Questioning Hermeneutics with Freud: How to interpret dreams and mute-speech in Sikh scripture

Abstract This paper begins to question the interpretive endeavor when it is applied to the Adi Granth. The text itself expresses a view that the ‘world is a dream’ and that there is real difficulty in communicating the truth about reality, since it is like a mute person who enjoys, but is unable to express, the taste of his sweet; that is the sweetness of the mystic experience. I raise the question: what is hermeneutics to this situation? How is one to interpret a dream and a text that is the ‘speech’ of a mute person? Traditional hermeneutic theories (conservative, moderate and critical) do not seem to cater for this problematic since they do not concern themselves with the unconscious, the sub-text, the dreams underlying waking thought. I thus turn to Freud to gain clues about the interpretation of dreams, and thus attempt a preliminary radicalization of hermeneutic theory. It is suggested that perhaps a reversal is required where dreams precede worldly reality, and interpretation is a sign of delusion, obviously locating and implicating this very text within the very problematic it attempts to illuminate. Beyond this ironic tautology I ask: could there be a self that does not dream and does not interpret? Notes 1 All references to the Adi Granth/Guru Granth Sahib will be abbreviated AG, followed by page and author; full references are given in the appendix. M1 = Guru Nanak; M2 = Guru Angad; M3 = Guru Amar Das; M4 = Guru Ram Das; M5 = Guru Arjan and M9 = Guru Tegh Bahadur. Translations are mine, though Trumpp Citation(1989), Chahil (1993) and Sant Singh Khalsa's Citation(2003) internet translation [http://www.sikhs.org/english/frame.html] have been consulted and sometimes adapted. This scripture, compiled in 1604, is a collection of hymns from a variety of sources and has multiple authors under three major categories: six Sikh Gurus above (90.4%), 15 Hindu and Sufi Bhagats or devotional Poet-Singer Saints (8.2%), and 17 Bhatts or panegyrists (1.5%). Later, according to tradition, the tenth Guru before his death in 1708 transformed the AG into the Guru Granth Sahib, claiming the eleventh Guru to be the Scripture itself. All Indic terms are given in their AG form (maaiaa not maayaa, karam not karma, bhagati not bhakti, etc.). 2 Nanak's most frequent term for ‘God’ is Hari, which is conflated with ‘truth’ (sac). Thus personal and impersonal, formless/attributeless (nirguna) and those denoting attributes/form are used (saguna). 3 The language of the AG is rich. Just looking at Nanak's extensive vocabulary four classes have been identified by Shackle (Citation1981, viii-ix): Perso-Arabic loans, contemporary New Indo-Aryan words (Old Panjabi, Old Western Hindi or Khari Boli, Old Siraiki or Multani and Braj); Middle Indo-Aryan forms (Apabhramsa and Prakrit); and Sanskritic words. 4 Gallagher (Citation1992, 60–61) clarifies the circle: ‘We are always already actively understanding the world even before we attempt to grasp anything in a thematic or cognitive fashion. The knowledge which we already have of the whole, constituted in our prepredicative experience, impacts on the constitution of the meaning of any particular thing, while the meaning of any particular thing adds to or reshapes our knowledge of the whole…’ 5 For elaboration of the Conservative (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Betti, Hirsch), Moderate (Gadamer, Ricoeur), and Critical (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Habermas) hermeneutic schools see Gallagher Citation(1992), though he adds, rather contentiously, a fourth: Radical (Foucault, Derrida). It is in this latter area that the questioning begins here. 6 Here the play of intertextuality confounds the notion that one can carry over meaning from one language-context to another in a singular way. What would it mean for one interpretation to be carried over from dream into waking state? Is it sensible to talk about the ‘correct’ interpretation of a dream? All closure seems to be a form of blindness and forgetting, revealing all naming as an exclusionary and often expedient process. 