Language is undeniably one of the technologies by which Greek Being became absorbed into modern European epistemologies. The extent to which language diffusion greatly impacted non-European philosophical systems is also of worthy note, since it has facilitated both the widespread diffusion and the global centrality of Greek-derived rationalism. The translation of philosophical concepts into Latin and other European languages has played a pivotal role in shaping philosophical discourse, reinforcing the hegemony of European epistemologies while pushing alternative epistemological frameworks to the margins. For instance, the English “logic” and German “Logik” stem from Greek logos, meaning both “reason” and “word.” There is a clear link between logic and being in European philosophy: Descartes (1596-1650) is credited with the well-known line “Cogito, ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” Building from this example, I am left to ask: To what extent can a concept, person, or trend resurface once buried? How might they adapt to new strands of philosophical thought? How about being?
As “to be” and “Being” in English suggest living within a bounded time and space, a la Heidegger’s concept Dasein, lexical bodies with considerably less Greek influence than many popularly spoken in Europe enable us to conceptualize different ways of being. In his sketching out of Dasein, Heidegger articulates how its metaphysical construction stems from a necessary relationship whereby the subject (i.e., an individual) must relate to an object (i.e., the world): “The anticipatory drive-towards – Being (in this sense, ego) does not signify any such thing as an isolated tendency in a World-less ‘subject,’ but characterizes the to-be-in-the-World” (Richardson, 99). In a Hegelian model, which inheres a teleological means and end, becoming surfaces vertically through self-awareness, and consequently through self-transcendence. In a Heideggerian model, the insistence of Dasein is also temporal: one acts, or is, in order to accomplish something, always within the constraints of time.
In a philosophy developed within language communities that were neither Greek nor German, however, “being” in a worldly sense takes on different nuances. For instance, there are several Sanskrit verbs which roughly translate to the English infinitive “to be,” though they differ subtly in use. The Sanskrit verb root as, for instance, serves primarily as a linking function, and it is usually simply translated as “to be,” as in the popular Sanskrit line from the Chandogya Upanishad, tat tvam asi (“you are that”). A closer analogue to the English verb “to be” as is resonant with Heidegger’s use of application of Dasein comes from a second verb common in Sanskrit and Pali literature. Sanskrit and Pali, two classical languages commonly associated with the religious and philosophical texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, commonly use words derived from the verb root bhu to signify “being” in a way that is terrestrialized. For instance, bhu may also be spoken to refer to “the Earth,” and many contemporary Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi and Bangla, have a word for “Earth” which stems from bhu. In this way, bhu refers to both being and the world. The questions arise: Is bhu the essential identity of being in the world, or is it both being and the world? Is it only one over the other? Is its use context-dependent? Notwithstanding these questions, bhu, a name which shares a relationship of differentiation with svarga and naraka, “higher” and “lower” realms of existence, thus characterizes being as being of the bhu-realm, or bhuloka. But being in this realm is a transitory existence, one which begins and ends and may recur, depending on one’s actions (karma) during their existence.
What differs between the Greek function of being in time, such as in Heidegger’s Dasein, and the notion of being in time in the popular Hindu cosmological system, is that being of the bhuloka is vanquished only when a being moves outside of this realm and into another realm within the Hindu cosmological system. Even if a being reaches the highest realm of existence, and in so doing achieves moksha, or liberation, then the being remains. Moksha in Hindu cosmology does not constitute the destruction of being, rather than permanent relief from the captivity of karma. Here, the dependency of one’s prior karma plays a role that would receive precedent importance in Hegel’s figuration of the spirit (German Geist), the latter of which becomes self-aware through time.
