अर्जुनव्रात्यस्तोमः

What is a vow save the Will's self-sacrifice?

Or, itself, but the thrill of self-violation?

Sadly, Vivek is wedded to this Vice

Else but 'Witness', to Suttee immolation.

Envoi- 

Prince! That thy Gandheeva vow, bow to Indradhanusha

May this, my Manyu's string, yet sing Gita's Purusha!

Brouwer & the Gita

I think most non-Mathematicians have a vague idea that Brouwer was in the tradition of Poincare and Borel- i.e. critical of logicism- and intuitionistic in some special sense which pragmatism has had reason to value. It would be interesting to see how he is viewed by Dutch mathematicians. 

In a paper titled  L. E. J. Brouwer’s philosophical views and the Bhagavad Gita  Teun Koetsier writes-

 The philosophical views of the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer had a crucial influence on his mathematical work.  His conviction that mathematics at heart consists of language-free and logic-free introspective constructions stems from his epistemological solipsism. This solipsism is embedded in an original world view based on Schopenhauerian ideas. In particular Brouwer’s references to the Bhagavad Gita are striking. 

I think a Hindu would say that Brouwer was a Samkhya dualist- the fundamental intuition for him is the 'two-ity' between what in Dutch is called ‘ikheid’ (‘the property of being me’ which corresponds to Purusha) &  the ‘images’ (‘voorstellingen’ which would correspond to Prakriti) appearing before the ego. In Samkhya the ikheid is a passive observer. Brouwer was an energetic 'constructivist' yet he longed for the restoration of a state of absolute purity and thus the 'Yogishvara'- Lord of Yoga- as depicted in the Gita appealed to him. This peculiarity of his makes it difficult to class him with the types of solipsism familiar to Western Philosophy. Instead, it would be more usual to see him as Schopenhauer style transcendental idealist. However, by the Thirties, it had become apparent that his notion of 'choice-sequences' (e.g in the hands of Turing) could do something Husserl's transcendental subject could not do. It seemed Brouwer, not Husserl or Wittgenstein, would be more philosophically fecund for the same reason he was so mathematically fecund. Alas, to my knowledge, what that philosophy might be yet eludes elucidation. 

Considering, as I do, the Mahabarata to have a mathematical structure (because it is careful to give each character or episode a dual so as to preserve symmetries such that karma and dharma, as principles of causality across time and space, are conserved, it would be interesting to see which parts of the Gita- considered as a Samkhya-Yoga text converging to the Advaita of the Chandogya- the great man found most evocative. 

In 1905 Brouwer published a remarkable booklet called Life, Art and Mysticism (LAM) in which he described science and technology as evil forces that lead mankind astray. The only way out of this sad world is via introspection. By turning-into-one-self liberation is possible.

Brouwer had joined the Remonstrant Church- a liberal Arminian (i.e. pre-destination means God knows who will come to truly believe and thus pre-destines them for Grace) sect which required converts to write a personal profession of faith. In other words, his mystical views were directly related to his hope of salvation. As with his mathematical work, he was serious and highly motivated. What made him different from ordinary people was his extraordinary mind and strong character. We may not understand exactly why Brouwer's work is helping create what appear to us to be magical new technologies, but such indeed appears to be the case.  

Brouwer quoted medieval mystics to illustrate his views. He also quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, for example, Book II, 62: “While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises”, and Book II, 64: “But a person free from all attachment and aversion and able to control his senses through regulative principles of freedom can obtain the complete mercy of the Lord”. 

'regulative principles of freedom' is a stretch. Self-control and being sensible is all that is required.  

What is interesting is Brouwer's youthful conviction that '“In his life of lust and desire the intellect renders man the devilish service of linking two images of the imaginations as means and end.

we can imagine a virile young student needing to delink the image of a Dutch prostitute from a means, which. though pleasant enough, ends in Syphilis and a rapid decline in mental power. Also your nose falls off. Help me, Jesus! 

 Once in the grip of desire for one thing he is made to strive after another as a means to that end 

Hang on. Maybe the guy is talking about the misuse of mathematics! The lust for solvability may lead to striving after moonshine! Prior to Hilbert's formulation of his second problem, showing the consistency of axioms meant constructing a model. Brouwer thought the use of the law of the excluded middle (which gets us quickly to solvability)  was illicit for infinite sets. Hilbert countered that this was like not letting a boxer use his fists. This sounds like 'funktionlust'- the fist wanting to hit things because it confuses the reason it exists- which is precautionary- with its purpose in life- i.e. aggression.

It is certainly true that in any applied field, there must be strict scrupulousness or 'restricted comprehension'. This may not be the case for pure math. It may be that any and every 'maTam' (dogma) yields the same 'vigyaan' (science). Certainly, that is one way- an ecumenical way- to read the Gita. 

The act aimed at the means, however, always overshoots the mark […] Man’s blinkered view prevents him from recognizing the sometimes very detrimental effect of such action”

Indeed. The misuse of fixed point theorems have resulted in generations of economists and game theorists writing nonsense.  

Brouwer speaks directly about karma-

The fourth chapter is about life after one realizes the corruptness of the world: “You look on this life as the direction of your duty, and you live it as directed from within the self; in other words: you recognize that all these earthly bonds remain your inevitable karma until God releases you. No new desires will be able to deflect you from your path and you will not wantonly increase the burden of your karma” ([3], p. 400).

I suppose Brouwer was speaking metaphorically. He wasn't saying that his 'prarabdha karma' in this life was created in his past lives. His duty had been laid out for him by God's mysterious economy. Nothing wrong with that at all. What is interesting is that the Theosophists, at that time, were talking about how karma was like an arrow in flight. But a superior archer could deflect that arrow with an arrow of his own. Arjuna and other warriors in the Mahabharata did this all the time. I suppose one might think of the debate between the Intuitionists and the Formalists as an attempt to deflect the arrow of progress in their discipline.

 In this chapter the word ‘karma’ occurs for the first time. Brouwer uses it more than 40 times in the last six chapters of the book. He uses it to denote that what is inevitable in this world.

The Hindu view is that karma is a delusion (Maya). But if you truly lurve the Lord and want nothing more than to fulfil His Divine Plan, then you want Him to be the 'Mayin' or magician controlling you. This is Dualistic Theism and no one can say it is inferior to Mystical Monism. But, equally, there would be little point saying the reverse. In this sense Brouwer is right to condemn language devoted to such ends.  

 Chapter six is on immanent truth, that is the “Truth which in this world points to the inevitability of the karma of this world”. An important source of immanent truth is art. True art reveals the situation man is in. “Art which is real truth, belies common sense, causality, and science everywhere […] it sees the avenging of fate in everyone’s life, how the illusion, the hope, and the trust in the stability of this world is turned into misery” ([3], p. 405).

I suppose, 'Art' back then meant Wagner or Tolstoy rather than Disney Cartoons. 

The next chapter is on transcendent truth.

Which, for Hindus, is just Being- though it may be apprehended as Beauty or Bliss 

That is truth that guides a man to a life free from the shackles of fear and desire. In this chapter and the next Brouwer quotes rather extensively from a German translation of the Bhagavad Gita. He quotes from Book II, texts 60-66, from Book V, texts 20-24, Book VI, texts 20-23. Brouwer calls the quotations an example of “mystical sounds that hover above the previous chapters” ([3], p. 420).

For Christians, this may be the 'still small voice' or it might be as a great rushing wind or the cooing of doves etc.  

And in the next chapter on the liberated life he quotes Book III, 17-19, 27-28 and again from Book V, 7-12. Brouwer quotes Book III, 17: “But for one who takes pleasure in the self, whose human life is one of self-realization, and who is satisfied in the Self only, fully satiated – for him there is no duty”,

The Bhagvad Gita deals with the duty of the agent. Self-realization means you become a principal- like the Vyadha (butcher) of the Vyadha Gita who has attained the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya while living an affluent life.  

and Book III, 18: “A self-realized man has no purpose to fulfill in the discharge of his prescribed duties, nor has he any reason not to perform such work. Nor has he any need to depend on any other living being”, Book III, 27: “The spirit soul bewildered by the influence of false ego thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by the three modes of material nature [goodness, passion, and ignorance – TK]”. In the German translation that Brouwer uses the ‘the three modes of material nature’ are simply called ‘the forces of nature’. And also Book V, 7: “One who works in devotion, who is a pure soul, and who controls his mind and senses is dear to everyone, and everyone is dear to him. Though always working, such a man is never entangled”, Book V, 8-9: “A person in the divine consciousness, although engaged in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, moving about, sleeping and breathing, always knows within himself that he actually does nothing at all. Because while speaking, evacuating, receiving, or opening or closing his eyes, he always knows that only the material senses are engaged with their objects and that he is aloof from them”, and Book V, 12: “The steadily devoted soul attains unadulterated peace because he offers the result of all activities to Me; whereas a person who is not in union with the Divine, who is greedy for the fruits of his labor, becomes entangled”.

The context is important. If you are a soldier you may have to kill people but you don't have to enjoy killing.  

The last chapter of LAM on economics contains a warning against attempts to improve society. Brouwer: “Trying to exert outside influence for the sake of a better world or one’s own power is vanity, blind folly, and lust for power.

Nothing wrong with trusting to the 'invisible hand' or 'mysterious economy' which holds at bay the Eschaton.  

The free man rather looks on his fellow men as burdensome hallucinations, luring him away from the right path and trying to make him join their ways because they cannot tolerate his freedom. The free man will carefully avoid them”.

Sound enough advise for a Christian who was also a Mathematician of genius. It may be that his faith sustained him in his work. What few could have appreciated at the time, was that his work would turn out to be so very useful in diverse fields.  But so would the work of Andre Weil- who knew Sanskrit- & Grothendieck's various 'Yogas' which seek to unify algebraic geometry. 

 

Joseph Vetukatti vs Vivek Iyer (part 1)

I am a Hindu. I am also a poet. If any Hindu has a problem with what I have written, they are welcome to question my 'Mimamsa' or interpretation of Hindu Scripture. Why does no Hindu do so? The answer is that I am not claiming to speak for any particular 'sampraday'. Moreover, my observations have 'apoorvata' of a poetic- pathos is mathos- type. 

Today, a non-Hindu told me that my 'vikalpa' ( I never claimed to be a fucking Acharya!) are not founded in the only thing they could, by oikeosis, be founded in- viz my ancestry.

Joseph Vetukatti is a Medical Doctor & a Professor & Research leader re. 'Congenital Cardiology'. 

His name suggests that he comes from a South Indian Christian family which built houses or were notable for some reason connected with house construction.

I don't know if he is constructing a sound edifice for research into Cardiology. I do know that his paper- titled

Nāma–Vikāra (Name Expression): A study into the Metaphysical Architecture of Sanskrit Epics 

Subtitle: A Hermeneutical Reconstruction within Advaita Vedānta 

is ignorant, stupid nonsense. He had invited me to comment on it on the Academia website. I wasn't too harsh with him. Yet he responded angrily saying that though I am descended from udgatrs, my 'Mimasa' has no foundation in the sacred text preserved by my ancestors- not his. 

I responded by suggesting he was a 'vidushak'- a joker- and he has either blocked me or taken some other such similar step.

I will now briefly show that every sentence he has written displays intense stupidity & an impartial ignorance of both Hindu & Western hermeneutics. 

Nama-Vikara means alteration of the Name- e.g. Mummy affectionately calls me Bikki not Vivek. Sama Veda alters pronunciation of Rg Vedic words for the sake of euphony. This gives rise to the notion in Indic musicology that there are shuddh (pure) & vikrit (altered) swaras.

Joe, the joker, says 'Nama-Vikara' means 'Name Expression'. Why? A Name is a phonetic string which is its own expression according to 'Shiksha'. But for the rhapsodist, the shiksha vocalisation is changed to create a musical effect. 

Lord Krishna says, in the Gita, 'among Vedas I am the Sama. Thus, among Upanishads, Krishna will be associated with  Chandogya & Devakiputra. 

