In this collection of essays and lectures spanning twenty years, edited and introduced by Tara Chatterjea, both the synthetic vision and the methodological and cultural pluralism of J. N. Mohanty's phenomenology illuminate fundamental reflections on consciousness and interpretation. In these essays, Mohanty argues that, while all levels of consciousness, structures of meaning, and forms of culture need to be accorded their own kinds of investigation that bring out their respectively unique features, there is a “flow” of consciousness, a centrality of text, and overlapping spheres of meaning that allow us all to inhabit the same world. At every step along Mohanty's journey of inquiry, the unique perspectives and arguments of Indian philosophy are joined to Western thought in a masterful seamlessness that no other contemporary thinker in cross-cultural philosophy has achieved.

In three of the book's powerful essays on consciousness, Mohanty argues persuasively against reductionism, while arguing for multileveled theories of consciousness. While all forms of scientific investigations of neural processes must be respected and learned from, he argues that to equate any given reduced neural state arbitrarily with consciousness would not, after all, be physicalism, but panpsychism (p. 18). Alternately, if we wish to identify a first-person report of an experience with a neural state, the identification would be parasitic on the validity of first-person experience, and this, too, would rule out reductionism (p. 18). While Mohanty agrees with the physicalist's goal of naturalizing consciousness, he points out that nature contains different kinds of phenomena (p. 51), and so the reductionist compulsion must be resisted. The lower physical and higher experienced “levels” at which consciousness can be explained exhibit an interdependent and not an eliminative relationship (p. 38). Hence, we can analyze reality at the thoroughly interconnected levels of material, organic existence, consciousness, and social existence (p. 20). Or, focusing on how consciousness is the “transcendental ground for the possibility of the world,” we can identify its structural correlativity of noesis and noema, its meaning-conferring activity, and its temporal flow as allowing it to serve as the condition for lived experience and historical experience (pp. 32–33). In such interdependent frameworks, the life of consciousness can be described in all its experiences, be they mundane, scientific, aesthetic, or spiritual.

Of course, consciousness gives us the abundance of our meaning through acts of interpretation, from the communicative to the textual to the historical and cultural. Here again, in several essays, Mohanty argues that “the world is the regulative idea” of interpretation, and interpretation unifies the world not through the violent imposition of an overarching explanatory structure, but through the achievement of communication (p. 91). Phenomenology, in Mohanty's view, provides the greatest explanatory framework for interpretation, as its concerns for both description and meaning allow it to explain historical variations of meaning within the context of a lifeworld's “noematic structure” (pp. 60, 62). The consequences of this are far reaching indeed, for every historical or cultural “world” can be conceived as a “noematic structure” corresponding to an “entire nexus of interpretive acts on the part of a community for which such a world obtains” (p. 86). To greater or lesser degrees, these worlds “overlap” with one another in historical and communicative relation, and the mutual translation of one culture's noematic structure into another's “enriches” both (pp. 86, 90). In this vein, identities of cultures are not given essential unities, but emergent identities synthesized out of meanings, whereby the introduction of new meaning structures brings about a new emergent identity (p. 159).

The overlapping of worlds is not merely a theoretical possibility for Mohanty; he performs such an overlapping in the ways in which Western and Indian thought are interwoven into creative dialogue. Both Buddhist and Husserlian transcendental depictions of consciousness insist on its sensory contents (p. 36). The Jaina theory of the conditional truth of every assertion (syadvada) confirms Welsche's posit of a “region of intersection” (Schnittenbereich) between contrary positions of reason (pp. 96, 99). Kant, Yoga, Husserl, Buddhism, and Advaita all capture different facets of both the flow of consciousness and its capacity to synthesize preceding nows with the present (pp. 121–22). Husserl's time consciousness, Heidegger's Dasein, and Kashmir Saivism's notion of time as a Sakti of brahman all bear witness to transcendental consciousness as the constitutive source of history (pp. 139–40). Vedic and Buddhist exegetical histories are proof of the hermeneutic possibilities that are grounded in and emanate from a body of texts (pp. 161–66).

Tara Chatterjea's collection of these essays, along with her own fine introduction, allow us a glimpse of the astounding breadth and depth of Mohanty's expertise and thought applied to philosophical reflections on consciousness and interpretation.