Once upon a time there was a little girl named Amelia who had big ears. She soon learnt to manipulate them- for e.g. she would cover her head with her ears if it got cold which is why she came to be known as Amelia Earhat. Soon she was able to take flight by using her ears as wings. She flew around the world teaching the 'Capabilities' approach to Development to poor and oppressed people. Sadly, the evil Disney Corp imprisoned her on some South Sea island. Using evil Nazi genetic science they created a flying Elephant named Dumbo. You may have seen a film by that name just as you may have heard the story of an American aviatrix named Amelia Earhart. However the truth is more sordid. Dumbo is a cartoon not a live action movie or documentary. The real life Dumbo turned out to be a jerk. He'd fly around crapping on people. That's why Disney had to spend a lot of money animating a cute baby elephant with a sweet nature.
As for the so called 'Amelia Earhart'- it is obvious that a woman who needed an expensive flying machine, invented and built by men, to fly around the world- could not have been a champion of a truly Aristotelian, and thus non-empty, Capabilities approach. This is because dunamis (δύναμις) in its stronger sense is independent of accidents such as might befall an aircraft reliant on fossil fuel energy. The entelechy associated with Amelia Earhat has, as telos, the self-generated capacity to fly. Furthermore, since ears which are also used as a hat are bound to fill up with all sorts of bird shit, it follows that Earhat would have been Martha Nussbaum level stupid. Thus it was Earhat, not Nussbaum, who was the first great female American expounder of the Capabilities approach. Amartya Sen was about 3 or 4 years old when Earhat visited him in India. Thus his version of the Capability approach, though wholly empty, is more in line with Earhat's doctrine.
Prof of Comp. Religion, Abrahim Khan, in the course of a keynote speech delivered 10 years ago, observed
what I seek to do here is to propose a line of influence, not hitherto discussed, on Amartya Sen’s thinking of the capability concept. It is done by postulating that the childhood or background scenes of his idea of capability are not exclusively that which we have come to know in discussions thus far.
Very true. Sen's meeting with Amelia Earhat is never mentioned.
For concepts, as with individuals, have histories. Their histories, reminded Soren Kierkegaard, “are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time.”
The full quote is 'Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.'
Khan doesn't say that Kierkegaard was writing about the concept of irony which, let's face it, retains a homesickness for Demeter's laughter- which restored fertility to the world- when old Baubo lifted her skirt to reveal... a twat truly worthy of our reverence, if not worship.
Kierkegaard thought philosophy could not be content to find irony, ironic- i.e. funny here and now- it must find some way for the joke never to pall. But Baubo doesn't eternally lift her skirts. She did it once and for a good purpose- to get grief stricken Demeter to laugh and thus unlock fruit from the earth's womb. I suppose Baubo's own daughters would have been past child bearing age. But, by her bawdy gesture, she ensured the sons of Man would not perish for want of love, laughter or such labor as is most becoming to what must always be a merely accidental and transitory state of being.
But in and through all the ravaging they “retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.”3 Our proposal contends that the Indic intellectual tradition and civilization,
which is either Hindu, Jain, Sikh or does not fucking exist save as a 'jahilliat' to be overcome
in so far as Rabindranath Tagore is representative and a continuation of it, also plays a role in forming the childhood or background scenes of the concept that is at the heart of much of Sen’s thinking on economics and development.
Tagore tried to set up an Agricultural Institute and a Cooperative Bank and so forth. He was quite pragmatic and empirical in himself. But he sent his son and son-in to Amrika to study agronomy. That was foolish. Like the Nawab of Chhatari, Tagore needed to either enter Government himself or have a son do it, so that the 'progressive' zamindar could get State help to gain scope and scale economies from which the whole District could benefit. What was crazy was to try to go it alone that too on a narrow and (let's face it) elitist basis. The fact is that what binds Humanity together is not 'Freedom' or 'Capability' or some other such abstraction. It is Tardean mimetics- monkey see, monkey do- and politics and other such monkey tricks.
Tagore had got it into his head that 'Freedom' and 'Humanity' meant that every Village could create its own Agricultural Institute and Arts College and so forth. He didn't know about 'non-convexities'- i.e. economies of scope and scale and mimetic effects and so forth. Neither did Sen because he studied stupid shit and then taught stupid shit even though less stupid shit was now known to be the case.
Capability is a crucial concept for Sen’s book, Development as Freedom. He began to broach that idea in his 1979 Tanner Lectures, following it up in a book, Commodities and Capabilities, in 1985, and then in collaborated studies with Martha Nussbaum during 1987-89.4 Academic discussions on his capability concept reference a western intellectual tradition represented by a line of thinkers that include Rawls, Marx, Adam Smith, Hume, and Aristotle. Occasionally, Sen himself has alluded to them, to Aristotle in particular, following, as it were, a cue from Martha Nussbaum.5 For, her discussion of the capability focussed approach is assuredly in the spirit of Aristotle, especially with reference to the human good or functionings by which we flourish. Both Nussbaum and Sen note that the Greek dunamin can be rendered in English as either “potentiality” or “capability of existing.”6 Sen, however, acknowledges in a footnote to his essay “Capability and Well-Being,” that he was simply not aware of any Aristotelian link when he was proposing the capability approach.7 What then might have influenced his thinking on capability? Where are to be found the childhood scenes of his capability concept?
