Somewhere in the early 2000s, while preparing to teach Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s English translation of Hind Swaraj to my undergraduate class, a passage about history in the text intrigued me. Since I happened to have the Gujarati version of that text at hand, I consulted it. The divergence is striking. The Gujarati text criticizes “history” (the English word occurs in the Gujarati text) and contrasts it to itihaas [usually translated as “history”]. The English text criticizes “history,” but in it there is no equivalent for itihaas; the contrast between history and itihaas is thus obscured.Is this really true? The passage in question seems clear enough. Gandhi distinguishes between mere factual Chronicles and moral narratives of an instructive or inspiring kind. Gandhi's Gujerati readership understood that, for some purposes, it was necessary to give a dry as dust chronological account of what happened- for example to prove a property claim in a court of law, or secure a favorable judgment in a caste tribunal- but that moral arguments drew upon historical narratives which might have a mythological or theological dimension. In translation, the relevant passage from Hind Swaraj, reads ': The poet Tulsidas has said: "Of religion, pity, or love, is the root, as egotism of the body. Therefore, we should not abandon pity so long as we are alive."
We may feel pity for historical, or even legendary, personages and this may motivate our own moral reformation or that of the Society we live in. Gandhi's choice of a couplet from Tulsi is highly effective. Conservative Pietism, 'Maryada bhakti', is being linked to Social Reform in a manner which appeals to the heart and bridges the generational divide.
This appears to me to be a scientific truth. I believe in it as much as I believe in two and two being four. The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force. But you ask for historical evidence. It is, therefore, necessary to know what history means. The Gujarati equivalent means: "It so happened." If that is the meaning of history, it is possible to give copious evidence. But, if it means the doings of kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul-force or passive resistance in such history, You cannot expect silver ore in a tin mine. History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world, and so there is a proverb among Englishmen that a nation which has no history, that is, no wars, is a happy nation. How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, how they murdered one another, is found accurately recorded in history, and if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago. If the story of the universe had commenced with wars, not a man would have been found alive today.'
Gandhi was not a scholar nor was he writing for a scholarly audience. He did not distinguish the different meanings of 'itihasa' by means of examples familiar to his audiences. Why? There was no need. The English word 'history' has displaced the Islamic term 'tareekh' for chronological, factual, accounts necessary for efficient administration.
The gap between the Gujarati and English texts, I have since come to realize, is symptomatic of Gandhi’s struggles to think his politics.There was no gap precisely because Gujeratis were already using the word 'history' for factual chronicles. No semiotic slippage is occurring, nor is there any aporia to get exercised about. It is an open question as to whether Gandhi was thinking in English and writing in Gujerati, because he was as bilingual in this respect as most Indian origin people are now when it comes to this sort of discourse. If you are asked to give a speech at a School function when visiting a rural District, you may be composing in Hindi or Tamil or whatever, while thinking in English. Then abruptly there is a shift. A pearl from a Vernacular poet tugs at you and you move away from English. However, it frequently happens, an English idiom then pops into your mind and you set it down. That is what happens here to Gandhi. He recalls the phrase Carlyle attributes to Montesquieu- 'Happy the land which has no History' in the same manner that he had earlier recalled Gibbon's- 'History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.'
Gandhi's thoughts, as expressed here, are by no means profound. But they are crystal clear. We know what he is getting at- viz. what matters now is our attitude, not what some stupid savant says happened in the past or is happening elsewhere. If we have a good attitude, we will prevail. If, instead, we think historical circumstances aren't right or that only some other country is currently fitted to undertake the task, then we will have a defeatist attitude.
Skaria takes a different view. He thinks Gandhi isn't expressing an idea familiar to his audience, rather he is taking the first step down some very complicated philosophical path.
What this politics involves is by no means clear to him; perhaps he writes so prolifically and indefatigably (his collected works run to ninety-eight volumes in English) precisely in order to try and understand his own politics.This would be the case only if he spent a lot of time re-reading his own work or abandoning manuscripts and then taking them up at a later date. If this were so, we would expect him to take a great deal of trouble compiling a magnum opus. Thus Gandhi would have produced something comparable to 'Das Kapital' or Aurobindo's 'The Life Divine'. But no such thing happened. As the proprietor of a newsletter, Gandhi was an indefatigable editor and editorializer able to turn his attention from naturopathy to the vialbility of khaddar to recent political developments in Europe from issue to issue.
Gandhi's political intentions and manouverings were by no means pellucid and the explanations he provides for some of the more dramatic volte faces are as clear as mud. But this is to be expected. He was a practical politician dealing with the minutiae of negotiation and party administration, not a 'big picture' armchair ideologue.
Skaria claims that there is a gap between Gandhi's Gujerati and his English- though the opposite seems to be the case. He was merely bilingual in the manner most of us are in middle age- at least when it comes to non-technical matters which crop up in general conversation. True, we may stick to English when criticizing a specific policy initiative of which we have high domain knowledge, but turn to the vernacular when we want to express the reason for our faith, or disappointment, in the present administration. Of course, if we took up politics in our own natal province, we would get soon get used to turning 'English' thoughts into seamless, if inelegant, vernacular expressions which we would then seek to render less jarring by quoting a satirical couplet or using a pungent idiom.
This politics becomes even more intriguing when we attend not only to Gandhi as an author or “intending subject,” but to his writing.[1]Skaria's footnote points to Spivak's foolish 'Politics of Translation'. She thinks translation is about 'meaning construction' as opposed to merely establishing a mapping between a Source and Target Language. Her 'intending subject' has to completely reconstruct, within a wholly different language, something which has arisen elsewhere. Thus, to translate Harry Potter into Hindi, the translator would have to create a parallel historical tradition in Hindi such that a Hindi writer would spontaneously have written a series of novels about an English orphan from a suburban background who suddenly finds himself translated into an Elite boarding school which has more in common with Oscar Browning's Cambridge than the local Kendhriya Vidhyalay.
Gandhi was a bilingual barrister for whom there was no 'gap' between Gujerati and English precisely because, to attain absolute precision, he could simply insert the English term into his spate of homespun wisdom.
