SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

lyz I Social Theory and Social Action Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I J73
On the other hand, it may well turn out, as Griffiths (1989:527-29) argues,
that it is in the nature of philosophical reasoning to exist in a relatively decontextualized
state, that is, not dependent upon cultural traditions, so that religious
discourse responds to metaphysical commitments but not vice versa. This reversed
causality would suggest research into the impact of philosophical discourse
on religious traditions, along dimensions such as systematization (e.g., promoting
local typologies of traditions in India), rationalization (e.g., the increasing attention
to exegetical rules and interpretive principles in religious contexts), and regimentation
(i.e., the development of official, standardized, or codified norms of
religious practice, feeling, and expression). Of particular interest here would be
to study changes in religious traditions across shifts in philosophical worldviews.
Second, in my opinion the comparative philosophy of religion needs to bepreeminence.
12 Many centuries later one commentator counters the possible implication
that members of the priestly or brahmanic caste might undertake different
occupational activities by framing the mantra with the question about a
hypothetical circumstance: what can priests legitimately do during a famine? An
even later commentary continues this theme by adding the idea that the mantra
was actually uttered "during" a drought, thus removing the text from its previous
ritual context. In the first of these commentaries the performative force of
the mantra is undermined by the process of literalizing the contextual presuppositions
of the text; in the second, performativity is reintroduced when the commentator
notes that the mantra is performed by priests who, having been forced
into unbrahmanic labors, utter it to purify themselves. Finally, the diverse social
roles mentioned in the Vedic mantra receive official codification in the Laws of
Manu. Operating at a tangent to these legitimizing commentaries, however, are
other occurrences of the theme of the "myth of exigency" in folklore and epic,
which, as Patton argues, reverse the officializing tendency by narrating instances
where other castes, even untouchables, can act toward the goal of ending the
drought. As this case makes clear, the Indian tradition must be seen as a fundamentally
diachronic (Vedic and post-Vedic) and essentially intertextual (mantra,
commentary, statute, folktale, epic) field of interpretation.
Finally, Al-Azmeh's (1994) analysis of the hermeneutical parallels in medieval
Arabic thought between the fields of religion and jurisprudence provides an
excellent example of the linkage among practical reason, comparison, and interpretation.
Theological interpretation is grounded in a genealogical typology
whereby historical events are rendered significant by being considered replicas or
simulacra of archetypal foundational acts; thus, chronological time is subsumed
by salvation history in such a way as to deny the contingency, randomness,
chaos, and uniqueness of instances, which are all brought into identity through
their being performative results of the original types (Burkhalter 1985:245). In
jurisprudence, the relationship between religious textual precedent and consequent
legal judgment is, likewise, viewed as one of causal iconicity; and in situations
where the particular case is not transparently assimilable under an explicit
Koranic passage, a mechanism of analogy intervenes as an interpretive tool to
"extend the purview of nomothetic discourse to previously uncharted domains"
(Al-Azmeh 1986:87). The indexical ground of the analogical correlation of textual
authority and particular judgment is not, however, located in either natural
law or social convention, since only God's wisdom knows the causal relation
between the two and since only God's command has true juridical force:
Having no compelling necessity, the concordance of the one with the other,
and the compulsion of the index linking the two in an analogical relation, is a
matter which lies beyond rational certainty, but is guaranteed by the authority
of the text and its hermeneutician. The final arbiter who decrees the ineffable
to be operative is therefore equally the final cause of this decree; and the concordance
which assures the assonance of humanity and divinity and thus
evades the horrors of infernal eternity is one whose custodian is the authority
that decrees it. (Al-Azmeh 1986:91—92)
A consequence of these principles is that identical legal postulates found in non-
Islamic cultures, or in Arabic societies prior to Islam, are by definition invalidated.
In other words, a hermeneutic of total encompassment correlates with a
comparative stance of radical exclusivism.
Directions for Future Research
By way of conclusion I point to two issues, one substantive and the other
methodological, which might serve as a challenge for future research in the comparative
philosophy of religion. After a careful review of the articles in the three
edited volumes in this series, I think that more systematic attention needs to be
directed to the bicausal relationship between philosophical discourse and the cultural
traditions in which that discourse emerges. On the one hand, the surrounding
tradition can provide an overarching, general ideology that influences the
character of philosophical reasoning, as in the effect of evolutionary (if not imperialistic)
ideologies on Hegel's typology of religions. Or, the existing social order
might provide a foundation for intellectuals in certain social roles to think in
similar ways, as in Humphreys' (1975:112) linkage of philosophies of transcendence
and interstitial and solidary intellectuals, and as in J. Z. Smith's
(1987:293) correlation of local notions of ritual as exact repetition with the social
context of archaic urban elites. Or, there may be a patterned relationship
between the predominance of implicit metapragmatic discourse and the nonscriptural
basis of the religious tradition, and inversely, the development of explicit
metapragmatics might correlate with scriptural literacy (Gellner 1988:75).
One might, in this way, juxtapose the metapragmatic devices of the Bimin-
Kuskusmin with the textually highlighted metapragmatic distinction between
commonplace yet instructional language and abstract yet direct language in the
Buddhist thinker Gurulogomi discussed by Hallisey.