President’s Welcome

Welcome to the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. It is gratifying to note that we have almost eighty attendees, a significant increase over the attendance in recent years, and this in spite of the economic crisis. Whether this increase is due to the attractiveness of the theme, the beauty of this place, the congeniality of our society, or some other reason, this year's program is both packed and exciting, and for that I thank you all, especially those who have come from long distances. We have participants this year from Australia, Singapore, China, Japan and Korea, not to mention exotic places like Hawaii. I would also like to believe that this attendance signifies both a commitment to our particular society, and a growing realization of the heightened importance of Asian and comparative thought in the contemporary world.

Once again the society has chosen a theme, "The Sacred and the Secular," that is very timely. For some time now we have been hearing of the increasing secularization of life in the modern world, without much clarity either about the meaning of the term or its precise implications. In his influential book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor distinguishes three different senses of "secular": (a) the expulsion of religion from most spheres of public life, at least in the West, (b) the purported decline of religious belief and commitment, and (c) the peculiar mix of secularity and spirituality in our time that allows us to speak of ours as "a secular age." Contrary to one strand of the "secularization thesis," which takes the first two phenomena to imply a reductive secularism, Taylor argues in his elaborate exposition of the third sense, that we are living in and through a non-reductive secularity that seeks new forms of spiritual expression.

At the other end of the spectrum from Taylor's liberal and irenic ethos, we have militant and sometimes fundamentalist forms of religious life that decry and resist many aspects of secularism, whether in the form of a secular state and the attendant separation of church and state, or the form of a purported decline of religious belief and practice and a supposed degeneration of moral and social life as a result. Examples are rife, from the rise of religion-based political parties and groups in India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Ireland and the "religious right" in the US. What is most troubling is the rise of religious violence and terrorism, both within and between countries. [I am writing these lines in the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Tiller in Kansas ostensibly by someone linked with anti-abortion groups].

These developments, both theoretical and practical, it seems to me, call for a renewed examination of the "sacred" and the "secular" and the relations between them. This examination can take, and in our program does take, at least three different forms: conceptual, contextual, and cross-cultural.

First, the conceptual aspect. It is clear that ideas like the "sacred" and the "secular" are polyvalent and mean different things at particular times and across time. Does "sacred" mean, "transcendent," "that which is set apart for worship or veneration," and does "set apart" in turn mean "opposed to" or merely "different from?" Or does "sacred" mean that which integrates and sustains, but which is not set apart, as in the various meanings of "dharma." There is a similar amplitude of meaning in the term "secular" as I mentioned earlier when discussing Taylor's recent book. At the very least there is a difference between what I call a non-reductive secularity and a reductive secularism. The former affirms the full reality and significance of this world and the autonomy of other fields of culture and knowledge besides that of religion, while the latter is marked by the denial of anything real or significant beyond the empirical world and the denial also of the rationality and cultural authenticity of religion.

The second contextual set of inquiries take as their point of departure the insight that terms acquire their specific meanings within social and historical contexts. Thus the Indian constitution upholds the ideal of a "secular state," but "secular" in the Indian context means something different than in the modern West. In the Indian context, "secular" implies a neutrality towards the different religious or non-religious attitudes of a pluralistic society, but by no means does it mean a hostility or indifference to religion, as is sometimes the case in Western interpretations. What in the Nietzschean sense is the genealogy of "the sacred"? How useful is it still as a philosophical or religious category? Is the dualistic relation between the sacred and the secular that characterizes some parts of Western religious history still valid?

The last question might serve to set up the third, cross-cultural, group of investigations. Our program begins with a reconsideration some thirty-seven years later of Herbert Fingarette's influential book, Confucius-The Secular as Sacred. It is obvious from the title itself and from Fingarette's reading of the Analects that he presents Confucius as softening the dichotomy of the sacred and the secular. In general, it would be true to say that not just Confucianism but other Asian traditions are critical of tendencies that denude or desacralize the world to the advantage of the religious, and the temporal order in favor of the extra-temporal. Does this mean that the very distinction between the sacred and the secular vanishes, or if it remains, where and for what reasons is the line between the two drawn? This gets us into comparative metaphysical questions of the Divine, the human and the cosmic, and practical questions about religion, society and politics.

What better place to wrestle with these important questions than serene and beautiful Asilomar, land sacred to the native Indians who lived here in antiquity and sacred also to us today. I wish us all a time of intellectual excitement, spiritual nourishment, friendship and comraderie, relaxation and fun.

Joseph Prabhu
SACP President 2009-10
June 2,2009