Purushartha would be the Hindu answer. Arvind Sharma has a good article on this here. The means by which wealth and capacity for enjoyment are built up are referred to as 'purushartha'. However some means are righteous, others unrighteous. Artha- meaning- is a 'saadhya'- i.e. something to be realized (thus like the Aristotelian dunamin). Saadhya is linked to sadhana with the former denoting 'ends' of a hedonic type while sadhana, or prayer, would be the spiritual means to a Divine end. Tagore would often quote Manusmriti to this effect
अधर्मेणैधते तावत् ततो भद्राणि पश्यति ।
ततः सपत्नान् जयति समूलस्तु विनश्यति ॥The question is all the more pressing when we inquire about the idea of human nature or person that Sen’s capability presupposes.
Purushartha presupposes 'Dharma' (Religion) and 'Moksha' (Deliverance) as undergirding all motivated actions. If you take God out of the picture, you either have to have Benthamite normativity which had been exploded long ago, or else you have to confine yourself to actually doing 'first order good'- e.g. improving 'mechanism design' thus economizing on resource use so everybody can be better off. Sen wanted to do 'second order good'- i.e. demand more first order good- but how is one to do it unless either there is a God who will reward and punish or else there is some objective Benthamite Social Welfare Function?
Sen's answer was just to endless talk stupid shite so as to postpone the moment when a decision had to be taken. This was a safe bet for an academic who would have been attacked mercilessly by some Grievance Studies group of nutters if he'd ever come down on one side or the other of any 'wedge issue'.
That one is presupposed becomes clear from his response to a criticism by Nussbaum for Sen to be more radical in his critiquing of utilitarian and well-being accounts. Sen has no objection to an Aristotelian route to capability or human functioning. His difficulty is with accepting that as the only route, and as implying that what constitutes human nature has a fixity or objectivity.
Which is cool coz the dude didn't know Greek whereas Nussbaum did.
He maintains that the capability approach must have an incompleteness or open-endedness
otherwise you might end up saying either abortion is good or it is bad- at which point you get lots of hate mail.
with respect to intrinsic human activities that are constitutive of good living. Unlike Nussbaum, he avoids offering a list of central capabilities to generate political principles or social goals. Why then does Sen resist any definiteness or objectivist framework of understanding the human person, and instead opts for a broader understanding of being human in his discussion of capability? The answer to this question may very well lie in his exposure to the philosophical insights and tendencies of Rabindranath Tagore, one of his early mentors and at whose school Sen spent most of his childhood and adolescent years.
Tagore had warned the Hindus that they needed to stop being idiots. The Christians and Muslims wanted to kill and enslave them. They needed to unite and fight back. This was around 1920 when Tagore still believed Hindus could dominate East Bengal where he owned big estates. Later, Tagore realized that Hindu politicians from Hindu majority areas would sacrifice the interests of Hindus in Muslim majority areas. The Muslim League later did the same. Sen's family had to flee their ancestral home in Dacca.
Thus, what is argued for here is that Sen’s capability concept, at the minimal, reflects the spirit of Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical thrust on becoming a person.
Tagore didn't live to see the big Famine or the Partition blood-letting. Remaining a person, not becoming one, was the overriding concern for Sen's peoples. That is why they ran away from East Bengal.
More substantively, central to the argument is that his capability concept has for its moorings a view of human development, freedom, and well-being that is more in the spirit of Tagore, the poetphilosopher.
Tagore was the hereditary head of a Religious Sect. There were moments when he thought Hindus should unite under his own banner but then he realized that everybody thought him a silly man with more beard than brain. Sad.
Paramount to Tagore is that freedom of mind and thought is quintessential for childhood development and forming of the human personality
Tagore was wrong. Kids need food. They don't need stupid beardies talking bollocks.
His play King of the Dark Chamber opens with a dialogue alluding to the spirit of freedom in this way: Visitors approaching a city’s gate, ask the guard how to reach the festivals.
The answer was that the road they were on would get them straight there. All roads led to the central square where the festivities were conducted.
The guard replies “One street is just as good as another here. Any street will lead you there. Go straight ahead, and you cannot miss the place.” One of the visitors remarked to a companion, “Just hear what that fool says: ‘Any street would lead you there!’ Where then would be the sense of having so many streets?”
This is stupid shit. 'All roads lead to Rome' because the Romans built the roads so as to minimize travel time back to their City.
The companion thoughtfully responded:
“You needn’t be so awfully put out at that my man. A country is free to arrange its affairs in its own way. As for the roads in our country – well, they are as good as non-existent: narrow and crooked lanes, a labyrinth of ruts and tracks.
Because there was no central planning.
Our King does not believe in open thoroughfares.
His beliefs were irrelevant. It is very difficult and expensive to do town planning after a town has mushroomed up.
He thinks the streets are just so many openings for his subjects to fly away from his kingdom.
Because he is as stupid as shit. People can still 'fly away' down crooked alleyways. On the other hand, it would be more difficult for the King's troops to put down an insurrection. Under Napoleon III, Paris was remodeled to make it easier to suppress Communards. Tagore knew all this. He'd been to London and Paris and America. Why was he so stupid? The answer is that sitting in Shantiniketan amongst adoring disciples had rotted his brain.
