Exitroutes

The trouble with Right to Privacy Judgment

2017-09-29T23:26:00.001+05:30

Can the right to privacy be deduced from article 19 and 21 or has it to be induced from it? Does the dark matter of articles 19 and 21 contain within them ideas relating to privacy or has the Supreme Court overstepped its brief and inductively formulated a more general and new right, after discovering the need for and importance of such a right?

Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution provides for the right to freedom of speech and expression. In Sakal Papers( P) Ltd and Others v. The Union of India, the Supreme Court had to decide whether the right to free press can be deduced from this article. That is, given a general right in the Constitution, the Court had to find out whether a specific right could be derived from it or not. Such general provisions of the Constitution which are not explicit were called by the learned judges, in the recent right to privacy judgment, as the Constitution’s dark matter. This dark matter has to be mined for more specific and concrete minutiae.

Alongside article 19, article 21 states that “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to a procedure established by law.” This article has been applied to instances of sexual harassment, dignity, reputation, health, honour killing and livelihood among others, where the Court has said that the right to be protected against the above mentioned violations can be deduced from article 21 itself.

In this instance, can the right to privacy be deduced from article 19 and 21 or has it to be induced from it? Does the dark matter of articles 19 and 21 contain within them ideas relating to privacy or has the Supreme Court overstepped its brief and inductively formulated a more general and new right, after discovering the need for and importance of such a right?

Now, to a matter of procedure: Courts are well within their limits to deduce particular rights from more general rights. The question is, are they also within their rights to induce general rights from particular rights? What is the difference? Imagine the following situation: We know that when it rains, the earth will be wet. If in a particular instance, it is indeed raining and you know that when it rains the earth will be wet, we can deduce that now the earth is going to be wet. Logic choppers call this modus ponens. But the opposite of this is bad logic. Seeing that the earth is wet, you cannot deduce that it is raining. It may be the case that someone has sprinkled water, or that there is a Bollywood movie being shot in the vicinity with a dancing-in-the-rain sequence and artificial rain machines. If you begin with evidence like wet earth, you will need a lot of corroboration to induce a belief that it is indeed raining. Most often, without some direct evidence of whether it is raining or not, it is extremely difficult to logically induce such beliefs. Usually, such inductions are fraught with difficulties. Scientists do this kind of stuff every day and they know how fallible and risky such enterprises are. Courts, thankfully, need not do this. It is not their burden, nor their brief, to be inducting more general laws from specific laws. We have legislators for undertaking that kind of risky behaviour. It is enough if the courts figure out whether a specific law can be deduced from a more general law.

When can privacy be deemed to inhere in a more general law? In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India the Court said that Right to Dignity inheres in Right to Personal Liberty. That is, without the former, you cannot conceive of the latter. Without dignity, you cannot conceive of personal liberty. This is the test. The specific instance has to be a necessary condition to procure the general instance. Now, think of this: owning a car might significantly enhance your personal liberty, at least in terms of mobility. But, it is not a necessary condition for personal liberty. Therefore, no one says let’s have a fundamental right to car ownership under right to personal liberty.

The challenge in front of the court was to show that right to privacy is a necessary condition for securing right to personal liberty and right to freedom of speech and expression. If the answer was yes, they could go ahead and pronounce that we indeed have a right to privacy. If not, they had to refer the matter to the parliament and ask them to make new law.

Instead of taking up this challenge, the court fell back on its own lofty belief that privacy is a right and sought to reinforce it by listing reasons for why privacy is important. Assuming that privacy is a right, it went on to show how it could be reasonably derived from articles 19 and 21. Rather than show the necessary relation between privacy and personal liberty, the judgment takes recourse to the principle of living constitutionalism (which says that the constitution should not be interpreted strictly going by the text, but liberally, by taking into account many contextual aspects). That sounds eerily like conferring a wildcard on oneself. This may not be the first time that such a wildcard has been taken by the Supreme Court, even in relation to Article 21.

What would be the consequence of inducing a general principle (right to privacy) from a specific principle (right to personal liberty), instead of deducing a specific principle from a general principle? Imagine socially significant decisions about things as varied as religious practices, euthanasia, suicide and gay sex, arbitrated not on the legal merit of the particular cases but on a catchall idea of privacy. In such a scenario we don’t need to ask if people have a right to euthanasia (which is a high-stakes question). It would be enough to ask if euthanasia is a private matter or not (which is a low-stakes question). Imagine making a single important decision in your life by skewing the question in this manner. If someone asked “should we burn fossil fuels and contribute to climate change?” and someone else answered “but shouldn’t we cater to American working class sentiments too?” The last time someone did this, you called him names: Adolf Twitler you said, and, Trumpty Dumpty. That guy did exactly this: replace a high-stakes question with a low-stakes question and feel virtuous about having solved a burning global problem.

If you will permit me a moment of flippancy, pretty much anything can be derived from anything else if you are speaking in a natural language (unlike strictly defined algorithmic languages) and using very broad concepts like privacy and freedom. Milords, years ago, your predecessors looked into the same book as you and inferred an opposite lesson that privacy is not a fundamental right. Today, you have pronounced that they were illogical. How do we decide between your two equally elevated majesties? “Is the particular right a necessary condition for securing the general right” was your test. How do you think you fared in it?

A magistrate in one of Marquez’s novels says, “Give me a prejudice and I will move the world”. Milords, we knew all along that privacy was important, verily so. We wanted you to tell us whether it is a necessary condition for the pursuit of free speech and personal liberty. Your learned lordships may want to go back to the antechamber on this one.

Minding your Words: How fine words about higher education betray empty ideas

2017-09-15T17:47:00.001+05:30

Higher education, and particularly the university system, is receiving unforeseen attention in India. With the emergence of private players committed to building institutions bench-marked against global standards, and the government interested in giving a face-lift to the public university institutions, we can expect some significant changes in higher education in the forthcoming days. However, something in the talk about reforming higher education and the university system indicates that a lot of these efforts may be chaotic, impulsive and even outright misdirected. Here are some symptoms and diagnoses about what the talk could be indicating. It is worthwhile to remember that this analysis is based solely on the words used to describe aspirations and plans and not based on any assessment of objective conditions.

Notice the focus on interdisciplinarity. From being a fashion statement touted by a few elite institutions, the word interdisciplinarity (a neologism, lest we forget) has now become staple in any conversation about higher education. The Google N-gram says that the word took off sometime after the 1950s and has been on a steep ascent ever since. It so happens that a lot of good research today is interdisciplinary. However, it makes little sense to aspire to be interdisciplinary in your research. You may be better off aspiring to the older ideal of finding truth, despite the fact that the millennials have pronounced the sentence on truth: “whose truth and which truth?” they ask angrily. Very significant questions those, if you are in an epistemology class trying to decide the best way of describing what knowledge or truth is. Only that, in your workaday life, either as a carpenter or as a physicist, you don’t need to know what knowledge is, or what truth is. You just need to know what is relevantand true about the thing at hand. And when you start paying attention to truth, you will also see that others, from other disciplines, may have a thing or two to say about it. Here is the first sign of trouble: a lot of our talk about higher education focuses on interdisciplinarity, whereas, higher education is in fact about instilling a desire for the pursuit of truth.

Another instance of semantic mayhem is the use of the word innovation. Every university claims to be innovative in doing something or innovating something. Again, do not get me wrong. All good technology, all effective solutions, all scientific theories would have done something innovative to succeed in the face of the challenges they set out to address. It is only that what they did was not a thing. They did whatever was the right thing to be done in that context. It is nearly useless to learn about innovations in the abstract, without learning the nitty-gritties of the domain in which those innovations were made. Of course, there might be that serendipitous trigger of an idea in a biologist’s mind when she is listening to Feynman on physics. But the serendipity can equally occur when she is listening to Hans Zimmer. Ok, maybe not. But you get my point. Rather than ask students to innovate, you are better off asking students to pay attention to the different aspects of the problem at hand, run scenarios and take into account as many contextual clues as might be possible in devising solutions. In short, we may be better off making students understand the problem situation closely rather than asking them to innovate. And we may be better off ourselves following this rule too.

A third example is about the word relevance. Most universities want their curricula and research to be relevant to the needs of the society. It is a lofty ideal indeed and it is hard to nitpick about this without sounding churlish. But, look at it again. Agreed, an irrelevant idea is also a useless idea and a great idea is usually relevant. After all, the meaning of saying that something is useless is that it is irrelevant. And to say that something is good is to attest to its relevance. But then, relevance is not an attribute of a thing, like colour, shape and size are attributes. It is a judgment one makes about the way a thing is used in a particular context. Knowledge does not respond to the criteria of relevance or irrelevance. Only particular pieces of information could be relevant or irrelevant in dealing with specific situations. Any knowledge, however acquired, needs to be conserved, once it is acquired: whether it is the knowledge of calculating time by looking at shadows or figuring out the therapeutic use of plants by tasting them. Therefore, it is not anybody’s business, least of all a university’s, to pass judgment on the relevance or irrelevance of any forms of knowledge. Rather, it is the task of a university to teach students to pay attention to relevant facts, and figure out which ones are irrelevant, in solving particular problems.

We could multiply these examples. But it is important to notice a pattern in this distortion. Our talk about universities, higher education, and knowledge production at large, has been rendered a huge disservice by this variety of talk. What is wrong with this talk? Take the contrast between interdisciplinarity and truth. Truth is a cognitive goal. When you are thinking about solutions to a problem, you have to keep an eye on the facts of the matter, as also on the truth of your statements about them. In contrast, interdisciplinarity is not a cognitive goal. You don’t need to do anything about it when you are thinking about a problem. Thinking hard about a problem also means looking around for solutions in other places than the usual. It is to search in other disciplines, sometimes teaming up with people from those other disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is a description of the product of your thinking. You could say that your solution to a particular problem was interdisciplinary. You may also want to say in retrospect that you could find a solution to the problem you were investigating only because you went the interdisciplinary route. But what you are doing is still solving the problem you encounter and so you are constrained and directed by the conditions and features of the problem. You are not directed by any interdisciplinary motivations or goals.

Like interdisciplinarity, innovation and relevance are not cognitive goals. They are not what you need to keep track of when pursuing knowledge. They are words which only help you describe the product of your thinking once those products are in place. It is hardly useful in the process of making those products. In short, words like interdisciplinarity, innovation and relevance are not cognitively significant in the process of knowledge building.

At an extremely general level, we would all agree that thinking about higher education means thinking about cultivating specific cognitive habits and the institutional arrangements needed to inculcate those habits. How could our talk ever live up to that task lumbered with such words?

Self-Transparency Requirement for Mental Actions

2017-09-15T17:46:00.003+05:30

1. Mental actions are those that an agent can meaningfully claim to be doing, in his mind, as it were.

2. These include actions like remembering, thinking, calculating, guessing as also getting angry, being jealous and feeling sympathy. It would naturally exclude mental events like cellular or neural activity in the brain, twitches and pains, aches and cancerous growths in the brain muscles and cells, as also auras and halos at the remove of an inch behind the brain and other such quarters.

3. A defining feature of these actions is that it cannot be done without the knowledge of the doer. I cannot calculate without knowing that I am calculating; nor can I be angry without knowing that I am angry. (Although I may be getting all my calculations wrong or I may be trying to hide my anger or even be completely flummoxed about the reason for my anger). In short, mental actions are self-transparent.

4. This may be so even in the case of extreme psychological situations. A sleep-walker may not be doing sane and safe things in walking right into a pit. But, that only means that he does not have the appropriate conditions and co-ordinates to make judgments about the situation. It is not very different from me coming home late in a jolly mood forgetting that today is my wife’s birthday. From the actions of the sleepwalker, it is hard to infer that his own mental actions are opaque to him. It is not clear what such a statement even means. Who is the subject of experience of such a statement? As a judgment about the sleepwalker, our exhortation that the sleepwalker’s mental actions are opaque to him may be sound. But that only means to say that he does not have the right conditions and coordinates to judge.

5. Now, a crucial implication of saying this is that all descriptions and explanations of mental actions have to protect the self-transparency feature of such actions.

6. This is the self-transparency requirement in explaining mental actions.

7. Attempts of talking about the ‘self’, either to prove or disprove its existence, especially in the case of autonoetic consciousness seem to violate this requirement.

8. Autonoetic consciousness is taken as a crucial test case to show how our ability to see ourselves (as it happened to me, myself) in the recollection of our past experiences implies a sense of continuous and timeless self.

9. Debates in the field also cite contrarian attempts which try to show how such autonoetic consciousness does not necessarily imply the existence of a self because recollecting an experience and seeing oneself in that experience in fact references our recollections of past objects and events encoded in our memory, and not a past and continuing self.

10. My hunch is that both these positions are significantly meaningless ways of talking. It is not to say that such talk it terribly meaningless. It is that such talk is both significant and meaningless.

11. It is significant for a straightforward reason. If our autonoetic consciousness proves the existence of a self, then, it should go a long way in determining our approach to many questions. Even the contrary position would amount to significantly different approaches regarding the same questions.

12. However, it is meaningless for the following reason. When I say “I” and when I talk in the way of referencing an “I” (or a self), I am not indexing a thing, even if that thing is a sort of a non-thing, called the self. To say that it is a first person usage is to already accede to the fact that “I” refers to a relation, a unique one, no doubt. The sentence “I am coming” does not mean, God forbid, “My self is coming”. It is not a report about someone coming; in this instance, the someone being my own self. Instead, it is a marker of a particular relation between the say-er and the said. When I say “he is coming”, we are supposed to look out for clues about whether or not that person is coming. In contrast, when I say “I am coming”, we are not supposed to look out for such clues, unless I am trying to deceive you. In normal circumstances, you are supposed to look at whether I will live up to my word. That is, there is self-transparency to my words in relation to myself. In effect, the statement “I am coming” is a direction to treat the truth-conditions for this statement differently than for the statement “he is coming”.

13. Similarly when, autonoetically, I remember that I was the very person who mangled a dog on the highway last year, it does not mean something like “my ‘self’ killed a dog on the highway” or even that “a ‘self’ killed a dog on the highway and that self happens to be me”. It simply means that, discounting ulterior motives on my part, you are supposed to look for the truth of this sentence not by asking further questions about whether it truly happened, but by asking me how it happened and how I could live with it, or even, how I could talk about it so nonchalantly, as if I had squeezed a mosquito between my fingers.

14. Even brain damaged patients who can remember their own past actions but cannot see themselves in their own memories cannot be taken to attest to the separation (or inseparability, as the case may be) of the self from the person. They merely indicate that their mental competence to appropriately talk about their own past actions has been garbled. Their logical, linguistic and symbolic ability to look for the right cues to talk about things has been impaired. It is almost like the kid in front of a needle clock. He knows what it is but cannot fathom what it means. The clock is not transparent to him like it is to us.

15. This saw cuts both ways. Those who take the preceding discussion to mean that the existence of the self stands disproven get it wrong too. If the first person statements direct us to look for its truth in a particular way and it does not implicate a self, then equally, it does not implicate its absence either. Why hold on to this too? Wouldn’t it be true that if the existence of the self is disproved, its non-existence stands proved?

16. Not quite. The non-existence of the self is a thesis that is pressed to service other philosophical and ethical projects which are also dubious in themselves. If the ‘self’ is non-existent, then, aren’t all those practices for the realization of the self so many meaningless fairy tales and all the debates about euthanasia, abortion and organ donation resolved in a simpler way? The answer is a resounding no. Because we know that these are significant questions and require serious and slow reflection, we should not allow anybody to wing these questions away using some fancy notions about the non-existence of the self. We need to ask the naysayers, what does it mean to say the self does not exist? When an entity is not implicated in a piece of speech (as a self is not implicated in our first person utterances), how does that piece of speech prove its non-existence?

17. Knowledge is to be had in exactly the way we have been going about having knowledge with things that really matter to us. This means that all statements we make about ourselves, our memories, our projects, our desires and our failures need to be examined piece-by-piece for how it fits our understanding of our world, our sense of our own station in it and our relations to others. No one got self-knowledge by figuring out whether there is a self or not. The best men among our forefathers aspired to understand how we wrongly attach ourselves to things, how we see ourselves as if we are our own pets that need to be pampered and that give us joy. They hoped that by mastering the difficult wisdom of acting prudently, and without letting our own pets called ourselves come too much in the way, we could attain greater happiness.

Essentialism: The Good and the Bad Varieties

2016-07-27T01:02:00.002+05:30

Essentialism is not a formula to derive a value.

