reflection, normativity and theory

Part I

These reflections or notes attempt to figure out how we might reformulate the questions
about experience and normativity (raised by Sufiya and implicit in some other postings)
to make them yield the kind of reflection that we are seeking to initiate and sustain here.
So some necessary indirection to give a methodological cast to Sufiyas query. I think it is
unhelpful to directly invoke the relativity of configurations. So to the indirection! Let me
take the question that Sufiya was groping toward as, Where to look for experience?
Where has reflection on experience gone?
1. When Sufiya first posed her question about (nearly enough) whether normative
institutions like the state retain their normativity in India, whether without norms it is
possible to hold the state accountable for its discriminatory acts against a community, I
was a bit surprised. Not because Sufiya assumed a normative stancewell, lets hope
people dont feel inhibited to express themselves when bitten by the normativity bug;
nothing can be more unhealthy or counterproductive than a prohibitory order against
moralizing! But because Sufiyas own research into communalism had provided
enough rich examples to take the question about the state and its relation to communities
in a direction that can be, lets say, experientially clarificatory. The kind of relationship,
the kind of skirmishes, there used to be between the Muslim communities and Hindu
communities began to be transformed once the colonial state began to view the
skirmishes through communalism; it rendered opaque the relationship between, on the
one hand, itself and the communities and, on the other, between the communities. The
skirmishes became riots. The post-colonial state only added another layer of opacity
through its politics of secularism and representation. So when I was thinking about
the relationship between reflection and normativity raised by that whole thread on
discrimination, I felt that Sufiya had the resources not only to resist posing the question
about the state but also to undertake the kind of historical, theoretical reflection that
would help analyze how the frame deployed by the state drives underground any other
frame that might have governed the relationship between the communities. Secular
histories seem to reinforce the former frame, while the transmission of the latter frame
which made possible different kinds of relationship, as well as skirmishes, seems to
become intermittent.
The two frames here are not unrelated to the two frames that we notice in our discussion
of the caste-system. Very quickly, and just to get hold of what I am talking about, here
is an example that emerged in Balus post: the varna system as the British transmitted to
us and the varnashrama as a way of orienting ourselves to act in the world. It should not
be surprising that we will find many structural similarities between the caste-system
and communalism. We will need to say a little more about what the British
transmitted: I think it is best captured by saying that they saw the caste system as the

foundation of relgious/cultural practices in India. I think we must never lose sight of

the central insight of The Heathento wit, how religion attempts to found practices
if we are to properly understand how normativity operates in different domains.
2. The discussion of caste discrimination brought home to me the urgency of initiating,
nourishing and sustaining certain kinds of reflection in order to understand and resist the
dangers of the normative stance. This reflection minimally involves looking at facts,
acts, practices unflinchingly without, as I said, moralizing them, but also much more, but
what that more is cannot be found in a manual, and has to be learned by practice.
Again, by experience nothing mystical or mysterious is meant, but it too will acquire
greater depth and resonance as we find structures to deepen our reflection. And it is
becoming more and more obvious that such reflection must take in different domains and
sites. One such essential site is the past, how we relate to it, what we want to learn from
it, whether history is the only access to it. As I tried to show above, Sufiyas own
material can be used to reflect on what history does to the past and our relationship to it.
This kind of reflection seems both pointless and undesirable once the normative stance is
assumed and one starts looking to normative political theories to lay down what the state
ought to do.
Let us explore this a little more. In my earlier post, I dont think I brought in the idea of
preserving experience. It is, however, an idea well worth thinking about. All organisms,
especially the human ones, have experience (unless we want to argue that zombies
without experience are conceivable, and if they are conceivable.). Its a different
matter altogether what cultures do with experience. It has seemed to some us that the
energies of Indian culture went into organizing and structuring reflections on experience.
To the extent the past was important for such a reflectionin fact, one could perhaps
make the case that the past for Indians is a dimension of the present, rather than being an
alien or distant territorythe cognitive structures organized by stories and Puranas which
enabled both acting in the world and reflection on it also included the past in their scope,
as it were. So relation to the past was part of the effort to evolve structures to preserve
experience. When history enters here, we can expect that it will get distorted either in the
direction of Puranas (historical figure will appear as figures in a Purana) or distort the
latter into historicity (think of Ayodhya). Either way, it will interfere with the preservation
of experience. To use the two frames idea, history will be the ally of the normative frame
that elbows out or drives underground the practical frame. So the self-consciously
secular histories may only be accentuating what all histories of Hindus and Muslims in
India will do. The important question then for restoring reflection to this site would be,
how do we bring to consciousness the other practical way of belonging together, which
certainly included skirmishes, but which probably also had learning. I want to fall back
here on that lovely notion of Nugura that Kabir coins; that was reflecting on experience.
[Talking about restoring reflection on our way of relating to the past, I am reminded of
this conversation I had with Balu sometime in the late 90s about how Ayodhya came
about. Balu offered this anecdote which illuminates both the presence of the past and the
process by which it might get distant. His high school in Bangalore was next to Tippus
small Fort (right in the middle of City Market, a lively, crowded area); and during breaks