Joe, joker of a 'house builder', that he is,  thinks Vedanta has 'architecture'. For Vedic yagnya, there is indeed 'architecture' of the ritual altar. This is karma-kanda & the subject of Purva-Mimamsa. But Vedanta is 'end of the Vedas'- i.e. what happens after the altar is disassembled and every last trace, (or 'crumb of the sacrifice) is properly effaced or disposed off. Joseph may have noticed that this same thing happens after the Christian Mass. Yet, this cretin talks of 'Metaphysical architecture' as inhering in Vedantic texts- that too of a Vaishnavite type!

What is the major malfunction of this cretin? His heart may be in the right place. But his brain is full of shit. What put that shit there? The answer is that he thinks Western Indology wasn't a wank.

To be fair, Hermann Grassman (who translated the Rg Veda) did make interesting discoveries because he treated the text as a data set.  Andre Weil learnt Sanskrit as a kid & taught at Aligarh alongside Vijayraghavan. One may say 'Weil made Bourbaki open to 'dhvani' echoes' & Grothendieck's Yoga arises from it'. But this is merely a matter of speaking.  Indian Samkhya was combinatorics based 'discrete math'. That's why it had notions like 'yukti' (Djikstra concurrency) & Cantorian notions re. Cardinality. Moreover, it was fundamentally statistical & game theoretic purely because that was the only manner in which it could 'pay its way' & get incorporated into the ars dictaminis paideia of the clerical (Mandarin=Mantrin) class into which Niyogi Brahmins migrated.  I am talking about my own ancestral history here. I know it by 'sampratti'. Joe the joker, building his clownish house of cards, is wholly ignorant of it.

Also he is as stupid as shit. He did useful enough donkey work in one field, but- donkey that he is- is now braying to enter the 'kshetra' of an alien religion so as to make it greener in his own eyes by the deposit of his own donkey dung.  I, very respectfully, requested him to turn his attentions to the Holy Quran.

PART 1 Vedantic Understanding 

Which is what Smartas like me have in an 'emic' & authentic manner. 

Abstarct (sic)

This thesis proposes a new hermeneutical framework

i.e. one with 'apoorvata'. If this shitty donkey has such a 'framework' he would be able to say something about my ancestral texts which would strike me as being novel & revealing a new, previously un-noticed, beauty=truth such that my 'shradda' or pious devotion was reinforced. 

Donkey Joe can do no such thing.

 for reading the Sanskrit epics by grounding epic nomenclature in the ontological doctrine of nāma–vikāra articulated in the Chandogya Upanishad 

Udgatrs were what Kosambi called 'a miserabilist class'- i.e. poor as shit. Why? The musical way of chanting goes against the common 'shiksha'. Even in Sri Lal Shukla's Rag Darbari, the 'nasal' accent of the udgatr is mocked. Puritans don't like Music. Vak, mother of the Vedas, herself went into vagabondage with the Gandharvas. It is a scandal to Dogmatics- or donkeys like Joe the builder of clown houses- but opens the 'sahaja' or easy path for 'women, fisherfolk, drunkards,  slaves' or even worthless Socioproctologists like me. 

Sama Veda and Vajd-e-Sama are one & the same. The Sufi qawwali, the Bengali Baul song- but also every composition by a Tyagaraja or Swati Tirunal- are equally suspect to the eye of orthopraxy.

This is the dramatic aspect of Chandogya- for those descended by sampratti- from the famished udgatrs for whom it was revealed, which unites Pathos & Mathos & thus removes any 'stumbling block' for Faith. 

and the ‘vacavibhuthir’ claim of Bhagavata Purana.

Which cashes out as onomatodoxy. This is perfectly orthodox. Indeed it is the most ancient 'Purva Mimamsa'. The name has a power over and above what we think it signifies. Nothing wrong with that at all. Thanks to Purva Mimamsa, my ancestors had an assurance of error-free transmission. 

There is a story that Valmiki was a murderous thug & robber. He started of by chanting 'Mara Mara' (kill, kill) but ended up hearing himself say 'Rama! Rama!' He was saved & saved countless millions by his great 'kavya' epic poem. This is known as true meaning, by highest Acarya & lowest Pariah,  of a term Joe the donkey-clown-house-constructor, lovingly deposits his own stinking dung on.

 Joe, who is not a Smarta udgatr, tells me I am not myself 'founded' in my own religion & oikeiosis. He hints that I am forcing a modern, Mathematical, model on ancient, utterly illogical and foolish, Hindoooo texts. 

Yet, mathematicians have always recognised that intuitions don't change where formalisations change. Indeed, as we have seen over the last thirty years, it is the intuitions which matter. An AI can do 'univalent foundations' formalisations which are canonical for almost any specific purpose. 

 Joe is so fucking stupid, he probably thinks there was no Game Theory before its formalisation by Von Neumann.  Nor could there have been non-dissipative systems before Noether. But double-entry Accountancy is non dissipative. Ensuring 'duality' is good enough to ensure error correction. Joe is a fucking Medical Researcher. Does he really not know this? Fuck is wrong with him? 

Suppose I said- on the basis of my having been born in Germany- 'there were no Christians in South India before 1887' - when some stupid racist German cunt shat on the Holy Bible? What would happen? My own mother would slap the black off me. Even Comrade Vijayan would give me a wide berth. 

I suppose Donkey Joe isn't really interested in the opinion of darkies like me. He wants to suck up to stupid White dudes with PhDs in worthless shite. 

But, if that is intention, he can't write utter nonsense like this-

 Beginning from the Upanishadic assertion that “Name is a mere expression of ideas; the underlying substance alone is real,”

There is no such donkey-dung assertion anywhere save in Joe's ignorant mind. Names designate. They don't 'express'.  Moreover, ideas are not connected with 'substance' save by a 'Structural Causal Model'.

No hypokeimenon is real. It is merely the lowest Kolomogorov complexity (i.e. uncompressible) SCM undergirding.

Where did Donkey-Joe go to Skool? I knew stuff like this when I was doing my fucking A levels! By the time I got to the LSE, aged 16, I understood why 'multiple realisability' (e.g convergent evolution) & lack of categoricity (or 'naturality') must be the rule- not the exception. 

 the study advances the thesis that Sanskrit proper names

In the philosophy of language, a proper name is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world.

A person can have a whole bunch of such proper names in various contexs. Consider the epithet 'fat bastard'- it uniquely identifies me, not Joe, if we happen to be having a drink together at the local pub.

 in the epics function as compressed ontology 

There can be 'pocket universes'. There can't be a 'compressed ontology'. Why? Ontology is information theoretic. The canonical ontology minimises Kolmogorov complexity.

Joe, donkey that he is, didn't get why my mention of Ramsey theory (prefigured in Uma-fucking-svati!) was relevant. 

rather than as arbitrary identifiers. If nāma (Name) is understood as the conceptual crystallization of a perceived expression, 

Nobody has ever done so. Fuck is wrong with this shithead? My name for him is 'Joe-the-donkey-dung-fabricator-of-clown houses'. One may say it is my conceptual crystallisation of my 'perceived' impression of the ultracrepidarian shite he has written.  But it isn't really. I don't perceive Joe as a shithead. I know he is a fucking ultracrepidarian donkey trying to shit on Hinduism.  

then epic nomenclature constitutes ontological condensation:

Not for Smartas. The Hindu doctrine of Incarnation has nothing to do with prosopoi or hypostasis. Maybe, this donkey of a Jew, is trying to save Trinitarianism by appealing to Ramanuja's bimba-pratibimbat-darpan. I'm kidding. This donkey just wants to shit on a 'kshetra' which his own Church tells him to avoid like the Devil. 

 each name encodes a metaphysical, psychological, and ethical principle embedded within the narrative form. 

Nothing wrong with proceeding on that assumption. But that's not an excuse for shitting on a 'kshetra'- a field- which your own Church says you should avoid. 

Audrey Trushke on the Mahabharata

The Great War was an apocalyptic war between Imperial cousins which made the end of European Imperialism inevitable. The Mahabharata- an Indian epic which featured a great war between Royal cousins- gained salience during this horrible time. In particular, the 'Bhagvad Gita'- a chapter from that epic- captured the imagination of many who had witnessed the horrors of trench war.

The MhB is not History as Chronicle- it is 'itihasa' a narrative constructed to elucidate the Vedic religion- or 'Dharma'-  as it applies to actual conduct. Dharma was translated into Greek as 'eusebia' which was translated into Latin as 'Pietas' which is the English 'piety'. It is relational, not substantive. Your asebia can cause asebia (impiety) in others. This explains why dharmic people can be driven to impious actions. 

Interestingly, the key to understanding the MhB was provided by a German Jewish female mathematician- Emmy Noether- in 1918. Her theorem showed that a system which has been built up on the basis of symmetries, will have conserved properties corresponding to those symmetries. The MhB is a 'non-dissipative' system which conserves karma- which is a law of causation through time applicable to individual souls- and dharma- which is the moral law which relates agents to each other across space. How this is done is by ensuring symmetry is maintained such that every episode and every agent has a 'dual' such that the nature of the law is elucidated. Furthermore, care is taken to make each episode a 'balanced game'- even if one party is a god and the other a mortal- so that there is some drama and suspense as to the outcome. 

In this sense, as mathematical game theory, starting from Zermelo's theorem in 1913, was further elaborated, the MhB did indeed become a tale for our times.

Audrey Trushke, writing for Aeon, says as much but does not provide the true reason for it. 

The Mahabharata is a tale for our times. The plot of the ancient Indian epic centres around corrupt politics,

There is no corruption. There are thymotic rivalries and personal affronts and vendettas. But nobody is taking bribes or betraying anybody.  

ill-behaved men

Draupati's bad behavior is mentioned as a cause for the War. The men behaved nobly enough according the thymotic code of their times.  

and warfare. In this dark tale, things get worse and worse, until an era of unprecedented depravity, the Kali Yuga, dawns.

Nonsense! Kali Yuga just means life-spans are shorter and work is more laborious. But there is an easier path to salvation available.  

According to the Mahabharata, we’re still living in the horrific Kali era, which will unleash new horrors on us until the world ends.

And starts again. But, we may gain eternal salvation during it.  

The Mahabharata was first written down in Sanskrit, ancient India’s premier literary language, and ascribed to a poet named Vyasa about 2,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. The epic sought to catalogue and thereby criticise a new type of vicious politics enabled by the transition from a clan-based to a state-based society in northern India.

Nonsense! It described an epic battle which occurred in remote antiquity. Plenty of the Kings and Chieftains existing at the time of its composition claimed descent from the heroes featured in it. However the 'state-based' society of Emperor Bharata had existed at a very much earlier period. Bharata was the son of Shakuntala. India is called Bharat because of him.  

The work concerns two sets of cousins – the Pandavas and the Kauravas – who each claim the throne of Hastinapura as their own.

Nope. The Kauravas rule Hastinapura. The Pandavas rule Indraprastha. Sadly, their eldest brother gambles it away.  

In the first third of the epic, the splintered family dynasty tries to resolve their succession conflict in various ways, including gambling, trickery, murder and negotiation.

There was no succession conflict. The Pandavas moved to Indraprastha and established their own city. It is related that the head of the Kauravas mistook polished marble for a pool of water and vice versa. Draupati, the common wife of the Pandavas, laughed at him. That's why he wanted revenge. There is a similar story about the Queen of Sheba in the court of King Solomon. 

I suppose you could say there was bad blood between the cousins because of the childhood pranks of one of the Pandavas. However, the MhB explains that all these ostensible causes of the war were actually part of the Divine plan. One could say that the Kauravas represented the older thymotic society of the warriors while the Pandavas represent the new commercial outlook of the emporium cities.  

