________________
115
VII Texts and Readings :
S. Gopal has shown that in the context of studying the philosophical thought of the past, Radhakrishnan treated as senseless the notion of an uninterpreted text. Radhakrishuan employed creative logic of interpretation by being faithful to the spirit rather than to the letter of the text. Derrida wants to be faithful to the letter of the text as well.
According to Richard De Smet, while preparing to write Indian Philosophy, Radhakrishnan found it difficult to reconcile the faithfulness to the historical data with the subjectivity required in interpreting them. Thus, at times, he creatively enforces upon the text the interpretations which show tlieir relevance for us today. Richard illustrates this point by referring to Radhakrislinan's interpretation of the place of intuition in Sarkara's Vedānta in ihe context of srutivāda: o.
Dallmayer finds Radhakrishnan mediating between ancient texts and contemporary understandings. Radhakrishnan asks us to remember as well as to create anew. He faced the competing paradigins of thought without being a traditionalist or a sceptic. His solution to the confiicting demands of the past and present was a recourse to interpretative mediation resembling Gadamer's hermeneutics. His work shows a "creative rethinking of philosophical and religious traditions.''31
Radhakrishnan advocates an essentialist version of the unity of all religions and a foundationalist version of the spiritual Being. His convergent readings of the texts involving Gadamer's kind of "fusion of horizons", are guided by synthetic and integrative orientation.
The underlying assumption behind Radhakrishnan's creative interpretative strategy is that there is a foundational Being and that an unmediated encounter with such a Being is of the same type across all cultures and all times. Thus there is historical diversity of expressions focussing on the essential unity of experience. Such a guiding assumption itself is an independent ontological and a linguistic thesis. It constitutes a philosophy of reading and interpretation.
Christopher Norris has rightly shown that Derrida's deconstruction has the qualities of logical tautness and dialectical rigour and it does not imply unlimited hermeneutic freedom in the sense that deconstructive reading suspends the issues of truth, meaning and reference in favour of an infinitized "free play” of language devoid of logical rigour or referential grasp.s? For example, in “White Mytholygy" Derrida shows