7 ‘…that philosophy – like literature – is a product of rhetorical figures and devices… [Derrida] is proposing what amounts to a psychoanalysis of western ‘logocentric’ reason, that reason which aims at a perfect, unmediated access to knowledge and truth. The ‘unconscious’ of philosophy – to pursue the comparison – could then be read in all the signs and symptoms of its own (long repressed) rhetorical dimension’ (Norris and Benjamin Citation1988, 7). However Derrida himself does not equate psychoanalysis with deconstruction, and sees this as a misreading: ‘despite appearance, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy’ (in Royle Citation2000, 212). 8 Indeed it is not hard to find dream-inspired works, nor the significance of dreams more generally, they abound: Jahweh, communicates to Moses through dream and vision (Num. 12: 6–7), Paul sees certain of his dreams as signs of God's will (The Book of Acts 16: 9 and 18: 9). The first revelation of the Qu'ran is said to have been given to Muhammad in a dream (Young Citation1999, 7). The most famous (in the West) however are Einstein's autobiographical claim that the theory of relativity was given to him in a dream, and the set of dreams that came to the ‘founder of modern philosophy’, René Descartes, as ‘the most important affair of his life’ making real the most embarrassingly ironic fact that Cartesian rationalism of modern philosophy has as its source the irrational par excellence: dreams. Yet there are also the dark dream visions too. Describing himself as a somnambulist whose footsteps were guided by a providence granted in a prophetic dream (1917) and vision (1938), Adolf Hitler was able to command an army with hypnotic power. He writes, ‘I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker’ (Stevens Citation1995, 292–8). 9 Note Guru Arjan's inversion of this, in line with the world-as-a-vain-dream trope: ‘His rule may extend in all ten directions; he may revel in pleasures and enjoy many women – but he is just a beggar, who in his dream is a king’ (AG, 176, M5). 10 Obviously, whilst Freud was attacking the dry positivism of his day, given their interpretation of dreams as ‘meaningless by-product(s) of automatic and uncoordinated brain activity occurring during sleep’ (Ellenberger Citation1970, 304), this was not to displace reason with dream-(ill)logic, but aimed to apply rational thinking to dreams as a meaningful enterprise. Though Freud did not go as far as make mathematical models of the dream's cinematic canvass, he did aim to ‘discover’, given the bent of his times, its ‘essential’ nodal point and chart its limited typography. 11 ‘Like some letter in cipher, the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication’ (CitationSully 1894, 364). 12 ‘that ideas in dreams and psychoses have in common the characteristic of being fulfilments of wishes’ (Penguin Freud Library 4, 163 – hereafter PFL). That is, ‘a dream is an attempt at the fulfilment of the wish’ (PFL 2, 58–9). Note the modification of inserting ‘attempt’ – given the problem-case of anxiety dreams – which are not easily explained as wish-fulfilments. 13 ‘…and the value of the dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense’ (PFL 4, 783). An example of Freud's denial of his own past can be seen in the Babylonian Talmudic saying: ‘sleep is one sixtieth of death; dream is on sixtieth of prophecy’ (cited in Frieden Citation1990, 4, fn.7). 14 ‘a dreamer's relation to his wishes is a quite peculiar one. He repudiates them and censors them – he has no liking for them, in short’ (PFL 4, 737). This statement cannot be separated from Freud's desire to establish ‘a psychology for neurologists’; since he believed that what explained dreams also explained neurotic symptoms, and their ‘true origins’ lie in the past – hence his infamous Oedipus complex and the notion of the infantile roots to all wishes expressed in dreams – dreams thus express primitive repressed desires. 15 Not knowing, according to the AG, the reverse to be true: ‘suffering is the medicine and pleasure the disease’ (AG, 469, M1). 