(recess as it was called) the children would go and play in the Fort, some perhaps acting
as Tippu. Of course, the Fort would be defaced and written over and chipped, but it
would be part of the imagination of the children growing up. However, once the Fort gets
locked up, becoming a historical site, it also becomes inaccessible, and slowly Tippu
becomes only a Muslim King. So in a way monumentalization and museumization, even
in the inimitable Indian style, play a role in the way history begins to change our
relationship to the past.]
3. In contrast, the West evolved structures that sought to preserve truth and norm.
History was entrusted with the task of preserving truth. History represented the past, but
it is unclear if we can speak of history providing experiential access to the past. In fact,
when people in the West turn to the past for help, they enact necromancy, as Marx puts
it in his scintillating analysis of Louis Bonapartes coup. (they timidly conjure up the
spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and costumes so as to
stage the new world-historical scene in the venerable disguise and borrowed language.
Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the revolution of 179-1814 draped itself
alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire) It is interesting to analyze
what brings about this necromancy. It is a distortion of the kind we saw happening in
India, but caused here by the demand that history yield reflection! Can we then say that
history too is framed in a perspective that insulates experience? Consequently any
attempt to learn from history ends in the kind of necromancy Marx is calling a
farce. (Hence perhaps the adage that the only thing you learn from history is that you
cant learn anything from history.) This is then to be contrasted with the reflection that
preserves the past as a dimension of the present.
4. From what I have said so far, let me isolate the reflective dimension as one frame and
the place of norms (and of colonial consciousness) as another frame. Although more
needs to be done than what I have done here by way of stage-setting, let me assume that
you are with me so far and use the metaphor of frames to throw into sharper relief the
relationship between reflection on experience, presence of norms and theory building (I
intend no connection between my use of that metaphor and either the cognitive science
frame problem or the frames in psychology). We can now readily ask what happens to
the frames in the West and in India: how to discern them and how, in general, to use the
frames to track experience and access to experience?
5. Lets start with the West and ask if we can locate the first frame. When we talked
about the caste-system we noticed something that has a bearing on this issue. We noticed
that the frame that brings into being the caste-system simply blocks out reflection on
experience (or the first frame). This is odd since if the second frame is to afford a
theoretical perspective on what presents itself as practical/reflective way of going about
in the world, then what we should be having on our hands is something like a Freges
Puzzle. (The puzzle is simply stated though the problems it gives rise to are complex:
Hesperus=Hesperus is a tautology but Hesperus=Phosphorous is not though they refer to
the same object. So a theory of sense/meaning needs to explain the cognitive significance
of the latter.) Admittedly this is a more complex version in that here the mode of
presentation is practical; still there is little reason to expect that the second frame simply