By dwelling in and on the gaps (between Gujarati and English and also within each of these languages) in his writing, this book tries to draw out his politics.The thing can't be done because there was no gap. All Skaria can do is interpose his own imbecility between Gandhi's univocal Gujerati and English texts.
For me, writing this book has been difficult also because of another gap—that between Gandhi’s insistence that there can be “no politics without religion” and the secular inheritance that I have, as far as I know, no desire to abandon.A person may be an atheist while understanding what motivates religious people just as a sane man may understand the actions of lunatics with particular fixations. However, if one believes that something which is perfectly clear is actually opaque, then one will find oneself in all sorts of difficulties.
Gandhi repeatedly describes satyagraha (his most famous neologism, which he coins initially as a translation of “passive resistance”) as his “dharma” or “religion,” even as the religion that stays in all religions.[2]The Greeks translated 'dharma' as 'eusebia' which the Latin's translated as 'pietas'. Thus we have a Kripekan rigid designator for dharma in English. We understand that Gandhi was asserting that what he was doing was enjoined by piety and that even if he changed his religion to some other, piety would still require him to stay on the same path. Whatever we may think of this claim, he has made it perfectly clear and, moreover, the fact is, some Muslims and Jews and Christians and Atheists hearkened to it.
Skaria however makes heavy weather of this. In a footnote, he says 'Each of these words, “dharma” and “religion,” has of course a complex and storied genealogy, and at least some of the uncanniness of Gandhi’s writing comes from the way these words occur there as also always translations of the other.
Gandhi did not know that 'eusebia' or 'piety' was a rigid designator for 'dharma'. He was concerned that using the word 'dharma' should be understood as equivalent to 'deen' and thus no purely sectarian point was being made. But, history shows that Gandhi was able to communicate what he intended perfectly. Jews and Muslims and Christians did join his satyagrahas. Thus there was no 'slippage' or 'infection'.
This infection often activates and foregrounds what is usually recessive in either term by itself. For brevity’s sake, I shall in this book often use only one of these words at a time, but it should be stressed that neither word can in Gandhi’s writings be understood without its infection by the other.'
Skaria can give no example of this though it is true that Gandhi sometimes did raise the question of whether non-violence was peculiar only to people of certain traditions. However, the plural nature of his following demonstrated that no problem of 'infection' arose because, at least for the like-minded, univocity prevailed as to the means though, no doubt, eschatological ends continued to differ.
Symptomatic of my difficulty with this religious politics was my inability for long to even recognize it. When Vinay Lal first asked me in 2007 to write an essay on Gandhi’s religion for a volume he was planning on political Hinduism, I protested that I was not interested in this aspect of Gandhi. But with his characteristic persistence, Vinay did not accept my protests, and I ended up writing that essay, which became a precursor of this book.What have they been transformed into? Either it is piety or it is shit.
In the process, my own understanding of dharma and religion as “concepts” has been transformed.[3]
Consider the footnote Skaria supplies- is it wholesome food for thought or is it evidence of coprophagy?
The quotes around the term “concepts” are to acknowledge its simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy as a way of thinking.Skaria may think concepts are indispensable to his thinking. But there is no proof that this is the case for the type of thinkers who have revolutionized Science. Concepts may be inadequate for Skaria's way of thinking but what task is that style of cogitation adequate to discharging?
“Concept,” with its connotation of mastery and sovereignty—of subsuming, without significant remainder, the particular under the universal—is in a sense always already ruined, for no concept ever masters its particulars.If Skaria knows this to be true then it is the case that one concept- a concept concerned with the question of whether there can be a concept which masters its particulars- has indeed mastered its particulars. In other words, he is lying if he believes he isn't.
Incidentally the concept of being a Skaria like fucwit has no connotation of mastery or sovereignty. Rather it is associated with abject coprophagy.
Something which is known to always be already ruined- like a birthday cake whose chocolate frosting is fecal matter- will command no great currency save amongst shit-eating shitheads. Thus Skaria's oeuvre will be of no concern to those interested with Jurisprudence and the Social Sciences.
Nor can it be of interest to those who admire Gandhi or who have an interest in Indian history.
That ruination becomes especially acute where we are concerned with thinking such as Gandhi’s, which at its most intriguing involves a vertiginous questioning of hierarchies of power.Gandhi did more than question hierarchies of power. He stated that they were satanic. Some of his followers gave up their mansions or Palaces to live lives of poverty, obedience and chastity. This was not because they got dizzy listening to Gandhi's rhetoric. Rather, they accepted as a plain fact that it was better to live a life of service rather than one of luxury.
And yet, perhaps no questioning of power can ever erase power and domination—this is why the concept remains indispensable even where ruined; it must be drawn on under erasure.Questioning power, like questioning the cat's Nicaraguan horcrux, may indeed be a waste of time. However, Gandhi wasn't questioning power. He was saying it was satanic.
Many of the concerns of this book—for example, conscience, death, forgiveness, friendship, gift, trust, question, religion, and sacrifice—are concepts only in this ruined sense.Who ruined them? The answer is it is Skaria himself coz he insisted on frosting his cake with shit.
Conversely, all these concerns are also “impossible” in the sense that they can never knowably occur in their purity; we can know them only in their ruined form.Not according to Gandhi. That was his appeal. He thought purity could be known directly and that it was not defiled in the process. Nehru, however, spoke of the 'pure and virgin present' being subject to the harlotry of the Ages. However, he had been to Collidge. Gandhi hadn't.
What is Gandhi’s religion? Which, given his remarks, is also to ask: What is the religiosity of his politics? What is the politics of his religion? And what is its universality? This book is an attempt to address these concerns. In preparation for later chapters, here I would like briefly to attend to an issue that, though not explicitly thematized in the book, is yet perhaps the specter animating it—the relation between Gandhi’s religion and secularism, or (to briefly signal the argument about this relation) how Gandhi’s satyagraha is a religion of the question.So, it isn't piety but shit of the sort one can, only by anatomical contortions and abdominal ruptures, produce from somewhere higher than one's arsehole.