It is quite the contrary here; nobody stands in your way, nobody objects to your going elsewhere if you like to, and yet the people are far from deserting this kingdom.”
But would run away in the manner of Sen's people from Dacca's boulevards if their throats were in danger of being slit. It turned out that the British Crown had kept Bengal from Famine and ethnic cleansing. Tagore shouldn't have returned his knighthood. The Americans respected that sort of bauble. Their plutocrats would have opened their wallets for the Viceroy's pal, Sir Rabidgnat.
The companion’s response has a noticeable affinity to how Sen conceptualizes cultural diversity relative to his ideas of capability, choice, and well-being.
Does it? The fact is that people live in cities so as to meet their material needs. They flee them if they might die or suffer privation. This may have something to do with 'cultural diversity' but only if Muslims are the majority in the area. If Jains or Jews are in the majority, you should be safe enough.
Though direct evidence for Tagore’s influence is sparse, some is evident in Development as Freedom (1999), a book whose organizing principle is the idea of freedom.
Which must be curtailed for development to occur. One might as well write a book titled 'Shitting as Eating'.
Sen marshals a quote from Tagore to underscore both our basic capacity to enjoy cultural objects from other lands, and to warn of the danger of the image of regional self sufficiency in cultural matters. The quote impressing Sen is from a letter by Tagore to friend about cultural diversity, and reads:
“Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours,
I become capable of speaking Chinese because I can understand and enjoy a translation of Li Po's poetry
wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.”
I'd be even prouder of Sen's humanity if I could fit him into the same pair of underpants as all the other stupid savants of the Past and Future. Indeed, I think the Nobel Prize committee should cram all living and dead recipients of awards into the same skid marked chaddi and parade them up and down the streets of Stockholm. That's a Capability we would pay good money to see realized.
Sen had in fact become acquainted with this cultural give and take, marking Tagore’s vision of the contemporary world during his student years at Santiniketan.
He attended a school run by the hereditary head of a religious sect. But he became an atheist.
He acknowledges in the essay “Tagore and His India,”(1997) his partiality to seeing Tagore as an educator,
coz the guy ran a school
and explains why. His learning at Santiniketan during pre-university years had a cultural openness to it. “There was,” he reports, “something remarkable about the ease with which class room discussions would move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere.”
I recall class room discussions which could move from Indian traditional literature to questions of whether Tarzan could beat up Bruce Lee.
Cultural openness was part of the larger picture of what Santiniketan nurtured. It sought to nurture in the pre-adolescent age, a freedom to explore, to be curious, and to cultivate thought and imagination, to be creative, to develop awareness of values, to see the world and life in terms of interrelationships and unity.
So did other schools unless they didn't in which case kids learned to do the thing properly. You can't be educated to be free or creative. You have to become free or creative on your own. On the other hand, I will become very beautiful if you pay for me to go to Beauty Skool.
Tagore, in his essay on a poet’s school, called for educational institutions to have as their main task that of nourishing our faculties “to give the mind its freedom, to make the imagination fit for the world that belongs to art, and to stir our sympathy for human relationships”
Remarkably, Shantiniketan produced not a single poet or song writer worth the name.
According to that picture, the freedom of the mind and spirit is quintessential to educating the whole person with an eye to broader social engagement and personal fulfillment.
But the 'whole person' is a terrible bore.
Sen found himself in such a setting that became in part the childhood or background scenes for the capability concept and approach that he would later develop. His autobiography for the Nobel Lectures Series acknowledges how fundamental this educational setting was for him. For he reported having “had a fairly formed attitude on cultural identity (including an understanding of its inescapable plurality as well as the need for unobstructed absorption rather than sectarian denial)”
But he went to a school founded by the hereditary head of a sect!
by the time he arrived in Calcutta to begin studies for his undergraduate degree.
I turn now to look more closely at the specific philosophical insights by Tagore that may have influenced Amartya Sen’s understanding of the capability concept and approach. The insights are primarily about two ideas that are for Tagore a mutual fit: freedom and personhood or self.
Tagore was opposed to the Indian freedom struggle because his people would lose their lives and land in East Bengal. Thus he had to pretend that he had some better type of freedom which involved giving him money for his money-pit of a University which was set up in the same year as Dacca University. The latter is doing fine. The former, though now a Central University, is languishing.
It is my contention that what Tagore has to say about freedom may in fact have a regulative significance for Sen’s conceptualizing of capabilities and of the capability approach as being open-ended to allow for breath and sensitivity.
Tagore had to pipe small once he realized politicians from Hindu majority areas didn't give a shit about the plight of Hindus in Muslim majority areas. Sen's people feel they must show themselves pro-Muslim just in case the demographic balance in West Bengal shifts. They themselves will flit to other nests but why let on that you have secured a bolt hole?
The insight on freedom may help us gain a deeper appreciation of Sen’s resistance to providing a list of central capabilities to serve as the normative basis for policy evaluation.
In which case policy could actually be evaluated. But why evaluate anything? You are bound to be attacked as anti-Gay or anti-Trans or something of that sort.
It may also explain what Martha Nussbaum considers to be complex, namely, Sen’s supporting in India a secularism that “gives the religions a large political role.”
Sen is against Hindu political parties because that is what it is safe to be in West Bengal.
But first, the capability approach – how does Sen understand it? And what exactly does he mean by “capabilities?”