But they fail. So, war breaks out,

as it was foreordained to do.  

and the middle part of the Mahabharata tells of a near-total world conflict in which all the rules of battle are broken as each new atrocity exceeds the last. Among a battlefield of corpses, the Pandavas are the last ones left standing. In the final third of the epic, the Pandavas rule in a post-apocalyptic world until, years later, they too die.

Iron age epics end in this manner. For a while great heroes are animated by something nearly Divine. Then they grow old and die in a greyer world.  

From the moment that the Mahabharata was first written two millennia ago, people began to rework the epic to add new ideas that spoke to new circumstances.

But they were careful to 'balance the books' by creating a dual for each episode or character.  

No two manuscripts are identical (there are thousands of handwritten Sanskrit copies), and the tale was recited as much or more often than it was read. Some of the most beloved parts of the Mahabharata today – such as that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha wrote the epic with his broken tusk as he heard Vyasa’s narration – were added centuries after the story was first compiled.

But all such additions (or recoveries from some other Ur-text) were careful to preserve relevant symmetries.  

The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterised as a set of narratives about vice.

No. It is about karma and dharma. If you uphold dharma you gain merit. If you fail to do, you will suffer karmic consequences. The MhB elucidates many aspects of Vedic religion and law. However, it shows the way to a theistic occasionalism which can be embraced by non-Vedic people.  

Inequality and human suffering are facts of life in the Mahabharata.

No. They are the consequences of failure to uphold dharma or are the fruit of bad actions in previous lives.  

The work offers valuable perspectives and vantage points for reflecting on how various injustices play out in today’s world too.

No. You actually need to know current law and economics to understand such things. We don't live in remote antiquity and can't get married to fairies or ogres.  

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviours.

 No. It refers to a pre-existing, quite diverse, tradition of dharmic texts and teachings. However, these injunctions are defeasible.

But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled.

No. Symmetries are carefully maintained such that dharma and karma are conserved properties of the system. The thing is not a hodgepodge. I suppose the 'book keeping' rule for its composition was simple enough. That's what makes the book as a whole 'balance'.  

The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

No. People who are rash do silly things which lead to their own suffering. We might say 'don't be like Yuddhishtra who was crazy about dice games' or 'don't be like Draupati, who could not control herself from laughing at the discomfiture of a guest'. 

Nobody is shackled. On the other hand, their actions were preordained. But if we knew God had preordained our actions, we would perform them all the more willingly. 

Bhishma, a common ancestor

he is celibate and thus can't be anybody's ancestor 

and grandfather-like figure to both sets of cousins, is a quintessential Mahabharata figure. Loyal to his family to a fault, he takes a vow of celibacy so that his father can marry a younger woman who wanted her children to inherit the throne. Bhishma’s motivation, namely love of his father, was good, but the result of denying himself children was to divert the line of succession to his younger brothers and, ultimately, their warring children.

Nothing wrong in that. Bhishma was the son of Ganga. He should have been killed as a baby as had been preordained for his own felicity.  

Appropriately, Bhishma’s name, adopted when he took his vow of celibacy, means ‘the terrible’ (before the vow, he was known as Devavrata, ‘devoted to the gods’). Bhishma remains devoted to his family even when they support the Kauravas, the bad guys, in the great war.

So does the common Guru of the cousins. They abided by their dharma. But, it was clear that the thymotic age was coming to a close. The future lay with the commercial emporium cities where the Vyadha (butcher) gained wealth.  

Sometimes even the gods act objectionably in the Mahabharata. Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, endorses dishonesty on more than one occasion.

 Which is fine because he is God and can do no wrong. The narrative tension in the MhB arises from seeing whether the author will be able to find a way to preserve symmetries without sacrificing anything of aesthetic value. My pleasure in re-reading the MhB is to find some new (apoorva) subtleties which the author used but which, on previous readings, I had failed to grasp. 

Even when Krishna advocates what the epic dubs dharma, the results can be hard to stomach.

For stupid people who don't understand the symmetries on which the epic is built up.  

For example, when Arjuna, the third Pandava brother and their best warrior, hesitates to fight against his family and kill so many people, Krishna gives an eloquent speech that convinces him to plunge into battle.

No. Krishna fails to convince him. He has to reveal his 'universal form'. What is interesting is that Arjuna could have got this anyway but then he would have discovered his true eldest brother was Karna. Since Karna wanted to either kill or be killed by Arjuna, the Gita reveals the subtle way in which even incarnate God is 'gamed' by his own game-plan such that, not Krishna, but Karna's will is done. 

Krishna’s discourse to Arjuna, known as the Bhagavadgita (‘Song of the Lord’), or Gita for short, is often read as a standalone work today,

it is the dual of the Vyadha Gita which deals with the dharma of the principal as opposed to the agent. But the Vyadha is twinned with the Nalophkyanam which says that the principal should master statistical game theory to avoid 'Vishada' depression. This is subtle stuff. Even Andre Weil didn't understand this though he knew both Sanskrit and Mathematics.  

and revered by many across the world for its insights on morality and even nonviolence. In the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi understood the Gita to support nonviolent resistance to colonial oppression.

Weil thought its message was to desert from the army. This almost got him killed. Apparently, his pal, Vijayraghavan was a Gandhian. Being a great mathematician doesn't prevent you from doing stupid shit. The Gita says 'do your duty. Fight!' Weil thought it meant 'run the fuck away'.  

In the Mahabharata’s plot, however, the Bhagavadgita rationalises mass slaughter.

It was already valorized as the quick and certain way for warriors to gain Valhalla.  If you don't want to be a soldier, resign from the army and go do something else. 

‘Mahabharata’ translates as ‘great story of the Bharatas’, the Bharatas being the family lineage at the centre of the tale. However, in many modern Indian settings, ‘Mahabharata’ means a great battle.

Because it truly is an epic battle which engrossed kids like me.  

War is the narrative crux of the epic. The war that settles the succession dispute between the Pandavas and the Kauravas

there was no succession dispute. The question was whether the Pandavas would get back their own kingdom.  

draws much of the world into its destructive whirlwind. Along with peoples from across the Indian subcontinent, Greeks, Persians and the Chinese also send troops to stand and fall in battle.

Sadly, the Americans didn't show up. They thought the only good Indian was a dead Indian. 

The Pandavas win, but at a magnificent cost of human life.

She means 'terrible'. However it is the 'night-slaughter' of women and children which is most horrific. 

The epic compels readers to imagine that human cost by describing the battle in excruciating, bloody detail over tens of thousands of verses. The Pandavas kill multiple members of their own family along the way, including elders who ought to be revered.

They were revered. Then they decided to lay down their own lives. Not a bad way to go even if Bhishma prosed on at inordinate length.  

Their victory is further soured by a night raid in which, on the last night of the war, the few remaining Kauravas creep into the slumbering Pandava camp and kill nearly everyone, including all the victors’ sons.

But one of them is brought back to life so that the dynasty continues.  

After the slaughter, when blood has soaked the earth and most of the characters lie dead, Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five Pandavas, decides that he no longer wants the throne of Hastinapura. What is the point of ruling when you got there only through deceit, sin and death? Yudhishthira says:
आत्मानमात्मना हत्वा किं धर्मफलमाप्नुमः

This is a reference to Krishna's self-slaying through theophany (which is a condign self-praise and therefore a type of suicide) Yet, the fruit of eusebia (dharma) arises only when the self slays the self. Still, what Yudhishthira had not bargained on was that he would himself have to rule Hastinapura, which after all, would be loyal to the Kauravas and thus would look upon him an usurper 

धिगस्तु क्षात्रमाचारं धिगस्तु बलमौरसम्

This was a common trope. Warriors lament their berserker fury and must expiate their sins before returning to peaceful life.  

धिगस्त्वमर्षं येनेमामापदं गमिता वयम्
Since we slaughtered our own, what good can possibly come from ruling?
Damn the ways of kings! Damn might makes right!
Damn the turmoil that brought us to this disaster!

It is right and proper that some expiatory ceremonies are conducted and subjugated populations are conciliated so that Princes can return to their peaceful occupation of protecting commerce and promoting civilizing arts and crafts.  

Yudhishthira’s fellow victors ultimately convince him to fulfil the duty to rule, regardless of his personal inclination to retire to the forest. In an attempt to address his numerous sharp objections, Bhishma – who lies dying on a bed of arrows – gives a prolix discourse on dharma in various circumstances, including in disasters. Still, for some readers, lingering doubt cannot but remain that Yudhishthira might be right to want to shun a bitter political victory.

It is important that after a bloody conflict, there are proper expiatory ceremonies and an attempt to conciliate the recently subjugated.  

The Mahabharata follows Yudhishthira’s reign for some years. It concludes with the demise of the five Pandava brothers and their wife Draupadi. In an unsettling twist, the six wind up visiting hell for a bit, en route to heaven. This detour calls the very core of dharma, righteousness, into question, again reminding us that the Mahabharata is an epic ordered by undercutting its own professed ethics.

No. It is a marvel of consistency. Bad actions have bad consequences- even for divine beings. However, there is also a theological point. The dharma of the agent is theistic and occassionalist. That of the principal need not be so. Yudhishthira is free to chose some better dharma or path of piety. But then, so was the Vyadha who merely butchered animals, not men.  

In its philosophy and ethics, the Mahabharata proffers riches to its readers, in particular about the nature of human suffering as an ever-present challenge to any moral order.

Nonsense! The fact that I have a tummy ache because I ate too much cake isn't a challenge to the moral order. Rather it is a reproach to the planet Jupiter which I requested to kindly do the washing up because I can't be arsed. It said nothing and silence implies consent. Yet my washing up hasn't been done.  

But how does the work measure up as literature? The work is considered to be kavya (poetry). In classical Sanskrit literary theory, each kavya ought to centre around a rasa, an aesthetic emotion, such as erotic love (shringara) or heroism (vira). But what aesthetic emotion might a tale of politics and pain, such as the Mahabharata, spark in readers?

Shanti rasa. There is a purgation of the emotions by means of pity and terror. But it is the artfully constructed symmetries which are aesthetically satisfying. Karma and Dharma can take care of themselves. We- like the Vyadha- can concentrate on doing well at work and having a happy domestic life. The honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya is available to us even if we aint been edumicated and are as common as muck.  

Confounded by this question, one premodern Indian thinker suggested adding a ninth rasa to the line-up that might suit the Mahabharata: shanta, quiescence or turning away from the world. The idea is that, after perusing the vicious politics and violence endemic to the human condition as depicted in the Mahabharata, people would be disenchanted with earthly things and so renounce the world in favour of more spiritual pursuits, as Yudhishthira wished to.

Fuck that. The one guy in MhB ordinary peeps- as opposed to Brahmin seers or Kshatriya warriors- we want to emulate is the Vyadha. How come he is so rich? The answer is he supplies good quality meat and thus has bigger market share and thus enjoys economies of scope and scale. Since he pays his taxes, he doesn't need to bother with either the Pundit or the Politician.  

The Mahabharata condemns many of the appalling things it depicts, but one area where its response is more tepid concerns the treatment meted out to women.

Not to mention the treatment they mete out.  

The story of Draupadi, the leading Pandava heroine, is the most well-known. Before the great war, her husband Yudhishthira gambles her away in a dice game,

This is a reference to the Vedic hymn known as the 'gambler's lament'. His own wife has been gambled away and is stripped before his eyes. The hymn ends by praising 'Krishi' or agriculture- which has its risks but which is a 'positive sum' game.  

and Draupadi’s new owners, the Kauravas, strip and publicly assault her at their court. The Mahabharata condemns this event, but Draupadi’s notorious sharp tongue also undercuts the empathy many might have had for her.

Actually, she poses a good legal question. If her husband was already a slave then he could not have a free-born woman as his wife. True, the men could rape or kill her but in that case her Royal father would have a claim against their kingdom. Indeed, he could say that any son she has is his own by putrika-putra. Nobody wants some other King to have a legal claim to their own throne.  