••••
Hegel notes already in 1802 “the feeling that ‘God himself is dead’ upon which the religion of more recent times rests.”[4] Hegel can assert this partially because, by the time he writes, God-centered ethics are on the decline among philosophers, and many philosophers think morality and ethics in secular terms, without reference to God.How is this relevant to Gandhi? His ancestors were coming under the hegemony of Victorian administrators who were, as a rule, more pious and Evangelical than their piratical predecessors.
Skaria must know that most Indians have no concept of the finality of death. Instead there is a notion of rebirth till 'moksha'- metaphysical liberation- is attained. However, Vaishnavs, like Gandhi, desire only to serve the Lord in birth after birth.
This is not to say that Indians are all theists. Pure materialism is a perfectly orthodox position. Alternatively, there is the Jain position which is that Grace is of no use whatsoever. All beings must work out their salvation for themselves. What is lacking is the notion that God may suddenly abscond or die or decide to wash his hands off creation. It is very foolish, not to say racist and Eurocentric, to think that that trajectory of an Indian must recapitulate that of some stupid European who died long before that Indian was born.
The apprehension of the death of God is not only a characteristic of “more recent times.” It is already borne (if only as nonpresence) by the various negative theologies that one finds “in” each of the various “religions,” including the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, and Judaic.This is nonsense. There was no 'positive theology' of Buddhism which was displaced by a notion of 'apoha'. Rather 'apoha' is the positive theology of the Tathgata. The Upanishadic 'neti, neti' is not 'negative theology' because the credo is a maximalist 'aham Brahmasmi'. Similarly the theology of an Erigena or Isaac Luria isn't negative at all. Rather it is positively maximalist to the point of heresy.
But it surely does gather an increasingly inescapable force in “more recent times.” Justifiably or not, all modern religions and ideologies share the apprehension about the death of God.Nonsense! Either God never existed, or there's nothing but God except maybe Free Will. What has gone for ever is the notion of Gods who are born and die or run away. Why? It's because almost everybody now knows that the Universe is very very big. There are other planets and there must be other life-forms.
This apprehension is the mark of their modernity. It forms these religions and ideologies regardless of whether they accept or deny the death of God, whether they denounce or accept secularism.[5]I know of no extant religion or ideology which 'accepts or denies' the death of God. In any case, no such ideology has any application to a Hindu country where belief in re-birth is the default position. Ram dies, Krishna dies, Buddha dies, but their next incarnation is Kalki.
Gandhi’s writing occurs under the shadow of this apprehension of the death of God.Only in Skaria's view. We think his writing occurs under the shadow of the apprehension of the eclipse of Europe. Not God, but Eurocentrism died. Skaria didn't get the message which is why he babbles dated shite about Nietzche and Heidegger.
He comes to his religion after crossing the “sahara of atheism.” And while he considers “modern civilization” “godless,” and thinks of his politics as striving for a godliness, his religion and godliness are themselves marked by reason.As opposed to what? The guy was a politician. Sure, he could have got naked and started running around screaming incoherently. But, in that case, though worshiped as a Miracle Worker, he would have had no political role.
Thus, condemning the practice of untouchability, he argues: “Hinduism like every other religion, apart from the sanction of Shastras, has got to submit itself to the test of universal reason. In this age of reason, in this age of universal knowledge, in this age of education and comparative theology, any religion which entrenches itself behind Shastric injunctions and authority is, in my own humble opinion, bound to fail.”[6]Gandhi was repeating the argument of the reformers at a debate in Vykom. However, he was defeated by the Pundits. They pointed out that there was no scientific reason to believe that a visit to a Temple was beneficial. Furthermore, the 'private' road in question was only closed to Hindus of certain castes. They could convert to another religion, or become atheists, and continue to use that road. Science could not show they suffered any deprivation as a result.
Moreover, he often stresses his affinities with atheists such as “Bradlaw” (Charles Bradlaugh, whom he admires greatly, and whose funeral he attends while a student in London), whose “atheism was only so-called. He had faith in the moral government of the world.”[7]In which case Gandhi could scarcely be afraid that someone might kill God or shame him into running away.
Most strikingly perhaps, Gandhi cannot conceive God as a sovereign or kingly being; God becomes a shorthand for sat or satya—words that can be glossed, respectively, as being and truth in the sense of the realization or accomplishment of being.Thus, there is no grounds whatsoever for asserting that 'the death of God' or 'negative theology' has any relevance to illuminating Gandhi's thought.
While he is willing to accept a “personal God for those who need his personal presence,” he also insists that it is inadequate to think God in human terms, and treats the very word “God” as an example of such humanization; for him, therefore, “satya is God.”[8] Such formulations are symptomatic of how satyagraha is concerned not with the transcendent world, but rather with the immanent one. Even his apparent invocations of a transcendent or sovereign God—as, for example, his claim that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was “a divine chastisement sent by God” for the sin of untouchability, or his claim that he seeks moksha (“salvation”)—turn out on closer scrutiny to be concerned with the immanent world.[9]If Skaria knows all this, why talk nonsense about Nietzche?
This immanent religion organized around satya is all the more intriguing given how his neologism satyagraha conjoins two terms: satya and agraha—force, firmness, insistence, or even seizing. It is not as though the satyagrahi, the practitioner of satyagraha, already knows or possesses satya and seeks only to enforce or spread it; rather, the satyagrahi is engaged in a “quest for satya.” And this quest is also a questioning because satyagrahis do not know what satya is—they are only constantly aware of being part of and yet abysally separated from satya, of striving to be seized by satya.This is a convenient doctrine because Gandhi says he and he alone has an 'inner voice' whose guidance is infallible. Thus his satyagrahais must be a disciplined band under his command.