Essentialist is, at the most, a strategy to arrive at consensus about divergent sets of values. That is, between us we will always hold something to be essential and something else to be inessential. Therefore, ethical debates presume that both parties hold on to an essentialist picture of values, failing which, all ethical debates become travesties. For instance, if we were to support euthanasia, we can hold a meaningful debate only with the person who opposes it or the person who is genuinely baffled about the right opinion in this matter. One cannot hold a debate with someone who is indifferent to it; who thinks there is no right or wrong answers in this debate and the answers depend merely on circumstances.

So, insofar as ethical conversations happen in the backdrop of an essentialist picture, it is right to argue that essentialism is a significant and valid ethical commitment. But when we attempt to derive a concrete and universal set of principles for action using the essentialist position, we end up in a dialogic redundancy. That is, we proclaim the need for a dialogue but already undercut any genuine dialogue by advocating one set of values on the basis of it supposedly being essential and prior.

Doing it Right and Getting it Wrong: Teacher Training in Higher Education

2016-05-17T20:04:00.000+05:30

This summer I ruined my holidays: I attended what is a compulsory Orientation Course for newly appointed university and college teachers at a UGC Human Resource Development Centre (HRDC) in one of the state universities in Karnataka. I had been amply forewarned, because hordes of my friends and colleagues in the teaching profession had undergone this mind-numbing ordeal many times over in their many years of service.

The cause behind this sense of waste and ruin is not the usual lament list one may familiarly associate it with. Neither the right intentions nor the preparatory work were lacking. The UGC believes, rightly, that to make one a good teacher mere subject competence would not suffice; he or she needs to be trained to teach. Accordingly, hundreds of teachers are made to undergo such month-long training programmes in scores of HRDCs (until recently Academic Staff Training Colleges) all through the year. The people at the HRDC where I did my orientation course were very conscientious, punctual, accommodating and efficient. For example, they made an exception for me when some document I had to submit did not arrive in time. They called me to check on my whereabouts on a day that I missed class. Our attendance was marked four times a day punctiliously. The resource persons, all senior-level professors from various institutions and disciplinary backgrounds, came on time, took classes with great passion and prepared well for their presentations by making impeccable PowerPoint slides, designing classroom games and involving us in conversations. Facilities for outstation participants were very decent and what is more, not just the resource persons, but also all participants were paid travel and dearness allowances (the proverbial TA-DA) for attending this course. It could not get better than this.

But all these rightness of intention and mass of earnest work could not save this course. If the UGC will not take notice and do something about this, generations of young teachers will pass through these sessions being disoriented and irritated with the higher education system they are part of and supposed to contribute to. Here are some points that might contribute to a meaningful diagnosis of this state of affairs.

The HRDCs do not have a well-thought out programme for training teachers. It is a random assortment of lectures given by people selected from a routine professoriate. To illustrate, while there were ample number of resource persons who emphasised the importance of ICT in education, not one designed an exercise for, say, using Wikipedia as an assessment tool, use of Moodle or similar platforms for coursework development or using animating statistical tools like Gapminder. It was as if ICT began and ended with this great invention called the PowerPoint and LCD projectors. All spoke about interdisciplinary focus in curriculum development but there was not a single exercise to take curricular units and design a competence descriptor for that curriculum. All spoke about research methodology but not one designed an exercise about evaluating the relevance of a piece of data to prove a hypothesis. All talked about social justice and equality but none of them bothered about its actual effects like the linguistic divide which hurts more than half the student population in India. No one asked the participants if they had devised some strategies and thumb rules to deal with specific learning challenges. Apart from trading in generalities, they did not share any such strategy they had used either. Almost all resource persons quoted two writers: Alvin Toffler (of the now-forgotten Future Shock fame) to say why we should learn, unlearn and relearn and, APJ Abdul Kalam, about why we should dream, big, that is. They all spoke about India being a country with the highest percentage of youth population and shared their intercultural insights about how Japanese speak softly, and Americans work diligently and Pakistanis bomb indiscriminately. They said India is an agriculture-based economy. Some said 70% of us are dependent on it while some others updated the figures and said 30% of us are. All drew attention to the woeful state of higher education in India. Some drew our attention to the increasing violence on women, while some others argued how in medieval times the church controlled everything and did not allow Galileo to speak up. Sounds familiar? Well, banefully so. I forget. The more enlightened of them talked about qualitative and quantitative methods in research.

Teaching as Communication versus Teaching as a task of imparting a Sense of Judgment

While it is true that competence in a subject and competence to teach it are logically distinct, considering them as concerned with two different processes is faulty. It is not that a good teacher knows his thermodynamics well and then attempts to deliver it using tools and aids that can be appended to his knowledge of thermodynamics. As the British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, would have put it, a good teacher is not executing two mental operations in sequence, in two separate locations of his brain. It is that he is executing a single task with an appropriate sense of judgment. He knows his thermodynamics not merely as canonical statements but as sequences of distinctions, questions, puzzles, methods, allowances and disallowances of specific lines of argument. A crucial implication is to say that the paradigmatic instance of knowledge is a sense of judgment within a specific domain of actions. Imparting it is impossible without engaging the student in the relevant actions and distinctions of a domain. Capacity for such sense of judgment is acquired through handling objects in heedful and relevant ways in a domain and speaking about such objects and ways of handling them in a way that is appropriate.

This has a direct implication on the way we think about pedagogy.

Take for example, what has now become trite: making a distinction between information and knowledge. Every teacher trainer we encountered in this programme bandied this distinction with much aplomb. However there seemed to be precious little understanding about the implications of making this distinction. It is impossible to classify a propositional item as falling within information or knowledge. A proposition appears the same whether it is the one or the other. The distinction, therefore, is useless when imparted as an abstract item. The point of making it is to focus on learning how a proposition is to be handled. A distinction between information and knowledge will not help someone handle things appropriately, even while handling things appropriately is what is entailed by the distinction between information and knowledge.

So, the essential challenge for a teacher is how to teach someone to recognise and handle objects in a domain. Training teachers is to make them reflect on such a process. Clearly, one cannot learn reflection in the abstract outside the objects and means which populate a domain. One of the signal failures of most teacher-training programmes in this country is their misplaced emphasis on teaching as communicative skill to the detriment of engagement with the actual content.

University as a place for Not-yet-Canonical Knowledge

A significant line of difference between school education and university education is that while the former deals with canonical content, university education ideally deals with works in progress and not already canonised knowledge, or at least the thrust is towards such not-yet-canonised knowledge. To approach a piece of knowledge as not-yet-canonical is to necessarily focus on the making aspect of knowledge, that is, it is to focus on the procedures of assembling, evaluating and reworking that piece of knowledge. In understanding these procedural aspects, trading with found truths and sparring about contending sets of such found truths cannot take us far. No talk about procedures (research methodology, as it is onerously called sometimes) in itself will help without acquainting one with the operations and distinctions associated with the terms pertaining to a domain. At this object-level the actual decisions are to be made with regard to what distinctions to make, and when, how, and what to handle as objects etc.

This is different from the meta-level talk which assumes a set of distinctions and objects as already available and given. Almost all teacher trainers wax eloquent about research methodology and have developed very sophisticated ways of talking about it without as much as referring to a specific research problem. But how to assess whether an action (of investigation, for instance) is executed prudently or not? It cannot be done by ticking a checklist. Otherwise, it is like judging Sachin Tendulkar as a very poor batsman because he fails to tick for many boxes in the checklist for an ideal batsman, like, reverse-sweeping, wrist work and so on. Competent execution of an action is the way in which an individual brings many different kinds of judgments to bear upon an action and succeeds or fails in executing them.

Another favourite style among teacher-educators is the use of quasi-scientific and folk-psychological concepts. Ideas like stress management, positive attitude, innovativeness, realisation of dreams, lateral thinking, left brain and right brain action, and creativity are thrown around like confetti. In appropriate contexts, individually, most of these concepts may be worthwhile scientifically. But keeping aside the issue of the explanatory worth of such concepts, there is a particular harm when they are used indiscriminately in contexts of teaching and learning: they lead us to mistakes and distortions with regard to the process of learning. The significant challenge for a researcher facing a choice between two hypotheses or a student encountering a new topic to be mastered is not what is the most creative option to take or whether to use the left over the right brain or even how to engage in lateral thinking in the face of a problem. The challenge is always how to decide between this over that hypothesis, where the parameters of judgment come not from concepts of behaviour explanation but from concepts of the relevant disciplinary traditions. In other words, even if folk-psychological concepts were robust explanatory tools in other contexts, their value in a teaching-learning situation is spurious.

In the frenzy of eulogising about teaching as an art, a skill and a science, most teacher trainers forget that teaching is largely an activity of initiating a pupil into a knowledge tradition. While transfer of canonical knowledge, skills and methods are important aspects of teaching, they are not its paradigmatic instances. Teaching is an activity which occurs in the shadow of a knowledge tradition and not merely in the face of an ever-changing world. Training a teacher is to make him a practitioner of a knowledge tradition, or a discipline, in such a way that he can also initiate others into it. Students enter a discipline from one or the other process of socialisation. A classroom, therefore, is a collider of sorts between various kinds of knowledge acquired through various processes of socialisation. As Michael Oakeshott put it evocatively, "education does not begin in ignorance but in error".

To sum up: training teachers is more about honing a sense of judgment in them rather than teaching them a methodology. Judgment is honed in the workshop, that is, in the process of handling objects and talking about the difficulties in handling them. Such a process works necessarily through example. Abstracting out of specific examples to constitute a learning is different from abstracting out of an example to constitute a theory. While the latter probes for regularities and explanations, the former is sensitive to the aspect of expertise in executing an action: the flick of the wrist in a fine glance, a dash of pepper in the pasta, the rarely used quarter note in a raga.

I hope the UGC takes note of the sharply declining standards of teacher training in higher education in India. In the coming decades they intend to set up hundreds of universities in this country to which thousands of young teachers will be recruited. Already, state universities are becoming near-cousins of the state school system. Very soon, the Indian middle class will not want to send their children to these state universities. Before it is too late, we have to plug this huge hole.

(A shorter version of this piece was published in Economic and Political Weekly, September 26, 2015 Vol L No 39 Pp 77-8).

Education as Disposition: Rearranging the Conceptual Geography of Education

2016-03-28T23:04:00.005+05:30

Our picture of knowledge is linked to our picture of education. However, existing analyses of education does not seem to appreciate the depth and implication of this link. What education does and how education is sustained are somewhat different questions. So, for example, while predicating the need for education on development and productivity we need to note that although education is a crucial factor in enhancing wealth and productivity, it is a function of education. It is not what sustains the practice of education in itself (although there is a correlation between growth in education and growth in wealth and productivity).

In trying to develop a new understanding of the link between knowledge and education, we need to keep in mind the following: i) Current state of a discipline does not exhaust the discipline and ii) Knowledge is practical in nature (that is, not merely put to pragmatic ends but the acquisition of knowledge is akin to the acquisition of a practice)

If we consider knowledge to be a resource or a good, we will need to ensure that external elements (like social pressures, political expediencies and economic realities) do not dilute the quality of this good. Therefore our concern in education will be to balance expansion and quality because our assumption is that the two are in a zero-sum game. If knowledge is considered not as a resource, but as an acquisition, a competence one acquires to deal with things and distinctions needed to deal with things, then our concern will be to induce this competence in people.

With this distinction, we can try and now approach the long-standing question about why does the typical Indian University fail to produce knowledge?

Existing answers to this question looks like a standard lament list: inadequate resources, undertrained teachers, unmotivated or wrongly motivated students, politicisation, systemic failure. This list explains the unitary causes but does not suggest a cure. More resources and better faculty are all good. But where and how is that had from? Is there a ‘here and now’ diagnosis? An internal diagnosis? If knowledge is a disposition and a skill, it means that the acquisition of such a disposition presupposes a social milieu where such dispositions are available and where they flourish. It is the absence of such a milieu that best describes the status of the Indian university. If our diagnosis bears out, then it compels us to ask the question, ‘How to develop such a milieu?’ Again, the standard solutions list looks somewhat like this: Teachers do not do research. Therefore, incentivise research. Students do not pursue basic sciences. Therefore, incentivise basic research. Talented faculty do not enter the educational mainstream. Therefore, incentivise the teaching profession. This solution should seem rational as it indeed does to many policy makers. But, this solution presupposes a picture of education: education as goods. If a good is not pursued, it is because the benefit of the good is either misunderstood or because that good is undercut by the desire for other goods. Therefore removing the obstacles to the pursuit of such goods is a rational response.

However, if education is not the acquisition of goods, but the acquisition of a disposition, then, our scheme may have to change. A disposition is not a ‘rational’ pursuit. This does not mean that it is an irrational thing. It only implies that our rationalisations are post-facto ways of understanding our dispositions and not the reasons for why we pursue them. How to develop a disposition if not through rationalisation?

Most pre-industrial modes of education were concerned with the development of such dispositions: praeparatio evangelica, the idea of samskara, riyaz, ritual practices in many philosophical schools like Buddhism and so on. However, all these modes presuppose a picture of education as disposition: Learning and meta-learning (learning to learn) are always the self-same moment in a genuine educational experience.

In our current thinking about education, learning and meta-learning come from two distinct sources:

Learning (the content) comes from disciplinary knowledge (our ‘theory of knowledge’)

Meta-learning: (the choice of what we learn, how and why we learn, the strategies we adopt etc) comes from requirements and agendas of the development state (our ‘theory of education’)

Treated as dispositions, both learning and meta-learning come from the same source: from the practice of a discipline itself (neither from the bank of extant theories in a field of study nor from the agendas of the development state). This might force us produce a new diagnosis of the education crisis in India. It might seem somewhat like this: Indian universities fail to produce knowledge not because of a ‘lack’ in the educational infrastructure. But because, we do not pay attention to the dispositional aspect of education. That is, our theory of knowledge and our theory of education are at cross-purposes. This does not mean that more successful universities elsewhere are successful because they have a “good theory about education”, but because in those instances the practice of education is so strong that it can thrive despite bad theories, much like music thriving in India, despite bad or poor theories of music, because of the strength of the practice.

Pragmatics and Language Learning

2016-03-28T23:01:00.002+05:30

The role of languages in school and college education in India has been under debate for many years now. In the wake of independence, in the fifties and early sixties, there were two sentiments: (i) education needs to be in the mother-tongue (ii) there has to be a ‘National Language’ in which everyone is proficient. Hindi was billed for the latter role, but providing for the first sentiment required some modification, since providing education in every mother tongue was considered impracticable. Instead, it was demanded that administration and education need to be in ‘regional languages’. Soon a dispute arose especially regarding the title ‘National Language’ for Hindi, since it was felt by many that if not all the languages spoken in India, at least all the major regional languages need to considered as ‘National Languages’. Thus the notion of a ‘link language’ that provides for easy communication between different communities and regions and thus promoting ‘National integration’ came into being. To English, which until then was the language of higher education as also the language of administration in higher echelons of the State, a new role was claimed: it provides access to the larger global milieu of commerce, diplomacy and knowledge. This was the background for the Chief Ministers' conferences held in 1961 which devised the so-called "Three Language Formula", which later was formalized as a recommendation in the National Policy on Education, 1968.

From the very beginning, however, each of these choices evoked suspicion in various quarters. With the passing of time, rather than decreasing, these suspicions have increased, especially with regard to the role and impact of English. Contrary to earlier expectations the demand for English medium instruction in schools grew exponentially. Naturally quite a few have raised alarm regarding the precarious situation of the Indian languages. It has been argued that the situation obtaining now leads to a progressive irrelevance of Indian languages and a 'loss of culture' as also disenfranchisement of the learners through de-legitimization of their traditional forms of socialization. Perhaps, the spread of Hindi as a link language can be considered a success across large parts of India. When it comes to languages, the concerns about ‘national integration’ has receded from public debate in the recent years, (although it does raise its head occasionally in instances of linguistic chauvinism and the issue of assimilation of people from the North Eastern parts of India). But regarding the role of English a nagging doubt is becoming stronger: On the one hand English is growing as a language of the public sphere but on the other hand, its spread as a means of access to knowledge is seen as very limited and restricted to a select metropolitan contexts.

We need therefore to look afresh at the sentiments and arguments underlying the three language formula. Undoubtedly this formula represents a decades-long attempt at consensus and does find acceptance amongst large sections of the population. The particular emphases and implementation mechanisms of the formula, however, still evoke dissent. Roughly, the points raised may be identified along the following axes: 1. the particular role(s) of a specific language in education 2. the appropriate means of imparting training in that language.

In the following we propose to look at these issues by situating them within the context of a theory on the nature of language use and language learning. This, we hope, will enable us to judge the concerns more systematically and flag problems that may have their origin in certain problematic assumptions. We want to make two claims: (i) Second language instruction has a markedly different function than that of teaching the first language and (ii) In India it makes sense to emphasize English as a ‘library language’ rather than as a lingua franca of educated discourse. This shift of emphasis has consequences to the way how English has to be taught.

