. On a side note, [now, this is silly – talking of a side note! This entire paragraph is a side note, having nothing to do with festivals!], it is indeed interesting that those who ask questions are in positions of power and those required to answer are under power. Articulations of question-answers are exercises and performances of power! The most immediate and safest example is that of a teacher-student. The teacher asks, and the student answers. The answers determine the fate of the student – being in the good graces of the teacher or…! Now, what happens when the student questions? Normally it affirms the same power relationship, because the student asks in ignorance of some knowledge possessed by the teacher which is supplied by the teacher in her response. But what happens if the student is at par with his teacher in the knowledge of a particular subject or topic and then questions her beyond it? Well, we all have different experiences of either being in or witnessing such incidents. But that is another topic and we have already strayed far off our intended discussion or maybe we will come back to this discussion and learn from it towards the end.

So let us begin with the first question, ‘what are festivals’? Immediate answers include – (1) celebration of special events of the past, (2) commemoration or remembrance of significant happenings, (3) cheer or happiness being expressed. I would add here that there is a fourth element in a festival, it is the (4) opportunity for the performance of the Carnivalesque. This term, in English translations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s works, represents both a historical phenomenon of the carnival and also a literary tendency. For Bakhtin, who set to interpret the deeper social processes involved in medieval carnivals, particularly the Feasts of Fools held in Europe from the fifth century onwards to the sixteenth century, the carnivalesque represented the inversion of the ideological, political, legal and religious authority of both the church and the state. As Terry Eagleton points out, it can be best described as ‘licensed transgression’. During the Carnival, established social, political and religious norms and behaviour were subverted through untamed revelry. Set beliefs and rules were ridiculed and mocked. Social hierarchies along with their solemn pieties and etiquettes were profaned and overturned. The public and the laity whose voices were normally subdued and suppressed were given space during the carnival. A spirit of free thinking was legally allowed during the carnival, which Bakhtin sees as the precursor to the European Renaissance. Bakhtin explores the idea of the carnivalesque at length in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and his World (1965). In Carnival and Carnivalesque, Bakhtin offers four categories of the ‘carnivalistic sense of the world’ – (1) Free and Familiar engagement between people, (2) Eccentric Behaviour, (3) Carnivalistic misalliances, and (4) Sacrilegious. Thus one could say that the idea of carnivalesque for Bakhtin entails that aspect of a carnival or festival in which there is an upturning of the regular and routine and a sacrilegious of the sacred power equations, and thus opens new space for new thinking, new alliances and new worlds. Charles Taylor, making a reference to Bakhtin in his famed The Secular Age, argues that carnivalesque entails the idea of ‘anti-structure’. The medieval world entailed within it a space for ‘anti-structure,’ a time when the normal given structures could be critiqued, parodied, critically analysed and overturned. In doing so, the power binaries within which the majority of humanity suffered throughout the year were overturned, albeit briefly, and in so doing, the entire social structure found respite, in a sense, strength to live through the tyranny of the rest of the year. During carnival the peasant is indeed king!

However, I can already anticipate a Zizekian critique of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque of which I am unable to find in Zizek’s writings. Zizek would or could argue that the medieval world domesticated revolution by offering legitimate space for the Taylorian anti-structure to play out during the Bakhtinian carnival. As the space of carnival is brief and temporary, so is the revolt. The real parody of the carnivalesque is the parody of revolt, as the powerful continue to be powerful and their seat of power is not truly overturned in spite of the antics of the carnival. Although the Bakhtinian carnivalesque critique offers a fresh insight into the significance of festivals and the powerful role they play in the healthy maintenance of social structure, the Zizekian counter-critique offers a powerful challenge precisely to the very celebration of festivals and carnivals. If the carnivality of festivals at the most are only able to offer a parody and mockery of existing power structures, then carnivality is truly a parody not of the power structures – but of the powerless and the oppressed, who even in their rebellion and anti-structures are following the dictate of the ruling structures.

If this be taken seriously, then celebration of any festival, including the December festivals, becomes highly problematic in three different ways. Let’s spell out the problematic explicitly: first, the naïve celebration of festivals which is in accordance with existing social structures and authority/power maintains and affirms existing power structures and necessarily even celebrates it. This can be equated to a simplistic understanding of festivals and their celebration. Often, here is where the majority of the population lies, simply unaware of the deeper structures of their celebrations. Here there is no threat, whatsoever, to the existing power structures, who stand behind as the puppeteer and watch the celebration of festivals with patronizing glee. 