All of this is symptomatic, I would like to argue, of how in Gandhi’s writing at its most intriguing, the apprehension of the death of God is accompanied by satyagraha as a religion of the question.[10]Sadly, this does not square with the facts. For Hindus, if God dies, he just gets re-born. A 'religion of the question' turns into one of positive command coz the Mahatma's 'inner voice' is infallible. Thus Govind Vallabh Pant can describe Gandhi as the 'Fuehrer and Il Duce of India' in 1938.
••••
But what is this—a religion of the question? We could perhaps begin with that last sentence of Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” which reads: “For the question is the piety of thought.”[11] That sentence condenses within it an immense paradox whose implications were already being thought before Heidegger’s forceful formulation. The paradox lies in the conjoining of questioning and piety.But what good did that conjoining do? Did it lead to a great Scientific discovery? No. Did it have some positive political or sociological effect? Quite the reverse. Does reading that shite make Professors smarter? Fuck off! Skaria has been rendered utterly imbecilic by his exposure to that imposture.
Had Heidegger said that the question, and questioning, is the essence of thought, he would only have succinctly restated a powerful and long-standing tradition. For the privileging of the question is shared across various philosophical traditions, most famously but by no means only in the Socratic tradition, which has resonated across the Arabic world, the Indian subcontinent, and Western Europe. Indeed, one of the ways in which what is as a shorthand called the Enlightenment would distinguish itself would be precisely through the claim that, more thoroughly than any other tradition, it makes the question the essence of thought. This relentless privileging of the question is precisely what anchors secularism, with its commitment to a certain vision of science and the public sphere. Where and when the question is privileged, the death of God becomes an especially potent possibility.No, because the guy who says 'God's dead' will be questioned as to how he came to formulate so absurd a proposition. Further questioning will reveal that, yes, he does have syphilis, and resides in a mental hospital.
But Heidegger does not simply say that questioning is the essence of thought. He says something quite different: that questioning is the piety, piousness, or devoutness of thought.[12] This formulation presumes that even if the question bears the possibility of the death of God, that death is not a privative one. Rather, the question as a concept conserves something of the spirit or perhaps specter of religion.The answer is that this happens in an exactly analogous manner to that in which the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbors cat scotomizes the Cylopean gaze of the pre-crepuscular Nomenklatura, as mediated by some shite or other.
What is this piousness? And how would the question as a concept be transformed if it is the piousness of thought?
It could be argued that the piousness of the question has two modalities.To make an argument requires some minimal intelligence and knowledge. Skaria lacks any such thing.
First, there are the dominant traditions of the Enlightenment.If these is an Enlightenment modality of something in Heidegger then Heidi was a fool and we shouldn't bother with his shite. Only if Heidi's formulation has no modality within any Enlightenment tradition can it be said to be truly noetic and not historicist simply.
These traditions usually privilege the question quite emphatically, and apparently accord only a secondary or subordinate place for piousness. These traditions also presume a distinction between the public and the private, where the public is the realm of the question and the private is the realm of faith, where the question is not allowed access. It is in this spirit that Kant famously says: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”[13]But this was a public matter! Prussia had a State Religion! Kant was demarcating Transcendental Metaphysics from matters of Dogma. Thus he and his followers weren't persecuted under Frederick William II who was pious and anti-Enlightenment.
This opposition between faith and knowledge does not erase piousness (and is not meant to by either Kant or Hegel) from the secular public sphere.How could it? Some Bishops in the Holy Roman Empire exercised temporal power. Established Churches held Estates and a system of Ecclesiastical Law was in operation such that lack of piety might disqualify a person from holding certain types of offices of profit, or exercising certain types of rights and prerogatives.
Now knowledge provides both an ontology (it grounds the world) and a theology (it names what is highest: as Francis Bacon says in the sixteenth century, “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge”).This is not the case. There was a concept of 'synderesis' such that a 'natural' theology was considered feasible. This was a matter of some debate in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. As for 'ontology', there were Berkleyan and Human critiques of any such beastie.
Knowledge is here constantly produced, revised, and governed by a certain kind of question—one that from its sovereign and autonomous (giving itself its own law) position seeks to know itself and its object.This is nonsense. Intuition may produce a certain type of synthetic a priori judgment. But Knowledge is not Intuition. It abides a quid juris/quid facti or ante res/ in rebus type uncertainty.
Knowledge is thus premised on an enshrining of the sovereign question.This is not an Enlightenment view. Barbarians may enshrine things. They may declare a cabbage their sovereign lord. But this provides no strong foundation for their advancement in Knowledge or Wisdom. On the contrary, they are confirmed in their imbecility.
In this enshrining, moreover, the question inaugurates modern secularism, for it allows the secular state to claim the grounding and the sovereignty associated with religious authority.Skaria is Indian. He knows that India is a secular state. Did any member of the Indian Constitutional Assembly, or any Jurist whatsoever, ever make so foolish a statement?
The Spanish Inquisition, we may say, 'enshrined' a type of question. The Auto da fe, it could be argued, bolstered the sovereignty of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Some Religions and some Despotic regimes do claim a right to put anyone to the question. However, Secular revolutions- i.e. broadly Liberal, anti-Clerical, seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth Century political uprisings- did not enshrine any such right, or- if they did- there was a brief reign of terror leading to an equal and opposite reaction.
In a Liberal, a Secular, a Scientific community, everybody has the right not to answer questions that may incriminate them. Moreover, people ignore stupid people asking impertinent questions.
Religious authority was grounded in being able to burn heretics or chop their heads off or, at the very least, impose a fine on 'non-conformists'. This in turn depended on the coercive power of the temporal arm. The authority of the State, similarly, depends upon its monopoly of legitimate coercive power.
Skaria may think that Kurdistan could become independent by explaining to Erdogan that some question had been 'enshrined' somewhere and this enabled the Kurds to appropriate a sovereignty which previously belonged to Religion. I would urge him to travel to that region and try out this argument for himself. I'm sure he will be very well treated.
Secularism appropriates the very terms of theology: as Karl Marx notes already in the 1840s, “the perfected Christian state” is “the atheist state, the democratic state,” the secular state.[14]Stupidity can think it is appropriating anything it likes. Imbecility it remains. Skaria does not seem to have noticed that Marxist regimes did not use the terms of theology. Nor did secular republics like India or America or France.