Anything anybody can dream up.
Sen’s capability approach, according to Development as Freedom, is a freedom centered one. It takes into consideration agency or people’s freedom to lead the kind of lives that they have reason to value, or to do the things they value doing as part of the good life, of living and doing well.
Why take this into consideration? How does it help anybody? If you walk up to a guy in a bar and explain to him that you are taking into very serious consideration his freedom to smell his own farts will he buy you a drink?
Alternative approaches focus on achievements, income variables, or utility. But this approach has a broader reach in that it directs evaluative attention to a variety of important concerns that are presumably missed by the others.
So, if someone says I am capable of helping my disabled neighbor I can reply that I have an unmet capability for becoming Pope. First make me Pope. Then I'll send a Cardinal to help that cripple.
It considers freedom of persons from a twin perspective – both processes and outcomes those persons “have reason to value and seek”
We have reason to value 'Moksha' or eternal felicity in Heaven.
Alternatively conceived, the approach is a space that allows for information to make better value judgements.
Or postpone doing so indefinitely. Why say 'ISIS is bad'? Some nutter may decide to jihad your sorry ass.
For its information takes into consideration the situation where people are at as they launch into becoming actively involved in shaping their own destinies, given the different options or opportunities realistically available to them.
Realistically available? Does that mean you aint gonna help me get into Pope Skool? Fuck you very much! You iz Racist- innit?
This agency-focussed approach keeps in its evaluative sight two factors simultaneously: the pursuit of the overall agency goals, and the freedom of the agent to achieve the goals.
Why not the pursuit of the freedom of the agency of the overall own goal by a secret agent from Mars?
Choosing to live the way one would like has an intrinsic value according to the capability approach.
I, will just this moment, choose to live like a 18 year old billionaire super-stud who is currently in bed with three super models. Damn! Nothing happened. What 'intrinsic value' did my choice have? None at all.
The act of choosing, and hence the freedom to choose, must therefore be constitutive of a person’s being.
That is why a guy in a coma is not really a human being. He can't chose. Thus he can't be said to constitute a human being. The same is true of a sleeping person. You are welcome to defecate upon such people because they are not human beings and thus have no dignity or rights which are violated by your doing so.
More light is shed on this becoming of a person through what Sen has to say about the concept “functionings.” This concept is also considered to be integral to the capability approach and is anticipated by agency. Basically, a functioning refers to what a person is actually able to do or be, in leading a life that he or she values. There are many kinds of functionings ranging from being adequately nourished, free from avoidable diseases, able to read and write, to being able to participate in community life and so on.
What about the functioning to have a functioning? Why not the functioning to have the capability of a functioning of a functioning?
“So understood, a functioning has to stand dialectically related to the idea of capability that in turn is determined by a number factors: personal characteristics, social arrangements, personal goals, to name a few. Put slightly differently, capability is essentially the freedom to choose from possible combinations of available functionings.
But that is itself a functioning. The set is impredicative. Moreover, defective functioning is a capability which is also a functioning. By an argument similar to Witsenhausen's counter-example we know that defective capability may be ranked higher than capability. But this also means that capability and functioning are not 'functors' in decentralized stochastic control problems because there is no universal property (because there is no optimality or 'naturality') This means there is an a priori reason for judging this to be useless shite. All this should have been obvious fifty years ago.
Since a functioning refers to what I am actually able to do or become with respect to well being, then capability must imply also an existential choosing.
Why? The fact is, if 'common knowledge' of a capability obtains, then you don't have to do any genuinely existential choosing. People know you will fuck them up if they mess with you. You don't have to existentially choose to be a tough guy or a rich guy or a handsome guy. The thing is second nature.
For its conceptual reach includes not just the range of alternative functionings available to me, but also how I value or choose from possibilities in the range.”
But this never happens in ordinary life. It really doesn't matter how I value stuff provided the stuff I'm choosing obviously permits me to flourish. Only if my health breaks down or I develop depression do I need to start questioning how I value stuff. It may turn out that valuing cocaine or putting up with a wife who beats you is not a good idea.
It is this how in choosing that holds significance in the way that Sen understands the concept capability, and in fact for his notion of well being. Sen considers that judgement about the how has to occur simultaneously and in an integrated way with judgement about the adequacy of the range of available functionings.
Moreover available functionings must be exercised in a manner which integrates respiration. People who fail to breathe while deciding how to value breathing will die. We need much much more scholarship on this existential threat to Humanity!
For the quality of life one enjoys depends both on what one achieves, and on the freedom to choose from a wide range of alternatives.
And on respiration. Why does everybody forget the need to fully integrate respiration into one's praxis of existential choosing and valuation?
Now, in the “what one actually achieves” inheres the idea of the how. There is an implicit knowing how that is a determinative factor in actualizing the what.
Nonsense! I don't have a clue as to how my computer works but I do know that my typing this now will cause it to magically appear on my blog.
This how as a factor does not always come through in what Sen is saying, since he translates human development in terms of substantive freedoms: liberty of political participation and dissent, opportunity to receive basic education and healthcare, and being able to avoid depravations, destitution, oppression, starvation, and undernourishment. As economist, he is focussing primarily on the material matrix for the enjoyment of a fuller life. But there is in Sen a philosopher alluding to an epistemological distinction between the knowing how and the knowing what or that, with respect to agency-achievement.