To pivot from the technology of language to Hindu and Buddhist logic, this beingness takes on different forms in specific schools of Indian philosophy. For example, the Nyāya school of Hindu philosophy might posit that a thing only maintains its thingness—that is, its being a thing—for as long as the conditions that give rise to its thingness are maintained. In this sense, a thing’s ability to be is directly correlated with time: when those conditions for thingness are not present, then that thing’s thingness ceases, and the thing ceases to exist. In this way, things which are inherently grasped (like that inherent quality which endows to a thing its thingness) suggest of themselves universality, because of their possession of the inherent quality of thingness (Siderits 97-99).
To extend a different perspective to thingness in South Asian philosophical traditions, the Mahayana Buddhist position would rather suggest that all things are causally produced, not linearly from an identifiable source or several sources, but as the culmination of pratityasamutpāda, or “dependent co-origination.” Not only does the concept of “dependent co-origination” do away with the Nyāya school’s eventual conclusion that universality does exist; it also posits a fundamental interconnectivity between all things and events which the individual Self “cannot account for itself solely through itself” (Wirth 51). This destabilizes the post-Cartesian imagination of the Self, which understands the Self as an independent and self-aware fixity which exists regardless of external factors—an essentially alienated being.
This assertion appears to have no shortage of opposition, as well, not least from European historians of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries (see Park, 69-76). Continuing into the 20th century, philosophers like Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) would, for instance, conceive of “mystical” and “meditative” practices within Greek philosophical schools, though he also noted a disposition towards the acceptance of a monotheistic God which supplanted mythology, rooted partially in translations across the Mediterranean world: “Translations from the Greek into Latin are indeed only a particular aspect of this vast process of unification, that is, of Hellenization, of the different cultures of the Mediterranean world, Europe, and Asia Minor” (Hadot, 55). The question of “who” started philosophy (at least, that philosophy which is palatable to the German continental philosopher’s sensibilities, maintaining the spiritual-ethical axis of God without forsaking the supremacy of logos as the “practice” of philosophy) is met without unanimity and, until after the 17th century, the narrative of a philosophical continuity from classical Greece to the present day had not been manufactured. If logos as reason—that is, the principle of order harnessed by the interior faculties of Man—is tied to word, the vehicle through which translation is exacted, then one could easily see how translation becomes market infrastructure for the exchange of ideas and the eventual establishment of “world philosophies.”
If logos as reason—that is, the principle of order harnessed by the interior faculties of Man—is tied to word, the vehicle through which translation is exacted, then one could easily see how translation becomes market infrastructure for the exchange of ideas and the eventual establishment of “world philosophies.”
But I think that a much more useful way to conceptualize the amenability of Greek philosophy is not to foreclose its compatibility with any other possibility than “a monotheistic disposition.” Instead, it feels much more fruitful a thought exercise to consider that emergent academic narratives that aim to reconstruct philosophical thought (regardless of space or tradition) will find it difficult to escape the pull of socio-political world in which they are enveloped, which continuously reifies itself in light of the post-18th century German philosophical tradition if allowed to do so.
In the interest of expanding possibilities for novel and generative paradigms within and beyond preexisting systems of thought, what would the ramifications be if Greek was not the root language from which “world philosophy” had been traced? Consider one of Sanskrit’s many words for “logic” in the epistemological sense, Nyāya. Some orthodox Nyāya branches, notably the Navya-Nyāya branch, attempted to identify four legitimate “proofs” (pramānas) by which one attained knowledge, within which includes shabda (“word,” thought to be indivisible from Supreme Reality or Brahman). The indivisible relationship between shabda and Brahman is an important facet of Advaita (“nondualist,” and importantly non-monotheistic) philosophies, of which Navya-Nyāya was one. In this way, two important characteristics of the Navya-Nyāya school can be established. Firstly, because shabda as a type of pramāna is indivisible from Brahman, shabda becomes a Hindu ontological and epistemological truth.