Secondly, following the critique of Bakhtinian carnivalesque, the celebration can become a Taylorian anti-structure, and can mock and ridicule existing power structures. Here both the state and the religious institutions that govern the populace throughout the year become objects of fun and mockery and are delivered a fatal blow. But it is here that Zizek steps in to ask – have we really delivered a fatal blow to the puppeteer, or is he, in spite of the revelry, still standing behind the curtains with a smirk on his face and holding the strings only tighter? This brings us back to our side-note at the beginning, the power relationship between teacher-student. If the student merely replies to the teacher’s question, she is following the dictate of the powerful teacher, but equally if she questions the teacher, within the boundaries of the teacher-student relationship and the politics of knowledge, then in spite of the student questioning and the teacher replying, the power equation is not disturbed, only affirmed, even more vigorously – the student’s questioning further establishes the authority of the teacher in her answering. This reveals the really sad state of affair of the carnivalesque, because in spite of the questioning student, who appears to be revolting, rebelling, and even parodying, everyone including the student knows who the one with power is, ultimately – the teacher of course! This expression of power is more sinister and sadistic, in that it has swallowed up the revolt and makes a mockery of it and thus disarming it even in its very performance. I am reminded of time given to question-answer after a lecture or paper is presented. During this time, although questions of challenge can be presented, it is domesticated and dissent is overruled simply by being given time during the session. Rarely do we find someone stand up and walk out in true challenge!

Thus thirdly and finally, following a Zizekian counter-critique, one may have to learn a new language of celebration – which on the one hand is not naïve and complaint, constrained by the demands of the powerful even in celebration, while equally on the other hand it is not a mockery of revolt by revolting under the same conditions of oppression that enables the rebelling revelry. Then how should we celebrate? Or maybe, to push it further, should we celebrate at all? What should the student do? Should he continually listen to his teacher’s answers unquestioningly, should he respond with questioning or should he turn his gaze, get up and leave the classroom?

Probably there is another way forward in which festivals can be retained and celebrated, but not necessarily as Bakhtinian carnival. This leads us to the second question we began with – Why are festivals important to humans?

*I have taken seriously the advice of dear friends who have reminded me rather strongly that the goal of writing is for the text to be read and not abandoned midstride, and hence to write shorter pieces. Therefore I have broken this piece into three parts.

Transforming Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing

‘If someone gives you a present, what do you say?’ is an oft-repeated question that parents pose to their young kids. Soon after the third or fourth time of finding oneself in this situation and being asked the same question yet once again, the child, with a blush covering her face and her eyes capturing a hint of shame, replies, ‘thank you’ first to the parent and then, turning, repeats ‘thank you’ once again to that ‘someone’ who had put that beautiful toy in her hands. You, the generous bearer and giver of that toy, lean down to her and smile back a reply, ‘you are welcome!’ Hearing that, the little girl takes the cue and flees, clutching possessively her new toy and running to her favourite corner, where she is away from those loving prying eyes, eager to look at the gift, the beautiful doll now securely in her hands. Watching the child run out of their horizons, everyone else, standing nearby and witnessing this happy-ritual, turn to one another and break into small talk. Of course the talk is not about the weather, which incidentally should have been the focus of the conversation, even as heavy storms gather without a sound outside the double-glazed windows, but the conversation is centred upon the ritual that was just performed. ‘What a well-behaved, lovely girl!’ remarked an aunt. ‘Did you catch that joy on her face when she opened the present?’ murmured another. ‘I do like how Pete and Jane bring up their kids. Her “thank you” conveyed such genuine gratitude’, claimed the giver of the present. These social rituals not only perform the rite of giving within modern societies, but also function as sites of training of acceptable social norms and mores, particularly the expression of ‘gratitude’, for the next generation.

At first blush, the vignette painted above appears flawless, rather a model of how gratitude must be negotiated within any social space. However, while the rite of giving taught the little girl to say ‘thank you’ it did not in any way explore for her what ‘gratitude’ entails leave alone its significance. Probably, if you or I were asked the significance of ‘gratitude’, we too as well might fumble for words. ‘Of course gratitude is being thankful’ you would retort, but then that is just replacing one term with another. What does it mean to be thankful or grateful? Albeit, there is a difference even between these two terms and the meanings they embody. However, my interest here is not to indulge merely in linguistic or conceptual gymnastics, rather to interrogate the mantra of gratitude that accompanies the rite of giving within social life.