(Carl Schmitt restates this insight from an idealist perspective in the 1920s, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”)[15]Schmitt had good cause to repent this statement. All, non Islamic, current concepts of the State come under the rubric of 'Law & Econ', not theology or phenomenology or Voodoo or Shape Shifting lizards from Planet X.
The most powerful of these newly sacralized terms is perhaps “citizen”—the figure who restlessly asks questions of the state, who demands to participate in the state’s sovereignty, and who by this very demand already begins participating in at least the form of that sovereignty.Citizens go about their business. They do ask questions about why taxes are so high and demand to be told how their tax-dollars can be made to work harder for them. But only shitheads 'restlessly ask questions' of the state. They are a nuisance simply. On the other hand, guys who can show tax-money is being wasted can do a deal and 'participate in sovereignty', thus enriching themselves.
Man as citizen worships the sovereign question as the essence of thought, as Being, but this question he worships is himself.I'm a man. I've never done anything so silly- and I once got drunk and phoned the Indian Embassy pretending to be Rahul Gandhi. 'Tell Mummy to legalize sodomy of I won't come home' was the gist of my maudlin ramblings. Strange to say, sodomy was indeed decriminalized shortly thereafter.
One form of questioning as the piety of thought, then, is this theological secularism.No. The piety of thought can't take the form of an oxymoron anymore than the 'beauty of mathematics' can take the form of a proof that the circle can be squared.
And theological secularism emerges along with the modern concept of religion, which now names the heteronomous realm— the realm of laws given by the other.Self-sodomising Ajay Skarias emerge along with the modern concept of Ajay Skaria, which talks meaningless shite incessantly.
Hence the challenge that theological secularism formulates for itself: How to limit religion to the private realm? How to sustain an autonomous politics?Legalistic secularism seeks to limit religion to the private realm by a constitutional separation of Church and State. In the U.K there is a law against 'undue spiritual influence' which was directed against Catholic priests swaying the voting decisions of their parishioners. Controversially, there was an attempt to use this law against a Bangladeshi Muslim politician recently.
Gandhi’s religion questions and relinquishes this theological secularism.Gandhi thought it was cool to mobilize the masses on a religious basis. But it was happening anyway. It may be, if the INC had given him a wide berth, then Partition could have been avoided. However, the indisputable fact is that political Islam militates for such separation- at least at the present time.
While he acknowledges the need for a secular state, this is a very different secularism, for he repeatedly insists that there can be “no politics without religion.” His “religion” of satyagraha or “passive resistance” is equally difficult to understand in the terms provided by theological secularism: it is neither a private religion (for it operates in the secular public sphere) nor a public religion (for it does not seek an institutionalized political or social space for specific religious practices).[17]It is easy to understand a political movement claiming to be Holy and sanctified by God.
In what sense, then, is Gandhi’s satyagraha a religion of the question?In the same sense that the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat is a religion of the question on Thursdays but a question of some other shite the rest of the time.
••••That's not what Augustine said. It was ' But do Thou, 0 Lord my God, hear me and look upon me and see me and pity me and heal me, Thou in whose eyes I have become a question to myself: and that is my infirmity.'
Even more than the sovereign question, the second sense in which questioning is the piety of thought predates Enlightenment traditions. It receives for example an especially succinct formulation in Saint Augustine’s cry, “I have become a question to myself.”
It is the gaze of the Creator, which causes the creature to appear to be a question unto itself save, by the operation of predestined Grace. As a Catholic web-site explains- ' The Confessions of St. Augustine, are, in the Biblical sense of the word confiteri, not an avowal or an account, but the praise of a soul that admires the action of God within itself.
Skaria has butchered Augustine's 'confiteri' for his own imbecilic purpose.
Here, to become a questioning being is to become bereft of one’s own sovereignty. Augustine’s question, as Hannah Arendt notes, is indicative of how “man initiates the quest for his own being. . . .Hannah's Aunt was Jewish. She knew from shit about Catholicism. Augustine does not say he questioned his own being. He says that he feels that in the eyes of his Creator he has become so insubstantial as to be a question for himself. He is asking the Lord to heal him by the operation of His abounding Grace.
Skaria says 'I accept Arendt’s reading of Augustinian Christianity as adequate'. Yet, it isn't at all as any one can quickly verify. It is wholly misleading.
This quest for his own being arises from his being created and endowed with a memory that tells him he did not make himself.”[18]No. St. Augustine says that God has chosen to dwell in his creature's memory. There is no endowment or 'subsidiarity' . Rather there is only a direct operation of Grace.
Many religions respond to this memory by becoming theological—by claiming to ground themselves in either knowledge or revelation.No religion answers to this description. If Religions could respond to memories, why not hypnotize them and plant false memories of some more useful question- like 'how to cure cancer' in their minds? Then they will become scientific and ground themselves in molecular biology.
At least at this moment of his anguish, Augustine finds himself unable to do this: his religion remains a groundless faith, a faith that accepts that it cannot find grounds for itself—this is why he becomes a question to himself.This is not what Augustine says. He is writing a passionate cri de coeur addressed to his Creator. He is affirming predestination. It is a short step from that position to full blown Occassionalism where God does everything- including causing us to lament our apparent separation from Him.
In one of the few remarks he makes about Augustine, Gandhi’s attention is drawn to this absence of sovereignty: “But one thing is sure that the humility which feels itself nothing before God is necessary for mystical experiences, such as those of Saint Francis and Saint Augustine. On the other hand, a Bradlaw [Charles Bradlaugh] or a Marcus Aurelius, though following conscience, felt themselves to be self-made men and not dependent on God, and so they could get no mystical experiences or joy.”[19] The contrast here with Bradlaugh, who, recall, has “faith in the moral government of the world,” is telling. Unlike Bradlaugh’s secular conscience, which retains sovereignty over itself, Gandhi’s “mystical experience” or religion involves a surrender of sovereignty.[20]The doctrine of the Gita is a full blown Occassionalism. Arjuna gains Union with the Lord of Yoga, not by any effort of his own, but a wholly gratuitous gift of Grace. Vaishnavs prefer this to the sterner doctrine of the Jains, which they sometimes call Atheistic- because salvation must come through 'works' not 'Grace;.