Bearing in mind that colonial-era translation has shaped common usage of countless terms in the broader Indo-Aryan lexical body, it might be a generative thought experiment to consider how conceptions of philosophy and justice—not to mention rationality and spirituality—may be informed by abandoning those terms in favor of others, giving new life to alternative ways of being. How might the relationship shared between shabda and Brahman offer an alternative to the relationship posed by rationality and spirituality? In an attempt to step away from the assumed baggage of rationality and spirituality as they have been acquired through Greco-Latin linguistic absorption, acquiring through this process the system of Europeanized logic via logos.
But the philosophical tapestry of South Asia, both modern and premodern, is much more complicated than even discourses on translation might suggest. In most South Asian philosophical traditions, with the exception of certain groups like the Lokayata, Buddhist, and Vaisheshika (Mohanty, 14), shabda is considered a pramāna. If Buddhists, as well as certain orthodox Hindu philosophical schools, do not share with a broader South Asian philosophical consensus on shabda, then it would be reasonable to suggest that what exactly constitutes pramāna differs across time, space, and philosophical schools, as well. According to J. N. Mohanty, shabda is one type of the pramānas “not only because words generate much of our language, but also because such knowledge is not reducible to some other kind of knowledge” (24). If not taken as a legitimate pramāna, however, then shabda cannot reveal epistemological truth. The ontological-epistemological operation of shabda also varies differently across traditions: in Sikhi, for instance, shabda need not be produced via verbal sound. Instead, shabda may be manifest or unmanifest, or anhad, “a pure form of egoless speech/thought that resonates with the underlying sonic-mnemic theme of creation” (Mandair, 63).
A most critical cautionary tale for translation is that an abstraction, such as being, is open to polysemous interpretation; but, on the other hand, its polysemic capacities require keen perception and interpretation to understand, imagine, and negotiate different conceptions of being, translating them in the process. To remain confined to a Greek-derived idiom of Being is to fundamentally misunderstand how being is expressed and interiorized, not only in non-European linguistic spheres, but in all communities across the world. Such limitations do not account for the vibrant multiplicity of human experience, within and outside of the spaces within which specific linguistic apprehensions of being are derived. It is critical to embrace multiple ways of being in a globalized world, remaining aware of how linguistic apprehensions of being shape its individuated experience. Brought into cohabitation via colonial-era migrations, the contemporary travel industry, and the global flow of labor, it is critical to acknowledge that meliorative expressions of being cannot be wholly translated into the Greek-derived idiom.
The implications of remaining within this idiom pose serious existential and epistemological consequences that affect not only the academy, but also the public world at-large, literature, and people on a singular level. As 19th century German existentialist philosophy thrives off the continuance of this idiom, it continues to reify the Hegelian Geist of being. In so doing, this idiom continues to breathe life into Eurocentric ontological paradigms. Those paradigms in turn limit one’s understanding of being, alongside all of the epistemological arguments that cannot be translated into this idiom of being. The act of translation itself presents a double-edged sword. On the one hand, to translate without a keen sensibility to localized apprehensions of being is to suffer a mistranslation. On the other hand, privileging language above all as a means of expressing being and logic, the horizons of existence are mediated through the word. In other words, that which is delimited outside of language’s capacity cannot be. In turn, philosophy risks becoming a European technological-scientific apparatus that cannot recognize an ontological multiplicity. As most creative work generated by people is an act of multiplicity—the infinite configuration of words and rhythms to produce lyrics, music, and poetry; the ever-expanding repertoire of colors and strokes that culminate in art; the random chance that recessive traits and biological mutations occur in healthy organisms; the list always goes on—it would be not only remiss, but also highly simplistic to overlook the many articulations of being expressed beyond paradigms inherited through Greek philosophical traditions.
References
Hadot, Pierre. “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy.” In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 49-71.
Mandair, Arvind-Pal Singh. Sikh Philosophy: Exploring gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Mohanty, J. N. Classical Indian Philosophy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
Park, Peter. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.
Richardson, William J. Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.
Siderits, Mark. “A Nyāya Interlude.” In Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007): 85-104.