Book Title: Sambodhi 1989 Vol 16
Author(s): Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Page 126
________________ 117 patterns of different texts. Radhakrishnan finds convergence among various religious and philosophical texts because he gives priority to Being over texts, whereas Derrida finds convergence among the texts not because they highlight the same underlying reality but because they share the same logocentric assumptions. The convergence that Radhakrishnan finds orregarding the notions of truch, value, meaning or reality is due to what Derrida treats as 'metaphysics of presence' Certain terms assume dominance due to logocentric approach and such dominance is reflected in various texts. Radhakrishnan would say that it is due to the common and shared intuitions or mystical experiences that certain terms acquire legitimate dominance. It is in this sense that Derrida's grammatology is different from Radhakrishnan's onology. The ineffable Being of Radhakrishnan is different from the unnameable differance of Derrida. Derrida reduces the experience of presence to the differentiated system of signs. The question uliimately is about the "textually inmediated awareness of the objects about us". Some critics of Derrida, like David Novitz ! have argued that linguistic beliefs do mediate our perception of objects, but from this it does not follow that we can never observe non-seniotic and nonlinguistic objects. Radhakrishnan would have accepted Novitz's point against Derrida. Play for Derrida is the disruption of presence. Derrida admits that the name of man is the name of that being who throughout his history has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.36 Radhakrishnan would have found nothing wrong with such a dream and he has already shown the possibility of such a dream being realized in certain kinds of experiences. Radhakrishnan would never have agreed to dissolve experience into differentiated expressions. Of course, it is difficult to convey the meaning of experience without language but for Radhakrishnan all the features of language can not be transferred to the nonlinguistic experience of the object and all the objects of direct perception can not be treated as tlie products of the system of semiotic differences. Radhakrislınan would say that the experiences of beings at an ordinary level and the experiences of Being at a transcendent level have to be accepted even though we inay fail to verbalize them fully due to the nature and structure of language. In this context. Radhakrishnan finds no difficulty in harmonizing various texts in relation to the experience of Being because he allowed for the textually uninediated experience at all the levels. This does not mean that there are no difficulties in Radhakrishnan's ontology but ihe point is that he is under no pressure to justify the normal assumption that reality is external to language, whereas Derrida is required to show why presence is reduced to a disruptive play of differance and

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