After she is won at dice, Draupadi argues with her captors. First, she speaks up privately, from her quarters of the palace. Then, after being dragged into the Kauravas’ public audience hall, traditionally a male space, she advocates openly about how the situation is ‘a savage injustice’ (adharmam ugraṃ) that implicates all the elders present. Her self-assertion in a hall of men works. She convinces Dhritarashtra, the Kaurava king, to release her and eventually the rest of her family. But in a world favouring demure women, Draupadi’s willingness to speak about her suffering means that she has always carried a reputation as a shrew and a troublemaker.

Not in Tamil Nadu where there are plenty of Draupati Amma temples. Tamil women very sharp tongued. Mind it kindly.  Incidentally, Draupati was born from fire with the aim of gaining revenge for her father. 

Draupadi entered the Pandava family when Arjuna won her in a self-choice ceremony. In such ceremonies, the name notwithstanding, the woman is given as the prize to the victor of a contest.

No. In 'svayam-var' the woman chooses the man she wants and puts a garland around his neck. Draupadi wanted to marry the best archer and thus set a test for archery skill.  

However, Draupadi ends up with five husbands, when Arjuna’s mother tells him – without looking over her shoulder to see that she is speaking about a female trophy rather than an inanimate one – to split his prize with his brothers. To make her words true, all five Pandavas marry Draupadi.

She should also have been split with Karna. That was a good enough reason for him not to press his claim to lead the Pandavas.  

Nobody ever says that a bride should be like Draupadi, unless the goal is to curse the newlywed

Draupaid is a kula devam for many in my native Tamil Nadu.  

Nobody ever asks Draupadi if she wanted polyandry,

Her purpose on earth was to get revenge on Drona. Having five husbands helped her achieve this. Her transgender sibling too played a great role in this.  

and the question has rarely interested readers.

Indian readers share Kipling's view of polyandry- it's great for the woman concerned as in his novel 'Kim'.  

However, the Mahabharata offers further justifications for this unusual arrangement that blame Draupadi. For instance, in a prior life, Draupadi had asked for a husband with five qualities; unable to find a man who had all of them, Shiva gave her five husbands. She should not have asked for so much.

She suffered no harm by it. If men can have multiple wives, why shouldn't women? The big question was whether she could treat all five equally. If the answer was yes, then she had achieved a great Vedic quality- viz. indifference between different awards of land at time when a new agricultural settlement was made.  

Draupadi has never been considered a role model in mainstream Indian cultures. Some later Sanskrit and vernacular works mock her. Even today, a refrain at Hindu weddings is that the bride ought to be like Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana.

To whom Lord Ram is faithful. 

Nobody ever says that a bride should be like Draupadi, unless the goal is to curse the newlywed.

You can say she is the incarnation of Parashakti- at least in the South.  

In the Mahabharata, kidnapping is also an acceptable way to compel a woman to marry.

No. It is one of the recognized forms of marriage provided this is acceptable to the lady. 

For instance, Arjuna falls in love at first sight (or perhaps in lust) with Subhadra but, unsure whether she would accept him, he abducts her.

Krishna, her brother, suggests this. Nowadays, the expenses of marriage have grown so great that we wish some nice boy will abduct our daughters.  

This story has been cleaned up in some modern retellings – such as the TV serial from Doordarshan (one of India’s largest public service broadcasters) – which tend to water down misogyny.

The story of Draupati is entertaining. It sticks in our minds.  Also, it gives an actress lots of scope. 

The world of the Mahabharata is stacked against women.

Did you know that Bhishma refused to undergo gender reassignment surgery? At least Arjuna spent a year dressed up as a woman. But then so did Achilles.  

Our world today looks distinct in its details, but some basic principles are not much different. For example, more than one person has compared Draupadi’s plight with that of ‘Nirbhaya’, the name given to the young woman mortally gang-raped in Delhi in 2012.

Which suggests that more than one person is as stupid as shit. Draupadi wasn't raped.  

Nirbhaya (meaning ‘fearless’) resisted her attackers, and one of the rapists later said that this resistance prompted him and his fellow assaulters to be more brutal than they would have been otherwise. Two millennia later, the corrupt ‘moral’ remains: she should not have objected to unjust treatment.

No it doesn't. What was sad was that Delhi's women refused to vote for ex-police officer Kiran Bedi who would have made women completely secure within a month of taking over as CM. Instead, women voted for Arvind Kejriwal who had a female MP from his party thrashed in his own house! Incidentally, that woman says she was raped by her daddy.  

The Mahabharata represents a world of caste and class, where bloodline determines identity.

No. It depicts a world where various dudes are the partial incarnations of various Gods. Karna's bloodline doesn't determine shit.  

Many characters try to break out of the bonds of lineage, but they usually fail in the end.

None do. The Vyadha (butcher) attains the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya in this life itself. Others go to Heaven or get reborn.  It is a different matter that a young chap might disguise his caste origin to receive a particular type of instruction.  

Among the many tales in this vein, that of Karna stands out as offering harsh reflections on the limits of an individual to reshape his identity.

Nonsense! He is granted a kingdom because of his martial prowess. If he wants to take over the leadership of the Pandavas he is welcome to do so.  

Karna’s mother is Kunti, mother of the five Pandava brothers, but Karna is not counted among the five.

He could be. It is up to him. Hindu law said that the son born out of wedlock of a woman you marry is your son unless he does not want to be. 

The story goes that, when Kunti was a girl, a sage gave her a boon that she could call any god at any time to impregnate her. Still unmarried, one night she calls Surya, the Sun god. Surya’s brilliance scares Kunti, and she asks him to leave, but he insists on seeing the matter through. And so, compelled by a male god who said she asked for it, Kunti conceives Karna.

Who is born immediately.  

This troubling conception augured Karna’s future troubled life.

Karna's story is similar to that of Moses or, going further back, Sargon of Akkad.  

Kunti fears her father’s wrath if he were to find his daughter with child but without a husband. So, after giving birth, she sends Karna, her first-born son, down the river in a basket. A low-caste

high caste. They were 'Sutas' (bards and charioteers). At Kurukshetra, both Karna and Arjuna have Royal Kings as their respective charioteers.   

barren couple finds the abandoned infant and raises him as their own. The story parallels (unintentionally, most likely) that of Moses,

which parallels that of Sargon 

with the classes of the birth and adopted parents reversed. Like Moses, Karna could never escape his birthright.

Hindu law said that the son born to a wife before marriage could be claimed by the father or, if the father was dead, he could claim to be of that father. Karna escapes his birthright by telling his Mum to fuck off. However he promises her that he will kill only one of her sons so that the total number will remain five.  

Karna is born with brilliant armour, inherited from his father, and other marks that he would be a great warrior. He is also drawn to fighting, which leads him, early in the epic, to enter a weapons competition in which the Pandavas and Kauravas also participate. When Karna is asked to announce his lineage, it comes out that he is the son of low-caste parents,

Not low caste but not royal either.

and Bhima – one of the good guys – ridicules him. Sensing a chance to make a new friend, the Kauravas – the baddies of the story – give Karna a kingdom and so make him, technically, a king and eligible to fight. At this point in the tale, nobody knows that Karna is actually the eldest Pandava and that he is already royal by birth – except for his mother, Kunti, who watches the event silently.

This is dramatic but isn't about 'caste politics'. The plain fact is, a guy who is very good at fighting can become a King or Emperor or whatever. He can pay priests to have him declared a God or a Mermaid or anything else he fancies.  

As the eldest Pandava by blood, Karna should have been king.

He could chose to reveal his identity and take over as the Pandava leader. Maybe his pal Duryodhana would not have wanted to go to war in that case.  

In fact, Krishna goes to Karna to make this argument on the eve of the great war, as a last-ditch effort to avoid catastrophe, and the conversation is one of the most interesting in the Mahabharata. The core questions are timeless: what determines a person’s identity?

The choices that dude makes.  

Can an individual reject or change who they really are?

Yes. 

Who gets to say who each of us really is?

The guy in question.  

Can we escape our destinies?

Yes because our destiny is to escape it.  

Karna refuses Krishna’s request to take his place as the eldest Pandava and ascend the throne. Instead, choosing bread over blood, Karna fights and dies with the Kauravas.

He is a warrior. Dying in battle is the best of deaths. Who cares if you win or lose? Indeed, the problem with the Kauravas is that their commanders weren't wholeheartedly committed to victory at any cost.  

But, according to Vyasa and the Mahabharata’s many unknown authors, Karna, no matter his actions, was never a Kaurava. At the end of the epic, in a scene twisted in more ways than one, Karna winds up in hell with the other Pandavas, briefly, while the Kauravas bask in heaven.

There is no twist. It was already apparent that something mysterious had happened at Kurukshetra. Someone should have remembered this was a sacred site. The two armies needed to find somewhere else to fight. But this 'vishodhana' or bloody lustration was foreordained. Lots of warriors got to go to Heaven. This was cool. Maybe there were simply too many warriors. Kurukshetra was a salutary 'shakeout'. It heralded the age of commerce and the decline of chivalry.  

The epic’s stance that we can’t transcend our births can appear very dark to modern eyes (or at least to some modern eyes) in stories that feature low-caste characters. Take the tale of Ekalavya.

A prince of the Nishadhs- just like Nala.  

Ekalavya is born a tribal (nishada), outside of the four-fold Hindu class system, but his heart is set on life as a warrior (kshatriya) and learning to fight from Drona, who taught both the Pandavas and Kauravas. Drona denies Ekalavya instruction because of casteism,

Drona was a retainer of the Bharatas. He wasn't supposed to be instructing warriors from a different tribe.  

and so Ekalavya honours a clay statue of Drona every day while learning on his own. After a while, Ekalavya’s skills exceed those of Arjuna. And so, Arjuna cajoles Drona to demand that Ekalavya slice off his own thumb, thus ensuring that Ekalavya could never shoot an arrow again.

Ekalavya became a great king. Krishna reveals that he killed him because he was likely to join the Kauravas. But to be killed by the avatar of the Lord is to gain the highest boon. In any case, Ekalavya attained immortality by his Guru dakshina. After all, he had already attained his goal of becoming the greatest archer of his age.  Some say, he was reincarnated as Draupati's brother and thus got to slay Drona. As the saying goes- karma is a bitch. 

Drona does so, under the guise of asking for gurudakshina (a teacher’s fee) since Ekalavya had built a statue of Drona’s likeness. Internalising the caste prejudice that condemned him, Ekalavya cut off his thumb and was never a threat to Arjuna again.

Why the fuck would a Prince of a different tribe 'internalize' the prejudice of some other bunch of guys? The plain fact is, Ekalavya gained merit by offering the daksina demanded of him by a preceptor.  

The message is that, one way or another, varnashramadharma (moral behaviour according to one’s social class and life stage) prevails.

Fuck off! All the Pandavas and Kauravas are the biological descendants of Ved Vyas whose Mum was a smelly fisherwoman. Also, the dude was as ugly as shit.  

A 20th-century poem by the Dalit writer Shashikant Hingonekar puts it like this:
If you had kept your thumb
history would have happened
somewhat differently.

This is also true if everybody had shoved their thumbs up their asses so as to avoid giving it to some Brahmin dude. 

But … you gave your thumb
and history also
became theirs.
Ekalavya, since that day they have not even given you a glance.
Forgive me, Ekalavya, I won’t be fooled now by their sweet words.
My thumb will never be broken.

I had requested Shashikantji to cut off his dick and offer it to me.  Sadly, he was refusing to do the needful even though I mentioned I was Wendy O' Doniger. Personally, I blame Mallikarjun Kharge for this outcome. 

The Mahabharata claims to be about the totality of human life in a verse included in both its first and final books:
धर्मे चार्थे च कामे च मोक्षे च भरतर्षभ
यदिहास्ति तदन्यत्र यन्नेहास्ति न तत्क्वचित्
What is found here regarding the aims of human life –
righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release –
may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas.
But what is not here, is found nowhere.

because, by properly preserving symmetries, anything can be added to it except there would be no point and, in any case, we are too stupid or lazy to bother.  