My argument here is that the understanding of gratitude has been reduced to a civil and moral value by a liberal ideology for which ‘thank yous’ and ‘sorrys’ are necessary to maintain the façade of secular well-being. Most of us are soaked within liberalism to such an extent, like a fish in water, that we are unable to even articulate it as a form of life, one tradition among many, leave alone critique it. These terms are used regularly within our liberal societies often as a mantra, performing a speech-act, within the performance of the larger rituals of giving and reparation respectively. These terms have been commoditised and perform as objects of social transaction through which social equilibrium is maintained. In the bargain the underlying processes and significance of a term like gratitude is lost to a generation that venerates the language of ‘thanks’.

‘Enough critique, come on, spill out the processes and significance of gratitude that you mention and yet continue to shroud’, you remark acidly. Of course you don’t believe that I have anything profound to add to the existing common understanding of ‘gratitude’. But, it’s my turn to retort, ‘my work is half done, if I have made you think critically about the term gratitude, something I am sure you have not done in all your voicing of thanks!’ I exclaim. Without giving room for derision, I start rambling about ‘gratitude’, of course, hoping, believing, that as the rambling progresses, new understandings will emerge, evolve, and become articulated. If there were other ways of renewal and transformation, books would be written on them, or maybe those books are indeed written and do exist. But even those works can hardly miss the fact that ramblings are precursors to revelation. I think it would be wise to cite some evidence for suggesting that one discovers what one wants to say amidst rambling about it, and that without rambling or writing out, one has nothing to discover, as there is precisely nothing to discover prior to the act of discovering which I claim here to be the ‘skill of rambling or writing’. Let me cite what the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the present Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University, had to say about something similar to rambling or writing in pursuit of revelation or discovery:

Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written! But I think, again, it will ring bells in some of those who are trying to write. Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head. I hope we never get to that point and I very much doubt that we ever will. But meanwhile writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being and so it is true of prose as with poetry. - 

See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1998/rowan-williams-on-writing

Of course, I have gone on a tangent, to talk about the ‘act of writing’ while I should be writing about gratitude! However, this detour is not merely to justify my method or justification for how I aim to think about gratitude, rather, I claim that in this detour is found insights with regard to the processes underlying the language of gratitude that I would like to explicate. I would like to claim that there are three insights in the above quote about the ‘act of writing’ that reveal the mechanisms underlying the mantra of gratitude, which has unfortunately been forgotten in our liberal society that instructs on showering platitudes.

The first insight draws attention to the posture of enquiry preceding and enveloping the act of writing. Williams, elaborating the point made by the Welsh poet, Lewis, in ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ writes, ‘in writing…the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is.’ The insight here is about the posture of enquiry that is begging a discovery or a receiving or a reception. The stress is on the posture of ‘wondering’ in other words enquiring. I claim that writing is the most evident site of enquiry. When one picks up a pen to write, or settles one’s fingers over a keyboard, the primary posture one is adopting, often unconsciously, is the posture of enquiry. For words to appear and sentences formed, different strategies that come to horizon begin to articulate, different strands of thought take form, and even as ink meets paper or keys strike, these strands converge and an enquiry takes shape. I want to claim further that this posture of enquiry must be treated as an ontological posture, in which human life is lived. It is a certain way of being human, and perhaps one could say, that the primal human posture, irrespective of one’s waistline, is the posture of enquiry.

