The Desire of the Mind



Three songs for Philosophie :

(1)

The agony that lies sleeping
in the midst of the mind's Desire
was yet unknown at that moment
when the earth, severed from the sky
wandered like a prodigal daughter
in search of a distant unknown father
and you sit near the window
watching the birds weigh
their songs with their silences
words too brittle for any divine voice
sighs too deep for any human funeral.

(2)

Even these sea gulls know
the oppressive weight of the Desire
that seeking its own depths
laments the death of the dawn
and when you come back again
the world still revolves in her beauty
as if Suffering had been just an illusion
as if the Quest had been a futile one
as if You had never been born.

(3)

The mind that is painfully hammered
on the fiery anvil of red suffering
must yet merge with the unsuspecting heart
that sleeps in a child-like eternity
and when at the end of the day
tired, mud-soiled, and empty handed
you come back to the peace of your home
you realise in that moment of freedom
that your home never existed.

Some Like it Absolute

There is a rumour afoot both within the campuses of the Academy and beyond them that are no more any Absolutes. Any acceptance of absolute claims necessarily leads, it is further rumoured, to such terrible modes of thought and behaviour as dogmatism, intolerance, exclusivism, and arrogance. In order that we may better understand precisely what this rumour is about, let us question its propagators, and try to find out just what it is that they are trying to tell us.

(A) Are they making a 'universal' statement that nobody in the world believes anymore in Absolutes? Obviously, they cannot mean this. Not only do certain sections of the Islamic world continue to stand resolutely by a specific set of absolute beliefs, there are (a) parts of the world which still hold on to some version of Communism; (b) nations which are witnessing religious revivals which are based on definite absolute claims; and (c) groups of activists as diverse as ecologists, environmentalists, evangelical atheists, feminists, pro-abortionists, and developmental workers, whose respective stances are rooted in absolute views about the nature of humanity and its place in the world.

(B) So let us try again : are they making not a 'descriptive' but a 'normative' claim, that is, are they saying that nobody in the world should believe anymore in Absolutes? If this is indeed what their position is, three responses to it are possible.

(i) The propagators are putting forward the claim, X such that X : Nobody should put forward any Absolute views. Now either X is intended as an absolute claim or it is not. If it is not intended as such, then there is no reason why everyone should accept it, but if it is, the propagators have subverted their own position (by putting forward at least one Absolute view, namely X), and can be compared to the proverbial woodcutter sawing off the very branch that she is sitting on.

(ii) Secondly, much depends on what exactly is to be included under the category of Absolutes. Shall we give up Newton's law of gravitation, and a host of other laws in the physical and mathematical sciences, merely because they are postulated as covering, universally and absolutely, all spatio-temporal events?

(iii) 'Geo-politically' speaking, it is highly possible that these propagators belong to countries that have accepted the notion of 'separation of Church and State', and are founded on some version of 'secular nationalism'. Consequently, there is, once again, at least one claim Y, Y : 'Religion' and 'politics' must be kept separate, which they put forward as an absolute truth for all human beings.

There does not exist, then, sufficient reason to believe the wide-spread rumour that (a) there are no human beings, descriptively speaking, who believe in Absolutes, and (b) there should be no human beings, normatively speaking, who shall believe in Absolutes in the future. Let me now make the discussion more specific by bringing up the question of moral principles, for it is usually the question of 'morality' that rouses people's passions and induces them to draw swords on the Absolute Vs Non-Absolute debate. One of the most popular views in this connection seems to be what is called 'ethical relativism'. This can take several forms, but, generally speaking, its proponents argue that (i) there are no absolute moral truths, so that moral statements are not objectively true or false, and (ii) these statements can be said to be 'true' only relative to the personal tastes of the individual or, at other times, only relative to socially accepted and established norms.

In contrast to such views, I shall here describe a much more 'old-fashioned' view called 'ethical Absolutism', which states that are objective moral facts, so that when we say that a certain act is morally wrong we are not simply expressing our personal whimsical inclinations but declaring that it is wrong for all human beings. An analogy from the history of science may help here. There was a time when (almost all) people thought that the sun went round the earth, today we know that it is the earth that goes round the sun. What has changed in this transformation is our beliefs about the sun, but the sun itself remained 'unmoved' even when people thought that it was in motion. In other words, the change was in us, not in the sun. An ethical Absolutist argues that the same holds for moral truths : there are certain activities which are always morally wrong, though it may have been the case that there was a period during which they were accepted as right (and are still accepted as such in some parts of the world today).

Moreover, the ethical Absolutist complains that the ethical relativist has not really proved her point that there are no absolute moral truths, she has simply assumed what she is supposed to prove. The mere fact that people belonging to different traditions and cultures have lived, and continue to live, according to divergent sets of moral codes does not in itself prove (i) that all of them are true, or (ii) that all of them are false, or (iii) that the notions of truth and falsity do not apply to moral principles. Pick up any text-book on economic theory, historical method, cosmology, educational psychology, criminology, or psychoanalysis, and be prepared to be assaulted by a plethora of competing and contrasting views. The mere existence of such divergent opinions in these disciplines does not lead us to conclude that there is no correct position to hold, or to declare all of them as being equally 'true' or equally 'false'. Why should it be different in the case of the diverse moral principles that human beings have lived, and live, by? Why should we not believe instead that some of these are right and the others are wrong, though we may not know precisely which of these are indeed right and which are wrong? (The standard reply to this question, of course, is that moral principles are 'subjective', but this is, in fact, the position that I am questioning here.)