First, however, a quick glance over the history of the way educated discourse depended on a trans-regional lingua franca: rather than mother tongue being the language of knowledge acquisition and communication, in the human civilization of the past 2000 years, we find each epoch exhibiting the dominance of a specific language as the medium of knowledge production and diplomacy: Latin for Roman and Medieval Europe, Sanskrit for the better part of first millennium India, Arabic for the early Muslim world, Persian for the Indo-Islamic culture of the second millennium, Pali and its variants for the Greater Asian Buddhist cultures, Mandarin for the greater parts of China, French for early modern Europe. That is, it is not at all unusual that a specific language other than the one spoken in daily discourse in the local contexts prevails as a language of scientific exchange and knowledge production. The question which language is adopted is not a question of whether a language boasts of the maximum number of native speakers (in that case, Mandarin) or the maximum number of second language speakers (in that case, French). It is the Global spread rather than the numbers that matter. English occupies such a position today and for the foreseeable future.

But what is important is to draw the correct conclusions from the prevalence of a language other than the one popularly spoken. Especially we have to notice two things.

From our past – whether it is learning Latin or Sanskrit - we know that such a ‘cosmopolitan language’ is learnt with some specialized disciplinary training as the focus. This specialized focus may be that of some special domains of knowledge or that of etiquette in certain specialized institutions like in court or diplomacy. That is, the attitude of learning we bring to such a language is tied to the context of formal knowledge, and our primary effort is not on learning to speak that language in day-to-day contexts as such. This aspect, it appears, is rarely taken note of while formulating the policy for teaching English. There is a dissipation of efforts with respect to designing and implementing reasonable curriculum because the objective of English training in Indian education lacks clarity. [Learning English as a knowledge-language in early schooling years is devalued further by the easy rhetoric about mother tongue education.

Secondly, such a lingua franca is literally a second language not meant to substitute a first language (This is true even for the population whose mother tongue may coincide with the official lingua franca, since the specialized nature of registers of communication are not the same as the ones used in day-to-day contexts.) Perhaps even the term ‘second language’ is misleading because it may suggest a device substitutable for the available device of the first language. In fact the relation between lingua franca and the mother tongue / regional languages is more complicated: It requires us to grasp the relation between the lived world we are accustomed to and the world of specialized disciplines we are introduced to through formal training.

On the Indian languages front too, a slow and gradual process is underway with primary education coming unmoored from traditions relevant to learners and entering a phase of extreme modularity. While there has been an emphasis on mother tongue education, the chasm between traditions of socialization at home and the curricular content at school has drastically widened. This has resulted in a situation where most school children learn things in vitro rather than in vivo. That is, the curricular content corresponds not to any tradition relevant to the social world of the learner but to a modular content articulated purely in terms of cognitive skills. We will have something more to say about the acquisition of skills, or acquisition of know-how, and its necessary dependence on prevalent domains of actions and traditions and why skills abstracted out of such contexts are not necessarily desirable. While it may be argued that mathematics is an example of such an abstract skill, acquired in the abstract as it were, it still remains true that people in the professions involving elementary arithmetic, like traders, grocers, petty financiers, milkmen, hawkers and vendors have a greater felicity with numbers than others. This shows that the context of learning a skill and the context of codifying the skill (for use in further instruction or application) are different in the sense that the former privileges specific domains of actions and the latter the logical structure of its propositions.

This goes to prove that the rhetoric of school education in the mother tongue is failing even in its stated goals of enrooting children in their relevant cultural traditions. A modular content imparted through a local language errs on both sides: it errs on the side of socialization by devaluing the sources of socialization relevant to the learners as it errs on the side of cognitive skills by imparting skills which do not aid in the development of social and intellectual intuitions.

The indicator of success for any learner would be in figuring out how his learning is successful in initiating him into specific traditions and domains of actions and not about how capable he is in performing abstract cognitive tasks in simulated situations. An example would help: someone taught investment banking must be able to manage an investment portfolio in real situations which entail market risks and not just show proficiency in dealing with the arithmetic behind shares and apply diligently learnt investment rules in board-game-like situations. This is one of the reasons why people often invoke the ideal of character alongside the ideal of knowledge. To know is not just to master propositions which will best describe a field of actions, but also to stand up to the challenges a situation throws up.

Pragmatics over Semantics and Syntax

The developments in Linguistics, especially such approaches as Text-Linguistics, have emphasized that language has to be looked upon as a scheme of actions rather than as a system of objects. Among other things, this approach reverses the order of emphasis accorded by Structuralists and Chomskyeans. The latter conceived language as sets of elements weaved together by a system of two sets of rules, one the syntactic and the other semantic, the former regulating language structures internally, and the latter regulating the relation between these language structures and the objects of the external world. Accordingly, a study of language involves a study of the Syntax and the Semantics. In addition, one has to study the application of this language device in specific contexts, the ‘Pragmatics’ of language. Thus the approach conceives Syntax as providing the groundwork on which Semantics and Pragmatics are built respectively. In contrast to this the approaches such as that of Text-Linguistics, consider the language as a scheme of actions embodied in action dispositions. To study them is to look at the contexts of use as primary, and the Semantics and Syntax as derivative stabilizations of the action dispositions.

One consequence of this for language teaching is to draw attention to the need to focus how the language is embedded in the context of a lived world. Our lived world is structured through the available skills and dispositions rather than some beliefs embodied in propositions. Thus the child gets initiated into language, i.e. into the words and rules of combination of them, as part of and as embedded in, certain domains of activity (cooking, praying, hunting, singing, sowing, and decorating and so on). Through socialization in early infancy the child acquires a repertoire of skills and domain distinctions which are his / her resource for learning further. The question of training in specialized skills or disciplines is the question of methodical introduction and / or reconstruction through what is available to him already.

Language fulfills many functions but let us focus on one of them: language as a means of making distinctions in one’s environment. Learning how to deal with something, i.e. learning a skill, does involve making corresponding distinctions. Learning how to cook, for example, involves learning to distinguish the objects and the degree of cooking from the utensils, the hot plate and such things. Learning a specialized skill of carpentry involves more specialized distinctions of utensils and wood types than we normally make in our daily dealings, as well as more skillful deployment of those devices. Suppose we consider the function of predicates as that of distinguishing the world, we can say, the more specialized a discipline is the more elaborate the repertoire of predicates we require and more discipline we need in deploying them in various contexts.

In order to indicate the relation between the lived world and the world of specialized disciplines let us illustrate the way a domain gets differentiated from others externally, and within itself internally, through the use of metaphors. In recent years looking at brain as analogous to computer has enabled cognitive science to make tremendous advances. An elaborate terminology has been devised, for example, speaking of the study of physiology of brain as the study of hardware in contrast to study of cognitive functions as the study of programs (the software) the realization or embodiment of which can be in different hard-wares. A simpler instance is that provided by the Linguist George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By). Lot of words we use to talk about arguments are generated by the root metaphor, ‘Argument is war’.

Object constitutive versus Object describing speech

These instances where a new set of predicates and the corresponding domains are generated through the novel use of a word to talk about a new potential domain can be considered as object constituting speech in contrast to object describing speech where a well established set of predicates are used to talk about a corresponding well established domain. Both in teaching and in conceptual reorienting we have object-constitutive speech. In teaching, the predicates of a specialized discipline are introduced methodically to novices in order for them to construct the new domain. The available knowledge is thereby reconstructed through the resources available to the student.

It is here that our language pedagogy and our general ideas about education come together. Most often, it is rather too easily conceived that language is a medium through which conceptual content is disseminated, whereas, in reality, those very concepts are linguistically sculpted devices. Therefore, the question about language pedagogy has to be treated not as an independent question about teaching a particular language. It is a question about introducing new predicates systematically. A line about the structure of predicates will help understand this better. Predicates are organized more in the nature of a web rather than in the form of a building. The building metaphor invariably brings along with it ideas of a foundation, more basic and less basic structures, construction plan and so on. This would further mean that initiation into a structure of predicates of a new domain is independent of the scheme of predicates already assimilated by the learner. After all, a building is built on a vacant piece of land. Instead, using the metaphor of the web, we can notice how the introduction of every new element transforms the existing web into a new configuration. In fact, such a web can be entirely redesigned through such a process of reconfiguration where every new element alters the gestalt of the whole predicate structure of the pupil. This process is akin to the famous metaphor of the ship of Theseus: acquiring knowledge is a process similar to the reconstruction of a ship plank by plank in the high seas. It is not a process of building something from nothing.

Emphasizing the web nature of knowledge is to point towards another aspect of knowledge, which is tradition. Saying that a pupil already comes from a particular configuration of predicates is to suggest that a pupil is socialized in one or the other tradition. Education is a process of negotiating with such a process of socialization. It is therefore apt to suggest that teaching always occurs in the shadow of a tradition (that of the relevant disciplines) and learning always occurs in the shadow of another tradition (that of the socialization of the pupil). A teaching learning situation is a fusing of these two horizons. In the absence of the recognition of different traditions at play in a teaching learning situation, we end up lamenting the pupils' lack of specific literacy skills and provide a sociological explanation for why it is so.

The preceding discussion, we hope, has opened up another channel of discussion about language issues in Indian education. The choice of a particular language in a classroom may be the result of innumerable local and contextual factors at play. However, the approach towards teaching and learning is what is in need to attention. Arguing for a specific language on the basis of cultural rights, the sentiments of patrimony, and appropriateness of mother tongue in education are all strategies which short circuit the process of understanding the real issue in education. How to deal with education as a negotiation between different socializations emerging from different traditions is the crucial question at hand.

[1] Many thanks to Habil Dr B Narahari Rao for his very valuable inputs and elaborate discussions.

Serious Earth: Science as Intellectual Virtue

2016-03-28T22:55:00.002+05:30

I was among a group of thirty teachers who visited the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore, as part of the Orientation Programme for university teachers organized by the Human Resource Development Centre of Bangalore University, recently. Keeping the science aside, I was interested in how successful institutions work and what can we learn about institutions and their health in general. It was Stephen Toulmein who first saw a connection between scientific enquiry and moral enquiry. His point, put simply, was that both endeavors required the use of judgment and both displayed a common set of virtues. What are the workaday virtues that such an institution displays? How are such virtues embedded in individuals who are part of this institution? And what is the nature of such virtues?

In mature societies, institutions shape and socialize individuals into their fold. However, in societies where such long-standing institutional culture does not exist, individuals shape the institutions according to their own socialization. One of the signal failures of Indian institutions of higher learning is that they are ceaselessly shaped by the social formation of individuals who enter them and have failed in imprinting their own shape on such individuals. In this background, I was interested in examining whether ISRO was an exception to this rule or not. After all, here was an institution which was much touted about, and has probably rightfully earned a place of pride amongst all knowledge institutions of modern India. Most publicity statements about ISRO never fail to mention the fact that many achievements of this organization surpass that of its international peers. If such claims are even partially true, then, axiomatically, it implies that ISRO has been able to inculcate an institutional formation, so to say, in its members. However, is that true?

The first evidence came when a colleague, Ganga Periasamy, was held up at the security gate, as she was the first to arrive at ISRO on the day of our visit there. Needless to say, our papers were yet to arrive and the security personnel had no intimation about it. As it always happens in India, she found that the security guard hailed from the same state as her, Tamilnadu, and spoke the same language, Tamil. What is more, they discovered, to each other's great satisfaction, that they were from the same town too. What followed piqued my interest: the security guard, in his adorable pidgin of broken English, peasant Tamil and immigrant Kannada, explained to her and to the rest of us who had gathered by then, something about Aryabhata, one of the first Indian satellites to be launched. Of course, much of his explanation was more akin to garden variety sci-fi rather than rocket science, which in this case, it literally was. But the important point was that a person from the security office found it exciting to understand and impart the knowledge about what the organization stood for. He was proud of the fact that he belonged to this organization and was proud to show off his interest and expertise, or whatever he had of it, to visitors. This was the first tick in my check list: regardless of the depth of expertise, mature institutions instill a sense of pride and belonging, and some knowledge of what they stand for, across the entire spectrum of people who work for it.

While our team leaders were busy completing the formalities to get our visitors' pass, some of us were lounging around the driveway. Soon, a young man pulled an immaculate steel trolley into the vicinity with tea and biscuits. No sooner was he there, a motley crowd of interns, technicians and guards gathered around him, collected their coffee, sipped it happily, chitchatting with abandon, and were gone in an instant back to their work desks. It seemed like they all knew when exactly was tea-time and how long they could saunter around there. In fact, it was nothing out of the ordinary for them. Another box ticked for me: mature institutions are successful in establishing everyday rituals to great levels of efficiency and perfection.

As we were entering the buildings which housed the main exhibition of ISRO, we noticed the impeccable lawns. Someone was sweeping the grass carpet on the lawns and someone else was pruning the hedges. I remembered the campus of Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai. Whenever I was there, someone or the other was mowing the lawn with an antediluvian mechanical mover which mauled and mulched the grass in delicious and crunchy morsels, giving out a heavy and confusing smell of freshly cut grass mixed with insecticide. A colleague, Mr. Ramdas, remarked about the half-a-dozen palm trees planted in mathematical order and showing the same degree of inclination towards the rising sun. Shift to any Indian university and the contrast is immediate: hedges grown wild, a sparse foliage quickly turning into unsafe and dense woods, the surroundings oozing the premonition of an urban forest. It does not show signs of worked-on-ness. Pune University is a case in point: wild, misshapen gardens with a very scratchy tree cover. In the very middle of such confusion sits IUCAA, the premier institute for Space Sciences in this country: the Inter University Council for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lawns well maintained, security personnel on their toes, guest houses maintained as if under the care of a jeweler's lens, buildings designed with a sense of purpose and form. Tick next: mature institutions do big things alright, but they pay equal attention to small details. The red and blue knobs for hot and cold water taps, the library stacked with books carefully selected and wrapped in transparent polythene and electrical switches at the right corners of the room.

We were received by Mr. Srinivas, who would be our guide through this visit. He spoke for the institution and on its behalf. A very big tick, that: mature institutions may have complex hierarchies and rigid bureaucratic structures. But they bind their personnel by a common vision such that each one of them sees his actions as reflecting not just his personal endeavors but also the endeavors of the institution. He was at pains to explain everything he knew about the space programme of ISRO, which was not unimpressive, I must add. What he had at his disposal was a lazily curated standing exhibition of some rocket-science artifacts, somewhat dilapidated but functional. He would have probably given this selfsame explanation to thousands of people (in his untrustworthy turn of phrase, he put the number at more than a lakh), but that did not make him sound like a bored tourist guide who repeats phrases which have become prosodic and monotonous thanks to mindless and intensive repetition. He engaged his audience in his awkward but extremely handy English, and did that in style. Tick again: in mature institutions, people grow and live up to the vision of an institution. Most importantly, they learn on their job. For all that we know, our man may well be a technician with a very narrow skill set, but that does not distance him from the core concerns of the institution. "We are all scientists here", he said. He was himself a Scientist-D, something closer to the lower rung in a hierarchy made up of all conceivable letters in the alphabet, all the way from C to K. And then finally is the Scientist O. Outstanding, he clarified. "One day, he will definitely reach there", someone quipped. Sayandip Mukherjee, a colleague from Bangalore University, tried to draw him out on why the souvenir shop here had been shut down. "That is different", was the curt answer from our Man Friday, Srinivas, accompanied by a twitch and an embarrassed wink. He would not wash the dirty linen in public. Insiders and outsiders are different people. While we owe to outsiders utmost cordiality, we owe the truth only to insiders. Tick all the way through.

Walking to the hallowed "clean room", a sterile environment where the satellites are assembled, (sterile, because, otherwise, any one of the many million solders may develop an undetectable snag, bringing to naught an investment of many thousand million rupees in a satellite) we all noticed the unmistakable scent of formalin emanating from the entire big building. Cleanliness, it must be said, is one of the cardinal small details a big institution will never miss. Polished wood banisters and anti-skid strips at the edges of the marble steps all added up to this list. We were allowed a glimpse from a high portico through the glass windows into the Clean Room where a bunch of young scientists were assembling some chips and circuits. They leaned over a huge table, almost as if it was Las Vegas, and they were inside a casino. From the other side of this sound-proof glass their movements looked unhurried but deliberate. Some of them wore anti-static footwear, and paddled around like penguins scaling the glacial floors of arctic lands, a point of great amusement to many of us. Srinivas was at pains to convince us that anti-static footwear is serious. No ordinary sandals those, despite the deceptive appearances. Tick again. Myth making, despite all the bad press it receives, is a hallmark of mature institutions. Myths about the secrecy, the significance, the potency, the impact and the influence of what an institution does, only goes to say what is the self-image of people associated with those institutions. They see themselves as participating in important things. Clearly, people cannot be fools all the time to believe in such stuff if there are no compelling reasons to sustain it. I remembered my own institution, where we are all self-appointed iconoclasts. Nothing is sacred and nothing mythical. Everything can be reduced to the ubiquitous deadwood of politics.