This makes the humility involved in secular conscience very different from that involved in religion in Gandhi’s sense. Even where secular conscience humbles itself before the sovereign question, it only humbles itself before man—this is the sense in which secular conscience remains sovereign. By contrast, the question that Gandhi’s religious experience humbles or surrenders itself before is the other experienced in groundless faith. But this humbling is also freely offered, and so it is never a subordination to the other. Religion bears always, in however obscured a manner, this surrender without subordination.Nonsense! King Rantideva giving away the last of his water and dying of thirst, says, ' I do not pray to the Supreme Personality of Godhead for the eight perfections of mystic yoga, nor for salvation from repeated birth and death. I want only to stay among all the living entities and suffer all distresses on their behalf, so that they may be freed from suffering.' What he does not add, because it would be otiose, is that he only does this because this is the service the Lord wants of him and which, therefore, he desires above any other reward.
This is pure Theism which any simple peasant can understand. Not so Skaria. He thinks there is no subordination here whereas the subordination is of the most ego-less kind. A Saivite may say 'actually this person is a jivan-mukta'. The insulted Vaishnav would prefer a more abject type of description.
Gandhi associates several persons with aspects of the experience of religion in this sense—among them Augustine, Jalaluddin Rumi, Jesus, Mohammed, Narsinh Mehta, Mirabai, Rabia Bibi, and Tulsidas. He claims, moreover, that satyagraha is the way of being most faithful to this experience of religion, that it is most proper to religion, that it is the “religion that stays in all religions.”It is quite true that this pure Theistic pietism or devotion- which Hindus call bhakti.
This claim turns on the distinctive way he conceives satya as “love.”It is not distinctive at all but a common thread in devotional pietism.
Exemplary of this way is his explanation (in the sixth of the Rowlatt Satyagraha pamphlet series, which is written during that movement to explain what satyagraha is): “An axiom of religion [dharma] is that satya itself is religion. Love [prem] itself is religion is a second axiom. But since religion cannot be two, so religion itself is love or love is religion. And if we sit down to reflect further, we shall find that without love, conduct based on truth [satya] is impossible. This is why truth force [satya shakti] is love force [prem shakti].”[21] Religion now becomes “universal love.”
As this and other similar formulations unfold, a striking difference opens up between satyagraha and the other conceptions of “universal love.” For example, the Augustinian love of the neighbor (of which the twenty-three-year-old Hannah Arendt provides a breathtaking reading in her dissertation) is for a transcendent and sovereign God.
Augustine says ' if you love the Head, you love also the members; but if you love not the members, neither do you love the Head. Do you not quake at the voice uttered by the Head from Heaven on behalf of His members, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute ME?” (Acts 9:4) The persecutor of His members He called His persecutor: His lover, the lover of His members.' In Vaishnavite terms we would speak of 'amshas' which vary in the degree they participate in the Lord.
Here, first, as Arendt notes, “For the lover who loves as God loves, the neighbor ceases to be anything but a creature of God.This is heresy. Nobody can cease being a creature of God no matter how often she fucks Heidi in the stationery cupboard.
'All meet in this love, denying themselves and their mutual ties. . . . he loves his neighbor neither for his neighbor’s sake, nor for his own sake. Love of neighbor leaves the lover himself in absolute isolation, and the world remains a desert for man’s isolated existence.”[22]Nobody meets because there is nothing to meet. It is the Lord alone who, by the operation of Grace, rejoins His members at his own whim and pleasure. There is no 'isolated existence'- there is Hell and Damnation which is a great suffering, one which is not diminished by the vast numbers who undergo it, but this fate may befall the most faithful and devout of worshipers for Salvation is by Grace alone.
Second, “In the equality of all people before God, which love of neighbor makes thematic,” the concretely temporal question of whether my neighbor is my friend or foe, or how my neighbor regards me, becomes a matter of indifference. What matters rather is that “in the being before God all people are equal, that is, equally sinful.”[23]This is contrary to dogma. God may play favorites. He may choose to reward Caiaphas and punish Chrystosmom. The great virtue of this dogma is that it deflates 'pride in works'- more particularly of a dogmatic sort.
The critique that Arendt makes of Augustine could very easily be made of Gandhi’s explicit formulations.Yes. But precisely because it is too easy to talk that type of shite, one should refrain from doing so. Arendt, as a Jewess, was showing courage, or foolhardiness, in critiquing one of the greatest of Christian Theologian Saints. On the other hand, the Church itself encourages this sort of meditation amongst those with a genuine vocation.
Indeed, he never thematizes and is perhaps never even explicitly conscious of his divergences from Augustine.Gandhi was not greatly concerned with Augustine. His own balancing act was between Jainism and Vaishnavism. The latter was similar to Sufi or Christian pietistic devotionalism.
But his writing at its most intriguing is marked by irreconcilable differences from Augustine or other thinkers of a transcendent religion.How so? The guy says we should all give up sex coz the thing is nasty. So what if our race goes extinct? Surely this points to the transcendent nature of God- though of course, this could also be Umaswati's 'Omega point' where all beings have gained kevalya.
In contrast to Augustinian Christianity, satyagraha is a religion that becomes immanent because of its apprehension of the death of God.No. There is no such apprehension.
Here the segue from satya and religion to universal love is not mediated through a higher entity such as God. It is rather the very impossibility of God as a sovereign being that sustains the emphasis on a universal love. Because of this very different starting point, even same or similar phrases, such as “universal love” or “equality before God,” rotate away on very different trajectories.This is the crux of the matter. Skaria says Gandhi thought his God was mortal. But there is no evidence of this. One may as well write a book whose premise is that Gandhi wanted everybody to become a ski instructor.