There ought to be, but there isn't. The fact is if we know how capabilities arise then we can directly change capabilities- just as Amelia Earhat did so as to fly around the world flapping her big ears.
Observing that epistemic distinction between the how and the what would assist in broadening an understanding of what Sen says about human development with respect to cultural diversity.
It is a fact that the Muslims in my area have done a lot to improve the lives of everybody here. I believe many are refugees from Arab countries. It is sad they had to flee war and terrorism but the cultural diversity they have brought has promoted 'healthy living' because it has made a 'Mediterranean diet' accessible to working class people. We even have great falafel. Also Muslims tend to be sober and their women don't try to bottle each other during the course of a pub-crawl. There probably are all all sorts of other communities around here from whose culture I could benefit but they may have lacked capital and entrepreneurial ability to set up similar cafes and groceries. I certainly wouldn't mind a bit of my Council tax being spent on encouraging that sort of thing. It would soon pay for itself in terms of business rates and increased footfall.
My point is that understanding how cultural diversity can boost local income is an ideographic, not nomothetic, affair. But because it is worth doing, one way or another it does get done. There is V.C money for the thing because the economic advantage is obvious.
Development has to be taken as coterminous with enhancing the lives of the reasoning agency as well as the freedom to enrich the lives we value.
No. Development means increased productivity. It doesn't mean pedants talking bollocks about agency and freedom.
That is, expanding freedom is essentially widening the range of functionings by reducing the conditions contributing to destitution, deprivation, and oppression.
This is better done by expanding wage-slavery of one sort or another. If there were no threat of destitution or deprivation or oppression fuck would we need development for? Things would already be optimal.
Ukraine had to reduce freedom- requiring all able-bodied men to fight the invader- in order to preserve its Independence and territorial integrity.
The more reduced they are the better the matrix for developing the freedom to achieve the actual living one values. Still, the combination of wellbeing and freedom may vary considerably from culture to culture as a result of factors such as physical disparities among individuals,
really? I am not aware that any such things are 'cultural'. A darkie or a disabled person can be English or Canadian or American.
environmental diversities, variations in social arrangements, differences in communal behaviour patterns, and the way in which income is distributed within a family.
These are not 'cultural'. It seems the author adheres to an obsolete type of racialist theory. Darkies are lazy coz they don't have cold winters. Arabs are proud and courageous because the desert makes them so. Bengalis are blathershites because their land is fertile and their rivers teem with fish. Also their women are gorgeous and like listening to the melodious Bengali language.
Taking into consideration that such factors vary from culture to culture even within an economic or geographical region, would impart a semblance of indefiniteness to the capability approach when compared to either a welfare or a resource approach. But that indefiniteness has its roots mainly in the idea of the person or human nature that the capability concept and approach presuppose. The act of evaluating and actualizing what we value in the range of functionings is constitutive of personhood, of living and being well.
No. Such an act is stupid and people won't do it once they realize they won't get paid for doing it.
Such acts evidence a subjectivity or immediate consciousness of our being or self as aspects of human development. Alternatively put, they enlarge our consciousness of a unity that is integral to understanding ourselves and, in fact, reality.
Why enlarge any such thing? We understand ourselves well enough. There is no higher unity accessible to us- unless God wills it so.
The inspiration for this seemingly thin view of person comes in some measure from Tagore. Sen mentions in one of his essays that Tagore, in conversation with Einstein indicated a view that truth is a quality of persons, realized through men.
Tagore forgot that the credo of his sect holds God to be the witness of all Truth and Being. Men must turn to God or they will gain neither.
Expounding it Sen writes: “To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe … appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable.”
By then, there were guys like Schrodinger who justified Quantum spookiness by quoting Hindu scripture. Einstein was looking for a Oriental Sage to endorse his own more substantive view.
It maybe that Tagore was quite perceptive to realize that when philosophy is concerned with reality its concern is with meaning and not truth.
But Tagore, as head of a religious sect, talked of 'artha' and 'syadya' as 'meaning' which becomes Truth (satya) through 'sadhana' (prayer) because God has established Religion as regulating all things.
Hence the arrival of truth regarding reality has to be a personal matter.
Because Brahmoism admits a personal Lord God and Savior.
Poetphilosopher Tagore, no systematic thinker or metaphysician,
save in his capacity as the head of the Adi Brahmo Samaj
cared much about art, poetry, plays, music and activities that give free reign to thought and imagination. Implicit in what he has to say about such matters is his perspective of becoming a human person. That perspective is best referenced by three concepts that are made to inter-relate: art, surplus, and vision. To limit our considerations here to what Tagore has to say about art is sufficient to make an acquaintance with his understanding of person or self for the purpose of showing Sen’s affinity to him on the idea of capability.
This is interesting. Khan- a Muslim- knows Tagore better than Sen. That's understandable. Muslims are Monists and have a very clear and rational theology.
Personality and its expression is the primary object of art for Tagore. In reflection on the question “What is art?” he considers that art is born of the heart’s relationship with the world,”
But all hearts have a relationship with the world- even mine. But my poetry is shite.
He repeatedly mentions the connection between the two, referring to art as having for its “vital point a principle of unity, and its harmonics in the personality.”