elbows out the first frame. But that is what seems to happen when we stand in the second
frame.
Why drag in this puzzle? Well, it had struck me that the problem presented by reflection
on experience (frame one) and what happens to it when viewed from what one took to be
a theoretical perspective the west brought in, but which we now recognize as norming or
normativity presented some kind of practical version of the Frege Puzzle. But that itself
perhaps has no particular significance except as another notation to present a problem
that has been bothering us (it being not clear whether this way of presenting the problem
is any more perspicuous). However, it now strikes me that, when the frames are viewed
comparatively, it is not that the first frame has entirely disappeared in the West, but it has
migrated to an areaphilosophy of mind, of language to be precisewhere it is not
readily recognizable as the problem we confront in a different practical guise. So the
presence in the Western intellectual world of something like the Freges Puzzle (and the
paradox it gives rise to) attests to the oblique presence of the first fame in the west, but
clearly in the theoretical domain.
6. We get an instructive further twist to the frame problem if we extend it to the famous
knowledge argument involving the hapless Mary example. Mary is a scientista super
scientist, in factwho has never seen color as she is locked up in a black and white room
all her life. She knows all about the physics, neurophysiology or whatever else that is
involved in the perception of color. What, if anything, does she learn when she first
happens upon color experientially? Is it a kind of knowledge? What kind? Originally the
example was constructed to get our intuition working for the irreducibility of qualia and
against physicalism (having complete physical knowledge of colour does not capture the
experience of colour). Whatever may the lessons of the example, what I find curious is
the conception of knowledge employed in the example. I simply cannot make sense of
the idea of what it is to have a complete knowledge of the physical things involved. In
fact, the conception of knowledge here is scientistic, that is, a normative structure that
uses science as a foundation. What muddles the picture here is the fact that we are not
simply given two perspectives, the experiential and the scientific. The experiential side
too is worked over by another kind of scientism, the human science kind which postulates
entities such as the self, the kind of things it is made up of (beliefs/desires) the powers
and properties it possesses (agency, transparency, authority). Two scientisms at play
then! Both are very much in evidence in contemporary philosophy, especially in
philosophy of language and in philosophy of mind. One scientism is attacked in the name
of another! Norms/values against physicalism/materalialism. So the two scientisms
present another version of the Frege Puzzle!
(Here is Chalmers: There is nothing even approaching an orthodox theory of why there
is consciousness in the first place. Is this a scientific question or an ideological
question?)
Centuries before Frege formulated his puzzle and proposed his theory of sense as a
resolution, Indian traditions had formulated the Mahavakyas (tat tvam asi, aham
brahmasmi). I am not sure if they spoke of them as puzzles but they were clear that we
can realize their truth experientially or practically. If we look at the Frege Puzzle and

especially his theory of Sense from here, we can see Sense as expressing what Maya was
trying to capture, but critically!
One must then be cautious in seeing the structure of the practical/theoretical as a Frege
Puzzle, mainly because many of the examples, such as action knowledge/caste-system,
phenomenal concept/physical description, turn out to be illustrating a different problem,
namely, how the normative view takes in or occludes the experiential. So sometimes
when we see the structure of a Frege puzzle, we may in fact be seeing the tension
between normative frame and the experiential frame. Which is not say either that the
Frege Puzzle is not an oblique expression of the theoretical/practical problem
(theoretically describing what presents itself practically?) or that the Puzzle is not a
puzzle of co-reference. Nevertheless one cannot help dig here for some deep and deeply
hidden theological/normative assumptions. After all, the Frege Puzzle is about the nature
of propsotions ; it directs one to the problem of the exact content of ones belief, the
belief on which one acts. So deep down there are assumptions about the self and what its
nature is--am I proposition? Am I a system of beliefs? Are belief/desires to be seen as
founding the self?
(Somewhere Stanley Cavell says that Tragedy and comedy are all filled with this
possibilitythat one among the endless true descriptions of me tells who I am. Shall
we say that this belief is at the root of if not of tragedy and comedy at least the western
conception of the self?)
7. The transmission of normativity is essential for moral learning in the west. The
secularization process in the west thus confronts the problem of the sources of
normativity (a central preoccupation in contemporary philosophy). To put it another way,
the relationship between norms and experience becomes problematic, a source of anxiety,
opacity and uncertainty. If St Thomas Aquinas had transformed the Aristotelian problem
of akrasia into a moral problem of incontinence or weakness of will, the secularizing
culture turns it into a problem of irrationality (knowing the best, doing the worst, the
problem however is how to decide what is best for me, when neither tradition, nor
institutions such as family, the church, the university, or the state, can claim to be clear
sources of moral authority, it is left to the individual to decide what is best for herself,
what is in her interest). The paramount question that a secular moral philosophy
confronts is: is it rational to be moral? So the norms that moral theory seeks to generate
seem destined to insulate moral reflection from experience, and rationality gets defined
entirely in terms of interest (which becomes a kind of primitive).
The paramount question for Indian tradition has been: how to set up sites of ethical
learning? They thought that we needed as many of them as possible, for what is unethical
is whatever occludes experience and experience-occluding structures are everywhere,
whether it is the body, the sense of Iness (ahamkara) or social structures. So ethics is
attunement of reflection to experience (anu-bhava), by removing any and every form of
ignorance (avidya) that distort experience or occlude it altogether. The akratic person in