The second insight consolidates the posture of enquiry into a visible act of questing, and this is revealed in the Williams’ idea that ‘writing is an act’. This translates the ‘posture’ of enquiry into a ‘process’ of questing. The process begins with (a) an acknowledgement that there is nothing ‘inside your head’ that can be ‘neatly typ[ed] up’. It begins with the recognition of a lack. Recognizing a lack is not easy, particularly within a liberal tradition, which has neatly packaged knowledge and truth into ‘propositions’ that can be easily ‘transferred’ from one to another, accompanied with platitudes. But human life is a life of lack, a nothingness which seeks to discover and to receive, thus gravitating towards a gift. But this acknowledgement of lack must immediately be led or channelled into (b) an ‘act’ of quest, or as Williams puts it, an act of writing. But how is the act of writing an act of quest? Here Williams gives us a warning about the first four pages of everything he writes. He reveals that in them one would find the quest for discovery for the argument or proposition, for the assertion that he aims to make in his text. In other words, writing is the act of articulating and clarifying the quest. But how does this happen? The quest happens in the act of sifting through ideas, thoughts, being brought forward in memory, finding being even as fingers bang on keys, and thus questing takes place in the very act of writing. In the beginning of sentences, and the searching of words, and finding the appropriate words that complete sentences is an example of a quest in operation. This can be said of the beginning of paragraphs or even of articles and books, matter of fact any piece that is being written that they are driven by a quest that regulates the flow of thoughts and whose immediate satisfaction guarantees the completion of the piece. Perhaps that is why it is often said that books, be it theses or of any other genre, are never finished but have to be abandoned, and their endings have to be artificially constructed as the ontological questing continues to go on and is never exhausted by the written piece. There is a third element to the mechanism of questing, which is not explicit in Williams, but implicitly there by its mention. I am referring to the content of the ‘first four pages’ of what he writes. The content of these pages would reveal the (c) tradition of enquiry within which the quest takes place. The interlocutors and the concepts that are articulated and connected together, fabricated and constructed into Williams’ text reveal the ‘world of literature’ to which Williams’ own quest belongs and extends. It reveals the tradition which is not only inhabited by Williams but the tradition that is working itself out through Williams’ act of writing. It is both the tradition’s quest as well as a quest beyond the tradition, but only through the paths laid out by the tradition embodied in the ‘first four pages’ enacted out through the body of Williams. I am reminded of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s more or less ‘four-page’ Preface to his acclaimed work, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, which neatly lays out the questing reformed tradition, and Wolterstorff’s own quest embodying that tradition. It is worthwhile to cite here what he says about writing this book: ‘There is another reason as well for this emphasis [the emphasis on the Reformed tradition of Christianity] in this discussion. The Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity is my own, and these lectures represent for me an attempt to appropriate its social vision.’ Thus, we find that Wolterstorff reflexively writes that his questing or ‘attempt’ happens within the tradition of Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity. He cites a key Heideggerian/Ricoeurian mechanism in operation in questing: the mechanism of appropriation. He writes, ‘Appropriation of one’s tradition implies neither uncritical acceptance nor total rejection; it entails a discriminating adaptation of its features to one’s own situation.’ Appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ of one’s tradition in one’s ‘situation’ of quest is the key insight in Wolterstorff. There is a dual process in progress in ‘discriminating adaptation’ – on the one hand the act of ‘discriminating’ which resonates with the idea of quest that we have been elaborating above and on the other hand, the content of ‘adaptation’ refers to the tradition that quests and through which the quest is embodied. Now, to summarize the three stages of the act of questing – it begins with (a) an acknowledgement of a lack, followed by (b) the act of articulating the quest, which in turn occurs through (c) the mechanism of appropriation within a tradition of enquiry.

The third and final insight is about the reception of the gift which Williams articulates as ‘an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being’. If we began with the posture of enquiry, of wondering, which translates into an active questing within a tradition of enquiry driven by the recognition of a lack then appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ must culminate with a finding. If the lack is truly felt, and the quest is authentic in its search, and the mechanism of appropriation is sincerely followed, then of course, there must be recompense, a satisfaction, a finding. This finding on one hand has to be a self-finding, because it is the self that is questing and therefore the discovery and the finding has to be made by the self. It is a discovery that the self makes or ‘self-discovery’. But where does the content of the discovery come from? This is where Wolterstorff’s ‘adaptation’ kicks in and therefore it is equally about bringing ‘something into being’. The being of the ‘something’ is the content of self-discovery. To make some sense of this we will have to at least for this moment discard the subject-object divide that we are trained to think within and see the integrality of ‘self-discovery’ as the ‘being of something’. The being is of course the self’s being in the discovery, although the ‘something’ that is discovered and gained being has come from elsewhere. I would like to call it the ‘gift’ – a gift that has been received in the questing and discovering by the self. The constraint of the gift is the tradition within which one is questing and the adaptation of the tradition through multiple processes of dialogue brings the gift into one’s horizon. The gift is both within the self and without. It is the conjoining of the inside and the outside due to the nature of our ‘porous’ self, a la Taylor, thus the reception of the gift and also the limit of the present gift as the gift itself is contingent on appropriation and indeed future cycles of appropriation and adaptation are yet to come. I have mentioned the idea of dialogue which I would like to claim as the deeper mechanism underlying appropriation and adaptation, but the mention alone would suffice for our purposes here.