Indeed, the Mahabharata’s promise to explore (among other things) immorality, politics, sexism and identity problems as general features of human life rings true in our times.

It really isn't that sort of shitty virtue-signalling book.  What is remarkable about it is captured by game theory (in each episode there is 'game balancing')  and Noether's theorem. This is because symmetries are carefully conserved. 

Over the past several years, politics in India and the United States have taken dark turns as both countries turn their backs on the values of pluralism

The US had genocide and slavery and a horrible Civil War. It had no 'pluralism'. India under the Brits had pluralism which is why it couldn't feed or defend itself. Chasing away the Brits by insisting on Independence meant partition and much less pluralism. 

and embrace ethno- and religious nationalisms.

Fuck off! The US has gotten a lot less racist during my lifetime. India, sadly, got rid of Whites though we were happy enough to import Sonia.  

Violence and death are heavily used tools by governments in both countries.

They were more heavily used in the past.  

Sexism has never gone away.

POTUS is refusing to chop off his own dick and offer it as dakshina to Wendy O'Doniger.  

It is a critical part of the current surge of Right-wing ideologies and their embrace of male privilege. Moreover, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reasserting retrograde gender roles in many places across the globe. The pandemic’s toll on women’s physical safety, mental health and careers is great and growing.

This own lady's mental health was destroyed long ago- probably because she chopped off her clitoris to offer it as Dakshina to Wendy O'Doniger.  

Identity, too, plagues us.

Why can't we all be just one homogenous mass of quivering protoplasm?  

The caste system is still very much alive, in both India and the diaspora.

No it isn't. Nowadays, even Namboodri householders don't scruple to eat food cooked by an Iyer. Caste is dead save for purposes of arranged marriage. But even there educational status and occupation are given higher importance.

We also struggle with types of oppression birthed in modernity, such as racism.

Racism was thriving when Neanderthals walked the earth.  

The Mahabharata makes no false promises of solving such problems,

whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey do- right? 

but it does offer us tools for thinking them through, now and in the future,

It does offer tools which we can put into the language of Noether's theorem, duality, and Game theory. The uniqueness of the MhB is that, in the Nalopakhayanam, it shows some ancient type of discrete math being used to simulate decision problems in statistical game theory. 

even if – or perhaps especially if – that future looks dark. The epic itself foretells:
आचख्युः कवयः केचित्संप्रत्याचक्षते परे
आख्यास्यन्ति तथैवान्ये इतिहासमिमं भुवि
Some poets told this epic before.
Others are telling it now.
Different narrators will tell it in the future.

Stupid narrators will tell of it in a stupid fashion. There was a time when few people who knew Sanskrit also knew Noether's theorem or Von Neumann's game theory.  But, surely, that must have ceased to be the case by the Seventies? If Robert Aumann can find Shapley values in Talmud, why can't any smart dude (i.e. not me) give an up to date account of the 'open problems' addressed by MhB? Why are rancid nutters like Audrey still shitting upon that relatively high IQ epic? 

I get that Indians are lazy but lots of non-Indians read the MhB. Surely, they can't all be wholly ignorant of basic math? Must Ind's epics turn into a Grievance Studies ghetto? I suppose so. Academia has become wholly adversely selective. 

Amber Carpenter & Krishna's Kantianism.

The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy states-

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the supreme principle of morality is a principle of practical rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI). Kant characterized the CI as an objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle that we must follow despite any natural desires we may have to the contrary.

if we are truly autonomous and rational. Kant wasn't saying a heteronomous person (e.g. a slave, a woman, or a Chinese dude) or an irrational person ( e.g. a big fat nigger- like Professor Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Ghanaian who held Professorships of Philosophy at Halle and Jena back when Kant was a kid) must, or could, follow any fucking unconditional principles whatsoever.  

All specific moral requirements, according to Kant, are justified by this principle, which means that all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the CI.

In other words CI is an axiom of any deontic system whose 'model' specifies a particular moral requirement. A moral theory (or philosophy) is a tool to accept or reject such deontic systems or, rather, their 'structure' in deontic logic. Iff deontic logic is 'rational', Kant is halfway home. Sadly, if Darwin, not Deuteronomy, better represents the facts of the case for our species, Kant is halfway to the madness that would claim that great mind.  

Other philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Aquinas, had also argued that moral requirements are based on standards of rationality.

Because, either God is rational or else it is natural for those who survive and thrive to have done things reason explains.  

However, these standards were either instrumental principles of rationality for satisfying one’s desires,

or just surviving 

as in Hobbes, or external rational principles that are discoverable by reason, as in Locke and Aquinas.

both of whom understood that survival is based on a rational 'economia'- which though mysterious (like the invisible hand)- keeps the Eschaton, or Anarchy, at bay. An example of a law code which appeared 'natural' rather than 'positive' (i.e. based on the King's command) was the Lex Mercatoria of the merchants.  

Kant agreed with many of his predecessors that an analysis of practical reason reveals the requirement that rational agents must conform to instrumental principles. Yet he also argued that conformity to the CI (a non-instrumental principle), and hence to moral requirements themselves, can nevertheless be shown to be essential to rational agency.

He hoped that his argument was 'prescriptive'- i.e. those who heard it would have an incentive to act in accordance with it. Kant was a careful thinker. He wasn't setting himself up as the new Moses. 

This argument was based on his striking doctrine that a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free, in the sense of being the author of the law that binds it.

Though sovereignty is precisely that which can't bind itself. It has an 'immunity' in that respect. Thus Kant was really talking about a type of 'beamten' or civil servant like himself who anticipates what the Enlightened Despot wants rather than waits for orders. In modern H.R jargon, such a person is a 'self-starter'- i.e shows initiative so as to implement the enterprise's Mission.  

The fundamental principle of morality — the CI — is none other than the law of an autonomous will.

But, if that will is sovereign, it won't be bound by it. Autonomy is less than Sovereignty. This is not Libertarianism or the doctrine of self-ownership. It is 'Beamtenliberalismus' or the Liberalism of the officials employed by the Enlightened Despot.  

Thus, at the heart of Kant’s moral philosophy is a conception of reason whose reach in practical affairs goes well beyond that of a Humean ‘slave’ to the passions.

No. At its heart is a sweet and nice version of Nazi 'Fuhrerprinzip' such that Civil Servants wouldn't wait for the 'word' but autonomously seek to fulfil the will of the Fuhrer.  

Moreover, it is the presence of this self-governing reason in each person that Kant thought offered decisive grounds for viewing each as possessed of equal worth and deserving of equal respect.

He didn't think women and darkies and proles and peasants and barnyard animals deserved shit though no doubt you could get more work out of them by refraining from beating or buggering them to death. 

Kant holds that the fundamental principle of our moral duties is a categorical imperative.

i.e. every theory regarding specific moral duties binding on a particular class has CI as one of its axiom. Moreover, CI is unique in that respect. Thus, if every 'true' moral theory, or every concrete model available for the evaluation of a theory (which is a tool to accept or reject a system or structure), is found to have CI as a fundamental axiom or Archimedian point, then, clearly, CI is actually 'categorical'. 

Kant, as I have said, was a careful thinker. He understood that a 'categorical imperative' might not be (at least, first order) complete. Moreover, he had an inkling of problems with 'naturality' (Hume too had come to this realisation) and thus really wasn't saying any of the things attributed to him by later, stupider, pedants. 

It is an imperative because it is a command

No. A command is 'positive' not categorical. Suppose your small child says 'Daddy I love you. Please don't smoke. I don't want you to die of cancer. Also it makes you smell bad and I don't like it when you kiss me.' Is this a command? No. Kids can't command big fat men. But it has greater 'imperative' force than a threat from your boss to sack you if you keep sloping off for a sly ciggie or, even, a dire warning from your GP. 

addressed to agents who could follow it but might not (e.g. , “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”). It is categorical in virtue of applying to us unconditionally,

Lots of things, e.g. the Law of Gravity, apply to us unconditionally but they are neither categorical nor imperative. Kant is here being mangled by lesser minds. 

or simply because we possesses rational wills,

possession isn't use. Lots of peeps with dicks or vaginas don't use them for pleasure, or to create joy.  

without reference to any ends that we might or might not have.

Like Kant's phenomenology, which was shit because he couldn't have predicted an Einstein would show Newton was wrong, Kant's teleology was shit because he couldn't have predicted that Biology too would have its Newton- whose name was Charles Darwin. He wrote that it would be “absurd for human beings…to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make conceivable even so much as the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no intention has ordered.'

It does not, in other words, apply to us on the condition that we have antecedently adopted some goal for ourselves.

No. It only applies to us if we believe CI is a rational argument and our goal is to act rationally. Kant wasn't stupid. He wasn't saying that his King was, or could be deemed to be, 'irrational'. Like other backward, beamten, German importers of Scottish 'common sense',  Kant was defending the autonomy (i.e. 'self-starter' type superior obedience) of the class his task it was to educate or otherwise inspire. 

There are “oughts” other than our moral duties, according to Kant, but these oughts are distinguished from the moral ought in being based on a quite different kind of principle, one that is the source of hypothetical imperatives.

The fact that a Professor (who was a 'beamten' or Civil Servant in Prussia- which is why Einstein was regarded as a German citizen by the German State while he held a Professorship in Berlin- is a Kantian doesn't mean he is likely to disobey a hypothetical successor to the King who wants to kill Jews and convert Universities into Military training camps.

A hypothetical imperative is a command that also applies to us in virtue of our having a rational will, but not simply in virtue of this.

We might say there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'- e.g. being born a subject of the Hohenzollerns. For Kant, this 'oikeiosis' gives rise to an 'end' it would be irrational not to have. Also, you could be killed if you didn't. To preserve conatus, you have to have the end associated with your 'oikeiosis' otherwise Kingji may fuck you over but good.  

It requires us to exercise our wills in a certain way given we have antecedently willed an end.

No. Kant just says that we could have done so. Obviously, if you are a subject of the Prussian King, it would be pretty fucking irrational not to do what he wanted- unless you had made arrangements to flee Prussian realms and had got British residency or Swiss citizenship for yourself and your family. 

A hypothetical imperative is thus a command in a conditional form. But not any command in this form counts as a hypothetical imperative in Kant’s sense. For instance, “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” is a conditional command.

Nonsense! It is purely phatic. It isn't a command at all.  

But the antecedent conditions under which the command “clap your hands” applies to you do not posit any end that you will, but consist rather of emotional and cognitive states you may or may not be in. Further, “if you want pastrami, try the corner deli” is also a command in conditional form,

Nope. It is alethic and informative.  

but strictly speaking it too fails to be a hypothetical imperative in Kant’s sense since this command does not apply to us in virtue of our willing some end, but only in virtue of our desiring or wanting an end.

wanting pastrami aint an 'end'. It is a fucking 'preference'. That is all.  

For Kant, willing an end involves more than desiring; it requires actively choosing or committing to the end rather than merely finding oneself with a passive desire for it.

Contextually, yes. But that context is guys who read books by stupid pedants, not those whose power and will are of a sort much superior and efficacious- i.e. the Princes and Prelates the beamten class served. 

Further, there is nothing irrational in failing to will means to what one desires.

Your flunkeys can figure that shit out by themselves on pain of being hanged, drawn and quartered.  

An imperative that applied to us in virtue of our desiring some end would thus not be a hypothetical imperative of practical rationality in Kant’s sense.

Only because no actual imperative was at work. Kant could be quite scrupulous in his thinking but, because of his geographical location and social background, could only replace dogmatic slumber with dogmatic 'wokeness' of an Enlightened- i.e. racist, misogynistic, sort. 

Against Kant, who said that a nigger who said something sensible (i.e. misogynistic) was nevertheless stupid coz his skin was black, you have Lord Krishna (Krishna means 'black skinned') whose 'Celestial Song' gained increasing salience in a Europe sundered from Kant's cant by Darwin's 'dangerous idea'. 