For example, even though Gandhi emphasizes universal love, in his writing such love becomes inseparable from swadeshi [staying with one’s own desh—country or place].In Greek, a distinction is made between oikonomia and akrebia. A principle like 'universal love' is rigid akrebia. However the method by which the principle is applied is called 'oikonomia'. Since Gandhi's economics opposed trade, division of labor and transport of basic commodities over any considerable distance, his oikonomia was swadesi while his akrebia was for Universal something or the other. We can defeat Gandhian 'management' or 'governance' (oikonomia) by showing it is infeasible or foolish for some other reason. But to do so we have no need to overthrow Gandhian akrebia- more particularly if it cashes out as something anodyne like 'Love is nice. Hate is bad.' After all 'cheap talk' has its uses.
He insists: One rule of swadeshi is that in serving people we should first serve [seva] those who live near us. There is also an opposite rule, that we should first serve those who are distant from us and then those who are near us. Near in the first rule means physically near, and distant in the second rule means distant from us mentally. . . .So, be nice to daddy, instead of bullying him to give money to some stupid charity. Also, could you kindly get me a beer from the fridge when I'm watching the game? The trouble with you is that you never think about your poor old daddy and all the suffering he has had to go through to put food on the table. Granted, Mummy pays for the food, but I put it on the table and then eat it. Did I ever tell you what she did to me on our honeymoon night? I was so traumatized I had to give up my job.
The reason behind this rule of swadeshi is that we cannot reach all human beings in this world. If instead of serving the person near you, you ignore your neighbour and seek to serve someone living far away, that would be pride on your part.[24]
“Universal love” is thus reinscribed in the local; it must first take up precisely the local friend or enemy, and from there proceed locally to other friends and enemies. This extremely local way of proceeding, which loves the neighbor for the neighbor’s and satyagrahi’s sake, and then strives to universalize itself, is quite at odds with Augustinian love.Augustine's Church had supplanted the oikumene defined by the Roman Empire. He naturally had a different 'oikonomia' from Gandhi- who had an obsession with autarkic village life.
Equality with and of all beings also undergoes a similar transformation, whose incendiary implications are perhaps even more striking.Sadly, no such equality can be said to obtain if some people think they are Mahatmas and that they have an 'inner voice' which is infallible.
In transcendental religions, equality is sustained by a Creator: love of that Creator, or emergence from that Creator, makes for equality.It may do, it may not. Sadly, it is quite feasible that women are inferior to men and blacks to whites and so forth. This at any rate is what is indicated by the history of the Abrahamic Religions.
In satyagraha, as I will indicate at greater length, we encounter an equality that comes after the death of God;Only in your own imagination, Prof. Skaria. On the other hand, it is an indubitable truth, that what we encounter in your work is the murder of Jimmy Hoffa of which and you alone are guilty.
we now have creatures without a sovereign Creator. Their absolute equality, moreover, is irreducibly and tumultuously plural because it must include all being (not only humans but also animals and things).Skaria is responsible for the death of some flies. Thus he murdered all beings including Jimmy Hoffa. Q.E.D
This absolute equality of all being, an absolute equality that does not in his explicit formulations seem to demand any specific political or institutional form (though there is perhaps a hesitant taste for republican democracy), is the most crucial stake of Gandhi’s thinking of religion, of “no politics without religion.”[25]No it isn't. If all beings are equal to Gandhi himself, there would be no need for religion or politics. Any way, the Human race would soon die out coz nobody would be having sex.
But even our radical traditions of thinking politics and the political often quite obscure from us this absolute equality of all being.Indeed, that is why Skaria won't admit to killing Jimmy Hoffa.
In order to indicate how this happens, we could start with another essay by Arendt, this time the controversial “Reflections on Little Rock.”[26] Arendt identifies three different spheres: the political realm, or the realm of citizens, which is organized around the principle of equality of “different men”;No such 'equality' obtained then or exists now. Felons and certain types of migrant were and are denied the vote. Arendt was writing at a time when many African Americans were kept of the electoral rolls in one way or another.
the realm of society, “that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private,” which has discrimination along various lines (such as “profession, income, and ethnic origin”) as its organizing principle;This realm is not different from the political realm. It is not 'curious' or 'hybrid' at all. The social existed before the private.
the realm of privacy, where “our choice is guided, not by likeness or qualities shared by a group of people—it is not guided, indeed, by any objective standards or rules—but strikes, inexplicably and unerringly, at one person in his uniqueness, his unlikeness to all other people we know.”[27]Sheer rubbish! We face coordination and discoordination games in our homes when hidden from the gaze of all but our family members. It is here that we recruit ourselves and rehearse the affiliative reflexes that will enable us to thrive, or- at least- survive.
Hannah's Aunt was a silly lady. Fuck did she achieve?
Arendt’s essay is not at all tenable as an analysis of school desegregation (Ralph Ellison powerfully pointed this out at the time).[28] Nor even perhaps is its distinction between the three realms tenable when it is made so rigidly.[29] The uncanny salience and brilliance of her essay lies rather in its distinctive double move: on the one hand, it identifies equality as the principle of the political, and on the other hand, it precisely identifies some apparently unavoidable restrictions placed on that principle by the other two realms.Talking stupid shite is not evidence of 'uncanny brilliance'. Arendt was wrong- that's all.
This double move has also been found unavoidable by many thinkers whose commitments we might usually consider, unlike Arendt’s, to be close to the radical left. Thus Étienne Balibar, in Equaliberty, his incisive exploration of how equality and liberty are coeval rather than (as much liberal theory would have it) equality coming after liberty as a way of limiting it, is quite clear that he is concerned with the “trace of equaliberty in the history of modern citizenship.”[30] In this formulation, one may say (and I make this point not so much to criticize the book as to bring out its founding presuppositions), equaliberty is restricted to humans.No. It is restricted to stupid cunts who wasted their time at Collidge. On the other hand, Macron took courses with the late Balibar who said ' It is possible to say metaphorically that crisis manifests the circle jerk in which the whole mode of production moves with an immobile movement.'
