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Intercivilizational Dialogue on Peace
"Both were members of ancient civilisations, struggling to define a role for their heritage in the emerging international environment," the writer succinctly remarks. Formation of reality through different kinds of relatedness and the phenomenon of opposition are their two significant areas of commonalty, albeit, they entertain two mutually exclusive approaches—Mallik represents absorptionist group society while Buber sanctions the communitarian dualistic scheme. For Buber, the notion of lived antinomy or the polarity of I-Thou I-It has no place for synthesis or any sort of mystical union. Though I-It dominates the human world, it is I-Thou that gives direction, depth and organic unity to a community. Mallik doesn’t agree with Buber’s classification of logical polarities as disjunctive because they are relational terms. Further, he establishes Being against absolute nothingness. In fact, contraries imply each other neutralising the negative in existence. While Buber takes the relatedness of individuals prior to individuality, Mallik thinks of it as a metaphysical given in the historical context. Forms of existence are essentially related and the lack of this awareness does not mean its absence. Polarities cannot be synthesised through the Hegelian/Marxian mode and they have to be calibrated in a creative way and lived together. Madhuri finds an uncanny resemblance between Buber’s statement that "All real living is meeting" and that of Mallik: "Life after all is meeting if it is anything". In this way both the philosophers point the way for raising a stable home for mankind through "meeting" or relatedness. Buber’s emphasis on the "willed address" in the I-Thou encounter is the source of ethics and is grounded in a pre-linguistic immediacy. Melancholy of the human race is caused by swinging back into the cognitive world of the I-It from that of the I-Thou. Evil for Buber means lack of direction. In contrast to Buber, Mallik "looked at received ethical systems as derivative from overall civilisational and societal values" and for him ethical challenges involved summoning of a person’s total understanding when he is confronted with a domineering force in the everyday life. This is the ethical way to total abstention from absolutism. While analysing the utopian thinking of the two philosophers, the writer finds that according to Buber, a truly organic community would simply be created in the space of the Between once we have a sufficient number of the I-Thou relationships incorporating an act of grace, i.e. the Eternal Thou. However, Mallik assessed that society was an end product which could be achieved only through "a process of unifying and individualising multiple constituents". While Mallik envisioned pure endless Being for all, Mallik’s promise was only for the "pure in heart". Political concerns of the two philosophers included Jewish-Arab, Hindu-Muslim relations and Gandhi’s ventures. Buber found a contradiction in Gandhi’s 1920 slogan of "swaraj in one year" as in religious reality there is no stipulation of time. Gandhi did not spiritualise politics but politicised religion. Mallik’s involvement with Gandhi has been of fundamental significance too and Madhuri avers that many aspects of his works "serve almost as a theoretical underpinning for Gandhi’s vision". The book is an immaculate work of a scholar whose mind, preoccupied with the subject for decades together, has traversed across reputed world-universities seeking measured answers. Tough, but very appealing.
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THE
author has juxtaposed the ideas of Basanta Mallik, the Indian
metaphysician, and Martin Buber, the Jewish existentialist, on the
issues of generic pluralism and the related possibilities and
methodologies of removing or harmonising different conflicts active in
the world-views. However, her study is not intended to reach a
conclusion; it remains open-ended and is designed only to suggest
further avenues of thoughts.