The Mahabharata is unusual in that though based on Iron Age Epic material, it draws on a sophisticated 'Sanhkya' tradition of what we would call 'discrete math'. In particular, the Just King, in order to overcome Vishada (Depression or Abulia) has learn statistical game theory in the Nalophkyana episode. The Bhagvad Gita, which deals with the method by which Krishna enables Arjuna to overcome Vishada, is the dual of the Vyadha Gita and the Nalophphyanam taken together. 

Sadly, nobody else seems to have noticed this. 

Amber Carpenter, a visiting Professor at Kings writes-  

Questioning Kṛṣṇa’s Kantianism 

Krishna is the God of an occasionalist Universe in which he is the only efficient cause. But is he what Brouwer might call a 'creating subject' and is his 'choice sequence' lawless? If it isn't, then is Krishna himself constrained to follow some rule? If so, Krishna isn't just recommending a 'deontological course of action to Arjuna- viz. do your duty- he is himself performing a duty. Perhaps this involves ensuring that karma and dharma are 'conserved' (Noetheran) properties of the system. This view is rejected by the Mahabharata. Karma and Dharma are sublatable 'Maya' or illusion. This does not mean the Theistic or 'Dualist' path is necessarily inferior. If you are a Theist by nature (that is your 'svadharma') that is your good fortune. 

Indeed, if Krishna's 'choice sequence' is 'lawless', God may grant you all sorts of goodies purely gratuitously and as a matter of Grace. Sadly, the true Vaishnav doesn't want Heaven or super-powers or omniscience or any Liberation from the cycle of re-birth. They simply want to serve the Lord through an infinite sequence of lives. 

It has been claimed

by Bengali cretins 

that we are best off seeing Kṛṣṇa—at least as he is depicted in his conversation with Arjuna in the Bhagavadgītā—as a sort of deontologist, an extreme sort. As the prince Arjuna’s confidante and advisor,

Krishna is Arjuna's charioteer. It is his duty to keep up Arjuna's fighting spirit.  

Kṛṣṇa insists that Arjuna enter into battle with his brothers, against their half-brothers and teachers who have usurped the throne.

No. They gained the Pandava's territories and are refusing to hand it back.  

Like Kant, Kṛṣṇa speaks in terms of duties—duties whose claim on us cannot be over-ridden by any other sort of consideration.

Except quitting your job and deciding to be a 'Principal' rather than an 'Agent'.  

I want to dispute this characterisation of Kṛṣṇa, firstly, to contest the interpretation of the niṣkāma karma (desireless action) principle on which the charge of deontology rests.

There is no duty to perform your duty dispassionately. Krishna merely says that the influx of karma binding particles is stopped if the thing is done dispassionately. If your job is to kill but you take no pleasure in it, it is less likely that your ethos will be affected.  

But I want to dispute it also, and more importantly, because I think Kṛṣṇa’s moral voice is rather more rich and interesting than our classifications of “deontological” and “consequentialist” (even broad consequentialist) allow.

It is a loving and affectionate voice. Moral voices tend to be boring and scoldy.  

I. NIṢKĀMA KARMA The best case to be made in favor of Kṛṣṇa as a deontologist is his support of the view famously articulated in that part of the Mahābhārata excised and treated separately as the Bhagavadgītā.

Nope. It is the dual of the Vyadha Gita which treats of the dharma of the Principal (more particularly in relation to dependents) , not the Agent.  

A considerable portion of the Gītā dwells on the principle that one should not act with a view to the fruits of one’s labors. “Work alone is your proper business, never the fruits: let not your motive be the fruit of works ...” (II.47).2 Isolated from its epic context, and developed as an independent view, this principle has indeed acquired, as Amartya Sen writes, “great theological importance.”

In other words, don't kill people because you like killing or so as to steal their nice shiny stuff. If you are a soldier and it is your duty to fight with the result that your adversary might be killed, then you are welcome to keep the wage you get. Just don't have an orgasm every time you stick your sword into the enemy's guts. The thing is unseemly.  

Is this view—niṣkāma karma, that perfect action is not done with a view to the fruits—rightly regarded as “high deontology”?

Nope. It is context specific. If your job is to pick fruit and your payment is eating some of the fruit you picked, you are welcome to relish that fruit.  

Even where “deontology” need have nothing in particular to do with Kant’s arguments, but has rather to do with a hostility to consequentialist thinking—“doing one’s duty irrespective of consequences” —

is itself consequentialist if you can quit your job or decide to follow some other way of life with different duties. Krishna isn't saying 'soldiers can't decide to become ascetics or farmers etc.' After all, his own elder brother decided to quit the battlefield while he himself has the epithet 'the one who fled the battlefield.' Obviously, the consequence of people not doing what they are paid to do, would be bad.  

I think the answer is “no.”

Carpenter studies ancient texts. She does not read modern nonsense into them.  Good for her. 

 Questioning Kṛṣṇa’s Kantianism In order to count as deontological, in the strongest sense, the niṣkāma karma ideal would have to be interpreted as advising that we act (rightly) when we act without any regard for what any of the consequences are.

No. 'Do your duty dispassionately' could be deontological. Thus a guy who is enjoying eating the mango he plucked as part of his duty could be scolded by his boss who says to him 'it is a condition of your enjoyment that you make a wry face when eating this mango. That way mango thieves will be deterred. You have failed in your duty.'  

But this is not, in fact, what Kṛṣṇa says. In fact, Kṛṣṇa says, “... so unattached, should the wise man do, longing to bring about the welfare [and coherence] of the world” (III.25).

In other words, the 'wise man' should pursue his own soteriological self-interest. If he takes pleasure or feels repugnance in the course of doing his duty, he may suffer an influx of karma binding particles or otherwise incur karmic consequences. The doctrine here is that there is a way to live in the world without forfeiting the karmic benefits of renouncing it.  

When acting well, we should after all have an eye on some consequences

because one's duty is only properly performed in a thoughtful and well considered manner.  

—on just the sort of impersonally considered, overall, sorts of consequences familiar from classical consequentialism. The injunction to “act, longing to bring about the welfare of the world” is a strikingly utilitarian attitude.

In context, it is psychological. The ancients weren't stupid. They knew 'Knightian uncertainty' exists. We don't know the consequences of our actions. All we can do is exercise 'due diligence' and foresight.  

There is some way that it would be good for the world to be, and good action is that which arises out of a desire to make the world better than it is.

This does not follow. Good actions can arise without any desire whatsoever. If we had omniscience and did whatever was required to promote an optimal trajectory, then we would be following a canonical or 'natural' path. Intentionality would be otiose. 

Krishna is merely pointing to a psychological 'cure' for 'vishada' or abulia.  

Kṛṣṇa, however, does not quite say that this end-state is what I should look to when considering whether an action is right or wrong, good or bad.

Because the 'end state' is computationally intractable- perhaps even for an omniscient being. We may speak of 'the end of mathematical time' but that is exponential to the lifetime of the multi-verse.  

In fact, as we shall see more closely later on, Kṛṣṇa’s view as the Gītā develops is disturbingly free from any useful or practical advice for distinguishing right acts from wrong, disturbing especially when what is at stake is whether or not to wage war on one’s power-hungry brethren.

But, over the course of the Mahabharata, Krishna reveals that he has a plan. Sadly, this involves the killing of nice guys like Ghatotkacha.  

But however we are to discern right from wrong action, it is at least clear that Kṛṣṇa’s endorsement of niṣkāma karma

for a psychological reason. Ancient Indians weren't stupid. They knew it was fine to enjoy eating a mango even if your job as mango-taster made eating mangoes your duty. Still, if you actually wanted to be an ascetic, there was a workaround so you didn't have to quit your day-job and join the long queue of ascetics (a.k.a bums) waiting for a Himalayan cave to become vacant.  

does not rest on a rejection of all consequences as informing the rightness or wrongness of an act. His point is rather that I must act, if I am to act well, without concern for whether the consequences benefi t me. “Hold pleasure and pain, profit and loss, victory and defeat to be the same” (II.38). I must not look to whether I get some profit from the act. I should not, when considering how to act, be looking for rewards—“Be without personal aspirations or concern for possessions, and fight unconcernedly” (III.30).

This is good advise for warriors. You have to stay alert rather than jizz every time you shove your spear into a guy's guts.  

Now this looks deontological inasmuch as Kant, for example, argued vehemently that acting for the sake of reward—for the sake of mere happiness—destroys the moral worth of an act.

Hinduism agrees that moral or spiritual worth can only be gained if an action is gratuitous and promotes no utilitarian end. But that's obvious. Only kids are told they are good little boys or girls if they do potty.  

Personal gain as a motivation extinguishes whatever was especially “morally” good in the action.

More especially if that gain is reputational. You should have done good with more stealth.  

One might think this Kantian view of the fragility (and exclusivity) of moral worth implausibly hard.

But it is 'common sense'. Sooner or later some one will point out you gained a benefit by doing good. Only if this is not the case- indeed, could never be the case- that we can say the act was morally good (unless of course, it was done accidentally or with some other purpose in mind). It is often forgotten that Kant's deduction are not 'natural' they are juristic- i.e. you have to provide grounds for why the relevant concept applies.  

For if I return the wallet in order to get the reward, it still seems something good was done, and I did the right thing, even if it was a less than perfect act; and if that greengrocer prices his goods fairly because he knows that he can only retain customers if he builds their trust, there is something good—even morally, not merely instrumentally good, or pleasant—in his fair pricing policy.

We may give the benefit of the doubt to either side. Something more is needed for a deduction or judicial decision.  

 

CONCEPTIONS OF VIRTUE But when Kṛṣṇa advocates acting without a view to rewards, he does not seem to be endorsing something even so strong as the hard-hearted view outlined above, that there is no worth in action done for the sake of reward.

The problem with this view is that we know Krishna will egg on Arjuna to kill his true eldest brother, Karna, while in the grip of 'Manyu' (dark anger). On the other hand, the Bhagvad Gita explains why the 'Vyadha' (butcher) suffers no ill effects despite his profession being synonymous with either brutality or (assuming he is a meat vendor) fraudulent business practices. This solves the puzzle of why some ordinary people- carters, house-wives, butchers etc.- could be 'jivan-mukta'. 

To be clear, the Hindu view is that moral or spiritual worth arises from gratuitous or non-utilitarian actions. These could be ritual in nature (karma-kanda). 

This will be partly because “worth” is not divided between moral and non-moral: If an action is to retain any worth, it will be also moral worth, or it will be as much distinctively “moral” worth as the fully perfect action.

This does not follow. An act can be factorized in various ways. Suppose we see a Corporation donate a million pounds to a good cause. On studying their financials, we might find that they gains 100,000 of consumer goodwill, 200,000 of share value appreciation, 300, 000 of political or other reputational benefit. 400,000 is 'moral worth' or would be if there wasn't a tax write off. Still, the Company promoter may genuinely support the good cause and perhaps 100,000 represents 'moral worth'.  

But the niṣkāma karma view remains deontological in its emphasis on the importance of motivation.

Motivation is psychological. It is not deontic unless there is a specific rule or requirement such that you are not allowed to show emotion while doing your duty in which cases you should try to be dispassionate- or appear so. 

A selfishly motivated act may be a somewhat good one, or the partially right thing to do; but non-selfish motivation invariably issues in better action.

Nonsense! You hire a guy who wants to get paid for fixing your toilet. A guy with a non-selfish motivation may be a shitty plumber. 

“The act as such is far inferior to the application of singleness of purpose to it” (II.49).

दूरेण ह्यवरं कर्म बुद्धियोगाद्धनञ्जय |
बुद्धौ शरणमन्विच्छ कृपणा: फलहेतव: ||

means 'stay away from an inferior type of karma (action, including ritual action). With your mind firmly established in Yoga, seek refuge in divine knowledge'. This is purely Upanishadic. It just means you should prefer the path of spirituality to ritualism. Rather than sacrifice a goat for a good harvest do some other shite which will get you Heaven or whatever. 

