Internal relation and Central Asia*
by Stanisław Zapaśnik
*transl. by Ryszard P. Kostecki of the fragments of: Stanisław Zapaśnik, 2006, „Walczący islam” w Azji Centralnej. Problem społecznej genezy zjawiska [„Fighting islam” in Central Asia. The problem of a social origins of the phenomenon], Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław, pp. 20, 44‒46. (The joint title of these fragments was added by the translator.)
(...) In my research and analyses presented in this book I am using the notion of culture proposed by Émile Durkheim in 1912. According to his definition, a culture is a system of logically connected categories of thinking, specific for a given collective. These categories precede, as the logical condition, the sensory experience of people in a given collective. In such an approach to culture, it is pointless to oppose thinking and acting as different ontological orders. While, as seen from this perspective, the institutions of a social life are the symbolic expression of a thinking specific for a given collective.
(...) in face of these facts, a researcher stands in front of an intriguing question: why the boundary between the religious and ethnic identity in Central Asia happens to be so fluid?
While attempting to answer this question, a cultural researcher understands his task differently from sociologist. Similarly to the latter, he believes that the sense of individual’s identity is constructed from the elements expressing convictions regarding her place, role, and position in society. However, he assumes also, that the knowledge that individual has about herself and about relationships associating her with other people is conditioned not only by the given type of a society and its state in the moment when he is carrying his research. In my case, due to the assumed definition of a culture, an attempt to explain the concept of „self” has to rely upon indicating the categories of thinking that are specific for a given culture, are conditioning it, and are the real foundation of identities, which can appear in different stages of an individual life cycle.
Due to limitation of a space, I have to stop at a few general remarks. First of all, I have to underline that in the traditional cultures of Central Asia we will not find any of these ideas that allow an individual in Western culture to think of himself as of a being ontically independent from a group, and that ― as Steven Lukes1 demonstrated ― are also a foundation of an individualism. These aspects of a culture are completely omitted in discussions about the complexity of the problem of individual’s identity in Central Asia.
The attention of researcher deserves to consider firstly the possibility that the understanding of the concept of an individual being in Central Asia is conditioned by the rules of logic of thinking that are different from those of western culture. Internal relation2 is the foundation of thinking in Central Asia. In such thinking, things and their qualities are determined by the relationships in which we perceive them, and they do not exist independently outside of those relationships. Adoption of the principle of internal relation implies the view that the same ― from the point of view of western logic, based on the principle of external relation ― thing A is not identical to itself, if we consider it not in the relationship to B, but in the relationship to C. It may be that our problems with the understanding of the problem of individual’s identity in Central Asia arise also because, without losing our identity, we assume a moral postulate of the preservation of identity of personality independently of situation and our current relationships with other people. On the basis of my experiences as Central Asia researcher I claim that such moral duty towards oneself has not existed here in past. Not pronouncing one’s own convictions in the presence of old people, and adapting one’s own opinion to their opinion in relationships with them, is considered to be a morally proper behaviour even today.
Another consequence of presence of the principle of internal relation in thinking is the view on the relationships between a part and a whole3. In the traditional cultures of Asia it was impossible to think of a part as existing independently from the whole, and, vice versa, to think about the whole as the sum of its parts. The whole ontically precedes the existence of its parts, hence a part cannot possess properties independent of the nature of that whole to which it belongs. In such a thinking, an individual being is considered only as a sign of the whole. In the case of a human individual being, this means that it was considered in thinking exclusively as a sign of that whole, in which it was perceived. A researcher of Islam arriving from Poland is rarely asked whether he is a believer. If, however, such a question arises, the answer is not provided by himself, but by someone else present at the conversation, noting „but he is a Pole”4 to a questioning person.
The third consequence ― important for understanding Islam in Central Asia ― is the absence of the category of substance in philosophical thinking. In the thinking based on the external relation it is assumed that both the things and their properties, as well as the relationships, in terms of which we capture these things and their properties, exist objectively. Therefore, there arises the need to presume the existence of substance as an ontic foundation of independent being of things, their properties, and relationships, in which they can occur to the cognising mind. The view on reality as the entirety of relationships perceived by the cognising subject is specific for the Eastern thought. This eliminates the need for inquiry on the ontic nature of beings provided in the sensory experience. Therefore, in the case of concepts which determine the contents of religious beliefs, as a rule we should not expect that we will obtain an explanation ― important from the western point of view ― of the ontic nature of a being that is signified by a given concept.
1 S. Lukes, Individualism (Key Concepts in the Social Sciences), first edition, 1973.
2 The notion of „internal relation” was disseminated in logic by Bertrand Russell. However, it was used already by G.E. Moore in the polemics with the neo-hegelian ontology, e.g., in the article External and Internal Relations published in „Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society” in 1919. Due to the problem of individual’s identity in the cultures of Central Asia, analysed by us, the critique of internal relation, provided by W. James in Essays on Radical Empiricism in 1912, deserves a special attention.
3 I owe the understanding of these differences in logical thinking to the book of Zoya Morokhoeva, Lichnost’ v kulturakh Vostoka i Zapada [Personality in the cultures of East and West], Novosibirsk, Nauka, 1994. It is so far the only work that draws attention to the existence of internal relation in the cultures of East, to the consequences of it for understanding of the relationships between the parts and the whole, and to the absence of the category of substance in the philosophical considerations.
4 So it happened, that, although several times I was directly asked this question, I never was the person who answered it. I was always relieved by someone present, reminding that I belong to the nation that, as opposed to Russians, is known for its religiosity.
2006
translated 4.X.2016, Frankfurt am Main