Suchergebnisse

With special reference to India

Uses Adrian Peperzak's (1993) interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas's indictment of Western philosophy to identify the religious dimension of modern liberalism. At issue for Levinas are the Platonic elements of the Other & the Same, where in the case of modern liberalism, the Same represents everything in the framework of capitalist society, & the Other is everything outside of it. Levinas contends that Western philosophical tradition's idea of modernity, developed from Machiavellian & Hobbesian notions, mistakenly & arrogantly addresses Otherness through the language & mechanisms of the sameness framework (liberalism). By overcoming the limitations of this traditional philosophical approach, Levinas exposes the religious elements of modern liberalism, first in an ethical examination of the Other, & second by locating Western liberalism's metaphoric surrogate for God. Using this sort of negative theology, the liberalized concept of the sacred is exposed, & parallels are drawn between the liberal notion of totality & the religious concept of infinity. D. Bajo

A major source of the problems in recent discussions of the continued relevance to contemporary Indian political life of the secular state and the practices associated with secularism lies in the heavy burden that has been placed upon these terms. Secularism, properly speaking, is an orientation and a set of practices. However, in India, it has become an ideology seen as both contesting with Hindu communalism by those who uphold it, and as contesting against the faith of the Indian peoples by those who lately stand against it. Secularism as an orientation and a set of practices is indispensable to India's future as a liberal democracy. However, it loses its force as a binding principle of Indian unity if it is transformed into an ideology.

More than a century after Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God," some recent books speak alarmingly of "the revenge of God" and the prospect of a "new cold war"—a conflict pitting religious "fundamentalists" against agnostic secularists on a worldwide scale. Remembering the cultural struggles of nineteenthcentury Europe, one might say that today Kulturkampfhas been globalized. At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization and their relation to religious faith.

First published in 1999.

Several critics of Indian secularism maintain that given the pervasive role of religion in the lives of the Indian people, secularism, defined as the separation of politics or the state from religion, is an intolerable, alien, modernist imposition on the Indian society. This, I argue, is a misreading of the Indian constitutional vision, which enjoins the state to be equally tolerant of all religions and which therefore requires the state to steer clear of both theocracy or fundamentalism and the "wall of separation" model of secularism. Regarding the dichotomy, which the critics draw between Nehruvian secularism and Gandhian religiosity, I suggest that what is distinctive to Indian secularism is the complementation or articulation between the democratic state and the politics of satya and ahimsa, whereby the relative autonomy of religion and politics from each other can be used for the moral-political reconstruction of both the religious traditions and the modern state.