Right motivation alone always improves the quality of an act;

It is generally irrelevant.  

but whether or not a motivation is right is determined in part by which sorts of consequences one looks to in deciding what to do.

It is subjectively determined. The fact is, if you take a dump you must also have the right motivation to do so- viz. to advance the cause of Socioproctology by expelling turds- otherwise you are merely shitting rather than participating in the battle against Neo-Liberalism.  

There might be two reasons one might invoke to support this claim that right motivation always improves the quality of an act.

Both are stupid.  

Non-selfish motivation might issue invariably in better action

They don't.  That's why markets work. 

because there is some special, intrinsic goodness to non-selfish motivations.

Subjectively, there may be. I like to think that every body, when taking a dump, is motivated purely by the desire to advance the cause of Socioproctology- more particularly if they are elephants.  

All non-selfishly motivated action includes the fact that there has been some non-selfish motivation going on, and this is good in itself.

Nonsense. A guy who non-selfishly chops you into pieces is not, in your eyes, doing something good in itself.  

Or, one might think that non-selfish motivation invariably issues in better action because it is only freedom from interest in reward that helps one to see clearly what is in fact to be done—what one’s duties in fact are and/or what overall state-of-affairs would be preferred.

This is why, when the police really want to catch a bad guy, they refuse to offer a reward. Most crimes are actually solved by rabbits which, famously, lack any selfish desire to gain fame as detectives.  

I think the latter is a preferable way of reading the niṣkāma karma doctrine,

perhaps because the Professor is actually a rabbit.  

and shall have more to say about this later.

 

It would put Kṛṣṇa, and the principle of niṣkāma karma, neither in the deontological nor the consequentialist camp.

The thing is psychological or part of a pep talk. Mummy says to the kid with exam nerves 'Darling, don't worry about passing or failing. Just do your best. Daddy and me couldn't be more proud of you.'  

If we are looking for post-Enlightenment bedfellows, the principle of non-selfi sh action taken on its own bears more similarity to impersonalist doctrines of all sorts than it bears to deontology in particular.

Not in this context. Krishna was giving Arjuna a pep talk because that was his duty as Arjuna's charioteer.  

If fact, I think this resemblance is also illusory, and perhaps more misleading than helpful, if we are to see what is philosophically engaging in the conversation between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna,

There is an open problem in Math re. the possibility of a wholly 'lawless' choice sequence. If an 'absolute proof' exists, or there is a 'natural proof' that P is not equal to NP, then maybe this is 'decidable'. Otherwise, all we can say is that the Bhagvad Gita is the dual of the Vyadha Gita. Just as, in the latter case, we don't know what type of game theory is needful for the Principal, so too in the former case we don't what is the substantive ethical doctrine associated with dispelling the vishada of the Agent. All we can say is that God has promised to take on the sins of omission or commission of his devotees provided they do their duty dispassionately.  

in the early chapters of the Bhagavadgītā. But before considering this, we should look at Arjuna’s arguments against going into battle.

That is easily done. He foresees the outcome perhaps because of the Gandharva's gift of caksushi vidya.  

II. ARJUNA’S NON-CONSEQUENTIALISM There is something else wrong with the picture of Kṛṣṇa as the arch-deontologist, oblivious to consequences, trying to persuade a consequence-sensitive Arjuna to fight.

Krishna took the job of charioteer which involved a duty of keeping up the martial spirit of the archer.  

While it is true that Kṛṣṇa recommends that Arjuna fight because it is his duty, Arjuna’s reluctance to fight is equally based on a sense of duty.

No. It is based on affiliation or oikeiosis.  

In fact, he is eager to clarify that it is not consequences that he has in mind when he considers whether the war is right: “I do not long for victory,” he says, “nor for the kingdom nor yet for things of pleasure” (I.32), “I do not want to kill them, though they be killers, Madhusūdana, even for the sovereignty of the three worlds, let alone earth!” (I.35)—all of these being the best possible consequences that could come from war, from Arjuna’s point of view.

This is silly. The Hindu audience knows that Arjuna had refused the gift of chaksushi vidya though, if he ceased to be master of himself, it might vest in him. But such faery gifts can be mischievous. The dramatic tension in the Gita has to do with the way a bad outcome is averted so that the worst outcome is achieved- viz. Arjuna ending up killing his true eldest brother. Recall, there would have been no war had Karna disclosed the truth of his birth.  

He is duty-bound—in fact, everyone is duty-bound—not to wage war on their teachers, elders, and brethren.

No. But the Pandavas would have been duty bound not to wage war on their true eldest brother- if that is what Karna wanted.  

“For, Kṛṣṇa, were we to lay low our own folk, how could we be happy? And even if, bereft of sense by greed, they cannot see that to ruin a family is wickedness and to break one’s word a crime, how should we not be wise enough to shun this evil thing, for we clearly see that to ruin a family is wickedness” (I.37–39). Arjuna is not just expressing a preference, reluctant to face up to a rather unpleasant but (morally) necessary task—giving an honest opinion of an elderly aunt’s hideous hat, or telling the axe-wielding psychopath at the door where to find the kids.

Arjuna is expressing oikeiosis or the kin-selective altruism of the Price equation. 

Arjuna counters Kṛṣṇa’s claim that it is his duty to fight with the counterclaim that it is equally, or more, his duty not to fight.

Only if he decides to become a Principal, rather than an Agent of his, supposed, eldest brother.  

“We have no right to kill the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and their kin” (I.37).

There is no 'right to kill' though there may be an immunity for doing so. 

Arjuna appeals to very general—universalisable—claims about what is to be done and not to be done.

No. He expresses his own feelings. The audience speculates whether this is because of the Gandharva's gift.  

It is not his duty in particular, but everyone’s duty to refrain from waging war on one’s family and teachers.

No. Everybody has an immunity against being killed though this immunity is defeasible. It is foolish to say that a person has a duty to refrain from shitting on the head of their Mathematics tutor even if that is what inevitably happens.  

Waging war on one’s family is not to be done—ever, by anyone.

No. It is licit to do so in self defense or because you have chosen a side in a properly regulated battle. 

The point is cast in quite impersonal terms at I.40 ff., concluding with Arjuna’s dismay that “we have resolved to commit a great crime as we stand ready to kill family out of greed for kingship and pleasures” (I.45).

This is his subjective feeling. I may say it is a hideous crime to take as shit without having the correct motivation- viz. to advance the cause of Socioproctology- but this does not mean there is actually any such crime. My statement is imperative, not alethic.  

And a few lines later, Arjuna says, “Better were it here on Earth to eat a beggar’s food than to slay [our] teachers” (II.5).11

Also, don't shit on their heads even if they are trying to teach you fucking Trigonometry.  

Finally, in an argument typically invoked against consequentialists, Arjuna adds, “Besides, we do not know which is for us the better part, whether that we should win the victory or that they should conquer us” (II.6). Since both the actual consequences, and the relative value of various consequences is not something we can judge in advance (or perhaps at all), we must, in deciding what to do, stick to certain principles.

or personal preferences or subjective feelings. 

If we still thought Kṛṣṇa was a deontologist, it might look now as if we’ve got two arch-Kantians on our hands, locked in dispute over just which maxim, in this particular instance, can in fact be willed universally without contradiction.

That maxim would be 'no maxim fits all cases. Let the one which has bigger salience swallow up all those which are lesser'. This is the Mimamsa maxim of 'matsanayaya'.  

Such disputes can certainly arise, even in the Kantian moral world in which only the possible can be morally necessary;

We don't what is possible.  

Kant’s description—or rather re-description—of moral dilemmas as the confl ict between a “ground” for action (Ross’s “prima facia duties”) and an actual reason (determining a moral duty) would make such a dispute, in certain circumstances, likely.

This is certainly true of judicial decisions but only because they are protocol bound in a particular manner. There is no reason that we should judge things in that manner unless we are actual judges or fulfilling a judicial capacity. Similarly, if we are acting as agents, we may be obliged to offer justifications which would not be required of us if we are principals. It is this which gives a spurious similarity to Krishna's canto & Kant's cant.  

Sometimes, some thing has all the look of a moral duty, but it is not one.

It may be that all apparent moral duties are delusory or, at the least, purely subjective.  

And it is natural to suppose that disputes would in such cases arise—what else could be the point of exercising public reason?

Solving collective action problems on the basis of superior Structural Causal Models. Not scolding each other or engaging in the moral equivalent of a cat fight.  

Yet if we consider further the progression of the discussion between Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa, we have reason to doubt whether this is a battle between two deontologists over what is morally required,

there is no battle. Arjuna wants to receive instruction in Yoga from the Lord of Yoga. This is what he gets. The cherry on top is theophany.  

reasons that go beyond our interpretation of the niṣkāma karma principle.

Which does not greatly matter. It's just the old chestnut that ' Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th' action fine'. You don't, like the Buddha, have to run away from your wife and baby son. You can stay at home, do your duty, and still achieve a like Liberation. 

III. DIVINE COMMAND—A CAVEAT, AND RESTATEMENT OF THE PUZZLE In describing “Kṛṣṇa’s view” in the Mahābhārata, and particularly in the Bhagavadgītā, I shall be considering primarily the first few chapters of the discussion between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna—I shall be considering, that is, those chapters in which there is something resembling a discussion.

This is foolish. By the time a Hindu is old enough to appreciate the Gita, they are thoroughly familiar with the story as a whole. In particular, they remember that a Gandharva had given the boon of 'chaksushi vidya'- the ability to picture anything you want in any way you want- to Arjuna who refused it. But the Gandharva didn't take it back...  

In so doing, I will be setting aside several chapters in which something with perhaps more right to be called “Kṛṣṇa’s view” is developed. In order to explain why, I shall summarize the remainder of the Gītā, as it relates to the pressing question: Should Arjuna do battle against his wicked kin?

We know that isn't the real issue since Karna is the true eldest brother- if he wants to be. The question arises- does Kunti, or some other person in the know (e.g. Krishna) bear 'war guilt'? Also, shouldn't the Pandavas done 'oppo research' on their enemies during the course of which they would have discovered the secret of Karna's paternity? One may even say, they were deficient in that instinct by which one is bound to those near in blood. Perhaps, this was because there was some defect in their piety. 

Kṛṣṇa’s first attempt to give Arjuna a reason to fight relies on the immortality and unparalleled value of the soul. The soul is eternal, and it alone has value—therefore, we should not fear killing someone, since after all we do his immortal soul no harm.

Krishna can't take the obvious course which is to say 'don't be so cock-sure! Bhimsha and Kripa can only die according to their own wish. Concentrate on keeping them from slaughtering your people. Victory or defeat is in the hands of God.'  This is because Krishna has omniscience and knows that Arjuna, thanks to the Gandharva's gift, could gain a limited version of it, if he wishes to do so while 'asvamika'- i.e. not the master of himself (in which case the Gandharva's boon can vest). 

“The wise are not sorry for either the living or the dead. Never was there a time when I did not exist, or you, or these kings, nor shall any of us cease to exist hereafter” (II.11–12).

Like the notion that none die save when their time has come, this reassures the warrior that, in reality, he is invulnerable, till Destiny decrees otherwise. The alternative involves shitting your pants.  

Arjuna is rightly dissatisfied with this response to the problem. For even if it makes it the case that killing one’s kin, or anyone else, does not annihilate them, neither is it a strong argument in favor of such a course of action.

There is no 'strong argument' for killing one's kin or, even, shitting on the head of your Math tutor.  

Arjuna notes that if the soul generally is supremely valuable, then far from giving reason to fight, Kṛṣṇa has given Arjuna reason to devote himself to the life of the mind. “If you think that the soul is loftier than the acts,” he asks, “then why do you command me to do a cruel deed?” (III.1)

It was Krishna's duty as a charioteer to keep up Arjuna's morale as a soldier. The alternative was to let the fellow shit his pants and run away.  