16 A rebus is a picture puzzle that has no narrative plot and juxtaposes a range of pictographic, phonetic and ideogrammatic elements that have no meaning as a whole. 17 Each classical raag is meant to evoke a particular sentiment, or flavour (rasa). 18 ‘What power have I to say Your deep thought?’ (AG, 4, M1); ‘If any loudmouth says (he knows), then it is to be written on his forehead [that he is] the greatest fool amongst fools’ (AG, 6, M1). Yet these lines often come at the end of passages of relating and ‘describing’ His deep thought. 19 Gadamer notes how central this statement is for the ‘whole history of modern hermeneutics’, which for him ‘contains the whole problem of hermeneutics’ (1992, 192). He quotes Steinthal's repetition of Schleiermacher's formula: ‘the philologist understands the speaker and poet better than he understands himself and better than his contemporaries understood him, for he brings clearly into consciousness what was actually, but only unconsciously, present in the other’ – and this is done through the ‘knowledge of psychological laws’ (Gadamer Citation1992, 192–3). To be fair Freud was aware of this over-interpretation and sought to check himself by making the opposite claim also: that only the dreamer can interpret his own dreams. 20 Traditionally these are five: sexual lust (kaam), anger (krodh), covetousness (lobh), delusion (moh), pride (ahamkar). 21 Dreams are ‘guardians of sleep’, they ‘are things which get rid of (psychical) stimuli disturbing to sleep, by the method of hallucinatory satisfaction’ (PFL 1, 168). 22 Gananath Obeyeskere (Citation1981, 180) argues that ‘this mode of knowledge… is one of the most powerful and ancient forms of knowing…. I believe that hypnomantic knowledge [derived from dreams, trances, and other ecstatic experiences] also lies at the base of most South Asian religions; on it are superimposed the ratiocinative speculations of the great historical religions of this region’. 23 That range in the Indic context has many aspects to it that cannot be developed here; dreams have been interpreted (svapna-vicaarin) as furnishing prophetic vision (svapna-darshana, svapnya), soteric instruction (svapnadesa), a form of super-consciousness (svapnajaagaritavishayaa, taijasa, turiiya) producing their own unique kind of cognition (svapnantika) and knowledge (svapna-jnaana). There have also developed dream methods (svapna-vishayaprayogam), techniques and rituals to cause particular ‘sought dreams’ (svapna-maanavaka), as well as having dream interpretation (svapna-vicaari), and a dream interpreter (svapnadhyaayavid) of the state of dreaming – (svapnavasthaa). See Sanskrit-English Dictionary Citation(1970), Young Citation(1999), and O'Flaherty Citation(1984). In contemporary Punjabi the dream (supanaa ‘dream, vision, reverie’) ‘comes’ (aaunaa), is ‘taken’ (lainaa), and is ‘seen’ (vekhanaa); one is to dream, have a vision and gain something to aim at (Punjabi-English Dictionary Citation1994). 24 This schema of the 3 + 1 states of consciousness, is first seen in the Upanisadic discourses, most clearly expressed in the Mandukhya Upanisad (tr. Radhakrishnan 1994, 695–705), wherein the self possesses three dualistic modes of consciousness and one Fourth nondualistic (advaitam) and distinct ‘mode’ of super-consciousness. Waking (vishva) ‘cognizes external objects’; Dreaming (taijasa) ‘cognizes internal objects’; Deep-Sleep (prajna) is a ‘mass of cognition’, the ‘face of thought’; and the Fourth-State (turiiya): ‘not cognitive, not non-cognitive’, i.e. nondual. 25 Nanak conflates these Yogic/Upanishadic terms with Buddhist Siddha ones: nirbaanii-pad, sunn-samaadhi, sahaj. He also talks in bhagati terms of mystic union (samaai, liva-laai), and the Way (jugati, calanaa) as well as Islamic ones of attaining Allah's Court (daragah, darabaar). 26 ‘Them’ refers here to the Absolute's three disciples of Creator, Storekeeper and Judge – who see everything but the Absolute – a thought also expressed in the Upanisads by locating the Absolute within: ‘You cannot see the seer of seeing’ and ‘Everyone sees his sport but himself no one ever sees’. (Brhad-aaranyaka Upanisad III.5.1 and IV. 3.14 in Radhakrishnan 1994, 220; 259). 