FLYING WITH THE WEST WING
I presume that when Dr. Sivamohan Sumathy, of the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, in her letter to the editor, that was published on the 11 th of April, says that we must talk but not the way Dr. Nalin de Silva carries out his monologic talk she is referring to the articles I contribute to "The Island" and the "Irida Divaina", weekly. She apparently has stopped reading me in English, but is very much interested in what I write in Sinhala and has got one of her friends to translate a non western sociological analysis regarding the film "Thani Thatuven Piyambanna" I wrote to "Irida Divaina". Perhaps she thinks it is not a "sheer waste of time" to get translated into English what I write in Sinhala. For her information, I must add that I write a series of articles in Sinhala to "Vidusara" on the evolution of western science, where I discuss what we have to do in order to formulate our own theories and concepts. I wish she gets those articles also translated into English or Tamil and enter into a dialogue on western science. Perhaps she could persuade somebody like a famous professor, who attempted to review "Mage Lokaya" without understanding it, I have got proof to establish that, to respond to the series of articles. I also like to enter into dialogues but unfortunately for the last seventeen years or so nobody has shown any stamina to continue a dialogue either in Sinhala or English in any one of the areas I am interested in. I only hope that Dr. Sumathy is endowed with the stamina.
I must confess that I may have got it all wrong. Dr. Sumathy probably uses the word monologic in a different sense. She may be referring to a talk conducted in a single logic. Not being a person fluent in English, perhaps, I did not understand it correctly. As there are many logics, such as Aristotelian Classical logic, Two valued logic, Three valued logic, Four valued logic, Constructive logic, Quantum logic, Fuzzy logic, Relevant logic, Bharat logic, Sinhala Buddhist logic, Dr. Sumathy could have preferred some pluralism in logic in our activities. I must assure her that the Sinhala Buddhist logic that is preferred by me, is a somewhat pluralist logic in itself and is more feminine than the Aristotelian Classical logic or the two valued logic that are very masculine logics that reject the rule (P and ~P), and accept the rule (P or ~P) leading to the law of excluded middle and the dichotomies. (In general there are differences in the logics of men and of women. This does not mean that all men use masculine logics or that all women use feminine logic. In western sciences it is the masculine logics that are used by both women and men working in those fields.) However, this does not mean that the Sinhala Buddhist logic excludes "dichotomies" totally. As in the cases of west and east and of left and right under certain conditions these "dichotomies" are retained.
Unfortunately for Dr. Sumathy, she has got it all wrong. I did not write a "negatively (Dr. Sumathy also has her dichotomies like negative and positive) critical appraisal of Asoka Handagama film .... .. without watching it in the Sunday, March 30 issue of Divaina". In fact it was a two part article that appeared on the 30th of March and on the 6th of April, on the sociological background to the film. I had stated, at the outset of the relevant article, that it was not a critique of the film and I am afraid the translator has missed the point completely. If Dr. Sumathy knew any Sinhala, she would not have got it wrong for the simple reason that in that case she would have decided not to read the article as she would have thought that it as a waste of her time. It appears that she is prepared to waste her time listening to translations of my articles but not waste her time reading them. There is some logic in what she does. It may be that she is prepared to waste her time when she knows that somebody else is wasting his or her time, as well, or that she wants to waste her time when another person is not wasting his or her time. (It depends on what the other person thinks of my articles.) It appears that she is not prepared to waste her time alone, but prepared to waste her time in the company of somebody else when that somebody else is either wasting or not wasting his or her time? Perhaps one could generalise this to extend the company to more than one other person. From my experience in senior common rooms in three different universities, Peradeniya being the first, I have come across different ways and means of wasting time, either in solitude or in company.
As I write this article, I wonder whether Dr. Sumathy who has stopped reading me in English would read this article. If she reads this article, then she has not stopped reading me in English and she would not have said the truth in her letter to the editor. Of course I admit that she could restart reading my articles whether it is waste of time or not. She could, of course get her friend to translate this article into Tamil or Sinhala and claim that she has stopped reading my articles published in "The Island". She must be able to understand spoken Sinhala as she is supposed to have gone to the film by Asoka Handagama and understood the dialogues, without a translator accompanying her. If she neither reads this reply nor get it translated to Sinhala or Tamil, then it could be inferred that she doesn't want any reply to any one of her articles, by me, or that she is not very clear of what she says. If she doesn't want any replies by me then it is her and certainly not me who is interested in a monologue at least as far as the context of the film is concerned, as she is interested only in writing articles and letters to the press criticising me but not reading any responses to them.