Indeed, an ethical Absolutist goes further, and claims that there are certain practices which are morally wrong in every socio-cultural context, and that if some groups actually promote them this does not show that it is 'true for them' but only that they have missed the truth on this matter. Four such practices are : (a) slavery, (b) ethnic cleansing or religious genocide, (c) discrimination on the basis of gender, and (d) destroying the environment indiscriminately. An ethical Absolutist will argue that an ethical relativist who believes that these four are indeed immoral will be hard-pressed to explain why other people around her too should hold them to be immoral. For example, if she were living in a country where gender discrimination is prevalent, she would be able to do nothing but to shut up and 'curse her fate', for this discrimination is 'wrong' only relative to her personal taste, but others who think that it is 'right' are entitled to their own tastes too. (Indeed, ethical relativism can be used as a sophisticated tool to justify the status quo. If the British administrators, whatever may have been their other faults, had taken up such a relativism, the Hindu practice of Sati may not have been banned.)

A concluding note. One reason why many people are put off by the position which I have described here is because of a suspicion that it will necessarily lead to some form exclusivist dogmatism. Historically speaking, there is much to justify this suspicion : ethical Absolutists have had a notorious reputation of being intolerant towards people who they thought were in the wrong, morally speaking. However, such a dogmatic stance is not a necessary concomitant of the view that I am putting forward here. An ethical Absolutist can claim both (a) there are absolute moral truths, and (b) we do not know specifically what these truths are, so that we can often be mistaken in thinking precisely which things are morally right and which are morally wrong. When we realise our mistakes, however, what we must do is not to give up the notion that such absolute truths exist, but renew our attempts to search for them. Moreover, ethical Absolutism recognises and accepts that we are prejudiced and fallible beings, and believes that we must engage in discussion with people holding divergent moral principles in a mutual search for such moral facts.

Speaking of Conspiracies

No form of socio-political existence is as dangerous as the one that has run out of conspiracy theories, or has even proscribed the circulation of them through legal measures. I define a 'conspiracy theory' not as a hallucinatory fantasy that someone may conjure out of 'thin air', but as a plausible alternative description of a certain series of events that places them within a broader conceptual framework which might have remained unnoticed (though the question of just how plausible it is will be a question that cannot be settled by the theorist herself).

Speaking for myself, I happen to harbour all sorts of conspiracy theories, such as theories which (at least, according to me) will really explain why some people believe in God, why some become atheists, why some women want to have babies so desperately, why some society-dames are such excellent brokers in the marriage-market, why some students want to get a Ph.D., why some academics want to publish books, why some netters write blogs, and why others even bother to read them. For the moment, however, I shall put forward (craving the indulgence of 'fact-hunting' historians, Indologists and political analysts) a conspiracy theory to explain why Indira Gandhi was able to become the Prime Minster of India.

In my younger days, I was quite impressed to learn that very few countries in the world have had women Heads-of-State; and even more so to find out that most of these 'very few countries' happen to be in South Asia : Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Later on, when I came to learn some troublesome words like 'patriarchy', I began to wonder : How is it possible that South Asia, one of the most Patriarchy-infested zones in the world, has produced (at least) four women Heads? One thing led to another, and a conspiracy theory began to brew.

"We must always start, as they used to tell us in school, with the beginnings. The beginnings were made when a young lad called Jawaharlal Nehru came to Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1910s. The time he spent in Trinity made a lasting impression on this young mind, and one of the things that he learnt there was that the independent India of the future would be able to stand proudly in the international community only if it were able to improve its public record regarding its womenfolk. Trinity came and went, and, indeed, so did the British themselves. In 1947, Nehru set himself the task of charting the course of a new shining India through the choppy troubled waters that the departing British had, with tiresome predictability, left behind them.

"One thing that he now particularly began to impress upon his young daughter Indira was that she must take up the reins of the government at 'some point in the future'. That would indeed be the ultimate PR-stunt : it would send down shock-waves all over the international community and would establish India's clean image when it came to women's rights and capabilities. Soon after, Nehru himself went away, pining for the distant woods, dark and deep.

"Indira found herself plunged into the maelstrom (read : male-storm) of Indian politics, and soon realised that in order to man-oeuvre her way through the corridors of power she would need some real man-power. So she first surrounded herself with a formidable coterie of menfolk, and entered into a secret pact with them, an Anschluss that, thankfully for her, never made its way into the newspapers. In return for their unquestioned loyalty to her, she promised that she would not only let the patriarchal foundations of Indian society remain untouched and allow her men to rule over their womenfolk as their ancient grandfathers had once done, but also that she herself would take on the role of the Supreme Patriarch. In other words, she would be, as we say, a wolf in sheep's clothing . Consequently, the election of a woman to the Prime Minstership became, paradoxically, the final seal of approval on patriarchy.