When we left the premises, someone promptly collected our visitors' passes. Just before leaving the gates, the Tamil watchman asked us if we had had lunch at the food court. He was sure it was very good food. We were escorted, attended to and watched over all through our visit. The institution cared enough about itself to bother about us. Philip Larkin, the reticent English poet, used this subtly revealing phrase about an old, probably abandoned, church building: a piece of serious earth, he called it. ISRO Satellite Centre was precisely that: a piece of serious earth for our desacralized world.

Modernism and Its Doubles: U R Ananthamurthy’s Stallion of the Sun

2016-03-28T22:52:00.000+05:30

From 50 Writers, 50 Books: The Best of Indian Fiction, eds. Pradeep Sebastian and Chandra Siddan (New Delhi: Harper Collins)

U R Ananthamurthy’s “Suryana Kudure” (a collection of short stories first published in 1995 and translated as Stallion of the Sun) simultaneously operates in two registers: it is a modernist’s elegy to a deeply ambiguous past (ambiguous because it is a monument to its own resilience as also the symptom of a degenerate society at the threshold of its own annihilation) and a moment of rupture in the very history of modernist discourse (rupture because, here, Indian literary modernism meets its own double: the aberrant, degenerate village simpleton transgressing both history and reason - not through an existential encounter with history - but by simply falling through the cracks).

The story itself is a staple of the Indian angst literature we are very familiar with. Returning to his village, the litterateur-author-narrator, Ananthu, discovers his old friend, Hade Venkata, (the nickname indicating the urchin that he was and continues to be) in a state of utter disrepair - unmarried daughters, a suffering, complaining and cursing wife, an errant and wayward son and Venkata himself in the midst of all this strife in his splendid, almost reckless, disregard for his lot. The subsequent narrative is a slow and painful unravelling of the minute details of Venkata’s life and his moral failure as father, husband, and above all, as provider of the family, occasionally interspersed with commentaries from the narrator, now on the abounding ‘village idiocy’ of Asiatic proportions, and now about his own dread at the precarious distance which separates himself from Venkata.

The central drama binding the narrator and the narrated is an oil massage and a scalding hot-water bath given by Venkata to Ananthu, an art for which he is known far and wide, and the reason why Ananthu has come to Venkata’s house this time. Venkata is supposed to have the ability to take his clients (amongst whom are included not just the local politicians and police officers but also the illustrious K. T. Basham) to the heights of bliss through his massages: showing the full moon as he describes it himself. At this point the narrative shifts gears and we are no more in the familiar domain of the room-temperature social theory of Indian modernism with its well-worn antinomies: the alienated individual versus his rotting, self-amnesiac, non-modern counterpart, the dangers of urbane vacuity versus the ancient violence of ahistorical modes of life and formal knowledge versus native intuition. The massage slowly dulls the narrator’s consciousness; standing behind him is the expert masseur Venkata chanting rhymes, mantras, Yakshagana lyrics and affected extempore poetry even as he is kneading, drumming, squeezing and twisting the flesh of Ananthu and bending, as it were, the rigidities of both muscle and mind. Both the narrative and the narrator from this point onwards acquire a suppleness and intimacy that dissolves the hitherto intellectual bravado and moral certainty of Ananthu and his puzzlement about the ways of Venkata. A process of healing has already begun for Ananthu where what requires healing now is not only the decadent human condition petrified in an antediluvian Asiatic mode but also the rigid varicose of a historical rationality subsuming life to abstract and monstrous goals bypassing the dialectic of experience and reflection. Of course Ananthu experiences nothing of the seeing the full moon after his massage but by now the narrator has been so undermined that we cannot take this as proof only of Venkata’s failure but on the contrary also as a question about the capacity of the narrator to do full justice to his own experiences.

I strongly believe this narrative failure to be the real success of the story.

Readers of Ananthamurthy will know that this is no isolated work of his but a central concern to which he returns repeatedly in his novellas and other short stories. Whereas, works with this theme prior to Suryana Kudure suffer because he fails to sustain the essential ambivalence of this moral-historical situation, then, later works can be squarely seen as formulaic attempts to milk this theme to produce a worldview, a gestalt, which modern Indian literary history has shown us it is incapable of. In some senses, then, Suryana Kudure stands at the pinnacle of Ananthamurthy’s achievement as a writer.

The story ends on an ambiguous note when the narrator, waking up early in the morning after a troubled sleep owing to a row between Venkata and his son, finds Venkata transfixed in the kitchen garden gazing at a grasshopper, the stallion of the sun of the title, which represents the lithe insect with the mythical capacity to bear the sun on its back as also the skill to be completely submerged in the colours of the background making itself innocuous. The stallion of the sun is only one small element in an entire matrix of mythologies shared by Venkata and Ananthu from their boyhood days. Probably seeing it as a metaphor or a symbol standing for some abstract idea is really beside the point. The stallion of the sun is only a point of entry into another completely different world of objects and relations, a world which is the common past of both Venkata and Ananthu, making them nothing more but also nothing less than two possibilities inherent within that world. The specific contours of that world will remain closed to the reader of this story but will reveal glimpses of itself throughout Ananthamurthy’s work as so many human possibilities.

Ananthamurthy works with similar themes in some other stories in this collection: notable are the stories Akkayya and Jaratkaaru. In Akkayya the two academics sharing, over a glass of whiskey, the story of Akkayya, (a child widow and the matronly sister of one of them, similar to Venkata in the incongruity of her existence with the ways of the modern world) in a tipsy moment start drumming on the antique earthen pots decorating the interiors of one of their American living rooms and mouthing absurd nonsensical rhymes in a bacchanalian moment. The story ends in their realisation that probably it is in this moment, which fuses their sentimental remembrances of Akkayya’s life with the ‘awkward and absurd’ (in their own words) hankering after sensitivity and sensibility, is true authenticity to be found. Although this refreshing light-weight resolution to the story shows a full awareness of the traps of the authenticity-seeking modernist writer, in so far as it cannot shake the received antinomies of much of modernist writing, remains an intellectual play of thin abstractions and does not push the narrative towards taking any real risks. In fact, both in Akkayya and Jaratkaaru, the problem gets reduced to the great conflict of historical modes of being, played out on the battleground of the modernist artist-individual’s consciousness. In all these stories the problem becomes one of seeking individual redemption from the gravity-free hell of modern alienation by finding an authentic mode of existence. But what is the stuff of authenticity that modernist authors are so taken by it? The hankering after authenticity is in the final instance the desire to render one life-world completely in terms of the other. What, then, is the problem with it? Only that, this necessarily intellectual task is converted into a problem of psychologies, of being able to feel or exist in a psychological state called authenticity. No doubt, this is a critique of Ananthamurthy’s work but we owe a debt to Ananthamurthy for opening up the possibility for such a critique of Indian modernism and of the social function of writing in India. To slightly correct our previous evaluation, then, both Jaratkaaru and Akkayya are in some senses the beginnings of a contrapuntal exploration of the artistic-intellectual problems inaugurated by Suryana Kudure.

What is Experience and What do we do with it?

2016-03-28T22:39:00.002+05:30

Two instances of our way of using the notion of experience:

- "Our experience is unavailable to others" (Eg: women's experience, dalit experience not being available to non-women and non-dalits)

- "We have experienced oppression" (The problem of what is an experience and what is its explanation. While it is always the case that the two tend to collapse into each other, thinking is an activity of pricing the two apart.)

In both the abovementioned cases, the idea of experience is that it is a "private episode". Private, because, it is unique to an individual and occurs in the inner theatre of the mind and episode, because, it has a duration and is some kind of recording of a public episode. So, the assumption is that while there are public episodes of specific duration, there are their mental imprints which are episodes of another kind, which are called experience.

Sensations, for example, are private episodes and are unique to the sufferer. No amount of physical pain one suffers in one's toe or stomach or head can be shared with or transferred to another. That makes sensation private. Similarly, sensations can and do have a duration. I could have had a headache the whole of yesterday. But since today morning, I could be feeling better. It hurts whenever someone stamps on my toe and not before or long after. That makes sensations episodic.

But experience is like neither of the two. To say that I have experience, it minimally requires that one specifies an object about which we can be said to have experience. So, for instance, we can be said to have experience in novel writing, driving and even in dealing with failure. That we indeed have had such experience is established both for ourselves and for others by looking at our behavior in the relevant circumstances. If we can maneuver an automobile, with our limbs permitting us, or in the case of the old or injured whose limbs may have become weak, then in the way they impart or speak about the distinctions involved in driving are the tokens by which their experience is established. That is, experience is comportment to the world of facts. What we have is experience if what we have is publicly available as a disposition to be learnt, imparted, shared or talked about with some degree of intelligibility. Without a world of objects to respond to and without a sense of appropriateness of such response, both of which are public facts, the very idea of experience loses its meaning. While it is true that an experience may be unique in the sense that it is acquired owing to the unique circumstances we find ourselves in, it is not unique in terms of its meaning. What is unique is not the experience as much as the way one ended up acquiring it.

In a broad way, leaving out many important intricacies, one can say that experience is of a piece with knowledge and is not of a piece with either mental or physical events. This feature is what makes experience very different from objects which it apprehends. Pain is a sensation. This sensation-object is apprehended as knowledge. Such knowledge is experience.

A caveat is in order here: the public-token picture of experience seems to privilege the articulation of experience over the experience itself (or the possession of experience itself). But that is not the case. While this picture indeed privileges an object-orientedness to experience, that in itself need not be and should not be construed as a bias towards articulation. Therefore, for instance, a man who has a great deal of experience in playing cards need not be in a position to articulate his experience either as rules or thumb-rules or even describe certain aspects of the game. Although it is not blameworthy in itself that he is incapable of teaching someone else the intricacies of the game, it is rather unfortunate that he is incapable of it. But it is merely unfortunate and not anything more than that. However it is absolutely necessary that he actually plays a game of cards, or if not that, then at least for us to assure ourselves through some or the other means that he knows his game of cards for us to even say that our man has some experience in the game of cards. Needless to say, what we mean by a game of cards cannot be radically different in our case and his. In the absence of such a public token (not a public articulation) our words would not amount to much.

Inventing a Christian Tragedy: William Shakespeare and the Conscience Organ

2015-09-07T21:01:00.001+05:30

The Greeks had a very special notion of tragedy. According to them, tragedy was not merely a string of unhappy events in one's life. If someone met with an accident at the height of one's achievements, that would not count as a tragedy for the Greeks. This was because an accident was nothing more than a random occurrence. It could happen to anybody without rhyme or reason and questions like "why had this to happen to me?" are merely rhetorical and indicates our ignorance rather than urge us to seek an answer. Similarly the devastation and grief caused by enmity was also not an instance of tragedy. It was in the natural order of things for men to fight against each other for variety of reasons, both legitimate and illegitimate. One could only infer from such happenings the woeful state of human intelligence and their inability to make peace with their enemies and their circumstances. For similar reasons, death by disease, failures in our endeavours and loss of our loved ones could not count as tragedy for the Greeks.

What, then, is the Greek conception of tragedy?

We could refer to one of their tragic masterpieces to find an answer to our question. Oedipus Rex is an example par excellence. The land has been scorched by a famine. The elders of the country are worried and seek the help of the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle, as is its wont, speaks in cryptic equivocations and says that this scourge has befallen the land because someone has committed the crime of patricide and has slept with his own mother. What is more, this man continues to live and the crime has gone unpunished.

The elders bring the tidings of this oracle back to King Oedipus. As a just and noble king, Oedipus promises his subjects that whosoever be the guilty man he shall be punished with death and the curse of the land will be lifted. As the play reaches its climax Oedipus comes to know that the guilty man is himself. The king he had murdered, without his knowledge, was his own father and the king's wife he had taken as his own queen what his mother. For the law of the land to prevail, the divine oracle fulfilled and the scourge lifted from the land, the guilty has to be put to death. If, on the contrary, Oedipus has to live, then, the land has to suffer from drought.

Clearly, then, Oedipus' existence is in conflict with the existence of the law of the land. This impossible conflict is what tragedy is made of for the Greeks. A tragedy can occur only when a man's existence threatens to annul the continued existence of the world and the continued existence of the world requires the sacrifice of the man's existence as a corollary. We can also say that such conflicts between individuals and the world occur only in the case of a great man. Ordinary mortals will seldom get into such impossible situations. Tragedy cannot occur in a world where moral laws are given once and for all by an Almighty God. For, in such a world, the question will never be about what is the correct ethical action because there is nothing for men to decide in these matters. Instead, the question will be whether man, insofar as he has been bestowed a free will has or has not complied with the moral laws of the Almighty God. This picture is verily a picture of the Christian world. It would therefore mean that tragedy cannot occur in a Christian world. The very notion of tragedy is completely absent from this world. This Christian world with its intrinsically un-tragic worldview is what William Shakespeare inherits.

We know, however, that he is the author of the greatest English tragedies of the modern world. This should raise a puzzle: how could Shakespeare compose the greatest tragedies in a world where tragedy was necessarily impossible? How could Hamlet's grief, Macbeth's misplaced ambition and Othello's jealousy come together to create a new notion of tragedy resting upon a worldview which was altogether different from the worldview on which rested the Greek notion of tragedy?

I suggest that we look for an answer in the intricacies of Shakespeare's characters themselves. Unlike the Greek hero whose tragedy is public, that is, a tragedy which is about publicly available actions and its repercussions, Shakespearean tragedy is morbidly private. That is, both the cause and the meaning of the tragic element in Shakespeare's plays come exclusively from the private recesses of the protagonists' souls. The central location, the ground on which the tragedy unfolds, is not actions which are available for scrutiny but motives hidden behind a veneer of falsehood, self-deceit, ignorance and pettiness. In the Greek hero, it is not that his intentions are wrong or his motivations are somehow questionable, it is plainly that what he has committed is a wrong action, judging by the laws known both to men and the gods. However, in Shakespeare, the actions are not in question. In fact, the actions are not even the point. For all you know, Macbeth need not have gone on to kill Duncan, but made him a puppet in his hands by any other means and the play would still have worked fine. It may have lost a few dramatic high points like the blood on the hands of Lady Macbeth and the unforgettably compulsive fear she expresses about all the perfumes of Arabia not being able to sweeten her little hand. But the central tension in the play would still work alright. Now, imagine Oedipus without having committed the sin of patricide. The play would not exist at all. Similarly, imagine Oedipus to have committed the sin of patricide knowingly. He would become an ordinary criminal worthy of the gallows and not the tragic hero that we know him to be. This is what I mean when I say that the Greek tragedy is about actions: it is about coming to terms with the truth of our actions. Oedipus is guilty because he has done something which is against the laws of men and the gods. He is not someone who is afflicted with a guilty conscience. He has not done something against the utterances of his inner voice. He has merely done what men ought not to do.

This is not the case with Macbeth. He has a heavy conscience. He has done something against his inner voice. And there lies the theatre of his tragedy. For the Greeks, such people as Macbeth would have appeared as petty criminals or as people without character and not as the glorious anti-heroes we take them to be, with their dramatic conflicts of conscience and their downfall due to the seeds of evil sown by them. The problem for Shakespeare is human frailty and duplicity. For the Greeks, however, it is human glory and fate.

One could schematise Shakespeare's tragedies as involving the exercise and crisis in the exercise of a special organ, a faculty of sorts: conscience. The tragedy of Macbeth or Othello is the tragedy of one who has stopped listening to his conscience. He lacks an organ or a faculty, if you will. This puts him into unforeseen difficulties and makes him perceive things where none exists and blocks him from seeing things which do exist. With a well-oiled conscience apparatus, Macbeth would not have come to this pass. It is the tragedy of a man not knowing the facts of the matter, in this case, of course, facts pertaining to the moral matters of the world.

Needless to say, it is not Shakespeare who invented the organ of conscience. It was forged in the old smithy of Christian theology where it meant a small voice of God lodged in humans. It was a regulative concept to account for ethical matters by bypassing the authority of custom. In the ancient world, ethical matters were decided largely by custom. What is right is what is held to be right and the ultimate court of appeal in matters of right and wrong are the ways of the world itself. However, early Christian thinkers, finding themselves in a hostile Roman world, could not take recourse to custom to establish the truth of their preaching. For, after all, the custom that existed was custom steeped in a pagan and Hellenic world, most often at odds with the revealed religion. The only way out of this impasse was to argue that there is a moral intuition lodged in the very hearts of men, placed there by God himself, such that the truth of the scripture is reflected directly in the hearts of men. This heavenly intuition was conscience. In time, Shakespeare had good use for this organ, put there in the first place by the forefathers of his own Protestant religion.