27 Young acknowledges that in the South Asian context ‘dreams can be stimulators of enlightenment’ (1999, 25), noting that ‘in fact, it suggests that in sleep, in dreams, one comes closer to understanding the nature of reality than in waking consciousness’ (1999, 25). Young concentrates on the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist traditions balancing the work already done on Hinduism by O'Flaherty Citation(1984). 28 ‘disturbances of the bodily elements, previous experiences, influence of the gods, and portents or prophecies caused by one's (karmic) merit and demerit’ (Young Citation1999, 46). 29 Much of the inspiration for these insights come from Carse (Citation1995, 89–110). Contrary to Freud, the secret that withdraws in the dream is not an ‘unplumable unknown’, but an ‘unplumable known’. Carse notes, ‘This dream does not hide what I don't know but what I do know.’ (1995, 103) 30 She further notes, ‘to say one has seen rather than had a dream is to suggest that the dreamer is the passive recipient of an objective vision. The literalness of this thinking is expressed in hymn 4.9 of the Atharva Veda, which recommends and eye ointment, asana, for protection from troubled dreams, and in a Tibetan text from the Tangyur that also recommends using a certain eye ointment when seeking an auspicious dream’ (1999, 9). 31 The influential fifth-century C.E scholar-monk Buddhaghosa ‘uses the word vipaaka to discuss how prophetic dreams predict future events that have already matured [psychically], making it just a matter of time before they manifest in [physical] waking reality’ (Young Citation1999, 27). 32 This ‘rupture’ is a form of ‘violence’ that is part of the bhagati praxis. See my ‘Text as Sword: Sikh Religious Violence Taken for Wonder’ in King and Hinnells eds., Routledge (forthcoming), where I discuss Sikh bhagati as a ‘violent-love’. 33 Cannabis sativa. 34 Without the Word (sabad), the Name (naam), the Guru, bhagati, the ‘whole world is insane’, being addicted to the Other (duujaa bhaai). (AG, 1417; 1140; 1287; 931; 1047) 35 ‘Upside-down’ language. Hess's excellent study provides a detailed exposition of Sant upaaya but without locating that term within its Buddhist context. For example she even argues that Kabir's Name-Word is meant as a device, a trick to get free of the tangle of maaiaa (Hess Citation1983, 135–61). See AG, 1194 for an example. 36 cf. Derrida's ‘Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth’ (1978, 53), and Baudrillard's ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’ (1983, 1) Radical hermeneutics and deconstruction move to Baudrillard's third order of the simulacrum, where the image masks the absence of a basic reality, but do not move wholesale with Baudrillard to the fourth order, where the image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever – it is its own pure simulacrum. This is because of their discourses on a ‘quasi-transcendental’. Baudrillard ditches truth, or the notion of a ‘god’, or ‘the other’ in the Levinasian sense, far too easily and neatly in his four totalised shifts in the orders of the image. 37 CitationTrumpp's 1877 interpretation claims that AG is contradictory, that is simultaneously, nihilistic, pantheistic, thoroughly pessimistic like Buddhism, and monistic (1989, xcvii-cx). This reading is followed by Macauliffe's Citation1909 opposite interpretation of the AG as a ‘moral monotheism’. Later we get those cashing in on the currency of this particular interpretation: from Gopal Singh's 1960 translation of the AG as ‘strictly monotheistic’ (1993, xxvi; xxxii), to Talib's translation as ‘uncompromising monotheism’ (1991, xliv-xlv). My own interpretation, though critical of the need to classify the AG, moves towards a ‘nondual monotheism’. 38 See the long introductory essays preceding major translations of the AG: Trumpp Citation(1989), Macauliffe Citation(1993), Gopal (1993), Talib (1991). For secondary exegesis of the AG's hymns see McLeod (1968; 1997), and Kaur Citation(1990). 39 Compare, ‘Speak the Unspoken Speech (and) merge the mind into the mind’ (AG, 1031, M1).

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