"Indira Gandhi's Prime Ministership was a brilliant move of high diplomacy, and she was able to keep two powerful parties happy at once. On the one hand, she mesmerised scores of international political leaders with her vigorous speeches, and they all applauded her : 'A woman has come to judgement!'. At once, 'Indian women' were plunged into the limelight as members of a brave new world that had been liberated by a Father's daughter, at one thunder stroke, from their menfolk. On the other hand, she kept the most powerful men in India happy by acting and living as the epitome of the Great Patriarch; in Her, they all saw their own reflection, and they sure liked what they did see. Her imperious style of governance; her rousing calls to her country-men to die for the Mother-land, if not for Herself, the Supreme Mother; her indulging in skirmishes on the frontiers threatened by the enemy; her habit of suffering from panic-attacks, one of which culminated in the declaration of an emergency; her intolerance of any domestic squabbles, crushing them, if necessary, with stars flying under the blue skies; and her suppression of civil dissidence --- all of these go towards establishing one curious truth.

"The truth that in the history of Independent India the greatest Patriarch was not a man but a woman. A woman whose brilliant scheming led her to devise a conspiracy, a conspiracy by a woman, of a woman but, sadly, not for the women. A woman whose Prime Ministership was a superb Public-Relations-decoy to trick the world into thinking that Indian women have become free, whereas her very Prime Ministership was established on their bondage and was a means to furthering it."

So that is my conspiracy theory. But I do not like conspiracy theories that are 'close-ended', and I will therefore leave it 'open-ended' with a question (especially) for my women readers. Is this account that I have given itself a patriarchal theory on my part? : that is a bone of contention that I shall leave you to gnaw on.

On the Notion of 'Beginnings'

The beginnings of this sentence that I am typing now were made even before I typed the word 'the', that is, the first word in it. The reason why I am typing it in English (and not, say, in Spanish or Tamil) is because I happened to go through, in my childhood, a process of learning this language. In one proximate sense, therefore, the beginnings of this sentence were made in my childhood when I learnt the English alphabet. One cannot yet, however, pinpoint the beginnings there, for the English language exists only because over a long period of time countless numbers of human beings have been speaking it so that it has today acquired the form which is, more or less, regarded as 'grammatical English'. Consequently, one has to shift the 'point of embarkation' even more backwards in time, and say that beginnings of this sentence were made sometime around the 1700s when 'modern' English began to emerge on the linguistic scene.

And, yet, we are still not quite there. A few minutes spent in browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary will reveal that almost every word in that first sentence is derived from some classical language such as Greek or Latin; the very word 'beginning' enters our vocabulary sometime around 1470 AD, and the word 'word' around 1462 AD. Therefore, in typing that sentence I am drawing from a rich source of linguistic, grammatical, and philosophical vocabulary into which several streams have flown from directions I may be unaware of.

So far, my comments have been largely of a 'philological' nature, but let me now change gears somewhat. There is an obsessive notion in several circles of 'academic' as well as 'non-academic' life that whatever is said, spoken, argued for, or written must be New. We often hear people forwarding their views with labels such as 'original', 'ground-breaking', 'earth-shattering', and 'foundation-shaking'. Rightly so. For unless we wish to be doomed to the inanity of tirelessly repeating verbatim what has been handed down to us, we must continually re-examine, re-evaluate, re-envision, and re-contextualise whatever we have received from our traditional sources of authority. Precisely therein lies a great danger, though, the danger that we develop such an infatuation for this drive towards innovation that we unwittingly lapse into making the fallacious association of 'novelty' with 'truth'. Consequently, some notions get swept under the carpet with the claim that these were first put forward in the 'Dark Ages' (with the implicit assumption that they must therefore be 'false') and others get paraded as transparent 'truth' simply because they are being put on display Now.

It is for this reason that we need to be reminded that it is quite difficult to make 'absolute beginnings'. A close examination of the thought of most people who claim to have made such beginnings will show that they have taken on board a huge baggage of conceptual and linguistic resources from the older tradition which they otherwise claim to have rejected. Beginnings we must nevertheless make, but when we have ended, we must go back to where we have started from, not this time to repeat what we had said earlier, but to say it with different words, to think about with new concepts, and to judge it from within our new perspectives.

The Desire of Our Needs

The magnificent Latin of St Augustine (354 - 430 AD) rolls down the corridors of time : Da amantem, et sentit quod dico. Da desiderantem, da esurientem, da in ista solitudine peregrinantem atque sitientem, et fontem aeternae patriae suspirantem : da talem, et scit quid dicam. Si autem frigido loquor, nescit quod loquor. Which in my poor translation roughly goes as : 'If you give me someone who loves, someone who desires, someone who has a raging thirst in this land of exile for the eternal fountains of the Fatherland, that someone shall know just what it is that I am speaking of. But if you instead give me someone who is cold-hearted and apathetic, he shall not understand me.'

Much human activity, historically speaking, has been concerned with the control, the governance, the regulation, the supervision, and, often, the repression of Desire. What is it about desire that (many) people find threatening to social existence? Perhaps we may start by making a conceptual distinction here between 'need' and 'desire' : desire provides the horizon within which our needs operate. To carry on with this metaphor of the horizon, what we need or recognise as a (horizontal) need is governed and influenced by what type of (vertical) skies we walk under. That is, desire has the capacity to orient us in a certain direction, by drawing out of ourselves and making us look at the world in a certain manner, and our needs are what we subsequently realise we are lacking in ourselves when we view the world through those perspectives.