Shakespearean tragedy is, in a manner of speaking, an instance of Christian tragedy. Christian tragedy sees the world as imbued with the virtue of God and threatened by the temptations of Satan. This theme gets refurbished as an eternal moral conflict in the very heart of man, where every man is a Faust who is being vied for by the virtuous voice of God and the devilish voice of Satan.

Ancient Greeks would have little use or patience with this kind of stuff. They had hugely different ponderings about the fate of man: how man forges his own fate, how his actions put into gear a series of events and repercussions, and how therefore knowledge of those actions is of paramount importance. Oedipus' crisis is the crisis of Sophia, of wisdom. And Sophia is not to apprehend moral rules, but the wisdom to understand the world of actions, prudence in short. At the cost of being cryptic, we could say that Christian tragedy is the result of a failure to apprehend the truth, and Greek tragedy is a process of coming finally to appreciate the truth. Imagine, for counterfactual purposes, an Oedipus who is put to death because of patricide, but without coming to know the truth about the fact that he has himself committed that crime. That would hardly result in tragedy in the way Greeks would understand it. The central point is that Oedipus himself comes to know and appreciate this unforgiving truth. It is his journey towards truth and therefore to his heroic and tragic annihilation which constitutes the crux of the tragedy. Self-knowledge lies at the end of the Greek tragic journey.

On the contrary, a series of events have led to the death of Macbeth and it is for us, the spectators, to causally explain the events as constituting a moral failure on the part of Macbeth. Macbeth's journey is not a journey towards truth and therefore his own annihilation. It is a journey in the reverse direction: it is a journey towards his annihilation which itself is the truth of his character. At the end of the Christian tragedy lies the realisation of the frailty of human knowledge.

Shakespeare invented, with his Christian peers, a new version of tragedy: the blood and gore on the stage of Shakespearean theatre is symptomatic evidence for the absence of a truly classical tragedy. The classical tragedy was about human beings coming to know the truth of their actions. Shakespeare draws a veil between man and his actions: his heroes are incapable of peering behind the veil to understand the truth of their own actions because that truth refers to an ever-receding picture about human frailty and the dark recesses of their psychology. If Shakespeare's heroes could peer in there, there would be no tragedy to speak of. Psychology, in this reckoning, is truly of the Satan: it is the realm where darkness and ignorance reigns. The virtuous realm after all is, as the Aristotelians would have it, the realm of actions and its knowledge, Ethics, the very realm that Greek tragedy is all about.

2013-04-18T12:37:00.002+05:30

Take these two instances:

1. It is raining.

2. You came to know that the currency in your wallet is counterfeit.

Both these instances present to you two facts. They are propositions about something or the other. Now look their cognitive charge. They are very different.

In case (1), you have classified a state of affairs. In the other, there is something more. You have come to realize something that you didn't hitherto know. You have made a new distinction. In fact, now take the third example. After a series of practices you come to know that the self is not an object but an effect of perceptual sedimentation or whatever else.

Now, this is something entirely new. It makes little sense to say that you believe this is the case. It is almost as if you have discovered a completely new dimension or aspect. Belief seems to be more appropriate if you know what different conditions can obtain and you can say that a specific condition has obtained. In the example of rain, there are two conditions which can obtain. Raining and not raining. You know beforehand about these two conditions. You just need to match your present situation with one or the other of these scenarios. IN our everyday intuition, this is when you say you have a belief.

Regarding the self, or even the counterfeit note, it is more the shock of discovering a new possibility (the counterfeit note) or the exhilaration of understanding something even deeply. To say that this is tantamount to holding a belief is to make the entire thing look somewhat trivial. Isn't it?

Now try and formulate a conception about truth which will encompass all my three examples and not just the rain example (Your conception of belief is useful in explaining only that). I think the best formulation is something like what Heidegger said: "truth as unhidden-ness of being" or capacity to "see" something which was hitherto unseen. This capacity comes in the form of a competence to make distinctions which you couldn't hitherto do.

To hold a belief is to deal with things you already know. The revelation of the knowledge of the self is nothing like what you already know. In fact, forget self, no genuine knowledge is the dealing with things that you already know. Therefore, belief does not capture the cognitive moment of perception of truth.

There is another aspect to this issue:

The importance of the categorical difference between truth and falsity is useful if we consider propositional statements. For all other varieties of statements this distinction does not apply with the same force. Especially in the Buddha example of Ganeri, it is clear that speech is seen as a variety of action and not as a variety of description. Therefore, true and false sentences implying beliefs in the truth or falsity of the propositions does not obtain with equal force. Modern linguistic commonsense prioritises the description aspect of speech. The declarative sentence by the way is the paradigmatic grammatical sentence, only proving that statements are considered as statements of descriptions. Beliefs naturally latch on to this variety of statements with greater fit rather than to sentences seen as actions. Even many speech act theories, I am afraid, do not capture the difference between this aspect of speech as action and speech as declarative propositions.

Dispositions, Moral Norms and Actions

2013-04-16T01:51:00.000+05:30

Ethics is study of morals. And the contrast is between normativity and "natural dispositions" which are tendencies (tendencies are not judged). But since we make judgements, we carry a sense of right and wrong which is necessarily evaluative, thus the mind has built in norms. So if solubility is a disposition of sugar, it just means a tendency; nothing wrong or right about it. Normativity, on the other hand, requires you to act according to your intentional states. If you don’t act according to your intentional states, by your own light, your own standards of norm, you’re wrong.

While so far I had assumed that only ethics are normative, AB argues it as a property of the mind itself which also extends to natural sciences in so far as we deal with beliefs (true or false) in natural sciences.

So my hunch is that conscience is the seat of normativity. Somehow people here hold up conscience as some independent thing which makes your action less Kantian (so when Gandhi upholds conscience, he sees moral actions as acts of conscience. Thus by setting an exemplary action, the action has universal appeal minus the universalibilty (which is the "ought to", principle). So he sees conscience as liberating one from the "ought to" demand. Conscience (moral judgement/exemplar) is set up against the moral criticism inherent in the idea of principle. Whereas I think they are two sides of the same coin.

Isn't it true that abhorring murder is to learn to abhor murder?

Doesn't it then mean that, it is false to say that we maintain a belief (or any equivalent thereof) which says murder is abhorrent? There is no such belief. What we have is a skill, a competence to see murder as wrong. Exactly like we have competence to see that a "pancham" note when it comes in Hindola is 'wrong'. Why is it wrong? It is wrong because there is no pancham in hindola. Why should there be no pancham in hindola? That is because my understanding of hindola is that it has no pancham.

Now, if that is the case, you do not require any special organ (bodily, non-bodily, mental, sentient etc) like conscience to account for the consistent feeling I have that murder is abhorrent.

And when something appears as true to you (propositionally true, that is) there is no need to see some normativity lurking behind it. Take the gravitation theory and moral norms that the west has in the same breath. Even then you don't need it. Why?

What are you saying when you are making a supposedly normative claim: you are saying "this is how the world appears to me". This picture of the world is singular and absolutely true at this point. So for someone who does not feel gravitation theory is wrong, the world appears as governed by gravitation. For another who thinks that sodomy is the most heinous sin, sodomy appears are heinously wrong. Gravity is right and sodomy is wrong because of the same reason: because that is how the world is.

Now, you can say this is normative only when you describe this world (that is the world of Christianity, where sodomy is wrong or the world of Newtonian physics, where gravity is correct) from the outside. That is, you are saying, the idea that "sodomy is wrong" is not true in any empirical sense but to people who believe in Christianity it appears with the force of a factual statement. That is, you need to account for the "truth charge" of a potentially unfalsifiable statement. (Substitute for this the example of gravity, and nothing will change). Therefore to label something as normative, you need to get out of the conditions within which it is true. Fundamentally then, however ingenious you are in avoiding this, all your talk about normativity is basically a plea to provide a theory of error (theory of error: that which shows why it is rational to hold a false belief).

So here is the catch:

Either,

1. You are within a particular world, where it is true that sodomy is wrong. and therefore, you don't require a normative injunction or a normative gene or a normative disposition or anything of that variety to be convinced by that belief or act as if it were true (because the 'as if' never arises).

Or,

2. You are looking at a "normative element" only from the outside of that world and therefore you have a perspective from where the normative statement has no normative charge for you, but has converted itself into a cognitive puzzle. That is, now, you are wondering, how can these cloister Christians believe in such fictions that sodomy is wrong with utter seriousness when nothing in the world says it is true or nothing in the human wiring compels them to believe so. Even then, you don't have any normativity. But only a cognitive puzzle.

Which is why most people, when asked why sodomy is wrong, will give you stupid answers but empirical answers. And all the while they hold on to the belief that there is something about the world which makes sodomy wrong. (That’s why their answers will never be "it is wrong because personally I feel appalled at it", but it will always be "it is wrong because it is unnatural" etc.)

You might want to ask why in some culture sodomy is wrong and something else is right and some other thing a crime. How come such things can come to pass? But then that is completely irrelevant here. It just so happens that that world has such beliefs.

So you don't require any conscience or its non-propositional second cousin to make claims about why Gandhi thought something was wrong or something was right or something ought to be done and something ought not to be done. Well, he thought all this because this is how the world appeared to him and people of his culture.

For clarity's sake I should ask you to keep these three things separate:

1. Particular instances where we think some things are good and some things are bad

2. The general capacity of human beings to make such judgements, when nothing in the world gives you empirical reasons to make them or there are no explicit moral laws which are grounded in some objective realm.

3. The assumption that (1) and (2) can only be possible if there is some normativity built into the human mind or the human world or what have you.

I think (1) can be completely explained by the agent's (or the community's) beliefs. That is, things are good or bad based on our social fabric. So it is not that anything goes. It is that, despite ourselves we are successful in making fairly consistent and uniform moral judgements about most situations in our world. This consistency does not arise from a common rule but from the nature of the competence and the limits of the world. So it is patently false and trivial to argue that by this count "anything goes". It is false because, it so happens that that level of moral relativism is never seen in our everyday world unless it is a very very special circumstance. It is trivial because, it takes a moral phenomenon (that is, we making moral judgements by the minute) and converts it into a normative claim. (That is, my moral judgement does not underlie a principle or a rule. However, when I use that judgement and try to argue my way out of a difficult situation by saying "anything goes" or some such thing, I am not making a judgement, but making a normative statement based on that judgement). The difference is stark, clear and simple: In cricket, I use my discretion and play a good-length delivery on the rise once, and then in the next instance, I go on a back-foot defence for the same good length delivery. From this, if you were to draw the lesson that anything goes with a good length delivery and try to hook it or flick it, you will be bowled out. It is that I can execute a good shot by using my judgement but by deploying that judgement, let alone executing a shot, you can't even play cricket. In our moral life, the difference is very obvious: you know in a split second, when someone is making a moral judgement and when someone is deploying a norm based on such judgements.

Regarding (2), the general capacity is a competence. Much of my previous mail is about this. Perceiving a situation and making a judgement are not two separates moments in an agent's mental life. They are the selfsame moment. It is not that you see a murder and then marshal some rules, feelings and norms and tell yourself, "What I saw was a wrong thing". It is that the two things are in fact the same thing. You seeing a murder is seeing a wrong committed. Therefore, to assume that you have to have some basis for moral judgement is a totally false thing. Your judgement is not your competence to judge but your competence to perceive. And in this world, what you perceive are not rules and norms but things (phenomena, ideas, objects etc). You do not perceive some sound in the pure form and then judge that that is music and then further judge that that is raga behag. You do it all in one whole. How to account for this? Well the simplest way would be to say, we perceive what is there. There is raga behag. But how do you say it is raga behag? Because of the nature of the thing itself. You may want to push it further and as why should I call it raga behag? Simply because, seeing it as raga behag is to learn to know that that is a raga and the raga is an aspect of music. If you do not even know ragas or hindustani music, the question of you judging it as this or that raga does not arise at all. Similarly, if you do not even know that murder is wrong, the question of arguing why or how it is wrong does not arise at all. Now, here is the idiocy of a normative culture. It sees people making normative judgements. So it thinks, there must be some rules which they are learning in order to play this game. But the fact is that playing the game itself means learning to play it well. There are no rules to be learnt and then applied. Or for that matter, there are no games to be played and rules to be then discovered. You just start learning to do things in one way and then another.

If you agree that (1) and (2) do not automatically imply (3), then you can go ahead and ask your question about why is that a particular culture goes about organising moral life in a normative way. But if you are not convinced about the statement [(1) and (2) does not automatically imply (3)] then, your proposal is shallow.

Last point: the statement "the world appears to me like this" is not valid as an argument made by me. It is a fact about me. So, you know it best when it is being reported as a fact and when it is reported as an argument. So for example, when someone says, “I killed him because he is wicked”, he is using an argument to justify his action. But when we usually see people who are in politics as wicked, we are making a judgment by using a competence. It is a fact that the politician appears to me as a wicked person. It is therefore not true that politicians are wicked people or its contrary). So your fear that people can use this line of argument to justify their actions does not arise because none of my actions can be justified based on any facts about me. It may be a fact that women appear as stupid to me but does this amount to a justification for treating them badly. In fact, my actions, as they are not implementations of a principle, cannot also be justified by any principle. If I am being charitable, it is not because I have a rule in my head which says I ought to be charitable. It is merely that I have learnt to be charitable. Similarly, if I am taking a bribe, it cannot be justified by the principle of social justice or the principle of humanising the inhuman bureaucracy. I take bribes because I think I can get away taking bribes. Whether taking bribes is a good thing or a bad thing is decided independent of my justifications. And it is decided not as a norm with principles but as a competence to go around in the world doing some things and not some other things. So actions are not candidates for justification. They are merely candidates for assessment of competence. That competence is called justness. My actions should have a quality of justness, like my cover drives must have the quality of elegance. My actions need not be justified exactly like my cover drive need not be justified by some rule book.

Values and Perspectives

2013-04-16T01:24:00.001+05:30

I intend I will...
I predict I will...

So:

The second "I" after "predict" is object. Every other "I" is subject.
If we can have a first-person and a third-person perspective on the self, we can have it similarly on the world.
Natural science is the third-person perspective on the world
What kind of a world must the world be if it prompts us to act in the first person?
It must be a world laden with values. When some boys are killing a cat, cruelty is out there like natural properties are (except they are value properties and not natural properties), as a value out there which prompts you to act. You try to save it, stop it etc....

So the argument is to show there are values in the world which are non-natural properties nevertheless out there like facts are. And we know it because we are moved to act on certain things.

Now, those philosophers of the mind who go with the dispositional theory of mind are totalizing the third person perspective. People who say there are no intentions which lead to action and are negating agency basically have a third person view on oneself.This means that the only way is to show that when you intend, you actually have a third person view on oneself/world. How on earth do you show this? And can we show this at all.

If I am a Hindu moved by the rhetoric of the Hindu right and go about killing other communities, don't I do it out of intention? Yet, this intention is derived not from some mind in vacuum but formed by my/Hindu right's notion of what constitutes the nation. So it appears to be an act of first person but is not. And intentions are formed by notions of good which decide in framing my intentions. Is the idea of good what gives the action its directionality. Do intentions give actions directionality?

I am wondering how does the idea of intentions as emergent property and not as essential property help us get a grip on any of the above? And how do you counter the charge that if you do not think of yourself as an agent (in the sense of being moved by values in the world), then, you have a third-person view on yourself?