One could equally say that art's vitality arises out of its partiality and dissonances. Indeed, Tagore made that same point in kori-o-kamal.
Continuing in that vein, Sen expands on the idea of person through an analogy that bears somewhat on aesthetics. He writes: “When we want to know the food-value of certain of our diets, we find in it their components parts; but its taste-value is in its unity, which cannot be analysed.
It is analyzed. That's how come you can have prawn flavor chips or plant based burgers which have the umami of meat. This is now a big industry.
Matter, taken by itself, is an abstraction which can be dealt with by science; manner which is merely manner, is an abstraction which comes under the law of rhetoric. But when they are indissoluble one, then they find their harmonics in our complexity of matter and manner, thoughts and things, motives and actions.”
This is nonsense. Manner is related to matter. Musicologists know that. So do literary theorists. Sanskrit, which Sen claims to know, had developed a complicated theory of how to suit manner to matter thousands of years ago.
In reflecting on art and personality, Tagore drew on Upanishadic poets for inspiration. One of their lines referencing income and capability, reads “Wealth is dear to us, not because we desire the fact of the wealth itself, but because we desire ourselves.”
But that 'self' is univocal with God.
Explicating it, Tagore asserts that wealth is one of the items that can arouse our emotions
He was wrong. People get awfully attached to nice shiny things.
and that we feel ourselves in it is the reason we love it. It is hardly wealth for wealth’s sake.
Because the enlightened man realizes that only God is the reality he finds within himself. Shut up and serve God by doing something useful.
Nor is wealth the only item that arouses the emotions. Whatever does so arouses also our self-feeling.
Because we belong to God.
For, when the emotions are in excess of what can be absorbed by the object arousing it, the surplus returns to us making us conscious of ourselves.
Which is a grudging way of saying 'sadguna worship'- e.g. prayer to idols- is okay coz ultimately you come to the 'nirguna' form approved by Brahmos.
Using old fashion economic idioms, Sen points out that in poverty, attention is directed to objects that have to be acquired to meet needs.
No. One can devote an hour or two to picking bananas or whatever and then lounge around for the rest of the day.
But once the needs are surpassed there is a feeling of being rich, of having a wealth of goodness. It is on this excess or fund of surplus that science and philosophy thrive, and that ethics is founded.
Parasites may thrive on a surplus but they may be displaced by predators. The Greeks were great philosophers. Then the Romans enslaved them. The Greeks then had to work hard to educate their masters.
For in Tagore’s estimate, honesty is valued “not for being the best policy, but because it can afford to go against all policies.”
Only if the other policies don't beat it to death.
Ability to experience intensely the surplus or “efflux of consciousness” in the personality is a distinguishing feature of our humanity,
like appreciating the smell of our own farts
separating us from creatures with only basic biological drives, instincts, and needs. Not just ethical behaviour but also art is outlet for the surplus “in our heart’s relationship with the world,”
Or our ego's desire for adulation. Oddly, I didn't take to writing poetry to gain acclaim. I did it out of sadism. When I was young various types of bores would inflict their stupid views on me. I then realized that reading out my poetry to them would drive them away. This also worked on cockroaches.
An outlet is a way of managing how we choose to express a surplus, and is therefore both a capability and expression of the infinite dimension of the self or human person.
Infinite dimension- eh? So we're back with God are we? Cool.
Continuing to reflect on “what is art?,” Tagore unambiguously notes that human life has a finite and an infinite side. The finite is where we exhaust ourselves, for it relates to the material and biological aspect of us. The infinite is the inexhaustible in us, for it relates not to accumulation of wealth or the world of materiality, but to our subjectivity: aspiration, enjoyment and sacrifice, revealing and perfecting itself in symbols that have elements of immortality.
That's God right there! Does Khan really not know that Tagore was the head of a Religious sect?
Tagore remarks that the point at which man feels his infinity, he is in truth, “divine, and the divine is the creator in him.”
'A'nal Haq' said al-Hallaj which is why he was crucified. Among Hindus, however saying 'Aham Brahmasmi' is perfectly orthodox.
That, for Tagore, is Reality – living in his own creation and thereby making the world his own world – making truth one’s own through action.
But only coz God pervades Reality- indeed, God is the only Reality.
The more one does this, the more is actualized that which is latent in him. Tagore expresses our infinitude through subjectivity in his essay on the realization of action this way: “in that actualization man is ever making himself more and more distinct, seeing himself clearly under newer and newer aspects in the midst of his varied activities, in the state, in society. This vision makes for freedom.”
Which entails giving yourself wholly to God.
Tagore, defines human nature in terms of our consciousness of the inexhaustible abundance within, and thereby paradoxically wanting to be more than oneself. Using the idioms of commerce, he remarks that “man is a spiritual being and not a mere living money-bag jumping form profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of the human races in its financial leapfrog.”
Or breaking its backbone so it can lick its own arse.
Our consciousness of the infinite, a distinguishing mark, encompasses also the finite aspect of our being. We are striving to make immortal the consciousness of the infinite is us by making the whole world ours, the universal within us to consummate in the unique. This seeking or striving has multiple realizability,
so capability and functioning don't actually supervene on anything. They are mere words.
and a variety of functionings including ones that are ethical and aesthetical – art, poetry, drama, music, monuments, museums, symbolic representations of various kinds. Capability is the manner or how we choose among the variety of realizable ways (functionings) to bring about that unity or inner harmony of ourselves with the world – how we chose to shape ourselves to live long and well.