So, for example, a person might have the desire to manifest through herself the beauty that she perceives in the world. Because of having this specific desire, she begins to experience the need for some media through which this desire can be expressed. She may turn to painting, in which case she shall need not only pastels, paints and canvases, but also probably some minimal acquaintance with various 'movements' in art history. (Similar needs would arise if she were to turn instead to composing music, writing novels, or practising a dance form, propelled by this desire.) Therefore, if she were living with a friend who has never experiened such a desire, her friend might be quite unable to understand why she needs to keep on buying more and more paints, reading books on painting, and making frequent visits to art museums.

Again, a person might have the desire to know what reality is like. This desire will immediately open up a wide conceptual space where various kinds of needs will come into play. First, she will have the need to find out what other people, down the ages and around her in the present time, think and believe about the nature of reality, and how they try to justify these beliefs. Second, she will need to know what kind of (methodological) tools people have devised and continue to use in their mutual investigations. Consequently, she will need to read through various kinds of books, and discuss the notions therein and those of her own with people around her. Once again, a friend of hers who has never experienced this desire (that is, the desire to know the structure of reality) will frankly be incapable of making sense of her never-satisfied need to discuss such matters on every possible occasion.

To condense all of this into the form of a dictum : As is a person's desire, so are her needs. Or to frame another one : First know what to desire, and your needs will follow from this desire. This implies that if you alter the nature of a person's desire, modify or restructure it, her needs will undergo a parallel change. Let us say that a person has a desire to seek power or control over other people, and let us also postulate that some implicit or explicit form of this desire leads her to try to join the Indian Administrative Service. This desire will create various needs in her, such as the need to keep abreast with all current political issues, the need to know about crucial historical events, and so on. On the other hand, there could be a person who has a desire to completely eradicate the human seeking for some kind of authority over others, and let us say that she comes to the conclusion (for whatever reasons) that this uprooting is possible only by becoming a Buddhist nun. With this desire, she shall now experience an inter-connected set of needs : the need to understand the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy, the need to become adept in practising various types of meditation, and the need to control her thoughts at all times.

One final example. What about a woman in the street who has no roof over her head, and barely manages to eat one (in)complete meal a day? What are her needs and what are her desires? To begin with, whether or not she realises this fact, even she has at least one desire --- the desire to live, and it is this desire that makes her experience the lack of food and shelter as a need. (That is, someone who was on the verge of committing suicide would not experience such lacks as needs.) It could very well be possible that if these latter needs remain unsatisfied for a sufficiently long period of time, she might eventually lose this desire, the desire to live. Somewhat paradoxically, this also applies to some members of the 'affluent society'. It may so happen that a certain woman in a city may be blessed with sufficient quantities of food and drink, and in short with everything else that the beggar-woman recognises as needs, and yet she might lack precisely what the beggar-woman does not : the desire to live. It could even be the case that people who barely subsist on a dole of 'minimum needs' have a much stronger desire to live than people who are overburdened on all sides with such needs but have lost all desire to go on living. Note, however, that this only a descriptive and a rather speculative comment at that : it is not meant to imply that this is sufficient reason for not improving the 'living conditions' of people of the former category. (To make matters even more complicated, we may point out that a Buddhist nun in a forest in Thailand might claim that this desire to go on living is precisely one of the desires that must be extinguished through meditative practice, and she could not care much for the lack of a roof over her head and the lack of food and water for days on end. These lacks, in other words, would be experienced by her as 'needs' not in an active but in a very muted passive sense.)

Desire is, therefore, something that has unsettling and anarchic potentialities, for it opens out for us a strange world which we do not know, and into which we hesitatingly take our steps guided by the walking-stick of our needs. Desire clears a space which points towards the future, and it is this space that we (try to) inhabit in the process of satisfying the needs that are located within it. It could even be said that, ideally speaking, the direction of the arrow of time is the same as the direction of the greater fulfillment of our needs (though given the nature of human finitude, this is rarely the case).

How To Argue with Anybody

The word 'argument' has picked up the negative connotation of a 'quarrel' in many circles where the process of arguing with a person is necessarily interpreted as a contest in which either party attempts to bludgeon the other, by a series of verbal abuses, into accepting its own position. There is, however, another sense in which this word may be understood, that is, as a series of statements or a course of reasoning through which the truth or the falsehood of a certain belief is demonstrated. In this sense, one might even claim that the very existence of every human being is an Embodied Argument, so that as she moves through life she puts into practice this Argument, responds to the Arguments of those who live with and around her, and thereby develops, in an ongoing process, newer forms of this Argument that is distinctive of her. Every human being, therefore, lives at the dynamic point of intersection of several Arguments. And yet, we are often wary of engaging in this process of mutual criticism and learning, and this is the case primarily for the reason that we are filled with a very elemental Fear, the Fear that we may have to give up those views and beliefs that are dearest to us.

Philosophy can be understood as a therapeutic practice that helps us to overcome this Fear : philosophy is the examination of all possible beliefs, and especially of those which we may have come to hold, for whatever reasons, as 'transparently true'. (I shall not go into this matter in detail here but note that this comment applies not only to religious believers who are routinely berated for accepting what-have-you on 'faith', but also to atheists who often turn out to be equally hostile to the notion of submitting their beliefs to evaluation and examination.) Philosophically speaking, the following is what an argument would look like :

(A) The first step of any argument is to make an assertion. There may very well be some people who would rather prefer the 'noble silence' of not saying anything. I do not wish, of course, to disturb their silence, but simply note that until this silence is shattered, the argument cannot even get started.

(B) The second step is to provide some justification for this assertion, for we are not interested simply in knowing what people believe but also in knowing why they believe what they do. So, for example, someone who claims, 'It is right to believe whatever suits your fancy', and in response to the question why we too should accept this claim says, 'Oh, that's my personal fancy' or simply remains silent has not given us any justification for why we should do so the same.

(C) The third step, however, is to make sure that we really have understood the assertion and the associated justification given to us. Very often, we misunderstand what is being declared to us, and this may happen for two main reasons. Firstly, we often like to believe that we are perfect listeners, and can understand everything that we are being told at the first go (whereas, in fact, both these beliefs may turn out to be false). Secondly, there are abstract notions such as justice, truth, freedom, and humanity, which we may understand in strikingly different ways than other people. To avoid the possibility of misunderstanding, we must give the speaker a summary, in our own words, of what has been said to us, and ask the speaker if she agrees that our summary is an accurate representation of her own position. If not, we must try again, and again, until a 'reasonable fit' is attained. In other words, the third step demands a great amount of patience and gratitude on both sides; one of the main reasons why arguments rapidly degenerate into quarrels is because quite often neither side has sufficient amounts of both.

(D) Fourthly, having acquired a reasonably accurate understanding of the speaker's view and of the justifications put forward by her, we must move on to evalute these for until such evaluation has been carried out by us we are not in a position to say whether or not we can accept the assertion and the justification as our own. For example, a woman may put forward the assertion that women have the (legal and moral) right to have abortions, and try to justify this view with arguments such as 'every woman has the ultimate right over her own body' and 'anti-abortionists are patriarchal humbugs'. To leave the matter at that would mean that the argument has come to an end, but we are not merely interested in what and why the speaker believes in but also in whether we, the listeners, can accept her position as our own. Therefore, we must evaluate all possible reasons that have been put forward in support of the assertion in question.

(E) Whereas a quarrel tries to be close-ended (one party has to 'win'), an argument is open-ended. It may so happen that we are convinced that the reasons given to us are valid, and we come to accept the speaker's position; it may also happen, on the other hand, that we reject these reasons, and we consequently disagree with the original assertion. Thirdly, it may also be the case that we have more urgent jobs at that moment (we may need to go and have our dinner, watch a TV show, or simply lie down in the green grass smelling the nice hay), so we may decide to postpone the argument until another time. In other words, the (telic) end towards which an argument is directed is not the establishment of who 'wins' or 'loses' (unlike a quarrel, an argument is not to be understood on the analogy of a boxing match), but the persuasion, through a patient, difficult, disciplined, and attentive process of providing justifications, of the listener to accept the speaker's standpoint.

By breaking down the process of arguing with other people into five stages, I do not mean to imply that all people who are engaged in an argument will be consciously aware of moving from one to the other in the manner of climbing and counting the steps of a logical ladder. Indeed, the more skilled a person becomes in the Art of Argument the more gracefully she will be able to move between them, not hesitating to lay down all her (axiomatic) cards on the table, whether she is Marxist, atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, agnostic, ecofeminist, anarchist, and so on. And even if she is someone who believes that all argumentation is a colossal waste of time (incidentally, a belief fast catching up these days), this belief itself immediately becomes her (quasi-)assertion : so let us, her listeners, ask her in return what reasons she has to justify that belief, and whether we too can accept her claim.

We can now see why the notion that argumentation necessarily goes with an 'quarrelsome mentality' is quite a misunderstanding on the part of people who are either too lazy to argue or are too scared of exposing their most-cherished views to public inspection. In fact, some of the greatest masters of the Art of Argument, in classical Indian philosophy, were the Buddhist thinkers who had to argue with, on the one hand, the Hindus who believed in the 'eternal soul' and, on the other, the nihilists who believed that morality is pointless; and nobody surely will accuse these Buddhist thinkers of being 'quarrelsome'. Classically speaking, in fact, Indians have been some of the most argumentative people around on this planet, until, that is, they forgot how to argue and instead started to quarrel among themselves. It is for this reason that we are often too intimidated to argue against other people simply because they are our peers in some way or the other, or when we do manage to get the argument on track we keep on throwing profuse apologies such as, 'I hope I did not offend you'. I do not mean to say, of course, that we should deliberately be obnoxious when arguing with other people, but that the question of whether a certain statement is true or false must be carefully (and resolutely) separated from the other one of whom we may have offended by trying to establish its truth or falsity.

An entry in the University Library catalogue, Cambridge (UK)


My best men are women

Main Author: Larsson, Flora.

Title: My best men are women

Published: London, Hodder and Stoughton [1974]

Description: 187, [2] p. 22 cm.

ISBN: 0340182008

Notes: Bibliography: p. [189]

Subject(s): Salvation Army--Biography.Women in church work--Salvation Army.

Format: Book

Location: UL: South Wing, Floor 4

Classmark: 158:1.c.95.7

Number of Items: 1

Status: Not On Loan

In Search of 'Objectivity'

Whether or not they are themselves 'scientists', most people believe that what distinguishes the activity that goes by the name 'science' from other products of human imagination, ingenuity, creativity, and industry is that the former is 'objective', and thereby gives us Objective Knowledge. What, however, does it mean to say that science is 'objective'?

(A) Firstly, science is an enterprise that is carried out by a certain group of people, whom we call scientists, such that these scientists are in active communication with one another. Perhaps they meet one another occasionally at conferences, or read about one another's hypotheses in international scientific journals, or have access (through a library, the Internet, and such sources) to a vast body of calculations, predictions, theories, conjectures and refutations that has accumulated over the centuries.

(B) Secondly, the messages that are passed among scientists in this manner are consensible, by which I mean that these messages are written in a language which can be understood universally. The favoured language is, of course, that of mathematics through which the contents of these messages can be readily transferred from, say, the University of Canberra in Australia to the University of Calgary in Canada as unambiguously as possible. As Galileo used to say, 'Nature is written in mathematical language'.

(C) Thirdly, the aim of the transferrence of these message is the attainment of the maximal degree of consensus among scientists. This does not mean, in most cases, that all competent scientists will come to accept the proposed theory but that a large majority of the scientific community will do so. These other scientists should be able to reproduce the results or events proposed by these theories through the design of certain experiments carried out under controlled conditions ('within the limits of experimental error'). In this process, through the countless repetitions of experiments or the criticism of the theory on which they are based, errors can be eliminated or the theory itself rejected.

(D) From the above, we see that the objectivity of science should rather be regarded as intersubjectivity. The reason for this is that no individual scientist can possibly repeat every single experiment that has been proposed in the scientific literature, but has to rely on the good judgement and the scientific competence of her peers and her fellow-scientists. In this era of hyperspecialisation, a scientist investigating the structure of DNA would, in all probability, never come around to finding the time or acquiring the comptetence to design experiments to test Einstein's Special theory of Relativity, but she can trust that other scientists have, under strict conditions of mutual criticism, tested this theory. (And the same applies for a quantum cosmologist who accepts scientific discoveries in the domain of micro-biology, a field she may have neither the time nor the inclination to venture into.)

(E) Through this process of intersubjectivity, a map or a picture of inter-related and coherent theories is built up, and this map is called a paradigm. However, the development of this paradigm is not a guarantee that 'the Truth' has been attained, once and for all by the scientific community, for history has shown us that these paradigms themselves have a history of their own. Once again, science is not so much an objective as an intersubjective enterprise into which all scientists who share the same paradigm enter. To become a scientist one has to first accept certain statements that she is not in a position to immediately test or verify without further training : for example, within the Newtonian paradigm, one must first accept the validity of Netwon's three laws of motion, and the same applies for other paradigms in the fields of microbiology, cosmology, relativity theory and so on. In this process, however, a scientist may imbibe these foundational statements so completely that they become her 'second skin', and consequently, she may not be able to easily accept theories or predictions that are in variance with such statements.

(F) Therefore, we must give up the illusion that scientists are 'neutral and dispassionate' observers. The grain of truth in that phrase is that the scientific community is indeed governed by the most stringent rules concerning the criticism of one another's theories, and the regular and careful repetition of designed experiments. However, the scientist cannot be 'neutral' as to which paradigm she wishes to live in : she is already born into one, and has no, as we say, choice in the matter. To be sure, after much training she can begin to offer reasons as to why the paradigm that she inhabits is 'better' than or 'superior' to other discarded ones, but she is not entitled the perfect confidence that her paradigm is the final and absolutely one. For example, someone born in 1994 cannot choose to reject the Neo-Darwinian paradigm that is currently regnant in evolutionary theory, and has to live, move and exist within this paradigm, and this in spite of knowing that it may come to be replaced by another paradigm in say another fifty years.

(G) It is because every paradigm is a set of inter-connected views that it is extremely difficult to design one Crucial Experiment that will falsify an entire paradigm. (The Michelson-Morley experiment to prove the non/existence of the ether is a rare example of such a Crucial Experiment.) Most paradigms have a set of 'core beliefs' surrounded by a periphery of 'auxiliary beliefs', such that even if a few of the latter are given up the former can stand untouched. Therefore, even if certain random observations seem to contradict a paradigm, it is possible to incorporate even these into its conceptual structure by making appropriate changes in or sometimes even by dropping some of the auxiliary beliefs. However, during certain 'periods of scientific crisis' the number of auxiliary beliefs that has to be dropped may become so large that significant changes may have to be introduced into the set of core beliefs : in such process, a new paradigm emerges out of the former (such as the Newtonian-mechanical paradigm from the Aristotelian-cosmological around the 1700s, and the quantum-mechanical from the classical-mechanical around the 1920s).

In short then every paradigm is a conceptual web, mesh, or network of inter-related statements, and scientists belonging to a certain paradigm form a group of communicating enquirers who, on the basis of such statements, press onwards to explore the world which is seen in the light of this paradigm. Science, in other words, is neither, strictly speaking, a subjective nor an objective affair, but an ongoing process in which messages, coded in a universally understood mathematical language, incessantly flow into archives where they can be preserved, read, assimilated, understood, criticised, (sometimes) verified and (sometimes) falsified by the community of competent scientists which is forever recruiting and training novices.