this culture is an ignorant person (in Aristotle too the akratic person, the one who, like an
actor, mouths other peoples words, is an ignorant and inexperienced person), not attuned
to experience. But colonialism brought in structures that effectively disrupted the
transmission of ethical learning and displaced the sites of learning. Part of this process
involved bringing norms and normativity that effectively created two frames in the
ethical universe of Indians. The peculiar coexistence of two frames have created
problems of a kind that has not even been registered, let alone theorized as a ethical and
cultural problem: the description of daily ethical activities acquires a tone of immorality,
when seen through the frame of norms, but the frame of norms itself has remained alien,
because of the absence of institutions and traditions that generated normativity in the
west.
8. This is also the place to situate ideology (as Balu has been trying to develop it in his
revised essay on Terrorism) and appreciate the difficulties it creates. Ideology or
ideability (reserving the former for a piece of discourse) is an ability, to be thought of in
analogy with technology. It is the ability, as I understand it, to open up any area or
domain for justification. It is not that a particular piece of discourse borrowed from here
or there does this; first, the marking out or opening of an area as needing justification,
then comes grafting from whatever discursive resources (theories, philosophies) onto that
space. Balu gives the example of nature/environment. It is interesting to figure out how
all the familiar entities and sites--the state, market, family, and many more-- that got
opened up this way. It is by now such a ubiquitous and natural phenomenon that it is
hard even to come up with a startling example that reveals how odd this operation of
ideability really is. Take, however, the case of the self and the folk psychology that
come in with it, drawn from all sorts of sources (philosophy, psychology, economics, pop
existentialism and pop psychoanalysis, spiritual mysticism). I need to get in touch with
my deeper self. She is guilt-tripping me. You need to look out for yourself. I need
my space. He is weak-willed.
The discursive explosion itself opens up vast areas for the operation of ideability. This
needs to be thought through very carefully because it has the potential to answer the
puzzle of how normativity sustains itself in India. But what should be clear is the way the
discursive onslaught would impact the first frame, whose existence in any case has been
shaky and uncertain. When the discourse of freedom, equality and rights superimpose on
the eclectic folk-psychology of self, the first frame would become mute and even the
language used once for the reflection on experience would feed into the folk psychology
of the self. (It would be interesting see how in Vivekananda the language of
Ramakrishna begins to enter the second frame, through the justificatory discourse of
nationalism and self.
9. What insulates reflection from experience? Norming a site, founding a practice,
giving reflexivity to practice are all roughly equivalent descriptions. In more concrete
terms, all of them involve making discourse pass through a practice, or making a practice
discursive. Language or more accurately discursivity plays a central role in constituting
normative institutions/structures. Perhaps the major reason for the first frame to go
underground, or become mute and ineffective is that when the discursively structured

normative institutions/structures--what might be called the garrulousness of the west

