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Comparative Political Theory and Heterology

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Abstract

One of the central difficulties for practitioners of cognate disciplines like comparative political theory and comparative philosophy concerns the hermeneutic problem of understanding that which is different. The philosophical challenge, put briefly, is this: Is it possible to bring something of an entirely different order into our world of understanding without imposing our own epistemological categories and civilizational prejudices on it? This essay focuses on recent exemplary work in comparative political theory that has explicitly grappled with this issue. Examined here are three models of encountering and learning from different traditions of thought—the models of existential immersion, conversion, and pilgrimage—as exemplified in the contributions by Farah Godrej, Leigh Jenco, and J. L. Mehta. The essay shows that while the first two authors have sought to resolve the problem of the encounter with difference methodologically (Godrej) and epistemologically (Jenco), their respective solutions remain implicitly bound to a spectator theory of knowledge. This becomes especially evident when their work is contrasted with Mehta’s own. Unlike Godrej and Jenco, Mehta does not view difference as a problem to be resolved. The advantage of his approach, I argue, is that it provides liberation from the rigid subject-object dichotomy which encourages the view that the ‘objects’ of our knowledge exist prior to and wholly apart from the act of knowing. Mehta’s work, therefore, opens the possibility for redirecting our attention to a question that has thus far been thoroughly avoided in the consolidation of the subfield: the question of the very constitution of difference or heterology.

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Notes

  1. For general surveys of the subfield as well as representative essays that engage in these discussions, see Fred Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory,’ Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2 (June 2004): 249–257; Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Political Encounter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Megan Thomas, ‘Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,’ The Review of Politics 72 (2010): 653–677; Diego von Vacano, ‘The Scope of Comparative Political Theory,’ Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 18 (2015): 465–480; Takashi Shogimen, ‘Dialogue, Eurocentrism, and Comparative Political Theory: A View from Cross-Cultural Intellectual History,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 77 (April 2016): 323–345; Andrew March, ‘What is Comparative Political Theory?’ The Review of Politics 71 (2009): 531–565; Farah Godrej, ‘Response to “What is Comparative Political Theory?,”’ The Review of Politics 71 (2009): 567–582, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other,’ Polity 41, no. 2 (2009): 135–165; Murad Idris, ‘Political Theory and the Politics of Comparison,’ Political Theory (July 2016): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716659812; Daniel Kapust and Helen Kinsella, ‘Introduction: Theory’s Landscapes,’ in Comparative Political Theory in Time and Place (Palgrave 2016), 1–24; Chris Goto-Jones, ‘If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past? On the Place of the Non-European in the History of Philosophy,’ The Royal Institute of Philosophy 80 (2005): 29–51, ‘A Cosmos Beyond Space and Area Studies: Toward Comparative Political Thought as Political Thought,’ boundary 2 38:3 (Fall 2011): 87–118, ‘The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan,’ positions 17:1 (Spring 2009): 13–42; Leigh Jenco, ‘“What Does Heaven Ever Say?”: A Methods Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement,’ American Political Science Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (2007): 741–755; James Tully, ‘Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond: A Dialogue Approach to Comparative Political Thought,’ Journal of World Philosophies 1 (Winter 2016): 51–74; Andrea Mura, ‘Orient, Orientation, and the Western Referent: From Comparative to World Thought,’ in Lucian Stone and Jason B. Mohaghegh (eds), Manifestoes For World Thought (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 3–21; Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the mirror: Islamic fundamentalism and the limits of modern rationalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the other shore: Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2006).

  2. Megan Thomas, ‘Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,’ 653–677; Jane Gordon raises the same point in her book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham U. Press, 2014), 209.

  3. Shogimen, ‘Dialogue, Eurocentrism, and Comparative Political Theory,’ 326.

  4. Shogimen, 345.

  5. Aakash Rathore, Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Swaraj (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 1.

  6. Christopher Goto-Jones, ‘When is comparative political thought (not) comparative? Dialogues, (dis)continuities, creativity, and radical difference in Heidegger and Nishida,’ in Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent (eds.), Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 160.