Sleepy Sunday --- The Laziness

Half a century after Independence, it might still be the case that we Indians have to thank the English for throwing certain odds and ends our way. Consider Sunday, for example, an official holiday throughout India. We are hardly, if ever, taught in school that it was the Governor General Lord Wellesley (1760 - 1842 AD) who made Sunday an official weekly holiday in India. I really do not know what the natives did on 'Sundays' before Wellesley's order : I am very curious to find out more on this matter. In any case, I suppose that without Lord Wellesley's blessing our famed Oriental laziness would have never been exposed to the Western eye. Our Indian Sundays are, therefore, a mixed blessing : they come down to us from a bloody past, a past that lazily slumbers in our villages, towns, and cities bursting at the seams in their attempts to rush headlong into the future.

From Astrology to Film to God to Music to Prozac to Yoga

‘What is happiness?’ is a question over which human beings have spilled rivers of both ink and blood. Perhaps there are few things that ‘define’ a human being as distinctively as the views that she holds regarding this matter. What a person takes happiness to be governs (and sometimes even determines) the way she lives, the professions she takes up, the people she meets, talks to, befriends, and lives with, the food she eats (and don’t eat), the skies she walks under, the places she visits, the books she reads, and the music she listens to : in short, the very pattern of existence that she chooses. Often, it turns out that the easiest way of ‘getting to know someone’ is by asking him/her : 'So tell me, what do you mean by happiness?'

In what follows, I do not offer what might be called a ‘normative’ definition of happiness. That is, I do not make the strong claim that if and only if a person has X, Y and Z, can she be said to be ‘happy’. Rather, I make the weak claim that most people who regard themselves to be happy usually seem to associate their happiness with X, Y and Z. I believe that ‘happiness’ goes with (at least) six elements : to feel good, to be able to maintain pleasant experiences continually, to know the ‘truth of the matter’, to have the capacity to achieve, to be content with what we are, and finally to be involved in inter-personal relations.

(1) 'To feel good' : This is perhaps the most basic level at which we call ourselves 'happy'. St Augustine (354 - 430 AD) was once walking through the streets of Milan when he saw a beggar laughing with joy. He pondered that he, anxious to get a job in Milan, was not as ‘happy’ as the beggar. In other words, happiness cannot be understood apart from the felt quality of our experiences. We take pleasure when our desires are satisfied, and are displeased and anxious when they are frustrated. This could either be a first-order desire, for example, to watch a movie, or a second-order desire to keep away from watching movies during exams. The subjective mental states of joy, happiness, despair, and misery constitute what is usually called ‘happiness’. In short, nobody can be called happy unless she is satisfied with her life from the inside-out (this is the point about Augustine and the beggar). This is the most common answer given to the question, 'What is happiness?'

(2) 'To continue to feel good' : Simply to feel happy in the sense (1) is not ‘happiness’. To be truly happy, we must not be continuously distracted by the thought that our pleasant experiences will pass away. The last meal of a condemned man may be a gastronomic delight and may make him experience pleasant emotions in sense (1), but that is hardly what we would understand by ‘happiness’. Sometimes we may even have to choose between conflicting desires : should a singer eat ice-cream right now and spoil her voice or give up the ice-cream and go for her recording tonight? In other words, we cannot pick out the experiences of a person at one spatial-temporal location and call her happy. An alcoholic may be happy during the appropriately-named 'happy hours' at a pub, but once again his happiness has to be understood within the wider scope of his life. That is, there must be a certain element of continuity in the happiness understood in sense (1). This does not mean that we have to be happy all the time : only someone living in a fool’s paradise would think that to be possible. What it does mean, however, is that happiness in sense (1) is not the complete story because it understands the satisfaction of our desires in a too one-dimensional manner. To be happy in sense (2), on the other hand, means that we are in a state in which our pleasant experiences can be, more or less, sustained over a period of time.

(3) 'To know the ‘facts’' : As they always teach you at school, ‘go for the bare facts’. (Though whether or not ‘bare facts’ have ever existed is another debate in itself.) Happiness in senses (1) and (2) still does not give us the ‘whole picture’. To be truly happy, I must know the truth of the matter. Consider this example. I am an Austrian nuclear scientist working on an atomic bomb, and I am given a splendid mansion with many cars and a massive laboratory. So I work day and night to make the bomb and I consider myself happy in the above two senses. Firstly, I am experiencing pleasant emotions in utilising my knowledge and I have been having these emotions over a period of say one year. The party high command, however, has more sinister plans for me. Once I have made the bomb, I am to be shot on the charge of selling my secrets to the Russians. Can I be called ‘happy’ in this case? In other words, before calling ourselves happy, we must consider the possibilities of ignorance and deception. Therefore, it is not enough to continually have pleasant experiences : what is even more important is that these experiences must not be delusional. Experience in itself does not make for happiness, and knowing the truth is a crucial aspect of our well-being, the truth not only about ourselves but also about the world, our place in it and our destiny (in whatever way we conceive it). A manic depressive or a drug addict can experience moments of pleasurable emotions but these cannot be equated in a straightforward manner with ‘happiness’.

(4) 'To be able to achieve' : Once we have formed our own conception of what the basic significance and meaning of life is (not that there is any unanimity on this matter : you could be a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, an atheist, a Marxist, an agnostic and so on), we should be able to pursue certain ends or goals in life as laid down by our distinctive world-view. Our well-being cannot depend solely on what happens to us (this is why happiness as understood in senses (1), (2) and (3) is inadequate) : this will reduce us to vegetative life. As self-reflective beings, we should also be able to strive for goals that we believe constitute our understanding of human nature. So if I believe that my goal is to become a music director, it is in the very process of developing certain skills and qualities along the way that I feel the worthiness of my existence. That is, happiness is not simply a matter of ‘happenings’ but also of ‘doings’.