I hope I will not be asked – what has this meditation on a piece of text from Williams, on writing, got anything to do with the rite of giving and the mantra of gratitude – precisely because, I hope, one has been able to recognize the inferences that I have already been drawing albeit implicitly between act of writing and the act of gratitude. But of course, the implicit will have to become explicit and take being. Therefore in conclusion, I will revisit the problematic of ‘gratitude’ in light of these three insights from Williams, with a hope that we can transform gratitude even as authentic gratitude transforms us.

What the opening vignette failed to reveal was the state of affairs after two days or after a week of the performance of the ritual of giving. The evidence of this can be attested by any parent. The doll, however pretty, is now lying in a corner or under the bed, and the child is waiting for the next gift, a new toy, a new wonderment to be beheld and embraced. Now, this is not just about children, we can recognize this boredom with toys, however expensive or beautiful, in our own selves. What does this ultimately mean – in spite of the rite of giving and the rituals of gratitude, the gift has not satisfied one’s quest and longing. Here is where I claim that the liberal teaching of gratitude in our societies enacted in our vignette cheapens gratitude and plays a negative role by making invisible the larger process of questing in which the reception of gifts plays only a minor part. The reception of the gift has to be seen as an end to one performance, one cycle of questing, a cycle that will have to be repeated a million times during one’s life time, and each time with a hope of receiving a better gift. The easy language of gratitude keeps invisible both the posture of enquiry and the act of questing that precedes the reception of the gift. So what am I saying? Simply this – No quick ‘thank yous’, rather a focus on enquiry and quest and probably even an evaluation of the gift received and its ontological worth. I claim that this will be an antidote to the superficial gratitude our social exchange is so full of, while often accompanied with the cheap gratitude is the simultaneous despise for what is received, precisely for the lack of fulfilment and satisfaction the gift brings; and no wonder soon, the gift finds its place under our beds. But if the reception of the gift aligns itself with our enquiry and quest, then even if the gift has only provisional value, it plays a powerful intermediary through which the quest progresses, a tradition lived, and life discovered and perhaps it would be worthwhile for our social rites and rituals to train our children in precisely these skills which precede the reception of the gift so that the gift in turn would fulfil its intention in the receiver’s life journey which itself ought to be seen as a quest of a greater life, a life that is indeed lived beyond death.

16^th November, 2013

Brainerd Prince

New Delhi

The Subject and Object of Knowledge

The problematic of the subjective-objective dichotomy in the quest for knowledge in my opinion needs to be wrestled with by every scholar, irrespective of the subject of their research projects. This is an issue I am still struggling with, and below, please find a short-version of the narrative that I am developing in my own search. Therefore, this is not only unfinished work, but also, unpolished and you can detect the rough edges and I am sure can be improved upon greatly. However, I am hoping that this narrative will serve as a background to the development of the debate on the role of the subjective and objective played in the construction of knowledge. Equally, I would like this narrative to be filled out, and corrections be made. It is still very much a cartoon that needs to be worked upon with rigour and thus invites inputs. This narrative has five sections: the first section deals with defining the problematic; the second lays the ground for this debate as explicated by the tussle between rationalism and empiricism. The third section explores the attempted reconciliation in the work of Kant and Hegel rather briefly while the fourth section deals with the reactions to Hegel in Nietzschean perspectivalism and Husserlian Phenomenology. And the final section deals with the present status of the debate which I argue is being lived within the Hermeneutical epoch and here I take the liberty of trying my hand at a bit of philosophizing and I hope you will pardon its simpleness.

 1.      The problematic of Epistemology
The subjective and objective when spoken of in terms of knowledge lies broadly within the domain of epistemology. Bridging the subjective and the objective has been a perennial philosophical problematic and on a lighter note, I think it will torment us for eternity. Different philosophical traditions have tried to deal with it a multitudinal of ways and one can find traces of this debate not just within the western philosophical tradition but other traditions such as the Indian philosophical traditions. I think there is a core problematic here that defies any easy solution. Put simply, the objective world that the self tries to describe and analyse is inclusive of the inquiring-self. Thus the inquiring-self is firmly located within the material and historical worlds that it tries to make sense of through natural or human sciences. Furthermore this inquiring-self is not a passive and non-active self; rather it is dynamic, active and becoming. Thus any definition of this inquiring-self will have to take into account its changing nature. But then how is it to be done?

