Societies Cultures and Ideologies (An Old and Rare Book)

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D.P. Chattopadhyaya studied Law, Philosophy and History at Calcutta University and London School of Economics. Anthropology. Language, Aesthetics and History of Ideas are among his various other areas of interest and study. Basically he has been educated in the school of experience and library. Formerly Professor of Philosophy at Jadavpur University, he is currently Chairman of the Indian Philosophical Congress and the Centre for Studies in Civilizations. Founder-Chairman of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, New Delhi, he was also Chairman-cum-President of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He researched, taught and lectured at many Universities and academic institutions in India and abroad during the last forty-five years. Chattopadhyyaya also held several high Public Offices.

Among his numerous publications, including more than 200 papers and 28 authored and edited books, mention may be made of Individuals and Societies (1967 & 1975), Form. Aesthetical Feefing and the Beautiful (1980 & 1989 in Bengali), Societies and Cultures (1972 & 2001), Individuals and Worlds (1976), Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx (1988), Knowledge, Freedom and Language (1989), Anthropology and Historiography of Science (1990), Induction Probabability and Skepticism (1991), Interdisciplinary Studies in Science Technology Philosophy and Culture (1996) and Sociology, Ideology and Utopia (19997). Professor Chattopadhyaya is General Editor and Director of a 50-Volume PROJECT ON HISTORY OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE IN INDIAN CIVILIZATIONS of which 20 Volumes have already been published and several others are under preparation and at different stages of planning and printing.

MAN, AS WE ALL know, is a social being. He has a past behind him and a tradition to support and regulate him. Sustained by the present and his culture he is futuristic in his orientation. He is more a project than a product. Continuously streaming forward in the channel of time he often also looks backward and within. Being finite as he is, he always tries to be aware of and to become what he is not. In other words, the quest for values is native to his nature. Being fallible as he is, he cannot but question and review his inheritance and acquisitions, propositions and proposals. The obligation of being rational makes him reflect on what he is and whatever he has.

Man is a multi-dimensional being. He lives and moves not merely in space and time but also, and perhaps more tangibly, in a society as an integral part of it. His life is also a part of history, he himself being its author and creature at the same time. His very being is embedded or, one might even say, he is born in a culture marked, among other things, by its tradition and modernity, language and myths, science and technology. Wherever he goes, and even if he is a cosmopolite, he always carries his cultural identify and personality with him.

Man is a semiotic being, a sign-using animal. This is claimed at times to be the most comprehensive definition of man. Man cannot identify himself or his own personality without the minimal use of some signs. The sign-using rules, rules of formation and transformation, are also social in origin. In fact, language, containing signs, symbols and the rules of their use, is the basic social institution. We use language not only to express ourselves, we need and do use signs even to be meaningfully impressed by external objects and sense-stimuli. We can neither abridge and conserve nor express and articulate our experience in concepts without using any sign or symbol whatsoever. Even our self-encounter and solitude is mediated and animated (but not necessarily) by signs. The limit of the use of signs is the limit of man's world, social intercourse and life.

Man, whether he is primitive or modern, is by nature self-reflective. He cannot help reflecting on what he is and what he is not. As he is integrally related to the society, his self-reflection also entails reflections on such social agencies and institutions like history, culture and language.

Sustained by a tradition and embedded in a culture, man almost continuously questions them both. For, his sense of values can never be completely dominated and determined by his tradition and culture. The challenge of modernization is always there before him. He cannot easily ignore or bypass it. Continuously growth of knowledge, particularly of its scientific form, and advancement of technology often makes him question his own traditional heritage and cultural past.

Different individuals and societies respond differently to this challenge of modernization. Some are so overwhelmed that they disown their tradition and culture and adopt the newest culture in its manifested lifestyle and in the process get hopelessly confused. They lack the distinction between modernity, defined in terms of some superficial ways and accessories of life, and modernization, which demands a really new type of integration and transvaluation.

Secondly, there are others who lightly dismiss the talk of integration and transvaluation. They think that our culture, rightly understood and interpreted, does contain all the contents and virtues which we may possibly derive from modern science and civilization. Their response to the challenge of modernization is almost entirely negative. They prefer to withdraw within the protective shell of tradition and try to rationalize and justify uncritically whatever they already have. This uncritical approach appears to my mind as a very perverse form of cultural positivism.