Well, he omitted the word 'jerk' which is why I describe him as the distressingly late in coming- that too to an obvious conclusion. Still, no one can doubt his, if only in articulo mortis, seminal contribution to the whole mode of production of 'immobile movements'- more especially of the bowels. Ricoeur, like Balibar, was a Socialist- though the former was of a more retiring type. He must be spinning in his grave at Macron's antics.
Even if “fraternity” no longer does the work it has since at least the French Revolution of simultaneously repressing sexual difference and mediating equality and liberty, even if “fraternity” is no longer explicitly invoked, it persists now as an anthropology.WTF? Did women grow dicks after the French Revolution? Did Josephine take Napoleon's anal cherry? Of course, she did! I have watched several highly instructive videos on this subject.
Anything at all can 'persist as an anthropology'. That is why the subject is now taught only by monkeys.
Implicitly excluded thus from equality are all those incapable of modern citizenship—most evidently, animals and things (though perhaps the lines between humans, animals, and things must always pass through humans).[31]Cool! Skaria will get my vacuum cleaner the vote. Moreover there will be some humans who will be declared part thing or part animal. Why is this man not writing a super-hero series for Netflix about Vacuum Cleaner Woman battling it out with South Park's 'man-bear-pig'.
To offer another example, Jacques Rancière, after identifying politics as “that activity which turns on equality as its principle,”Why quote a soixante huitard retard who 'identifies politics' with anything so unrealistic?
goes on to describe politics in terms of disagreement, which is “a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying”; it is “the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness.”[32]Such disagreements don't matter in the slightest. No two members of a Political Party may agree as to what it is they represent. Yet that Party may flourish.
Thus, though Rancière would include the social and the private within the political, his own conception of the political must exclude all those who do not have speech, who do not have the power of agreement or disagreement—most massively, again, animals and things.Votes for Vacuum Cleaners! Extend the suffrage to stalactites!
It is symptomatic of this exclusion and anthropocentrism that Rancière conceives equality in terms of the demand for emancipation—a demand, in other words, that presumes the potential for an everyday exercise of sovereignty, which it would be difficult to attribute not only to animals and things but also, in many situations, to humans.So, the cunt has been talking nonsense these many years! No wonder the French Left is as dead as the Indian Left.
In a dizzying departure from secular traditions of thinking the political, then, Gandhi insists on the absolute equality of all beings;No he doesn't. He says most Dalits are as stupid as cows.
indeed, this absolute equality is satya or the realization of being.Rubbish! Only Mahatmas get anywhere near this. Everybody else should shut the fuck up and just do as they are told.
That insistence makes satya synonymous with justice—now the seizure by the demand for equality and against inequality is ownmost to being.Heideggerian 'ownmost' means the most primordial aspect of being. For Vaishnavs- which is what Gandhi was, not a Heideggerian avant la lettre- this is hiranyabarbha- the 'golden egg' of creation. But it does not represent Equality of Justice or anything else. Why? Because Jatis (universals) don't exist within Hiranyagarbha.
To this seizure, Gandhi gives the name satyagraha.Gandhi whose wholly unaware of any such seizure. Why? Because nothing like it could have happened.
Gandhi repeatedly describes satyagraha as an “ancient truth.” There is of course something new about satyagraha, but “like the name itself,” it is only “a new presentation of an old doctrine.” Gandhi can make these claims becauseKarma works in a particular way according to Indic thought- i.e. the law of causation has not changed.
in his writing satya always already is this absolute equality and absolute plurality,If Skaria means that all are equally subject to karma then he should say so. The fact that everybody is subject to the Law of Gravity does not mean we live in an absolutely Just and wholly egalitarian Society.
and it bears practices that sustain this equality and plurality, practices condensed especially in the word satyagraha, but also in all those words that Gandhi uses as synonyms for satyagraha and for each other: among them, “pure means,” “love,” and “pure self-sacrifice.” These practices are the originary answer that satya bears.A synonym can help restate a question. It can't bear an 'originary' answer to anything.
But that answer, satya, dehisces into many questions, for what satya “is” is constitutively obscured.In Sanskrit, dehisce would be 'sphota'. But a sphota is a unit of meaning, not a bunch of questions. Satya's 'sphota' can't be a bunch of questions which obscure it. Sakaria is babbling nonsense.
Justice among such radically different beings cannot be thought in the usual terms;There are no 'usual terms' for thinking about what Justice entails in dealing with the silent petition of the vacuum cleaner to become a member of the House of Lords whose identity is also claimed by a cabbage which fell off a barrow in Evesham and rolled into the gutter.
what is now required is a justice without sovereignty.because that sort of justice sure works swell! Consider my own Supreme Court of my basement. It has ordered BoJo to dance naked in the Notting Hill Carnival. But since my basement lacks sovereignty with respect to the United Kingdom, the British Prime Minister remains in contumacious defiance of the orders of its Highest Court.
It is only satyagraha as a religion of the question that can apprehend, in trembling and without knowledge, this other justice— satya as the equality of all beingWhy only satyagraha? What about the practice of farting and exiting an elevator any time Amartya Sen walks in? It too is a religion of the question- as for as Atul Gopichand is concerned. It is equally capable of apprehending, in trembling and without knowledge, any shite you care to specify.
Conversely, it is only as a religion of the question that those of us who find it impossible to abandon their faith in secularism can at all think with—as distinct from think about—Gandhi’s religion.How can we be sure? Has Skaria tried thinking with Gandhi's religion while having a radish inserted up his bum? It is entirely possible that this will cause him to abandon his faith in secularism. In that case, he may drop this talk of a 'religion of the question' and go back to the way most Eighth Standard Students think about Gandhi's creed- viz. that it was some hypocritical bania shite.
Unconditional Equality attends to this never-ending dehiscence of the answer, satya, into the question, satyagraha.But 'unconditional equality' never obtained in India. Thus the 'never-ending' sphota of satya into satyagraha was wholly unattended by it. Skaria's own sphota is as but a fart in a crowded lift- i.e. a nuisance simply, unless Amartya Sen happens to be riding in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment