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Totalization, Reining Totalities and the Dialectics of One and the Many
Opinion | Articles | Victor Ferrao | 14-Mar-2021
When unity is construed as uniformity, diversity suffocates and dies. There is the diversal in the universal. Both sameness and otherness co-exists in the real. This is why what is universal cannot be reduced to sameness. When unity becomes uniformity, it becomes a mask of hegemony. This is why we need a hermeneutics of suspicion to critically discern the pluriversal in the universal. Often what we regard as universal is tainted by Eurocentrism. This is why the logical problem of one and many cannot be decided merely on the side of the one. We cannot reduce otherness into forms of sameness. There is infinity in the otherness that refuses our attempts of totalization.
Emmanuel Levinas, a French thinker uses the phenomenology of the face of the other to drive home this point. He points out that the face of the other carries the trace of infinity that cannot be erased. But there are reductive epistemologies and metaphysical positions that impoverish us by totalizing reality. Reductive thinking builds hegemonies and requires totalities that forget otherness, diversities and other possibilities. This is why we need a thinking that is open to border crossing that transgresses the set boundaries that are isolating humans as well as clamping down on other ways of being in the world. Sameness often imposes on otherness. We can see how Europe imposed itself as a cultural capital of the world. Caput means head. Therefore as a cultural capital, it took the position of hegemony. The same is true of Brahmanism in India. This is why there are many Europes or Brahmanisms in our minds that we try to mimic and order as forms of being in the world.
We in India have fallen prey to a domineering and imperialist discourse that is disassembling our country by putting it into forms of uniformity. Slogans like one nation, one market, and one law have come to dominate our social and political discourse and public policy. This Europeanization of the plural civilization of our country is certainly a regressive step and has not stopped even after colonization. With a borrowed image of nationalism mainly arising of the treaty of Westphalia that masks as Indic, we are disassembling the plural cultural and civilizational ethos of our people. We are mimicking what has happened in Europe with regards to form while we insert Indic elements into it. This means we are hybridizing as we mimic the West. But this mimicry is impoverishing our country and our people as we are have become willing to mutilate our limbs of our nation thinking that they are sickening its body.
This outsidering of our very own people as enemies of the nation is unfortunately thought as making our nation strong. Actually, it is a strategy to centralize power in our country and build condition of hegemony that can enable the power elite to prey upon the natural, human and cultural resources of our people. This is why we need a critical and emancipative dialogue with the plural civilizational ethos of our country so that through what many are called civilizational dialogue, we are enabled to resist its destruction through its Europeanization. There is irreducibility in our plural cultures, languages and civilizational ethos. We cannot standardize this untranslatability into singularized mold of the West through the privileging of the logic of one over many. We fail India and our people in our attempt to gain mastery and power by reducing its diversity to uniformity.
India cannot be totalized. Such a totalization is actually a subtraction. It impoverishes us as we live behind the vital many, the other that relates us to one-ness. It is only by adding up that we can open all possibilities of being Indians in the world. Addition of the many to the one will open the world of multiplication or possibilities. Subtraction takes us into the power of division and hurts the soul of our country by mutilating its body. This model of domination is Eurocentric. We do have another model of dominance in India. It is also unwelcome. This model hierarchizes the many. It does not reduce the many into one as we find in the West. It uses the power of division. Society then is divided into castes that are hierarchically ordered. What we have it operating today in our country is a complex combination of the two. The Brahminic ordering of the society on a hierarchy of purity and pollution does remain but it scales it up on the order of the power one by imposing uniformity. This means castes that are assembled under the term Hinduism that acquired religious connotation/ meaning only in the 19th century are embraced while it disassembles others like religious, tribal and dalits as outsiders.
Thus on one hand it remains faithful to the principle of purity and pollution by ordering the diverse and the many on the scale of hierarchy, while on the other hand, it also mimics the domineering logic of one over many that we find in the West. This amounts to finding the reductive power of one as well as divisive power of many being abused to build hegemony in our country. What we need is the power of addition. A civilization that invented zero has understood the myriad power of zero. Zero is not merely a place holder where we place otherness in our country and order it on the scale of caste hierarchy. We seem to also use multiplying power of zero to annihilate or castrate the power of the other. Zero also has fertility power when it is placed alongside any other number. We have used it only to develop caste hegemony and let loose the power of addition and multiplication selectively to benefit upper castes in the past and majoritarianism in the present.
The minoritization of the other is indeed using the castrating power of zero and logic of subtraction and division. What we need today is to understand the power of the logic of addition that will bring multiplier effect in our society. We can arrive at this point of exponential leaps only through the dialogue of civilizations. We need the dialogue of the East and the West and discern how we distil the West or East or both to support imperial powers within our society. Such a dialogue has the power of the logic of addition that will bring multiplier effect of building peace, harmony and common flourishing of all children of mother India.
(The Author is a Priest in the Archdiocese of Goa, Daman and Diu, and a Professor in Rachol Seminary. He could be reached on victorferrao@yahoo.co.uk. Views expressed are personal)
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