I think there is a trick involved here:

Assume that you can have two perspectives on yourself and the world: first and third-person.
Now, when used in relation to yourself: the first person account gives you an account of your space of reasons and so on. That is, it treats the self as reasoning itself. (or some variety thereof). The third person perspective gives you an account of motivations and causes. That is, it treats the self as object. Fine. The point is, good philosophers should not draw any ontological conclusions from this. This is a perspectival dualism and so can only tell you that you can look at yourself in these two ways. From this, it does not follow that the self exists in two forms or two modes. It is the selfsame entity, this self. It is like looking at one of those pictures: Top-down it looks like an old man and bottom-up it looks like a young woman.
Now, take this lesson home and ask whether two perspectives on the world can be sufficient reason to infer that the world exists in these two ontological modes? One value-laden and the other value-neutral? Clearly no.
However, you may want to argue that, the point is not that ontologically the world has these two modes, but only that the one perspective binds you to a picture of the world as value-laden and the other perspective binds you to another picture of the world as value-neutral. There is nothing ontological here, you may say.
If indeed there is nothing ontological here, then why bother, in your own words, "to show there are values in the world which are non-natural properties nevertheless out there like facts are"?
You may say we need to do this because otherwise we will not be able to understand the uniqueness of the space of intentions and values in the world. How will you account for our sense that the boys killing the cat is wrong? Clearly, you will say, we are not to be accused of using specious legal or moral reasoning to "prove" that due to some principles of good and evil, what the boys did was wrong and therefore we feel it is wrong. Yes. Agreed. You will also say, you cannot reduce our moral opprobrium to some conventions we have leaned as part of our socialisation. The simplest way, you will argue, is to say that, well, the opprobrium (in the first person) is analogous to recognizing facts (in the third person). That is, exactly like my writing table is out there for all of you to see and feel, wickedness and altruism (or any value like that) are out there. The world contains it. That is all.
But hold on. Why do you need all this? Why is it not sufficient to say this: values are part of our perspective about the world. You cannot jump out of your perspective about the world. And so you cannot ever jump out into a value-free world. The world need not contain value for this statement to be true. And notice I am not making a dispositional claim. Neither am I making a conventional socialisation claim.
Supposing you say, there is no difference between your normative claim and my claim about perspective-locking (as in 7), then, look at this: moral norms make sense only when you need to account for the following question: how to account for the beckoning of value from the world? How to account for the sense of that unmistakable calling from the world which says "this is wrong" or "this is how it ought to be"? But, may be this is not a very good picture of our moral life after all. The most important aspect of our moral life is not that we are compelled by the world to act in one or the other way but that our actions are ethically generative. That is we are capable of producing actions which can be perfected, judged, evaluated and reformed. Dogs and cats, I think, do not feel compelled to act in one or the other way. But more importantly, that is because dogs and cats do not have the capacity to generate actions. The question of actions in itself has nothing particularly moral or normative. The moral aspect is only one very very small subset of the capacity to generate action. Therefore it has to be account for as a special case within the generative potential for action that we possess. Not as an autonomous domain of problems independent of the problem of actions. So what is the problem for action theorists? It is not account for which actions are good or bad. It is also not to account for how come actions are possible. It is to account for how to understand actions as different from motions and activities and such like. Now , if you say, well, the simplest way to account for actions is to say they are special by virtue of their normative value then you have left out three quarters of very significant actions performed by human beings, including but limited to ritual actions. If you say they are different by virtue of their intentionality, then you have distorted another aspect: intentionality is what is seen in some or most actions. But intentionality does not make something into an action.

Well, the entire debate is situated in the tradition of thinking about values

Are values objective?
If they are objective, are they objective in the sense of natural properties are, by which we mean properties which natural sciences studies, measurable etc...

We need to show it, because values have been thought of as projections from individuals, their beliefs, desires...from within. What is the larger motivation to show values are part of the world, I don't know. Presumably, it takes for granted that there are values. The question is whether they are subjective or objective. So given that there are values, how do we study them?

Dworkin and the Meaning of Life

2013-04-16T01:02:00.000+05:30

1. Dworkin says, "Life’s intrinsic meaning and Nature’s intrinsic beauty" are the two aspects which best capture religion. Now, the question is: are these two aspects a) two attitudes instilled by religion or b) the best description of religion?

2. If you argue for the first, then you have lost your case in the first salvo itself: if these are attitudes instilled by religion, then, we still need to account for what is religion such that it can instill such an attitude so consistently in its members. That account of religion cannot take recourse to rehashing religious attitudes as explanation for religions.

3. On the contrary, if you argue that these two attitudes are the best description of religion (regardless of whether religion instills these values in its adherents or not), then you have the following problem: 'life appearing as meaningful' is not an empirical claim about the world or the people thereof. Take the linguistic level itself: you have to prove that the subject (life) in the sentence can take the predicate (meaningfulness) legitimately, without there being any religious shade to that usage. How can life be meaningful? Clearly, there is a trick involved here. The 'meaningfulness' is not the same meaningfulness that you and I know of with regard to language usage. In language usage, when I say something is meaningful, I mean sentences have displayed a certain property. (Translatability, verisimilitude, grammaticality, linguistic acceptability and so on. You may choose your favourite school amongst these, but the general point is what is important). But when I say 'life is meaningful', then, I cannot possibly mean any of the above mentioned things. I cannot presume that life is grammatical or acceptable or translatable or so on. I can only mean something else: that life is purposeful. But purposes are attributes of agents. Even Dworkin would not want to grant purposiveness to non-agents, I hope. What is it to treat life as purposeful if life cannot be seen as an agent? Minimally, it is to treat life as embodying the purpose of some agent, whose power has been transferred onto life because life is the creation, handiwork or embodiment (in whatever sense of the term) of that agent. Now, this agent cannot be man because, then, the whole argument collapses. It has to be something other than man. Oh well, it has to be god.

4. However, this is undercover theology and therefore cannot stand as an explanation for religion. What is more, the theological picture is non-trivially required to generate ideas like "meaningfulness of life". So, despite all his caveats and carefulness, Dworkin is doing theology. Which is all fine in itself. Only it cannot be an explanation of a phenomenon called religion.

Query:

When you say life is purposeful, it does not mean that someone has given life some purpose, but that you are giving a purpose. That agent is oneself. And why should the argument collapse in this case?

Clarification:

If "you" give purpose, then, how will you save yourself from the "hall of mirrors" problem? That is, you have purpose, you have given it to life. And it is a closed-loop relationship between the two things. Like say hallucinations in neurotics. I think there is a cop in this room. And I behave like there is a cop in this room. And for all purposes, there is a cop in this room as far as I am concerned. However, this in no way proves whether there is a cop in this room or not.

Freedom, Determinism and Science

2013-04-16T00:52:00.003+05:30

Why is the question of the free will/freedom significant? Why is it so important to know if we are free?

Here is an answer from a friend:

All knowledge is tentative
Knowledge in the field of the natural sciences is more secure/more highly developed than that in other fields (must not be so but happens to be so in the world in which we live)
Since the natural sciences posits determinism (or chance, but that's another story) all problems that are potentially threatened by determinism must take this threat seriously.

Thus we can't just say, as Strawson does, that we can't take the threat seriously, and then just ignore the most secure knowledge we have.

From the way this problem is posed it appears that:

Natural sciences says there is universal causality
That all events in nature have a cause
Since man too is part of nature, then everything man does must have a cause. the determinist says there is therefore no freedom
On the other hand, the libertarians say there is freedom and it is an interruption of causality
Thus both the determinist and the libertarian accept that if there is universal causality, there is no freedom
So Hume comes along and says "the premise is wrong". Not all causes threaten our freedom. Only some causes do.

Science develops its laws to explain things in a deterministic causality
From this you can say that scientific explanations have a deterministic nature. No sane person can deduce from this that the world is deterministic or any such thing. That is a metaphysical claim which has nothing to do with science. Determinism is an attribute of our description of the world; not an attribute of the world
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the claim about freedom cannot be emerging as a response to science. It can only emerge from some other source

So what do you mean when you say explanations have deterministic nature? It does not make sense to say explanations have a deterministic nature. It is an assumption about the world, is it not: that there are laws governing events in nature. So events in nature are determined.

I think you are simplifying things here, a little too much. So are you saying natural science is only a perspective? And that it is not about the true nature of the world. And that everything that happens in nature has a cause is the assumption of the description?

Nature has laws according to which everything happens
Science posits that nature has law according to which things happen

You are saying “do not collapse the description of natural science about the world (that everything that happens in nature happens according the laws of causality) to be the property of the world itself? And that natural science is just one among many descriptions of the world? Have I got you right?

There is universal causality is no doubt the feature of the description of the world, but that description we assume is true. Therefore it is alright to collapse it with the property of the world. That is the only way science can progress.

Re: Goodman’s “The Way the World Is”. It seems like the old problem. Can we know the being in itself? The author here seems to say we can only have a partial description or one truth. There may be several ways and that no description really can get at the world as it is.

Natural science is a true perspective. It may even be a better perspective than many others. But then, it is total bullshit to claim that it is a perspective about the "world" (by which is meant the totality of being). Natural science, by definition, is a true/better/good perspective about some part of the world. You may say this is a quibble. No. This is not a quibble. This is the whole damn story.

To talk about the "world", "nature" or "universe" in terms of 'what is given' is to necessarily make ontological claims about the universe which are metaphysical in nature. You cannot get scientific theories to do that. Scientific theories are not there to give you descriptions about how the world is. But they are there to give you explanations for how something or the other works.

It is a category mistake to ask the "what is?" question to a domain which deals only with "how does something work?" question.

This is the first general point. The second one is more specific. Regarding Goodman you say, "The author here seems to say we can only have a partial description or one truth. There may be several ways. And that no description really can get at the world as it is." This is not what Goodman is saying. He is not saying "no description can really get the world the way it is". Instead he is saying there is no one way the world is given. To assume that is to have a false picture about the world. It is to have a bad metaphysical view of the world. The world is given in many ways. Therefore the descriptions are also many. We can of course evaluate between the many descriptions and see which ones are good and which ones are bad. All this in no way implies that our description is partial (in a lamentable sense of the term). It only implies that exhaustive description of objects is a sad myth. No description exhausts the object. This does not mean that a given description in relation to a given field of problems cannot be good. Of course, it can be good and even sufficient. But it does not exhaust the object.

Your objection is: universal causality is no doubt the feature of the description of the world, but that description we assume is true. And therefore it is alright to collapse it with the property of the world. And that's the only way science can progress.

No scientific theory is saying that universal causality is a true description of the world. Scientific theories do not say such things. It is bad philosophy which thinks scientific theories are saying such things. Scientific theories are giving accounts of phenomena. For example, gravity, thermodynamics, natural selection etc. These accounts to be useful must have a feature. They must be deterministic accounts. If not, it is not clear what the point of your knowledge is. So for example, Newton's theory is telling you that if you want to understand motion in bodies, it makes sense if your account is true for all bodies and all times. This only proves that gravity is a deterministic picture about some phenomena in the world. It may even prove that gravity is a determinate force. But this in no way proves therefore that the world is determinate. To say the world is determinate is to talk about an object (the world, and its mode of existence) about which science has no investment or interest, let alone the expertise to deal with.

Do Classificatory Systems and Taxonomies reflect Ontological Commitments?

2013-04-16T00:13:00.002+05:30

1. Different cultures have different classificatory taxonomies. There is a remarkable similarity between them as well as significant differences. One of these three cases must therefore follow:

Similarities show that nature is mind-independent. Differences show that some cultures are wrong.

Differences show that nature is culture-dependent. Similarities show that there can be significant overlaps in our perception owning to similarity of circumstances in dealing with nature.

Similarities show that nature is largely mind-independent. But differences show that it can be validly carved out in more than one ways.

2. But I do not see the reason for making any ontological claims in any of these three cases. One can equally render this story in the following language: there are remarkable similarities between different cultures' ways of classification because human perception has remarkable similarity of structure across different times and cultures. There are significant differences because human beings differ in their perception to a small but significant extent (owing to culture and various other factors) despite the similarity in their physical make-up.

3. If we agree with the preceding point, then, the entire debate about whether ontology (or scientific theories for that matter, as this paper is not particularly bothered with that distinction) cuts the world at its joints makes little sense. In fact, the inability to make distinctions between ontology and scientific theories is probably more than a minor error and is the source of the undoing of this paper. Let me try and elaborate:

4. Scientific theories provide explanatory models about parts of the world using concepts and tools that are relevant to the purpose. They do not give you an ontological story about beings and categories used to apprehend beings. They do not say "what the world is" or "what things there are". It is possibly outside of the purview of science. But ontology asks the question "what is there". The premise of the ontological question is why and what things exist? And what are the relationships between different categories of being? Note that you can take any one or the other ontological position and still arrive at the same scientific theories.

5. In fact, sensu stricto, ontological determinations have nothing to do with scientific explanations apart from indirectly influencing your line of inquiry. So, for example, when I say 'electron', I could assume that the mode of being of the electron is as a theoretical entity, a postulate, an empirical entity or simply a thing in the mind. It does not matter for my theory of the electron what ontological status I provide for it. But it matters whether an electron is to be classified as a positive charge or as a negative charge. And this decision has nothing to do with the ontology of the electron. It is a theoretical decision based on empirical and other such factors.

6. It follows that taxa are part of the theoretical constructs about our world and do not imply an ontological commitment about its mode of being. When I look at bats and say that they are mammals or say that they are birds, I am classifying an instance using one or the other theory (explicit or implicit) about the natural world. I am not entering into an ontological question about the being of bats.

7. In fact, ontological questions are not about entities at all. They are about categories of being. Therefore, to ask whether bats are really mammals or bats are really birds is to ask whether the natives' theory is better or the scientists' theory is better. You can answer any which way and all the issues that you encounter in evaluating two theoretical paradigms you encounter here too. But, if you mistakenly think of this as an ontological question, then you will be foxed with insuperable problems like "whether the world really is like how the scientific theories describe it or is it like how the folk taxonomies describe it?" etc.

8. You may want to ask, "insofar as a theory is correct (or good) are we not compelled to say that it describes the true reality or reality as it truly is?" My answer is: No! Try this experiment: lets assume a world where neither bats exist nor mammals exist. Assume further that we find people in this world making some talk about bats beings mammals and about bats being non-mammals. You may want to say that these people are hallucinating or babbling. But you can still perfectly figure out whether or not they are making sense (at least to each other). What does this show: There is a difference between a) the consistency and veracity of our descriptions and explanations about the world and b) our ontological commitments about things in the world.

Scientism and Curtailment of Thought

2013-02-04T23:32:00.000+05:30

Science and scientific pursuit has today acquired one of the two narrow meanings. It either means the pursuit of specific disciplines like Physics and Chemistry (and increasingly also Psychology and Management) or it means thinking about things using tools which are ostensibly scientific: like quantitative data, statistical methods and experimental techniques. In all this the scope of science ends up being curtailed to some set of objects (like electrons and alkalis) or to some set of tools (like statistical inference or experimentation). There would be no crisis if it were merely a problem of wrong or inadequate conception of science that people have. After all it is nobody’s lament that bad definitions are a problem in and by themselves. The more intractable problem is this: behind this curtailing of the scope of science, is another related change. That of lack of attention to thought in everyday life. We think of living as accumulating right beliefs (which explains the great thirst for books about motivation, self help and all the Chicken Soups for every variety of soul) or we think of living as making right choices and decisions based on the limited data we are encountered with. It seems like the contemporary notion of living is almost exhausted by these two relationships we have to living. Either we need to know how to make friends, how to win partners and how to impress bosses or we need to know, given a variety of choices, how to make the right decisions and selections regarding stocks and shares, apparels, cars and life partners. Be it folk psychology or normative political theory, all contemporary thinking seems to push us to this spot of choosing and evaluating between contending alternatives.

However, there is a strong hunch most people have which they would not be able to articulate, but would nevertheless want to hold on to. That is, that living cannot be exhausted by these two functions. It most often gets articulated as the desire for ‘higher pursuits’ and the need for thinking about the ‘greater good’. However inadequate and faulty these formulations are, it is undeniable that they are attesting to something significant and meaningful for most people who make such claims.

We can minimally draw from this commonsense articulation the following criterion: a good life will have an element of reflection and understanding about what is it to live a good life. That is, it will necessarily contain an intellectual disposition towards our experience. But we are unable to put this with any degree of clarity thanks to the two related changes we have seen: the curtailing of the scope of science and the lack of attention to thought.

It is important to rejuvenate thinking in order to enable us to make sense of our own experience. This is not equal to producing in us a sensibility; but the task is to equip us with tools and concepts to attend to and examine our experience with greater felicity and richness. Doing this, I believe, is doing science.

Edinburgh Journal Part II

2013-01-18T23:09:00.001+05:30

13.06.2012

The Musselburgh Beach

To call it a beach would be to disturb the tranquility of the waters' melancholy murmuring on fine sand. This is the hinter-waters of the North Sea. Out here, the Sea is a slow, placid and musical immensity brought to rest. The waters of the North Sea is cold as ice and it is up here almost beyond the tropic of Capricorn. Therefore, the light stays until about 10 in the night at this time of the year. So by about 9.30 in the night, the sun had ravaged the western horizon with an immodest saffron toasted sky. Facing the setting sun I walked for about half an hour to reach the quay and then sat at the quayside of the harbour for many a minute. Slowly, the Sea started to undulate due to a cold blade of wind, like sheet steel under a sledge hammer.

The Horizon is to the north. In India, beyond the horizon, looking to the sea, one will find the sun setting or rising. But here, the horizon points to the north pole. The sun sets by your left to the western part which glimmers with the pointed and wavy sodium lights of the city of Edinburgh.