  7. Loubna El Amine, ‘Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity,’ Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 14 (March, 2016), 103.

  8. See, for e.g., Hassan Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other: Comparative Perspectives on Politics, Religion, and Culture Before the Enlightenment (Lexington Books, 2013); Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford U Press, 2015); Leigh Jenco, ‘“What does Heaven Ever Say?”,’ 741–755; Takashi Shogimen, ‘Dialogue, Eurocentrism, and Comparative Political Theory,’ 323–345; Antony Black, ‘The Way Forward in Comparative Political Thought,’ Journal of International Political Theory Vol. 7, No. 2 (2011): 221–228; Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent, ‘Introduction: The study of comparative political thought,’ in Freeden and Vincent, Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (Routledge, 2012), 1–23.

  9. See, for e.g., Shogimen, (2016) and Jenco, (2007; 2015).

  10. On this point, see, for e.g., Fred Dallmayr and Andrea Murana.

  11. Andrew March has identified at least five motivations that, in his view, sustain current arguments in support of CPT and expanding the boundaries of the Western canon to include previously neglected thinkers and thought traditions.

  12. Thomas, ‘Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,’ 654.

  13. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), 24.

  14. Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY press, 1988), 167.

  15. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (U of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 127.

  16. Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford U Press, 2011); Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford U Press, 2015).

  17. Although engagements with Mehta’s work in political theory remain few, one exception includes Fred Dallmayr’s chapter ‘Heidegger, Bhakti, and Vedanta: A Tribute to J.L. Mehta’ in his Beyond Orientalism (1996). Outside the field of political theory, the most in-depth treatment of Mehta’s entire philosophical corpus can be found in Thomas B. Ellis’s On the Death of the Pilgrim: The Post-colonial Hermeneutics of Jarava Lal Mehta (Springer, 2013).

  18. See Viren Murthy, Fabian Schafer, and Max Ward, eds., Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017).

  19. Ibid, 2.

  20. Ibid, 3.

  21. Ibid, 3.

  22. See, for e.g., Ming Xie, The Agon of Interpretations: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermeneutics (U of Toronto Press, 2014), Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry (Continuum, 2011); Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, eds., Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Johns Hopkins U Press, 2013); Tim Connolly, Doing Philosophy Comparatively (Bloomsbury, 2015); Steven Burik, The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism (SUNY Press, 2009); Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); Robert Smid, Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process Traditions (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009).

  23. See, for e.g., Idris, (2016); and Andrew March, (2009) on how to evaluate different visions.

  24. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, ‘Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy,’ in Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, eds., Comparison, 136–7.

  25. On this point, see Ania Loomba, ‘Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique,’ in Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, eds., Comparison, 147–167.

  26. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 49–50.

  27. Ibid, 240.

  28. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 15.

  29. Walter Mignolo, ‘On Comparison: Who is Comparing What and Why?’ in Rita Felski and Susan Friedman, eds., Comparison, 104.

  30. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 17–18.

  31. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 56.

  32. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 61.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 58.

  35. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 61.

  36. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 120–121.

  37. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 72.

  38. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 60–70. What we see here is that Godrej implicitly equates objectivity with ahistoricity, a position that has been called into question by the same phenomenological tradition that informs her own approach. Both Heidegger and Gadamer, for example, would argue that any attempt to escape to an ahistorical thinking is not only futile, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of thought. Our historical situatedness is not like an attribute that we might set aside for investigation; we are this historical situatedness.

  39. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 81.

  40. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 81.

  41. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 82.

  42. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 87.

  43. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 87.

  44. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 88.

  45. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 81.

  46. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 88.

  47. Godrej, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,’ 164.

  48. Godrej, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,’ 163.

  49. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 95.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Ibid.

  52. See, for e.g., Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 92.

  53. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 92.

  54. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 93.

  55. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 130–133.

  56. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this book to my attention.

  57. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Oxford, 1999), 3.

  58. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 313.

  59. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 239.

  60. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 54.

  61. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, 55.

  62. Jenco, ‘“What Does Heaven Ever Say?”,’ 745.

  63. Jenco, Changing Referents, 6–7.

  64. Jenco, Changing Referents, 217.

  65. Jenco, Changing Referents, 9.

  66. Jenco levels a similar critique at what she calls postcolonial or subaltern theory. As with the ‘particularists,’ Jenco similarly finds subaltern theory to be defeatist in that it suggests that certain voices or classes of otherness may be impossible to represent (93).

  67. Jenco, Changing Referents, 207. Jenco notes that the China-origins thesis should be read not as a ‘historical claim about actual origins, but a political claim intended to endow foreign knowledge with “membership” in some existing practice’ (68).

  68. Jenco, Changing Referents, 68.

  69. Jenco, Changing Referents, 73.

  70. Jenco, Changing Referents, 79.

  71. Jenco, Changing Referents, 74.

  72. Jenco, ‘Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of “Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge”,’ 1860–1895, Political Theory, 42 (6), 662.

  73. Jenco, ‘Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory,’ 668.

  74. Jenco, ‘Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory,’ 662.

  75. Jenco, Changing Referents, 76.

  76. Jenco, Changing Referents, 80.

  77. Jenco, Changing Referents, 205.

  78. Jenco, ‘Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory,’ 660.

  79. Ibid.

  80. See Chris Goto-Jones, ‘The Kyoto School,’ 13–42. See also Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner (eds.) Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  81. For an extended discussion of Panikkar’s diatopical hermeneutics see Purushottama Bilimoria, Devasia Muruppath Antony (2019). Raimon Panikkar: A Peripatetic Hindu Hermes. Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 3(2), 9–29. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1 (http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1). Raimundo Panikkar, ‘What is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?,’ in Gerald Larson and Eliot Deutsch, eds., Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton U Press, 1988), 130.

  82. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, New York: Continuum, 1989), 276.

  83. On this point, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY Press, 1988).

  84. Jenco, Changing Referents, 70.

  85. Jenco, Changing Referents, 71–72.

  86. Jenco, Changing Referents, 158.

  87. Jenco, ‘“What Does Heaven Ever Say?”,’ 753.

  88. Jenco, Changing Referents, 104.

  89. William Jackson, ‘Steps Toward the Whole Horizon: J. L. Mehta’s Contributions to Hermeneutics,’ in J. L. Mehta on Heidegger, Hermeneutics, and Indian Tradition, William J. Jackson, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 2.

  90. On this point, see Mehta’s essay ‘Heidegger and Vedanta’ in India and the West: The Problem of Understanding (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 221–268. Heidegger dismissed Indian Philosophy on the grounds that it did not provide a radical departure from Western thought. However, when I say that some of his predecessors evinced an awareness and interest in Indian Philosophy not shared by Heidegger I do not mean to suggests that they engaged with the Indian tradition in a way that does justice to it or that is free from Indologism. On Hegel’s engagement with Indian Philosophy, see Purushottama Bilimoria, ‘Philosophical orientalism in comparative philosophy of religion: Hegel to Habermas (& Zîzêk)’, Cultura Oriental, Capa vol 2, n. 2, Jul-Dec 2015, pp. 47-63. On Nietzsche’s engagement with Indian Philosophy, see Purushottama Bilimoria, ‘Nietzsche as “Europe’s Buddha” and Asia’s Superman’, Sophia (Guest Issue on Continental Philosophy of Religion), 2008, vol 47, No 3, pp. 359–376.

  91. Mehta, India and the West, 115.

  92. Mehta, “World Civilization: The Possibility of Dialogue,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 257.

  93. Mehta, “World Civilization,” 258.

  94. Mehta, ‘The Saving Leap,’ in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 91.

  95. Mehta,‘The Saving Leap,’ in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 97.

  96. Mehta, “Heidegger and the Comparison of Indian and Western Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 20, No. 3, p. 309. (Full citation: Mehta, J.L. 1970. “Heidegger and the Comparison of Indian and Western Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 303–317.)

  97. Ibid.

  98. For a critique of this position, see Goto-Jones, ‘The Kyoto School.’ Goto-Jones and other critics have charged that Heidegger’s repetition of the Greek beginning and the approach to the past on which it rests reinforces rather than challenges the parochialism of the Western philosophical tradition.

  99. Mehta, ‘Heidegger,’ 309.

  100. Ibid.

  101. Mehta, ‘Heidegger,’ 310.

  102. Mehta, “The Hindu Tradition: The Vedic Root,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 109.

  103. Mehta, ‘The Saving Leap,’ in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 90 (emphasis mine).

  104. Mehta, “Understanding and Tradition,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 193.

  105. Mehta, ‘Heidegger,’ 315.

  106. Mehta, India and the West, 191.

  107. Ibid, 191–192. Quoting Paul Hacker, Mehta continues, ‘If Chinese religion, for example, is defective, it will be Chinese experience which will discover it, and the cure should come in China not in India…If Indian religion is defective, why must the more perfect stage emerge in Tibet?’.

  108. Mehta, “The Will to Interpret and India’s Dreaming Spirit,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 185.

  109. Mehta, “Problems of Understanding,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 272-3.

  110. Ellis, On the Death of the Pilgrim, 88.

  111. Ibid.

  112. Thomas Ellis, ‘On the Death of the Pilgrim: The Postcolonial Hermeneutics of J.L. Mehta,’ in Purushottama Bilimoria and Andrew Irvine, eds., Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion (Springer, 2009), 113.

  113. Mehta, “Problems of Understanding,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 271.

  114. Mehta, Philosophy and Religion, 216.

  115. Ellis, ‘On the Death of the Pilgrim,’ 112.

  116. Mehta, “Problems of Understanding,” in Jackson, W. (ed), J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, 273.

  117. Mehta, India and the West, 206.

  118. Ellis, ‘On the Death of the Pilgrim,’ 116.

  119. Cornel West, ‘Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience.’ in A Companion to African American Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 9.

  120. Calvin Schrag quoted in Cornel West, 9.

  121. Mehta, India and the West, 242.

  122. For a critical reading of Halbfass, see Purushottama Bilimoria’s forthcoming piece, ‘After Comparative Philosophy: Discussion of “Wilhelm Halbfass and the Purposes of Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” by Dimitry Shevchenko’, Philosophy East and West, Volume 71, Number 3 July 2021. Mehta quoted in Halbfass, India and Europe, 442.

  123. It is important to note that despite his critique of metaphysics, Heidegger did not turn his back on scientific thinking. Rather, he openly acknowledged the need for two types of thought: one philosophical (or scientific) and one meditative (or recollective).

  124. J. N. Mohanty, ‘Introduction,’ in Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (South Asia Books, 1990), ix.

  125. J. L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision (Honolulu: Hawaii U Press, 1976), 469.

  126. Mehta, Philosophy and Religion, 198.

  127. J. N. Mohanty, ‘Introduction,’ in Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (South Asia Books, 1990), viii.

  128. See Goto-Jones, ‘The Kyoto School.’ In this article, Goto-Jones argues that claims about historical origins sustain rather than challenge the ethnocentricity of the history of philosophy.

  129. J. N. Mohanty, ‘Introduction,’ in Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (South Asia Books, 1990), x. For a similar point see also Purushottama Bilimoria’s forthcoming piece, op. cit.

  130. Joseph Margolis’ book, Interpretation Radical but not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History (U of California Press, 1995), gave me the language to develop this insight.

  131. See, in particular, Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History (New York: Columbia U Press, 1988) and Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

  132. On the distinction between relational and substantialist ontology, see John Hobson and Alina Sajed, ‘Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency,’ International Studies Review (2017) 19, 547–572.

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    Evgenia Ilieva

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Ilieva, E. Comparative Political Theory and Heterology. SOPHIA 61, 697–725 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00841-9

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