Based on what Dr. Sumathy has written it is clear that her translator friend doesn't know either English or Sinhala or may be both. Dr. Sumathy says: "Dr. de Silva criticizes the film on the basis that it is 'western' and not suitable for an eastern country like Sri Lanka." I have not said anything that could be translated into English in the above manner. I have no intention of giving a summary of what I wrote to "Irida Divaina" but I must say that in the relevant article I had only said that Asoka Handagama has produced a western film with Sinhala dialogues, and that he is an agent of western cultural colonialism, without mentioning that most of the university lecturers also belong to that category. Most of the academics, including those in the Department of English at the University of Peradeniya, only propagate western theories and concepts. Has Dr. Sumathy or anybody else in the English Department at Peradeniya created any new theory or concept during the last sixty years? Having attributed to me something that I had not said in my article, she goes on to write a tutorial on so called epistemological and ontological issues and asks some questions on east and west, that only a below average first year undergraduate would ask. She asks whether Sri Lanka is to the west or east of California? What a profound question to be asked? If she was more philosophical she could have asked whether Sri Lanka is to the west or east of Sri Lanka. Surely starting from Colombo and going either east or west one could come back to Colombo! In any event why ask whether Mexico is to the west of Sri Lanka. Surely Sri Lanka is not the centre of the globe nor of the so called global village. I only hope that Dr. Sumathy knows up and down, top and bottom, right and left and the other little "dichotomies" that she encounters in daily life. She has referred to the "Cartesian fashion of dichotomizing what we know" in her letter to the editor and one gets the feeling that she is no fan of Descartes who separated mind from matter. These philosophical name dropping would not help her to separate right from left or top from bottom and at a junction she would be wondering about the "Cartesian fashion of dichotomising what we know" without either turning right or left. She would come across similar difficulties when forced to take decisions involving up and down and top and bottom. Perhaps, she does not know that though the dichotomy of epistemology and ontology is elaborated in western Philosophy, in Eastern Philosophy there is no such division.
Now the kind of philosophy that Dr. Sumathy displays, may be good for the first year students in the tutorial classes in English but certainly not good enough if at least a few of them have ever read some of the articles by me. Unfortunately Dr. Sumathy has stopped reading my articles and if she could get a better translator she could learn more about this Cartesian separation by referring to "Mage Lokaya". The Cartesian separation, Aristotelian law of excluded middle etc., belong to the western "chinthanaya", and the westerners have not been able to go "beyond" these concepts even though occasionally some of them smatter something about the "Cartesian dichotomies". They have not succeeded in their attempts to come up with anything to replace the "Cartesisn dichotomies". Dr. Sumathy has obviously picked up these fashionable smattering from some western writers. If she has studied the works of the great Bharat Philosopher Nagarjuna Thero she could have been spared the mistakes that she has made on east and west. It has to be emphasised that one doesn't have to agree with the Thero hundred percent in order to learn from him.
All concepts are created by men and women, and they (the concepts) are relative to the person who uses them. This also means that the concepts and the theories are relative to the particular cultures that use them. The westerners are prisoners of the "Cartesian wall" and they have not been able to break the wall in spite of attempts by some leading western philosophers in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The logics such as the three valued logic, the four valued logic, the Bharat logic and the Sinhala Buddhist logic have no "Cartesian wall" to begin with and those who use these logics know how to use the rule (P and ~P) that is rejected by the western logics and to exclude the rule (P or ~P) when it is necessary. They know when to consider a proposition as true, when to consider it as not true and more importantly to consider the case when it is both true and not true. When the rule (P or ~P) is accepted one ends up with either P or not P being true. That is one ends up with the so called dichotomies, up or down, top or bottom, west or east. In the eastern logics I have mentioned above, west or east is not rejected and they are used when necessary. However in these logics either west or east could be rejected depending on the context, a freedom that is not available in the western logics. In the western logics they could shout about the so called dichotomies without offering a solution them. If Dr. Sumathy rejects division into west and east, top and bottom, left and right what is the solution that she (meaning her masters in the west) offers.
In certain cases one has to use concepts such as west and east, right and left. The NGO "intellectuals" have been using the concept of a north south dialogue not only with respect to the Tamil racist problem but with respect to the so called developed world and the developing world. (Is it a dichotomy to divide the world into a developed world and a developing world?) Does Dr. Sumathy ask any one of these "intellectuals" to define what south is? Is Australia a country belonging to the South or North? The words (and concepts) are not only relative to the person who uses them, but with respect to any user of a language the words are relative to one another depending on the context. The words west and east do not always refer to geographical west and east. Australia, wherever it is situated is a western country and Peradeniya University is a western University in spite of being at Peradeniya on the banks of Mahaweli. Is Dr. Sumathy of the view that Ivor Jenings wanted a non western University to be established in the Hantane foothills.
The Universities are not neutral institutions where academics are engaged in objective research. Most of the so called third world universities are mere appendages of the western universities in the western countries, that propagate western knowledge. It has to be emphasised that western knowledge is created in the western culture and the logic that is used is not Bharat or Sinhala Buddhist. The westerners through their cultural web (websites constitute only a small part of the bigger web) have succeeded in appointing their agents into various institutes to propagate the "myth" that western knowledge is objective. When there is no objective reality how can there be an objective knowledge of an objective reality? There is a west and there is an east not only geographically but culturally as well. The geographical west could be identified as the region between certain longitudes. The cultural west need not coincide with the geographical west. I use the word west in a cultural and political sense and I find some western people in the national dress or in sarees. Some of the western ladies and gentlemen may be opposed to Bush politically, but in the final analysis they take their orders from Bush. It has to be emphasised that within the same culture there can be different political views. Well, I may not have defined the cultural west. The eastern knowledge systems usually do not begin with definitions. If Dr. Sumathy is interested in finding out more about the cultural west and western knowledge she could get one of her friends to translate the articles I contribute to Vidusara.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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