The North Sea

slowly

begins to become something more than a water body. As the night approaches, the city lights in the far distance become sharper and the sky grows heavy with the curdling of rain clouds. It becomes an ashen gray and before you know it is black with cloud piling. The Sea slowly murmurs and rises its heaving and its dull and muffled waves hit the oyster shells in the beach with a spent force rambling along backwards. The water becomes thick and its colour changes from a deep turquoise to a pale amethyst. It is almost like an immense liquid pebble. The muffled roar of the sea does not dislodge the quiet but works like a barometer to measure the depth of silence.

As the night thickens and the sky showers an occasional drop of rain here on my cheek and there on the stone paved parapets, I walk back home. The Sea has put a huge chunk of silence inside my chest and my breath has become heavy and thick. The Sea folds back into itself and my eyes hurt with the sight of objects.

Edinburgh City:

This is a city of many levels. The Edinburgh Waverly Station is about a hundred feet below and the old University Halls halls are a hundred feet above from where I stand. In a way the city is a multistory arrangements of roads and mounds and closes. Closes are small passages with steps which connect two streets and wind through the backyard of buildings and work as shortcuts for pedestrians to cut across roads from one level to another. Seen from a distance, the tip of one building forms the foot of another and so on for nearly ten to twelve levels. At the top of all this is the Edinburgh Castle. Since it is a major tourist attraction, I need not describe it. Suffice to say that people find it extremely beautiful and majestic and rightly so.

But my Edinburgh moment was something very different. I got a snap of myself standing next to the greatest figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. On a solid pedestal of about ten feet height stands the immense eight-feet high bronze statue of this greatest Philosopher of Scotland. The Bronze has oxidized over the years in contact with air and moisture and turned an ammoniacal green. Hume is sculpted as seated on a chair with a bent back pouring over some object of study. His toe shines in a brilliant coppery gold as this one little part has not been oxidised. Or well, the tourists or administrators have polished it with their hands by repeatedly touching the only part that is touchable by someone standing below. Interestingly, Hume is dressed not like an Enlightenment intellectual but like a Greek philosopher with a long robe made of a single raiment. It is largely the pseudo-Hellenistic trends in sculpture, painting and architecture that prevailed in the nineteenth century that explains this bizarre choice of dress.

The Scots gave the Enlightenment to the world a couple of centuries ago. Recently, they got a parliament of their own, separately from the one at London.

We tasted some very fine single malt distilled in Edinburgh and it was just right. The poison singed the tongue with a loving touch of its million pointed fingers all down through the throat.

Now, as a result, I need to sleep.

The North Sea is sleeping too.

Ashwin K

Edinburgh Journal

2013-01-18T23:07:00.002+05:30

11.06.2012

Here I am. Sylvan country. Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Scotland

The mercury has significantly dipped compared to London. The countryside is an undulating meadow with horses, sheep and cows grazing in the distance. The houses are impeccably designed in the classic English style. The eye meets order in what man has made as much as what man has left untamed. However, the roads are absolutely empty.

We are staying on campus in a huge building with absolutely geometric proportions and precise construction. It is modernism at it best. Steel, glass and biting cold concrete. Let me describe the bathroom. I wanted to send you a snap but that will ruin the image. In size, it is about seven eights of the Indian Railways toilet in a typical compartment. Or say, it is about a fraction bigger than the toilets in international flights. But then, they have made it with so much thought and precision that from now on I have come to believe that optimum toilet space for human beings need to be only two and and half feet by three feet or something like that. Everything else is opulence. I will not bother you with details of the sheer neatness of design. In fact, I think if there is something to learn from these people (I mean English and Europeans across the board), it is the neatness of design. I guess the World War II and industrial design and of course the transatlantic influence of Fordism may all have played their role in this. But the striking thing is the attention to detail in design. In parenthesis, I need to mention the "British Design 1945-2012" exhibition that was curated in the Victoria Albert Museum which we went to yesterday in London. It was in a way a magnificent history of appearances. How come the Western world (British specifically) has come to look the way it looks in terms of objects, design, layouts and technology was what the exhibition tried to explore.

Back to Edinburgh. Since we are staying this time in a University Guest House which is designed like a self-catering flat, we walked for about a mile to buy groceries for the next three days we are staying here. We are not cooking but microwaving frozen pasta and suchlike. And since I have a very broad-spectrum cuisine tolerance, I have no complaints.

In London, today, near the Southbank Area, just off Waterloo, we went lunching with Sanjay Seth and his wife Rajeshwari Pandey to Ping Pong, a fascinating Japanese (Or was it Chinese) Restaurant. If I tell you what we ate, some of you will curse me with jealousy and some of you will criticize me with anger. So I will not bother you. But Dim Sums it was largely.

Since Kaushik objected to not having Subbi Chinnu on the mailing list, I am creating a new Gmail ID for Subbi Chinnu now. Although I will not send her these mails, I thought I can send her a few mails which she can read when she grows up. It is like a message in a bottle from another time, an autonomous time bubble, as it were. If you are interested, I can copy you on those mails too. You see I cant trust parents to bring their children up correctly. It needs people with some background in metaphysics and philosophy to bring up children. I mean bringing them up in order to become citizens of the true Platonic Republic. Philosopher Kings. (Well, since it is Subbi Chinnu in question, let us say someone like Hypatia, the celebrated pagan scientist and astronomer from Alexandria from the Greek antiquity).

I will write with details of London and Edinburgh in a few days from now. I am still reveling at the thought that I now have unlimited access to internet in private space in this place. Something that was not the case for the last three days.

More later

Ashwin K

London Calling

2013-01-18T23:05:00.000+05:30

08.06.2012

Dear long-lapsed subjects of Her Excellency the Queen of England and Wales and the Empress of India (the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown of Her Excellency),

I'm three hours old in London.

If someone can fund me and all of you can join me, I see no reason why my remains should not be interred here, earth to earth and dust to dust in the soil of this holy mother country.

London is a huge golf course, dotted with Brickwork buildings, archaic cars and pretty cobblestone streets; in fact today's edition of the London Evening Standard has a story where some citizens are protesting the civic authorities' decision to lay asphalt on cobblestone streets from a hundred years ago. Of course, in the interest of your limb and person, the suggestion is that you look for the green lights in the pedestrian crossings, because car drivers and cyclists alike think that a green for them means a "go" all the whole hog and they can mow you down. But then if it is a red for them they think it is a stop. Now, come on, neither of it can be true in the tropical colonies out there, where you are ensconced in your soft beds at this unearthly hour of your meridian.

An ambulance passed by. It only proves that utter reality of the place I sit in. This is the lobby of the Tavistok Hotel, Tavistok Square, Bloomsbury, London. The lobby is a curved glass affair at street level. These two sumptuous old women outside the glass walls, with a shivering cigarette in their hands to tease the nipping chill in the air, are actually at my fingertips. I mean I can touch their blonde hair or smooth their shins, if my fancy wants it.

I was told one needs to avoid English food. Thankfully, the English themselves have done that favour to us. (Boy! My computer flashes an error on the word "favour" spelled with a "u". Disgrace to the Queen's tongue brought about by slaves and slave traders from across the Atlantic). The food virtually invented by the English and made popular in the subcontinent is called the "Chicken Tikka Masala". Don't laugh. It is you who got your history wrong this time. Not me! Nevertheless, the point is, for dinner, I had some Lebanese/Mediterranean food of Kubbus and cheese cakes with hummus and olive and jalapeno salad. Of course there was the wine to top it which had to be billed separately because university accountants in India do not allow for alcohol expenses.

We took the London Underground ('the tube' in slang) from the Heathrow to Russel Square and then trotted and rattled our luggage across the street to the hotel. The Tube (well, granting lowly speech its just place in the world) took us through lawns and flower beds dotted with lilies. The sky was uniformly overcast. The temperature was 15 degrees Celsius. There was a cold and stiff breeze that pounded you whenever the Tube stopped in the stations and the automatic doors opened. (I will reserve my comments on automatic doors for another occasion. Basically I think we need to programmatically remove every singly one of them from every public transport terminal in the world. It is a disgrace to see people trying to accurately guess the unpredictable motions of these automated monstrosities. I would rather they paid that kind of attention to their awry and moody wives and girlfriends. Then, our beds would be filled with more love and our world would be filled with less bile). But coming back to the stiff breeze, it was like purity given an aerodynamic kinesthetics. Now, the English weather forecast contains not only details of when and where and how it will rain but also the amount of nitrogen phosphorous particles per million grams of atmospheric air. Now you know what I mean by purity. They say London is polluted but I guess I can attest for that only when I see the city tomorrow when it is fully awake.

We are close to where Virginia Woolf lived, where Sherlock Holmes spent futile hours in metaphysical speculations about human criminality and where of course the British Library is housed. But all that is lore. The real London is, believe me, the two sumptuous women who are offering their flesh to my optic thirst outside the oval-shaped glass lobby.

More when I have more to say.

(Please don't think I am happy being here and the trip is a success. That can only be said after I touch Indian soil again. One should not confuse the beauty of the world with the state of the soul). Never. The legendary Pre-Raphealite artist and art historian John Ruskin, who, by the way, walked these very streets, called that error "pathetic fallacy". He accused Wordsworth of it and praised Homer for not succumbing to it.

Darlings, Lovers and Sparrows in my palm,

Lots of love and benedictions,

The Patron Saint of Canterbury and the Keeper of the Conscience of this Nation be with you,

Deus Caritas Est,

Ashwin K.

Politics for Swaraj

2012-10-10T21:16:00.004+05:30

Dear Yogen da,

At the very outset, let me express my solidarity with your idea about the Bharat Yatra. (After all, the great idea of Swaraj for Gandhi began with a similar Bharat Yatra).

In the sidelines, let me add my musings rather than concrete suggestions to your idea. I am sure you have come across this famous interview of Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Movement, conducted by the legendary Garcia Marquez. Here is a link for ready reference.

The Punch Card and the Hour Glass

What do we want from a new political party? A space which can open up for questioning rather than governing. You will agree that governing will boil down to the same thing, no matter who governs. Therefore, what we need our youth to understand is that politics is more than merely holding state power, or aspiring to hold such power. It is about living a particular kind of life: of reflection on common life, of a sense of the corporate nature of social living. I think the current diagnosis that youth are disillusioned by politics merely reflects the fact that state power has become the limiting horizon of all political activity. Needless to say, unless you are very hungry, state power is a pretty tiring thing. No wonder the youth shy away from politics.

In this attempt, it may not be all that important to address civic issues, although not for a moment am I suggesting that they are not important in themselves. What I am saying is that politics is undercut by thinking of it in terms of getting the state to deliver social goods. It is also not important to get our youth to be concerned about the 'nation', that rallying point which we still make use of to evoke our corporate life. We do not require, strictly speaking, polemics against corruption either. Definitely we do not want any refined variety of social reform. All these are short lived, and detrimental to the true vocation of politics, as you would have already seen. What we need is some kind of readiness to think, to understand, a space to debate and understand and put things in perspective: Politics as Understanding.

The next question is, what do we think about? And why do we need Politics to think? Of course, we think about the good. Somehow, all our discussions about 'the good' is usurped by thinking about rights and social justice. Political parties are vendors of rights and arbiters of social justice. We need a political party which does not speak for any constituency but speaks about conditions of good life. And the conditions of good life is not income levels and GDP growth. I'm sure political parties of the present age will take care of all that. We would want a political party which will think of good life not as an achievable, but as a concern proper to the human being. As a state of जागृति.

Why do we need politics to think? For the simple reason that there is no social thinking without acknowledging the social nature of our thinking. And politics is the quintessential space where such an acknowledgement is brought into our experience.

I'm not for a moment hoping that this will become a manifesto line for the new party. People will laugh at such ideas in a manifesto, and rightly so. But I am serious about the concern one needs to have at the back of the mind regardless of the methods and manners adopted in bringing such a change about. In short, we want a political party, which will truly inaugurate the political as a mode of life. Gandhi attempted it and Lohia tried it. My present-day examples come from the Open Source movement in software. I am not suggesting that open source is a political movement and is an example of how politics should be done. Open source, if you really get to the bottom of it, has no agenda or ideology either. It is just a space for people to really experiment, reflect and learn. Whatever else it may be, open source is definitely, minimally, a space to think about common life and the conditions of such life. If it is so, then, that attitude which is behind so many young people contributing their time and energy to a particular mode of living amidst digital technologies contains a lesson for us.

I am sure you will treat my thoughts with your usual indulgence and that has encouraged me to write such an uncharacteristically polemical letter.

I hope this Bharat Yatra will be the beginning of what you yourself have so evocatively called the "Swaraj of the mind".

Yours,

Ashwin

Hegel, Positivity and Nationalism

2012-04-15T12:49:00.001+05:30

Hegel ends his 1795 text, The Positivity of the Christian Religion, with an observation which is very crucial for our contemporary understanding of nationalism:

The rise of all the Christian sects in the Middle Ages and in modern times is based on individuals’ sensing that they had the right to legislate for themselves. But in uncivilized ages, or in men born in a social class condemned to barbarism by its rulers, the principle of such a legislation was generally a fevered, wild, and disordered imagination. Still, among its products a beautiful spark of reason glowed from time to time, and thus man’s inalienable right to legislate for himself out of his own heart was always upheld.

In tracing the origins of nationalism many theorists have taken recourse to a truncated version of this argument. They have argued that it is the desire for self-determination that has motivated peoples of different nations to make sovereign claims. We can readily appreciate the merits of these theories and the connections it has with Hegel’s ideas especially after recent scholarship has shown the deep links between the origins of nationalism and the history of religious movements in post-reformation Europe. However, what we cannot understand from these theories are the reasons behind the emergence of such sovereign claims. Explanations which take recourse to industrialisation, break-up of the erstwhile empire structures and the dwindling power of the Church give an assortment of conditions that may have been catalytic in bringing about sovereignty demands. But they do not suffice as explanations for understanding these demands themselves.

To argue that sovereignty is an inalienable need of a people does not fully solve the problem. Firstly, insofar as sovereignty is an inalienable right and nationalism an instance of sovereignty, we still need to demarcate nationalism as a specific phenomenon different from other sovereign claims. It is here that most explanations of nationalism fall short of proposing adequate answers: rather than inquire about the specificity of nationalism as a sovereignty claim, most theories of nationalism try to provide socio-historical causes for the emergence of sovereignty claims in the historical period of nationalism, thereby contradicting the inalienability of sovereign claims thesis. And secondly, insofar as we do not want to presume the inalienable right of sovereignty, we need to ask what is the scope of this right, that is, to what things and under what conditions can it be applied.

If sovereignty is such a natural need of the people, we need to answer why until the moment of nationalism people did not feel the need for sovereignty? Either we need to show that people were always sovereign and something happened during the period immediately preceding nationalism whereby their sovereignty was robbed and therefore nationalism was a backlash to reclaim that lost right, or we need to show that absence of sovereignty can be characterised as a lack and that most societies progressively evolve towards understanding the salience of sovereignty. Both these strategies have been attempted without much success. We can sum up the entire scholarship by showing what are the conceptual limits within they operate: once they argue that sovereignty is a basic need they are forced to explain all apparent deviations from the theory as teleologically prior points in the history of the realisation of sovereignty or they have to explain the emergence of the demand for sovereignty retrospectively as a result of social processes, bypassing the substantive discussion of the problem.

Another recurring pattern in the theories of nationalism, when they are not talking about sovereignty, is the problem of social cohesion. That is, nationalism is seen as the modern answer to the perennial question of ensuring social cohesion. The assumption here is again that societies require cohesion to function and that it is brought about by the conscious intervention of social actors. What founds a society (the principle of cohesion) is here treated as something which needs to be put in place and maintained.[1]

We need to take up and examine the underlying assumptions in each of these cases, i.e, the principle of sovereignty and the principle of cohesion, in their turn and see if the difficulty that nationalism poses for social theorists is not due to some of the pre-theoretical assumptions that underlie the explanations for nationalism as a phenomenon. One of the ways by which we can begin addressing this problem is by a close re-working of Hegel’s arguments and drawing out of its full implications. As suggested earlier, contemporary theories of nationalism are but a truncated version of the problem set up by Hegel and so restoring the lost unity of that argument might be a logical way forward. Hegel’s concern in The Positivity of the Christian Religion in his own words is the following:

We are to search, partly in the original shape of Jesus’ own religion, partly in the spirit of the epoch, for certain general reasons which made it possible for the character of the Christian religion as a virtue religion to be misconceived in early times and turned at first into a sect and later into a positive faith.