THIS BOOK is a sequel to my earlier book, Societies and Cultures. published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in 1973. It was out of print for quite sometime and requests for its republication came from various quarters. In response when I wrote to Shri S. Ramakrishnan, Executive Secretary and Director General of the Bhavan he readily agreed to bring out the enlarged second edition of the book. In the process of bringing it out Shri K.V. Gopalakrishnan, Director, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Kolkata helped me most. This book, Societies, Cultures and Ideologies: Reflections and Interpretations, is much larger than its predecessor. But the similarity in the titles of these two books is deliberate and indicative of the identity and continuity of the subjects dealt with in them.

The three books, Individuals and Societies (1967), Societies and Cultures (1973) and Individuals and Worlds (1976) form triology. The first one is primarily methodological. The second one and its sequel, true to their titles, are basically sociological and ideological. And the third one is concerned with issues of ontology and epistemology from the stand point of philosophical anthropology. The thematic structures of this trilogy receive focused attention, supported by history, in this new publication. Even a cursory look at the 16 chapters, quoted under four heads, I. New Age, II. Renewed Old Questions, III. Heritage Extended and IV. A Critique of Culture, would clearly indicate the basic concerns. Social issues interest me most. These are articulated through ideological debates, historical details and philosophical dialectics. Humanization of transcendental issues like religion (dharma) and soteriology (mokasastra) and elucidation of the philosophical pre-suppositions of the seemingly plain social, cultural and ideological questions have always fascinated me. The supposed dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete, between philosophy and the life- world, always appears suspect or contrived to me.

Eight of the 16 chapters in the book, have been taken from the earlier edition. These are "Marx on Alienation and Freedom (Chapter 3), "Must Ethics be based on Religion?" (Chapter 6), "How can History be Objective?" (Chapter 7), "Democracy and Ideology" (Chapter 8), "Moral Challenge of the Gandhian Ideology" (Chapter 9), "Gandhi on the Paradox of Violence" (Chapter 11), "Identity, Integrity and Cultural Confusion" (Chapter 13), and "Utility and Culture" (Chapter 15). Each one of these Chapters is being reproduced here substantially in its original form. Some stylistic and, in rare cases substantive modifications have been effected.

The new chapters are, "Raja Rammohan Roy A New Appraisal" (Chapter 1), "Communist Manifesto: Before and After" (Chapter 2), "Marx and Sri Aurobindo on the Stages of History, the State and the Stateless Society of the Future" (Chapter 4), "The Ideal of Human Unity and Vivekananda" (Chapter 5), "Gandhi on Freedom and its Different Facets" (Chapter 10), "Buddha to Gandhi" (Chapter 12), "Schism in the Colonized Soul: A Critical View of India's Transit from Raj to Swaraj" (chapter 14), and "We" and "They" in Indian Culture" (Chapter 16).

These new chapters have been written on different occasions and over a number of years. "Raja Rammohan Roy-A New Appraisal" was originally delivered as the First Raja Rammohan Roy Memorial Lecture at Raja Rammohan Roy Library Foundation, Kolkata, in 1992 and a version of it was published in the Foundation's Journal, Granthana. "Communist Manifesto: Before and After" was presented in a Symposium at Calcutta University, Alipore Campus, in 1997 on the occasion of celebrating the Centenary Year of the publication of the Manifesto. "Marx and Sri Aurobindo on the Stages of History, the State and the Stateless Society of the Future" was written at the request of Dr. Kireet Joshi, the Chairman of Auroville Foundation, who organized a Seminar at the Indian Institute of Technology jointly with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi in 1998. I understand that the proceedings of the Seminar will be brought out in the form of a book edited by Dr. Joshi. "The Ideal of Human Unity and Vivekananda" was presented at a Seminar organised by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research at Hyderabad in 1994. "Gandhi on Freedom and its Different Facets" was written for an International Seminar jointly sponsored by Max Mueller Bhavan and the Indian Institute of Management, Joka, Kolkata. It was presented at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata in 1996. I was told that the proceedings of the Seminar will be brought out in the form of a book. But I have not heard from them since. "Buddha to Gandhi" was written at the request of Shri S. Satyamoorthy of the Ministry of Culture in 1997 for an Indo-Italian joint meeting held in Milan. It was intended to be a lead paper. I could not personally attend the meeting. "Schism in the Colonized Soul: A Critical View of India's Transit from Raj to Swaraj was presented at Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 1998. The initial presentation was oral and I prepared the text of the lecture later on. " "We" and "They" in Indian Culture" has been written at the instance of Dr. (Mrs.) Krishna Roy of Jadavpur University for a volume on Indian Culture which she is editing.