2.      Rationalism and Empiricism: Descartes and Hume
The modern development of epistemology was a key feature of the Renaissance (1500) with the rediscovery of the historical works of Sextus Empiricus (flourished 3rd century ce). Solving Empiricus’s scepticism became one of the intractable problems of modern European philosophy. Duignan shows clearly, how eventually, two broad approaches developed – ‘one influenced by Aristotle’s emphasis on empirical observation and Sir Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) conception of human knowledge as founded upon the proper application of scientific method; the other by the mathematical metaphysics of Pythagoras and Plato and the spectacular successes of mathematical physics in the 16th and 17th centuries.’ For the empiricists human knowledge is a posteriori, or derived from experience while for the rationalists, human knowledge is primarily a priori, or obtainable independently of experience. ‘The task of epistemology, therefore, is to justify knowledge claims either by showing how their elements (e.g., concepts) are connected to something real in the outside world(empiricism) or by showing how knowledge claims are ultimately inferable from a set of basic propositions that are innate or otherwise knowable by the mind alone (rationalism).’ The most important form of rationalism was that of Descartes who claimed that all human knowledge could be founded on a priori propositions based on the self. He came up with a dualism which separated the self (cogito) from the body and the world. The doubting and in our case the inquiring self becomes the firm and unchangeable foundation separated from the world around, whose mysteries it is able to unravel through a rational scientific (mathematical) inquiry. The major critique of rationalism came from the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume. Hume argued that since the connection between cause and effect is not possible, all scientific theories are rationally unfounded. This extreme sceptical empiricism of Hume took deep root in the Anglo-Saxon world leading to the dominance of empiricism and pragmatism in England and America respectively.

3.      The Reconciliation: Kant and Hegel
However Hume woke Kant in Germany from his slumber. Kant tried to bridge rationalism and empiricism through his theory of transcendental categories. He argued that a priori knowledge of the empirical world is possible because the structures of the empirical world are part of the structure of the mind itself. However, that the mind can only know what is presented to it in appearance and the thing-in-itself can never be known, only its appearance to the mind. So, in attempting to bridge the subject and the object, the rational and the empirical, Kant ended up creating an unbridgeable gap between the knowing self and the thing-in-itself of a magnitude that had never existed earlier. However, Kant laid the foundations for the German Idealism of the late eighteenth century and particularly to Hegel’s thought in the 1790s which tried to provide an account of reality that appeared to bridge this divide between the objective and the subjective once for all without compromising on the radical freedom of the self (won by Kant) on one hand and the expressive nature of Nature on the other. And Hegel actually believed that he had at last found the answer in his fabulous metaphysical construction of ‘everything’. His Absolute Spirit was not just the eternal Subject, but through its involution had become the objective world. Reality IS the dialectics between the subjective and objective moments of the Absolute Spirit, which the English Philosopher Bradley called the 'the unearthly ballet of bloodless categories' (a favourite quote of Bernard from whom I heard it for the first time) and thus for Hegel history comes to an end with his work.

4.      Reactions to German Idealism: Perspectivalism and Phenomenology
Unfortunately, the world goes on and as history itself has shown us, the quest continues. It is interesting to note how this question continued to dominate the nineteenth century German and French thought which, as I see it, can be said to be in some sense a response to this fundamental contention between subjectivity and objectivity. There was beginning to be developed a strong distaste for the scientific approach which had reduced everything to mechanics and industrialization. Felix Ravaisson and Michel Henri are a couple of examples from the French quarters, and the biggest name on the German front is Nietzsche (we must not overlook Marx) and we cannot of course forget Kierkegaard from the Danish quarters, our father of existentialism. All, in some sense, were critiquing on one hand Hegel’s overarching meta-theory of the universe and equally scientific empiricism. Nietzsche is important in that his perspectivalism which stressed on the subjectivity of the inquiring-self was laying the seeds for postmodern thought. However his perspectivalism destroyed the notion of the self itself and finds its completion in Sartre for whom Being is nothingness and there is no unified concept of the self (this echoes Hume’s view of the Self as a ‘bundle of perceptions’), thus leaving us with dark feelings of existential nihilism. Thus with the advent of the twentieth century, the lines of this debate were redrawn where on one hand there was Descartes’ universal self and on the other hand Nietzsche’s nihilistic self – the former standing for a complete objective view of knowledge and the latter for a radical subjectivity where not even an objective view of subjectivity is permitted leading to the destruction of the self itself. As I see it, the twentieth century can largely be seen as an attempt to rescue humanity from both the tyranny of enlightenment universalism and the despair of postmodern nihilism. We have a new approach in the early decades of the twentieth century in Husserl’s Transcedental Phenomenology. He acknowledges the Crisis of the scientific tradition, but then comes out with an alternative means to provide a foundation for truth. The radical epoche of the transcendental inquiring-self was able to provide an objective account of the life-world, or so was the claim. This euphoria did not long last as Husserl’s own student Heidegger debunked his project by grounding the transcendental self firmly in the world in proposing that Dasein is always being-in-the-world and furthermore that being is necessarily an interpreting-being. Post-Heidegger, the subjective-objective debate by slipping into the philosophy of language has reached a height of philosophical sophistication never seen before.