But, unless God is the only reality, harmony does not exist. It is just an empty word. Prof. Khan may want Sen's Capabilities to stand for something Sufi or from the Sadhu tradition. But it can't so long as it is atheistic.
Sen’s Development as Freedom begins with that very question that the Upanishadic poet frames rhetorically in a dialogue: How far can wealth go to obtain what we desire, reasoning in freedom, namely, living long and well? The question of a wife to a husband draws a negative answer.
No. He tells her about God and how to get with God through prayer and devotion and austerities and so forth.
This gives Sen a window to focus on the broader question of lives that we can lead or develop, rather than merely on issues of economic wealth, gross national product, and income indices. But he eschews grappling directly with what might pertain to subjectivity, and thus does not have to articulate a robust view of human nature.
Because he can't mention God. Also, he couldn't mention Marx's paradise because, by the Seventies, everyone knew about Gulags and long queues for carrots and cabbages in the USSR.
There is enough, however, demonstrated here to sustain a hypothesis that his view of person in the approach to development as freedom, to poverty and to conceptualizing capability is in the spirit of Tagore.
But without God. So this is just bullshit in the service of bullshit rather than bullshit in the service of some actual creed.
According to a Tagorean spirit, the human person at a minimum is more than a mere biological being. For the self has the capability to gain an “inner” and “outer” knowledge of itself
but that inner knowledge is knowledge of God.
through evaluating how it relates itself harmoniously with its environment. The human is simultaneously creature of its environment and creator of its own values.
Very true. I created my own desire to sleep with beautiful women. It had nothing to do with my genes.
More specifically, the inner and outer corresponds to the dual set of desires in us that have to be harmonized.
This can be done by following the example of Amelia Earhat. You should turn your ears into wings so you fly around the place teaching the Capability approach. If you wish to travel to other galaxies, you should learn to emit powerful tachyonic farts which will enable you to travel faster than light and thus get to distant planets in their own remote past. Wouldn't that be cool?
One set relates to our immediate sensate desires. The other to our physical system as a whole and includes our unconscious seeking of health and well being, and our establishing a link between the past and the future.
Very true. If you don't establish such a link, you will have no Present. People need to exercise their capability to make Space-Time connected before going to be bed at night. Otherwise, they may wake up yesterday instead of tomorrow.
Tagore refers to the latter set as “the wish in us which does its work in the depths of our social being. It is the wish for the welfare of society,” transcending the “limits of the present and the personal. It is on this side of the infinite.”
As opposed to up the backside of the infinite.
Whoever is wise, for Tagore, is seeking to harmonize the two and can thus realize the higher self.
Which is God at which point you'd hand over a lot of cash to Tagore.
Clearly, recovery of a fully human life occurs within and not outside the context of a social structure. The human is playful as in artistry, and is at the same time a social being. Having economic sense is one of the capacities exercised in dealing with wider social problems. It was just such a sense that led Tagore to view suspiciously and rejected the proposal by Gandhi to alleviate poverty by all of India making home-spun yarn.
So Gandhi's pals, the Mill-owners, could profit from a boycott of foreign cloth. Tagore later threatened to call for a boycott of Bombay cloth. Then Gandhi gave him some money and peace was restored.
To consider home spinning as the only route to eradicating poverty would be a failure to hold before the mind of his people a complete picture of welfare. Tagore conceptualized that picture in this way: ‘The people’s welfare is an amalgam of several ingredients. To take one of them by itself cannot do much good. Health, recreation, the activities of the body and mind – thrown together in one combination they make the picture complete.”
But that picture was still pretty shitty which is why Bengal was saved from the Japanese by British and American and Punjabi and Gurkha troops.
He went on to note also the importance of having in the many parts of India “examples of different types of revived life,” in short, a plurality of lives we value.
Or don't.
This Tagorean view of human person resonates in Sen’s thinking about religions vis-à-vis India as a secular state. The claim by Nussbaum that Sen’s position on religions is complex may have to do less with perplexity and more with the fact that
he does not want to be fatwa'd. Look what happened to Dr. Tasleema Nasreen when she escaped to Calcutta. She soon had to run again.
it does not fit to the paradigm of Western secularism, discussed as the secularization thesis.
Though Macron may succeed because few French Muslim women seem attached to the hijab. But it does no harm here in London. I firmly believe that the hoodie riots spared my borough because thugs are afraid of women in burqas.
His position is not at all at variance with the dharmic tradition of Indian civilization
or the cowardice of the Bengali bhadralok
and culture, once the philosophical anthropology sketched here for Tagore is kept in mind. That anthropology takes into account the human as a social being, with duties and welfare obligation.
Like fighting in defense of the country.
According to India’s historical tradition, the society, and not state or government, looks after the welfare of the people.
Indian Society looks at the lack of welfare of the people and has a hearty laugh.
The state for Tagore regulates in conformity to the laws it makes based on the use of force and in that sense it presupposes disagreement.
The British Raj may have done so. But famine and ethnic cleansing marked the dawn of democracy in Bengal.