(5) 'To be content' : Happiness in senses (1)-(4) comes very close to ‘defining’ the term, and yet not close enough. One important element of happiness is contentment. Contentment is paradoxically the giving up of the continuous striving for happiness. Our satisfactions and our achievements not only contribute to our happiness but also pose a threat. No matter how happy we are, we will eventually want something more, something that lies beyond our grasp. This is in fact how the consumer industry works : first create an artificial need and then see the dollars pouring in. To be happy, therefore, at some point we must be content with whatever we have (once again, this is the point about Augustine and the beggar). We have to accept the risks of living and the limited security that we have. Contentment is in its basic sense a question of humility, humility not in the sense of abject servility but in the sense of a willingness to accept and affirm the reality of the limitations inherent in our finitude. We find ourselves immersed in complex social matrices of conflict, hatred, and struggle and it is impossible to always achieve just what we want to. We must at some stage confront the inevitability of failure.

(6) 'To live in a community' : Anyone with the slightest of sociological tendencies will be rather displeased by my account of happiness so far because I have focused entirely on the individual aspect of happiness. A little thinking on the question of happiness will reveal that it is only by being involved in constitutive and communal relations that we get to learn the range of satisfactions, doings and experiences that go towards a happy life. In some cases, we can get along with 'mere association' as in a corporate boardroom meeting but in many others, we may also be engaged in deeper constitutive relationalities. Given the basic social context of human existence, it may be difficult to lead a truly good human life apart from the irreducibly communal goods such as friendship, family, and civil society. Mutuality not only enables intense happiness but is also the most important background condition for meaningful and worthy endeavours. In conjunction with (5) above, moreover, our own contentment is inextricably bound with the contentment of those who live around us. In other words, we see the indispensable value of constitutive relations to our self-understanding and to our pursuit of that elusive entity called ‘happiness’.

The Ironies of 'Orientalism'

They used to say, in the not so olden days, that nothing is as powerful as an 'Idea' whose time has come. Thinking of the various twists and turns taken by the 'Idea' called Orientalism, I can only say that nothing is as dangerous as one which has served its time. Although there are many writers who write on Orientalism, the definition given by Edward Said remains one of the most succinct ones : Orientalism is a system of theory and practice through which oriental cultures were reified, particularised, divided into smaller components, and thereby dominated. Historically speaking, of course, Said stands on terra firma : many of the West's encounters with the East have been characterised by the former's ethnocentrist, imperialistic and racist attitudes towards the colonised 'natives'. At the same time, however, many writers who follow Said on these matters move along one-dimensional tracks, and ignore (a) how these 'natives' themselves have assimilated certain aspects of Occidental culture, often by extricating them rather arbitrarily from their wider contexts, and used these aspects for their own specific purposes, and (b) how these 'natives' have often paid their Orientalist masters the reverse-compliment of constructing their own fantastic images of what (they think) the Occident is like.

I shall give two examples here, one of (a) and the other of (b). It is quite ironic that Edward Said, a member of the 'third world' can use the philosophical ideas of Michel Foucault, a member of the 'first world', and thereby perpetuate a new kind of (disguised) 'Orientalism', the Orientalism of using the texts of a French philosopher to understand an 'Eastern' phenomenon. In order to truly cast off the skin of a 'quasi-Orientalist', Said should also have used notions derived from, say, Islamic, Hindu, Japanese, or Chinese thought to criticise Western imperialism. Instead, by choosing to view a complex multi-levelled process through the perspectives provided by a French philosopher, Said unwittingly confirms the Western prejudice that 'Orientals' have no indigenous philosophical resources to construct critiques of Western practices. Secondly, much of what Said writes is based on the assumption, derived from Foucault, that all human knowledge is a tool for seeking political power. Once again, this is a superimposition of Western notions onto the Orient, for classical Indian thought has many interesting arguments against this very assumption, and by not bringing these arguments into the discussion on 'knowledge and power', writers on Orientalism who follow Foucault in this respect are repeating the Orientalist mistake of denying the Orient its distinctive voice.

There is a second more crucial, and ultimately epistemological, problem with writers who follow Said : they seem to assume that it is possible for Westerners to study the Orient without using any spectacles whatsoever. I have shown in the above that this is patently false, for those who follow Said often use Foucauldian perspectives (or other perspectives that ultimately stem from European thought). The reverse question is equally interesting : is it possible for Orientals to understand the Occident without using any standpoints? Once again, the answer is no : Orientals will always start from their own horizons that are given to them by their cultural specificities, and it is from within these horizons that they shall try to reach out to the Occident. This is not to say that their representations of the Occident will always be accepted by Occidentals themselves; indeed, often such representations, such as the Occident being 'materialistic', 'morally bankrupt', 'individualistic', and so on, can be shown to be distortions of reality.

It is for these reasons that we should suspect that it may be the case that writers on Orientalism themselves (especially, those who use Foucault and ignore indigenous Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese perspectives) have not completely got themselves rid of the 'Orientalism' that they are trying to criticise. Moreover, we must equally beware of the reverse tendency of 'Occidentalism', which is the claim that the 'essentials of Occidental culture' have been isolated, purified, distilled, and pinned-down to a drawing board for the gaze of all Orientals.