By the positivity of Christian religion Hegel means the subordination of the subjective virtue of freedom where people discover the ethical values proper to them to a “positive religion, i.e., a religion which is grounded in authority”. He further claims that positive ideas of religion give birth to positive sects. Contrasting the philosophical sects, where holding on to erroneous doctrines is treated as unworthy of a thinking man but not as blameable, he says, the positive sects “for which both ethical principles and also what strictly does not depend on reason at all but has its credentials in the national imagination, are not so much unnecessary for morality as downright sinful and therefore to be guarded against”. Or in other words, “such a positive sect is one which puts in the place of this positive [product of popular imagination] some other positive doctrine”.

Therefore for Hegel the proliferation of sects within medieval Europe can be explained thus: the positivity of the Christian sect violates the fundamental desire for human volition in moral matters. If the Church is successful in this endeavour, then, it has to effectively wipe out an essential trait of humanity which is freedom and insofar it is not successful it has to give rise to voices of dissent which try to “give to themselves a moral law which arises from freedom”.

Simultaneous with the working of the Church is the working of the state.

[1] Hegel observes that this is the result of a monasticisation of everyday life, that is, a monastic order or a small sect might require maintaining its cohesion through some or the other means whereas expanding this same principle to society at large is futile.

Genealogy and History: A Comparison

2012-04-15T12:34:00.000+05:30

This is an attempt to look at the relationship between genealogy and history as two modes of writing and trace not only the differences but also the critical interdependence between the two modes. Further it delineates the importance of the non-reliance of the genealogical method on the notion of a trans-historical, supra-individual subject of experience for its writing. It tries to posit that this take on the subject is of critical importance for the genealogical method. It also attempts to map the post-colonial scene and the dilemmas of historiography here, onto this problematic and examine the issues that would arise in attempting a genealogy of non-western objects and concepts, or more precisely, objects and concepts in their non-western locales and avatars. Speculative as it may sound, the whole attempt is aimed at addressing a few conceptual ambiguities entailed in envisaging problems and questions for the contemporary. Therefore it is an exercise not in framing a problem but more rudimentarily in looking at the possibilities for a problem in a particular domain.

History as a mode of writing is mired in the narratives of enlightenment rationality and is therefore susceptible to a variety of epistemic traps, many of them constitutive to the genre itself. It presupposes a linear, dialectical and sometimes even evolutionary pattern to the objects that it describes on the axis of time. Most critiques of history and historiography which have emerged in recent years have noted this problem but have themselves been vulnerable to the vicissitudes of it in turn. The Subaltern Studies Collective is a prominent example. Although Subaltern Studies challenges colonial historiography and unearths deftly the imperialistic agenda and imagination behind such writing, and maps a subversive, counter narrative to it, it falls short in one serious way. Rebellion and oppositional claims exhaust a sociality’s imaginary and the contending claims of the subaltern become visible only against the rampant generalized imperial gaze. The subaltern is the new subject of history and a new locus of experience. In a precarious way it reinforces the imperial imaginary by bringing all histories to contend, subvert, react and redefine themselves against their signifying matrix of the colonial. The problem here is as much about ‘history’ as it is about imperialism. It still imagines the centrality of history in explaining the experiential world of the ‘subaltern’ which requires a translation of experiences into the terms of the modern, political, national idiom of classes, rights and secular destinies.

We need to reflect on the nature of the problem we are contending with: the issue is not really of doing away with history or historiography as a mode of knowledge. That would have to terminate in an undifferentiated negation of all knowledge, because that would be what rejecting history would entail, and what is more, it would also result in an uncritical acceptance of any and all practice as embodying an inherent cultural ‘value’ of its own, regardless of its content but precisely because of its content. This would be a sinister variety of third world post-modernism at best.

The other mode of operation is to work through the historical writing/tract, and thematically rework it to examine the shifting terms of that discourse itself. This would be the genealogical method. I would quickly gloss the genealogical method to then discuss the more pertinent concern of this paper, which is the critical inter-relationship between history and genealogy.

Genealogy, as Foucault enumerates in his essay Nietzsche Genealogy History, “does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and the profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the mole like perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins”.” (Foucault: 1977)

Genealogy therefore is not a narrative about an object whose contours, essence, and most importantly its presence is already given or assumed to be existing in a pre-discursive originality. Instead it is a delineation of the processes of negotiating the objects into existence, tracing their shifting features and accounting for their ‘meaning’. It is this aspect that Foucault highlights in his critique of what he calls ‘academic Marxism’ in France, when he says that the methodological defect here is, “that of assuming that the human subject, the subject of knowledge, and forms of knowledge themselves are somehow given beforehand and definitively, and that economic, social, and political conditions of existence are merely laid or imprinted on this definitely given subject.” (Foucault: 1974)

We need to make another clarification here regarding Foucault’s argument: it could well appear like Foucault is advocating a banal point about the constructed nature of all objects and knowledges and since all objects are constructed there in no special claim about any one or the other mode of knowledge or politics. This trivialization of knowledge and politics results in the reading of Foucault as another of those postmodernists pronouncing the death of this that or the other truth of the world. In place of such constructivist arguments, there have been attempts to relocate Foucault’s work differently. Although genealogy begins by examining objects and discourses for the rules and properties of their emergence and construction, it subsequently moves beyond that to look at the normative grids that underlie the truth claims made by systems and traditions of knowledge. These normative structures, or rationalities necessary for the production of truth, much like the justificatory apparatuses of state structures and juridical institutions, seem to be lost in the truth of a misty natural order or an inaccessible collective psyche or some fundamental human attribute unavailable for rational scrutiny. It is this mode of construction of knowledge, which is unique to enlightenment rationality, which requires a positing of a metaphysical, or at least what is its near equivalent, some inaccessible recess of the human psyche, that then delimits enquiry and acts as an absolute horizon for knowledge, all the while advocating the paramount importance of knowledge and falsifying its own agenda by positing this cognitive limit as an absolute condition of knowledge, that Foucault critiques.

Against many other critiques of enlightenment rationality, which tend towards the denial of the very possibility of knowledge or relegates knowledge to a purely contingent and playful system or in more cautious ways try to impose self restrictions or ethical barriers on the ‘mores’ and excesses of this knowledge, which is the same as accepting it in principle but not functioning with it in practice, Foucault’s critique of enlightenment rationality is different in many significant ways.

Foucault’s genealogical reconstruction of the culture of self of the Greek antiquity re-imagines a different mode of knowledge which is not linked to normative structures of truth. What is important to note here while delineating the methodological details of genealogy is the nature of the object being studied. We need to compare the genealogical object with the historical object and trace a few differences between them. It is possible that these disciplinary objects are housed in the selfsame body but their constitution as objects of enquiry are very different.

We may take the notion of the self: a historical understanding of the ‘self’ would delineate the many discourses that emerge regarding the given object ‘self’ on the axis of time. So we would have a Greek conception of the self and a Christian conception and so on which would describe the changing contours of the ‘given’ object called ‘the self’. In other words, history is a narrative of objects in their full positive presence. On the contrary a genealogical analysis of ‘self’ or ‘subject’ would account for the meaning of the object itself:

My aim will be to show you how social practices may engender domains of knowledge that not only bring new objects, new concepts, and new techniques to light, but also give rise to totally new forms of subjects and subjects of knowledge. The subject of knowledge itself has a history; the relation of the subject to the object; or, more clearly, truth itself has a history. (Foucault: 1974)

We have a crucial difference emerging here between history and genealogy. The changing terms of the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge between cultures or traditions separated by time and/or space requires an understanding of the conceptual categories through which a culture makes sense of its own experience. A supposedly universal grid like history reads all concepts regardless of their cultural valency as available for direct scrutiny. This is not a simple political process of co-optation to be easily explained as a strategy of colonialism or some other power structure, as what is at stake is an entire epistemology that undergrids disciplines and whole systems of production of knowledge. Therefore it becomes important to look at the conceptual, epistemic shifts, distortions that happen to systems of knowledge and practices because of colonialism with respect to non-western cultures or the spread of Christianity with respect to western cultures, as the case may be.

Voice Behind the Song, Song Through the Voice

2012-04-15T12:09:00.001+05:30

Review

[Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India, Amanda J. Weidman, Durham: Duke University Press. 2006. (pp.xiii+350) Price not mentioned]

Amanda Weidman’s Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India, comes in the wake of an increasing interest of social science scholarship in India about music.[1] This interest, as she mentions, is different from the investment that ethno-musicology has had in music theory and practice, which “was embracing Indian classical music as part of India’s “great tradition,” [and] anthropology at least in regard to South Asia, was busy developing its own canon around the “little traditions”” (24). These two dominant ways of looking at music have been displaced by a more fully articulated claim on music by anthropology, which takes it away from the strongholds of ethnomusicology and musicological study by examining “the practices of musical performance and cultures of listening [which] are crucial as domains in which modernity is staged and embodies and in which claims to authenticity are made” (24).

The book is divided into six chapters under the titles, “Gone Native?: Travels of the Violin in South India”, “From the Palace to the Street: Staging Classical Music”, “Gender and the Politics of Voice”, “Can the Subaltern Sing?: Music, Language and the Politics of Voice”, “A Writing Lesson: Musicology and the Birth of the Composer” and “Fantastic Fidelities” which is appended by an afterword “Modernity and the Voice”.

Weidman’s narrative traverses the various modes of ethnography beginning from her own experience as a student of Karnatic classical music, especially the violin, under a guru in the atmosphere of a gurukulavasam in Madras (Chennai), to archival research and the many interviews she has had with practitioners and theorists of music. These various strands are sutured into a very perceptive narrative which has the multiple facets of being partly a social history of Karnatic music, partly a theoretical exposition of the politics of voice and an eminently readable account of the interaction of cultural and aesthetic forms and larger political structures.

In the first chapter discussing the history of the violin in South India, the author says, “the violin came to be seen simultaneously as the modernizer of Karnatic music and the preserver of Karnatic Music’s authenticity, as embodied in the centrality of the violin”(14).

In reproducing voice, the violin also becomes a ventriloquizer. The perfect violin accompanist is one whose playing is so self-effacing and unobtrusive that the vocalist forgets there is anything except her own voice. At the same time, the vocalist cannot be heard without the violin. The violin thus renders Karnatic music “more articulate.” This same power of ventriloquism, which effect a separation between voice and subject, content and form, is perceived as the very magic that saved Karnatic music from destruction in the face of colonialism… By the logic of ventriloquism, the site of deepest colonial impact is transformed into the very sign, and sound, of a pure Indian voice. The voice emerges as that which escapes the colonial impact precisely by allowing itself to flow through another medium, the hollow body of the violin (56).

In the second chapter titled “From the Palace to the Streets: Staging Classical Music”, the author discusses various issues ranging from the changing institutional structures of patronage, the pedagogic anxieties of the music critics who deemed it necessary to train people into becoming good audiences and the emerging discourses of a new urban public sphere and the complex interactions between the then newly introduced microphone and the voice. The third chapter “Gender and the Politics of Voice” discusses through the case of M.S. Subbulakshmi the emergence of a new discourse about natural voice. This discourse was interlinked with the nationalist attention to the women’s question which makes them not only the true bearers of tradition but also the best suited agents for this tradition to travel globally. Women are then the custodians of a tradition in modernity. This modernity has the contradictory qualities of becoming an all effacing presence and bringing about a desirable refinement to culture. The contradiction is here dramatized in the cryptic visibility of the female body on the concert stage where, unlike in the Western classical tradition, it is not effaced by a concert black dressing, but made visible as a respectable family woman. The voice, then, is separable from the body as it is also that which provides interiority to the modern subject. “The interiorized conception of voice made possible the subject positions of both the classical artist” and the “respectable woman”; the natural voice of the artist was – and still is – identified with the chaste body of the respectable woman” (149).

The fourth chapter “Can the Subaltern Sing? Music Language and the Politics of Voice” offers new insights into the question of Tamil nationalism along with theorizing the role of music in this politics. Observing that “the Tamil music movement was more than a demand that the classical music repertoire include more songs in Tamil” she goes on to suggest that “it was part of a new set of discourses about the singing subject and the relationship between music and language.” Weidman argues that music emerges at this point a domain separate from literature but modeled “like a language” or is a language in itself. This twentieth century idea, she says, applies “to music the concepts of meaning, intentionality, and understanding that are commonly applied to language in modernist thought” (152). This then leads to an interesting conflict between, on the one hand the universality of music, and on the other its particularity, its cultural ‘meaning’, which is laid out beautifully in Weidman's narrative.

The fifth chapter “A Writing Lesson: Musicology and the Birth of the Composer” begins by recounting the controversy around establishing the authenticity of the composer Swati Tirunal, a debate sparked off by S. Balachander in the mid 1980’s arguing that the composer did not exist at all and the compositions attributed to him were penned by someone else. Locating in this example issues around authorship and authenticity the chapter moves on to describe in fair detail the emergence of the practice of notating South Indian Classical music. Weidman makes a few perceptive comments about the different functions of the notes in Western and Indian Classical Music, where she says in the former tradition if notation “acted as an authoritative text” then in the latter it functioned as “a trigger for memory”:

Like a palm-leaf manuscript, notation in this second sense is not meant to be sight-read but studied and then interpreted. This way of using notation acknowledges the impossibility of total interchangeability between the oral/aural and the written; it considers the gap between oral/aural and written as productive rather than problematic. In admitting that notation is not perfectly legible, it acknowledges its profoundly mediating role (232).

This profoundly ‘mediating’ and ambivalent role of the text is an aspect which comes out time and again in Weidman’s work. Using mediation as a concept is a significant move that Weidman makes. This could further push her towards examining music practices more closely than to impose on it an already existing and by now predictable post colonial rubric of nationalism and modernity. Although nationalism and modernity are very significant frames for Weidman the limit that they impose on her rich ethnographic and archival material is quiet visible.

The last chapter “Fantastic Fidelities” discusses the role and meaning of technology in shaping music practice. It is almost a coup de grace when Weidman’s finishes her elaborate discussion of the anxieties begotten by the infusion of technology into music with an example of an electronic tambura (tanpura) manufactured by Radel, the shape of which actually resembles a ‘real’ tambura. This fantastic closure beginning from the ventriloquism of the violin and ending in the simulacrum of the electronic tambura opens up many more contrapuntal ways of reading the material in this book.

Weidman’s book is a fine example of rigorous ethnography and a close and intelligent reading of cultural forms. But it is also an opportunity for us to reflect on a larger methodological question, and that is the question of reading itself. Weidman’s analysis in some senses ‘reads’ the processes of modernity on to the particular cultural practice of ‘classical music’ in South India. The resultant narrative makes music yet another instance of the machinations of modernity in a non-western space with its vicissitudes of colonialism and nationalism. The close reading that Weidman subjects her material to is useful only insofar as it functions like an anchor to narrate modernity.

One wonders if the solution to this problem lies in what Weidman begins by critiquing: ethnomusicology and anthropology of music. Although Weidman’s arguments about the way in which these two disciplines frame their research object is very compelling, it does not take into account one significant factor: ‘the rules’ of the musicological discourse and practice itself which might gain significant emphasis in these two disciplines. It is this shift in the structure of rules when traced in the backdrop of modernity, which would have given Weidman’s work a better analytical edge. One instance should illuminate this: discussing the emergence of codifications of ragas and tracing its connection to the desire for reformulating music theory and practice in the light of the western musicology, Weidman fails to theorize an example which is similar and what is considered in South Indian musicological circles even to this day a rigorous codification system: Venkatamakhi’s melakarta system (c.1660). She goes on to describe in detail the functioning of the melakarta system and notes how this system was reclaimed as a marker of and for the modernity of classical music. She says, “the point however was that any raga past or future could now find a place in this universal table of scales”(234). By making this minor point about placing past or future ragas in this scale Weidman seems to be missing what according to me is the crux of the issue: to differentiate between the logic of the melakarta system and the logic of that very system as it functions like a system of ‘scientific’ classification in present day music practice. The expertise of an ethnographer/anthropologist may not be best suited to carry out this task but it is only when modernity is thus understood from this ‘outside’ as it were, do we ever get a better theoretical grip on it. In the absence of such an enquiry Weidman’s work runs the risk of becoming a description of the ‘differences’ between music practices in modernity and in a previous infinitely regressing non-modernity, meticulous, patient and nuanced that it is. These difference do not illuminate much as there is no systemic framework within which to see them.

None of these are problems with the scholarship and detail that have gone into Weidman’s work. On the contrary they are problems about finding better and alternative frames to cast the study of modernity in. In conclusion we must make mention, enviously, of Weidman’s writing which is so crisp and simple and yet capable of carrying complex ideas within a sparse and measured prose.

(Published in EPW, VOL 42 No. 38 September 22 - September 28, 2007)

[1] Janaki Bakhle. 2005. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. New Delhi: Permanent Black; Lakhsmi Subramaniam. 2006. From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy. New Delhi: OUP; Tejaswini Niranjana. 2006. Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration Between India and Trinidad. Durham: Duke University Press.