Society, however, is the well-spring of constructive activity, a living organism that develops practices of social service, sacrifice and cooperation to promote the welfare of the people. Social cohesiveness or dharma (a spiritualized secularism awkwardly rendered in English as “religion”) upholds an organic unity out of a plurality.
This is nonsense. Dharma means Religion. It does not mean 'social cohesiveness'- which would be 'Samajik ekta' or something like that.
Society is in effect a self-expression of man and is interpreted by Tagore to mean that India’s problems are of a social kind and have to be approached through social system and cooperation, and not through government. Modern constitutional India preserves that interpretation in so as it understanding its secularism not as demise of, or indifference to religion, but as symmetry in its treatment of all religions, showing partiality to none.
It is kind of Prof. Khan to say so but it isn't true. Hindus run India. They prefer Dalits- who are of their own creed- to get ahead of Muslims even if they personally like Islam and appreciate its literature and philosophy. But then plenty of Bangladeshi Muslims harbor no ill-will to Hindus.
Sen, arguing from worldly affairs, takes a similar position to Tagore on tolerance of religious diversity, which he sees as part of the long tradition of public reasoning and dialogue in Indian civilization. This means that the India as a state could be secular, while still relating to all religions in a neutral way.
India wanted to gradually reduce sectarian and casteist conflicts within Hinduism. That is the reason it took the road it did.
Why tolerance of religion and religious pluralism? Religion understood as dharma, is the source of energy for social change that removes life-threatening risks.
Sadly, we can't say this of either Hinduism or Islam. What removes or reduces life-threatening risk is stuff inherited from the British- the Army, the Police, the bureaucracy, the Courts etc.
The liberty of religious beliefs is among one of our capabilities. Sen explains India’s symmetry in treatment of religions by the example of the state offering financial support to all hospitals, irrespective of their religious connections.
And also irrespective of whether they are any good.
But this secularism of India has incompleteness, for it does not specify the distance at which the state must keep all religions.
It can't prevent the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from the Kashmir Valley. The fact is each State is able to be as religious as it wants to be. Punjab will always promote Sikhism. Haryana will favor Hinduism and so forth.
While the lack of specificity may create problems it may lead also, as Sen remarks, to opportunities as well.
Very true. Indians can claim religious persecution and get asylum somewhere nice. That's a valuable opportunity right there.
To conclude, the capability concept and approach by Sen subtend from views of human development, freedom, and well being that are in the spirit of the philosophical insights of Tagore, the poet philosopher.
and leader of a religious sect.
That is, the recovery of a fully human self is understood in terms of living and doing well, and hence the removal or reduction of destitution, deprivation, and oppression.
By nice White peeps.
In short, human development and life imply more than meeting just the minimal required for biological existence.
Thanks to nice White peeps.
What is seemingly puzzling is why there is a relatively thin view of the concept person implicit in Development as Freedom, if Sen has an affinity to the spirit of Tagore.
It's because Tagore was the head of a Religious Sect and thus totes into God.
An answer would require recalling that for Tagore the self or person has two polarities that must be kept in harmony. At one pole, the strength is “in the fullness of its community with all things” and is subject “to the rule of universal law.”
the ruler being God
At the other, the strength is in self-transcendence in which the self reveals to itself its own meaning.
which is that only God is its inner meaning.
Sen has avoided this latter pole in his treatment of development and capabilities, thereby imparting the semblance of a thin view of the concept person. But, as shown here, resonances of the avoided pole persist in his conceptualizing of capability.
No. There is no resonance. Sen walks across us half the Tagorean bridge but then has to stop because the rest of that bridge would be God stuff.
For, in so far as his capability approach takes into consideration more than opulence and income indices,
it is like a host of other such indices which were used to prove that Cubans were better off than Americans and that Jamaica has more press freedom than England or that Scottish women face greater food vulnerability than Eritreans and so on and so forth.
Sen is making a point similar to what Tagore has rendered this way: cultures and societies are to be judged not by “what they have and in what quantity but [by] what they express and how.”
Judge not lest ye be judged. Sen's shtick was that Democracy was super-nice. Then China rose and rose while India stagnated. We now judge Sen to have been a shithead.
They are enough such resemblances, I would suggest, to warrant postulating an affinity between Amartya Sen and Rabindranath Tagore.
Tagore's songs will live. Sen's thoughts were abortions. That isn't affinity. It is proof that Bengal went backwards after the British left. Sen-tentious shitheads migrated to secure intellectual affirmative action. Good for them. Without Bengalis in Ivy League University Departments, White kids might not understand why it was so easy for the Brits to rule Bengal. The explanation was simple. Hindus wanted the Brits to keep the Muslims at bay. In other parts of India, British rule was preferable to that of your cousin because he resented your repeated attempts to kill him. Also, it must be confessed, non Bengalis tended to be a whole lot stupider. I come from a State ruled by a guy named Stalin. Nobody raises an eyebrow. There was a Congress MP from the North East named Hitler. That too was cool. Compared to the rest of us, the Bengalis are smart and cultured. Thankfully, Mamta will give them tight slap if they try to do anything to catch up with Bangladesh. There is a blessed equity in the Indian capability to fuck up any type of worthwhile functioning. But I only say this because, in my experience, God really exists and a miserable life does really make you want nothing that is not God. On the other hand, if like Amelia Earhat, I could flap my ears and fly around the world, I'd be less keen on the Creator.
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