Understanding Cultural Tradition

This book is unusual in many respects. It was written by a prolific author whose tragic untimely death did not allow him to finish many other undertakings. Zilberman’s legacy still awaits its true discovery and this book is the third installment to it after The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought (Kluwer, 1988) and Analogy in Indian and Western Philosophical Thought (Springer, 2006). Zilberman’s treatment of cultural tradition is unique in its approach, scope and universality for Western philosophical thought. Such applications as linguistics, logic and social analysis, historical and anthropological research, Indology, and all Hindu and Buddhist studies are an integral part of Zilberman’s book. A prophetic leap to largely uncharted territories, this book could be of considerable interest for experts and novices in the field of cultural tradition alike.

David B. Zilberman (1938-1977) was a Russian-American philosopher and sociologist, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture.

Since 1973, David Zilberman lived in the United States. In 1973 Zilberman was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, New York. In 1974 Zilberman accepted a position as Post-doctoral Fellow with the Committee on South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. For the last two years of his life Zilberman taught at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, first in the Department of Anthropology, and later in the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas. Zilberman taught a variety of courses in Indian and Western philosophy, and related disciplines.

David Zilberman died on July 1977 in a car-bicycle collision while returning home from his last seminar with his students at Brandeis.

It seems most appropriate to introduce Zilberman to the reader, in both a professional and personal way, by using his own words.

In his letter to B. K. Matilal, dated February 20, 1977, the author of this book wrote about his work on Advaita-Vedanta: "... It was not to present Advaita in the light of current problems of the logic of scientific discovery and modern philosophy of language ... but just the contrary.

I do not believe that any 'logic without metaphysics' or 'philosophy of language without thinking' is possible." This passage alone may serve as the clue to Zilberman's understanding and mode of explaining that specific and highly original approach to (not ‘of !) philosophy that he himself nicknamed modal.

Four points would seem to me to be most essential here.

First, a philosophy cannot have 'anything un-thinking' as its object of investigation. Language, to Zilberman, is not a phenomenon of consciousness but a spontaneously working natural mechanism (like, for instance, 'mind' to some Buddhist philosophers). It may, of course, become used for and by consciousness; consciousness may see itself, so to speak, in language, but only secondarily, only as in one of its modifications, derivations or modalities. That is why to Zilberman linguistics - as to Kant psychology - cannot and must not figure as the primary ground for any philosophical investigation.

Second, since the more thinking is an object, the more usable it is as an actual or potential object of philosophical investigation, the most natural object of philosophy would then be philosophy itself or, say, a philosophy, or the philosophies. This, according to Zilberman, is his own task, and the focus of his own philosophical thinking. And the task is neither epistemological nor historico-philosophical, but merely methodological for, as he wrote to me in March 1976, "I have employed my thought in a certain way to investigate how various different philosophies (not philosophers!), have employed theirs to establish the principles of organization of their own thinking activity with respect not only to thinking, but behavior and culture in general."

Third, since, while dealing in our philosophical investigation with a variety of and differences between philosophies, we have already established the objects and directions of their respective thinking activities (such as, for instance, 'ethical', or 'epistemological', or linguistical', or 'political' for that matter), we have to turn our attention to an entirely different problem: how and in what does a philosophy see itself? Or, in other words, what does it operate with as its own primary material and natural point of departure, at any given moment of its historic existence?

Grossly simplifying the problem we may, for example, assert that to the pre-Socratic Philosophers such a point of departure could be seen in words, thoughts, and opinions of their predecessors or contemporaries or, say, in their very persons, through whom these words, thoughts and opinions were traditionally or non-traditionally conveyed. But, speaking of Indian philosophy on the whole, or of practically any particular Indian philosophy taken separately, we cannot help but see that what it does essentially operate with, root in and identifies itself as, is the primary text. This text may, itself, be philosophical or non-philosophical, with or without the author, human or divine, extant or lost. But it figures as the coditio sine qua non of any philosophical activity, as that on which one thinks in one way or another, at one time or another, in one school or another, under one teacher or another. Thinking on a text produces thinking on thinking on a text, and this goes on in principle indefinitely, unless you stop doing it - then you are outside it and philosophy itself. That is what makes Indian philosophy unique and unrepeatable, and that is what makes it Indian. Or, putting it in a little different way, Indian philosophy was not what it was because it was Indian - such an ethnocentrist position would be totally impossible for Zilberman. On the contrary, it is that exceptionally and uniquely primarily textual character of it that constitutes its ‘Indianism'. And more than that, it constitutes ‘Indianism' in general. And here we are arriving at the fourth and the last point of Zilberman's meta-philosophical approach to, this time not philosophy in general, but Indian philosophy. Speaking of Indian philosophy, we cannot call it 'an element', 'a feature' or least of all 'an achievement' of Indian culture for, as Zilberman points out, our very notion of culture (which is ours, not Indian, for Heaven's sake!) in its application to 'India' (our notion again, for it appears on the subcontinent when all main philosophical schools had already been in existence for hundreds of years) is entirely senseless without philosophy. Philosophy could be seen as not only 'culture's thinking on itself' but as an activity which made and went on making their life cultural and culturally meaningful not only to an outside observer, but also and first of all to Indians themselves. And this is so, even if they had no idea of their philosophy, or if philosophy itself was in itself acultural or even anti-cultural. Moreover, one could even go as far as to suggest that there are several varieties (or modes in Zilberman's terminology) of philosophising in the world in general, and one of them, which simply happened to occur in the place afterwards called 'India' somewhere between 5th Century BC and 9th Century AD, was called 'Indian' only for the reason of its having occurred there and then. But it cannot be stated, that it is because it occurred there and then that it is what it is. In fact, the time and space of its occurrence are merely accidental if not entirely irrelevant.

This book is an English version of the monograph Understanding Cultural Tradition by David Zilberman. Its Russian version was published in 2015 by Rosspen, a Moscow publishing house specializing in encyclopaedias. It was prefaced by Oleg Genisaretsky, a well-known Russian (Soviet) art critic, philosopher, and public figure.

Everything that Zilberman thought and wrote can be traced back to this initial visionary text that offers a clear formulation of the problem of tradition.

Alexander Piatigorsky, a widely known philosopher, specialist of Indian philosophy and culture, historian, philologist, and semiotician, wrote a Preface to the English edition. He was indeed the first who affirmed that Zilberman had created a distinctive type of methodological-philosophical thinking which Zilberman himself called "modal methodology" or "modal metaphysics," applied to the analysis of cultural traditions.

We owe sincere thanks to A. V. Rusakov, M. Y. Nemtsev, and V. A. Fedoseyev who prepared abundant notes to the text of this book. The primary goal of these notes is to provide references where needed. They also explain the author's terminology and his numerous terminological innovations.

The quotes in Sanskrit and Tibetan are transliterated in accordance with international standards and presented in boldface italics. Citations used by the author from the Russian translations of sources originally written in English have been replaced by the corresponding passages from the originals. Quoted passages from Russian, French, and German sources that were not found in English translation have been paraphrased.

The notes written by the author himself appear as footnotes. The editor's and the translator's footnotes are differentiated from the author's by markings such as "-Ed." or "-Trans." respectively.

The "Bibliography" contains a complete list of published (and several unpublished) works by Zilberman (presented in curly braces).

I am deeply moved that Zilberman's book finally is published in English. For many of us who lived in the sixties and seventies in Moscow, David Zilberman appeared as an outstanding thinker with vast philosophical experience and energy, intellectual boldness and creative vigor. We admired him and, I add, we needed at that time such a figure as David Zilberman. I wholeheartedly welcome his book.

**Contents and Sample Pages**