are unleashed in India, it is as though they provide their own understanding, the
discursive structure, what gets taken to be theories, are what compel understanding.
Normativity or the second frame is anchored when we begin to buy into those
theoriestheory of the state, discourse on freedom and equality, chunks of European
history functioning as cognitive schemes (feudalism, secularism, revolution and so
forth). It is easy to overlook that they are what need to be understood. We still have not
realized that. The insulating material is discursivity. Let me use the term deployment
for reflection that develops after the insulation and that uses discourse from different
sources (thus deployment of feminism, of nationalism, and so forth).
(Its not surprising that Wittgenstein who sought to rescue reflection on experience
thought that the philosophical problems become remote and unresolvable, metaphysical
in the bad sense, when language begins to idle or goes on a holiday. That is to say,
when language stands apart from form of life.)
Consider the presence of the second frame within the individual, what I called the self.
Once the second frame kicks in and elbows out the first, reflection proceeds from the
insulation. The questions of about the sources of the self, the moral law within, the
autonomy and freedom of the self, and so forth that are so crucial to morality, all these
are reflections that emerge, as it were, after the self has performed the insulating function.
The importance of this becomes clear when we have to deal with the perspective of
freedom, of rights, of sovereignty. But the moment we assume that perspective, the first
frame is no longer available or visible. So the reflection of experience must resist that
perspective. What is the reach of such reflection? At what point must such reflection
take the form of theory? How can it come about? Or how do we develop theories?
10. By beginning with the familiar the caste-system and communalism, I tried to
show that there is a peculiar but systematic problem created in very different domains as
a consequence of the presence of what I called the two frames. The problem is that the
first framereflection on experience taken as a unit, if you likegets elbowed out
wherever the second frame takes root. We can register the same problem with respect to
history, nation self, and perhaps many other areas. During the stereotype research,
I had tried to capture this systematicity by contrasting stereostates with stereotypes (see
the Asia-Link site). But in the process I had seemingly ruled out the possibility of social
science theorizing as a result of not having seen my way clearly to distinguishing the two
frames from a third one, namely theorizing. We have in effect three thingsreflection on
experience, normativity and theoretical knowledge. We are acquainted with the first,
perhaps even practice it a bit; and to the extent we do that we have learned to mark out
the presence of the second, even resist it, but we need to know a lot more about it; the
third item is the one we are least familiar with, in large part because we mistakenly think
we understand it when all that we do is simply assume the standpoint of some of the
discursive/normative entities in frame two (I will avoid using the term normative
theory preferring the clumsier compound like discursive/normative.).

Our greatest difficulty is with recognizing when is something a piece of theory (here
our indexes not only Indians because we are talking about social scientific theorizing).
For one thing there arent many exemplars! Well, hardly any. The difficulty is further
compounded by the flotsam of orphaned (Balu) concepts (in India and elsewhere in the
non-European world) and our enhanced ideability! The former are readily deployed by
the latter for all sorts of vaguely justificatory purposes. Think of people deploying
theory of human rights. I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses human
rights is inauthentic or ideological. But for every Balagopal we have hundred junketeers
like Hargopal (we used to call him Haranguegopal; this is a very local reference, local to
the civil liberties discourse and to the South. If you dont get it, just ignore it). But the
point here is that both the authentic and the inauthentic deployers make it difficult for us
to recognize that we do not know what it is to theorize. Surely, they will insist, theory of
human rights is a theory! (In the same way, people will insist that introspecting with folk
psychological concepts is reflecting on experience.) Since anything sitting in frame two
is for us not a theory, we also incur the charge of arrogance because we are forced to
place not only human rights but even so called radical theories there. As I have tried to
make clear in the clumsy framework I have set up, it is a matter of survival for us to hold
onto the first frame. And that means resisting anything in frame two. Our eventual hope is
to set up a third frame which will help us understand why frame two causes such
problems and enable us to reinvigorate frame one. Needless to say, I am offering these
notes in the hope that we will all actively, if initially, naively, engage the first in
reflection, attempt to mark and resist the second, and slowly learn to contribute to the
third.
Some of you will by now be impatiently asking: What about The Heathen? Isnt that
a good exemplar? Well, it is so far the only clear exemplar. Precisely because of that we
(or, at least, I) have not fully understood what it has accomplished and how.
In a way, all this has been leading up to the question: Whats the experiential route to
The Heathen? I will take this up in the second part, along with the question of how
we might recognize, rescue and redevelop something as reflection on experience and as a
piece of genuine theory. This question of the experiential route is important also because
some of us need to come to terms with Marxism. Viewed one way, it is easy to see how it
destroyed our intuitions, but quite clearly that is not the whole story. There has to be a
way to understand Marxs own theorization of capitalism through, as it were, the
experiential route. Perhaps we can then raise the more complex question of how one
attempts either reflection or theory (or former through the latter) especially when we are
overwhelmed by the ever expanding frame two. We can then also see why it has not been
easy to traverse the path opened up by The Heathen and, therefore, why it is
necessary to figure out an experiential route to it.
Vivek