5.      The Hermeneutical Turn
This brings us to the present. In simple terms, the contention is between Scientific method and philosophical quest, both having the same goal of arriving at the truth of being. There are different terms that are used to represent these two sides of the problematic, for example, realism and idealism, empiricism and rationalism, naturalism and non-naturalism, reductionism and non-reductionism. Although, modern philosophy itself has gone the way of scientific method, with Analytical philosophy’s obsession with prepositions and their correspondence to ‘reality’. Many more binaries can be in some sense traced back to this basic contention between subjectivity and objectivity. The way I see it, today there is a growing body of scholarship in the works of Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, MacIntyre who, building on Heidegger, are exploring a hermeneutical position as the middle term between subjectivity and objectivity. This position does not dismiss the objective world including the self as proposed by postmodern constructivism, nor does it claim to have a God's eye-view or a complete objective picture as a rationalist or empirical scientific inquiry would like to claim. It would argue that all knowledge is interpreted-knowledge and while there is no access to objective knowledge, there are sets of rules that govern the different quests of knowledge. The structure that frames a particular inquiry of knowledge in a particular field is restricted by the ‘background’ which has constructed the field in the first place. Therefore there are field parameters that enable us to get objective knowledge of the field. For example, let’s take the games of Football and Basketball. Both contain phenomena that involve human action involving hands and legs. In Football, the ball is moved from point A to point B with the use of legs and if the hand comes into play it’s a foul. While in Basketball it is the reverse, the ball is moved from point A to B with the use of hands and if the leg comes into play it is a foul. This is a very simplistic example, but will serve the point being made. In the Cartesian mould of things there must be one universal set of rules that should govern ‘games’ and these rules are pre-given and universal. They can be found through scientific inquiry and can be expected to be in play wherever games are in play. That would be the only way to play a game. The Nietzschean critique would counter-argue that all rules are man-made and a genealogical trace will show that there are no universal rules, rather these rules have changed over time and they all possess only the status of perspectives. A radical Nietzschean would argue that there are no rules at all, as each person has his own perspective and therefore in this scheme of things, there can be no game in the first place. However, both these interpretations in this very simplistic account are unsatisfactory as we not only find both Football and Basketball played in many parts of the world with great gusto but they have become multi-billion dollar businesses. So what would a hermeneutical reading of the phenomena look like? First, there are no universal rules that govern the movement of hands and legs in ‘games’, because there are different games and each game has a different set of rules. Secondly, just because there are different games with different rules does not lead us to a point of despair where we cannot play any meaningful game. There are objective rules that govern particular games, even though there may be no universal rules for ‘games’ as such. Thirdly, this leads us to make a claim that rules are game-dependent. Put simply, the movement of hands and legs are governed by the rules of the particular game within which the movement occurs. The framework of a particular game gives an objective and in a sense universal set of rules that govern how that game ought to be played at least in a given epoch. They are not primarily subjective to the inquiring-self or the historical context where the game is enacted, unless the game itself has mutated over time, if yes, then the new-construction of the game would become the objective referent. The game dictates how it is to be understood. So we can analogously have conflicting sets of rules (of different games) and yet not give in to contradictions as these rules are constitutive of and constituted by the particular game. In hermeneutical language, both phenomena and the inquiry of the phenomena are situated within particular traditions and in our illustration, the traditions of Football and Basketball. However, with full acceptance that traditions are not passive, rather change, mutate and renew themselves in time. Therefore, there is a need for not just an inquiry into the nature of the phenomena, but also a contemporaneous inquiry into the nature of the inquiring-self and it is in this dialogue between the inquirer and inquiree, knowledge is constructed which is both full-blooded and bloodless, ideas meshed within flesh which is the fabric of life.