Kṛṣṇa responds by introducing the principle of niṣkāma karma.

Only in the restricted context of a 'role-model' or target for Tardean mimetics. If the guy everybody imitates shows that he does something or wears something or eats something without any partiality or attachment to it, then it is de rigueur.  It would be a faux pas to omit doing that thing. 

And he grounds the value of detached action (at least in part) in the fact that  this is the sort of action God engages in. “In the three worlds there is nothing that I need do,” says Kṛṣṇa, “nor anything unattained that I need to gain, yet action [is the element] in which I move” (III.22).

This is to jump the gun somewhat. Krishna does not reveal his divinity till the next chapter. Here, Krishna is merely saying that he is perfectly free and has no fear of Hell or desire for Heaven. But he is a role model. He does his duty so others will do theirs.  

And further, Kṛṣṇa argues that while He has done the work of establishing the order of the universe (especially the social order), “I am the doer, [the agent]” and yet “[I am] the Changeless One who does not do [or act]. Actions never affect Me. I have no yearning for their fruits ... Knowing this the ancients too did act, though seeking release: so do you act as the ancients did in the days of old” (IV.13–15).

It turns out Krishna is the reincarnation of the guy who taught Yoga to the Vedic Rishis. What is interesting is that 'chatur varna' could be considered merely a delusional or subjective construct. In a mimetic context, it makes sense to make such a differentiation. The priests or spiritually minded will mimic the superior in one way. Barons and soldiers will do so in a different way. The middle class will take a third course. The servile class may adopt one or two features useful to them or within their means. But this is arbitrary type of classification. A slave may turn out to be a better General, or even a King, than those born into the purple. A priest may be a mindless drudge while a merchant- like the Vyadha- may possess the honeyed wisdom of the Vedas.  

On examination, what Krishna appears unambiguous. He created the 'varna' caste system. If he is the only efficient cause, then the world is the way it is because God wants it that way. 

चातुर्वर्ण्यं मया सृष्टं गुणकर्मविभागश: |तस्य कर्तारमपि मां विद्ध्यकर्तारमव्ययम् || 13||

 'I, Krishna, created the 4 class system on the basis of the qualities people have or the things they do.'

But qualities and actions can contradict each other. The accusation against God levelled by Yuddhishtra and Draupati, is that if God does everything, then he is stained by all the evils of the world even if he says 'Yet know me as the non-doer and as eternal.' This is the dilemma of Occasionalism. We could say, with Liebniz, that there is a pre-established harmony such that this is the best of all possible worlds. But, equally, we could say that neither God, nor the Wise, are greatly concerned with the shithshow that is the world. Impassability is like dispassion. Yet this is not what what the Gita as a whole shows. The Lord of Yoga loves the Yogi- and even 'vishada' (depression) is a Yoga. God sacrifices himself to take on our sins. Krishna and Christ both turn out to be a 'korban' or 'pharmakos'- i.e. a scapegoat sacrifice. 

The argument seems to put together two common ideas: (1) God is self-suffi cient, and not in want of anything; and (2) to make ourselves as like God as possible is to make ourselves as good as possible.

That does not follow. There is an ambiguity in what Krishna says. But there is also ambiguity in what he shows by way of theophany. It may be that, because of the Gandharva's gift, Arjuna sees what he wants to see not directly through the boon but for a strategic reason (which Krishna knows but Arjuna does not) such that the possibility of its vesting causes the desired vision to be gratuitously granted.  

In Kṛṣṇa’s view, since God acts without wanting to get anything out of it, so too should human beings act.

Only if they want to become Gods or, like Arjuna, are an incarnation of a particular God. We imitate what we want to become. Some day soon, I will win the coveted title of Miss Teen Tamil Nadu and will go on to become the second Jayalalitha.  

This desireless acting is presented by Kṛṣṇa as a devotional act.

A peculiarity of Hinduism is that Gods pray to gods.  

The appropriate attitude to take into deciding how to act is a devotional rather than an acquisitive one. Thus action is taken in the spirit of a sacrifice (IV.24–33).

Kurukshetra is a site of sacrifice- a bloody lustration or 'vishodhana'  

But this, so far, is a purely procedural consideration—it indicates a rule for how to do what we do, not for what to do.

It is neither. It is a metaphor of a suggestive type. For there to be a 'rule'- i.e. a deontic injunction- something more is needed.  

Again, Arjuna notices that this does not adequately address the question; it gives him no more reason to fight than not to fight.

No. Arjuna shows a genuine interest in Yoga- of which Krishna is the Lord. The dramatic structure here is familiar from childhood. A kid is feigning sickness so as not to go to school. Mum points out that though Trigonometry is taught there, there is also play-time. This is not a strong enough reason to go to school and so Mummy tells the story of the King who set out to battle a ferocious dragon but was confronted by a bhoojandi instead. You can imagine how that turned out! The kid is intrigued. He wants to know about bhoojandis. Mum says she will finish the story after he returns from school. It turns out Trigonometry isn't so bad.  

Thus in Chapter VIII, he is still asking, “What is that which appertains to self? What, O best of men, are the works? What is that called which appertains to contingent beings? What is that which appertains to the divine?” (VIII.1).

Why do bhoojandis have no shadows? Oh. Their shadows failed Trigonometry and were sent away to boarding skool. 

Kṛṣṇa’s advice seems to be, “Whatever you do, do it out of devotion to God, and not for personal profit.”

No. He says 'if you know me in a certain way you get a particular benefit'.  इति मां योऽभिजानाति कर्मभिर्न स बध्यते. This is like saying  'if you have the right conception of Love, you will never be disappointed or betrayed in love' or 'the right conception of divinity itself saves from sin'. 

But as far as that goes, it seems perfectly compatible with Arjuna dropping his weapons, and walking away from the fight—not in order to save his own life, nor in order to avoid killing his kin, but simply in the spirit of devotion.

But that's not what he really wants to do. The fact is, by this stage in the Gita, the issue of fighting or not fighting has become irrelevant. What we have is a story within a story which has its own momentum and narrative tension.  

We might say, for example, that Arjuna is renouncing the battle-field glory, sacrificing it to Brahman, and thus his action—walking away from the battle—is a pure and good one.

If that's what he actually did, sure.  The whole point about the Gita is that so long as you lurve God you are peachy. 

Procedural constraints alone, where these are explained in terms of maintaining a certain mindset, cannot decide which of two actions ought to be done (devotionally). I do not mean to dismiss the claim that devotion as a virtue should have on us. But it does not answer Arjuna’s question, and at least for a spell, Arjuna realises this, and presses the point. We still need to know what works or deeds it is that God requires or recommends we do out of devotion to Him—unless He is equally happy with whatever we do, so long as we do it disinterestedly (in which case Arjuna would have no reason in particular to fight). 

The dude likes fighting. That's reason enough. 

CONCEPTIONS OF VIRTUE This line of thought is precisely the one that Kṛṣṇa follows in the Bhagavadgītā. For ultimately, the reason he gives Arjuna to fight is that He, Kṛṣṇa, is God—and He says, “Fight.”

But only because he has taken on a particular human duty. The obvious rejoinder is, 'if you are God, abolish Poverty and Illness and Death.'  

This, of course, does give Arjuna a good reason to fight. When God truly shows Himself, and says, “Do X,” then we are rightly overwhelmed as Arjuna is, by awe and humility and devotion (XI.14, 34), and see incontrovertibly that X is to be done—for that is what God commands.

Not if God is a pal with whom we chat all the time. In that case, we are bound to say 'God, dude, just fucking turn the water into wine already.'  

“Here I stand with no more doubts. I shall do as you say” (XVIII.73). Such a reason needs no further explanation, for a genuine divine command is pretty much the best reason there can be for an action, given the nature of God.

God is constantly suggesting to me that I get up in the middle of the night and eat all the chocolate eclairs I bought in order to hand around at the office tomorrow. Given the nature of man, God's commands are never reason enough not to do what you really really want.  

But taking Kṛṣṇa as a character within a dialogue trying to determine what is right, and why, we are still left with a mystery on our hands.

Because that isn't how you should be taking him.  

For divine command merely tells us what Arjuna ought to do, and why he is motivated to do it. But we still do not have an argument for why Arjuna should fight.

It's his job and he likes doing it.  

Why, we still wonder, is Kṛṣṇa so determined that Arjuna should fight? Kṛṣṇa presumably knows that, whatever the outcome of the battle, it will involve near-universal devastation on all sides.

God wants to thin out the herd of Barons. 

After all, Arjuna’s suggestion is not the cowardly one that he alone should skive off, save his own skin but leave the others to the dirty business of killing and dying. He wants rather that his side of the war as a whole should give up their just claim to the kingdom, thereby averting mass destruction of many innocent and worthy lives (I.31–39).

That is a matter he should take up with his brothers and their allies. Krishna is merely his charioteer.  

Is Kṛṣṇa’s rejection of this suggestion simply wilful and wanton—He wants to see a good fight, and a good fight He will see?—or beyond our understanding?

No. He explains later on that he has a plan. He has decided that some of the warriors must die on that battlefield.  

Perhaps it has not given us to peer into the mind of God, or to understand what makes something good and right, or bad and wrong. While this may ultimately be the best interpretation of the Gītā available to us, Kṛṣṇa does, at first, try to give Arjuna arguments, and reasons.

Because that is a duty he took on when accepting the role of Arjuna's charioteer.  

And, in fact, even after Arjuna has seen and accepted Kṛṣṇa’s divinity, his dissatisfaction merely returns in a different form: Granted that we are to do what is commanded by God, how, Arjuna asks, do we reliably distinguish what is divine, or divinely commanded, from what is not?

By getting a theophany. 

Thus after seeing Kṛṣṇa’s divine form, but before agreeing that his duty is to fi ght, Arjuna asks, “How may I know you, yogin, in my constant meditations? In what various modes of being may I meditate on you, my lord?” (X.17).

At a later point, Krishna reveals that uttering praise- even purely alethic and condign praise- of oneself is to slay oneself. Thus, Arjuna by his questions is forcing Krishna to kill himself as the korban or scapegoat who takes on the sin of others.  

Looking at the many reasons Kṛṣṇa tries to give for pressing Arjuna to battle, we find a less capricious sort of explanation for why it is good and right that Arjuna lead his brothers into battle.

Arjuna's job is to kill Karna, or be killed by him. That was what Karna thought good and right and he was the actual eldest Pandava- if that's what he wanted to be. Also, there is a difference between telling a bloke you don't want to fight and actually quitting the battlefield. Moreover, what you say to your coach or confessor is privileged. Krishna could have pointed out that Arjuna's misgivings arose because Kurukshetra was a holy place not ordinarily to be profaned by the spilling of blood. However, this was God's plan- or Destiny- and who can fight Destiny?  

For Arjuna, this will play itself out in the various ways in which “meditation on the self” can inform one of the right course of action.

But the 'right course of action' is bloody obvious here. Krishna is instructing Arjuna in Bhakti Yoga- which is why this is an important text for Vaishnavites.  

IV. KṚṢṆA’S PARTICULARISM—SVADHARMA For all that certain modes of expression sound superficially like an impersonal universalism,

Theism is an impersonal universalism because God, as the sole efficient cause, is universal and is not a person.

both Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa acknowledge as morally relevant aspects of the situation that could only have extremely narrow application.

No. Neither are discussing morality. These guys are warriors not Bishops.  

Thus the reasons given will sometimes be reasons personal to Arjuna.

 Because they are personally given to Arjuna. That's how conversations work. 

Thus if we look at the terms in which Kṛṣṇa casts his appeal to duty (dharma),

Dharma is translated as eusebia that is piety. Duty is not piety. There are pious observances traditional to particular vocations or ways of life. But one can change vocation or way of life. However there is a 'sadharan dharma' common to all. But one's 'vishesha' or specific dharma can override it.  

they are not usually of the “Kantian,” universalisable kind, nor are all of them even loosely deontological (universal), or general principles or obligations. On the contrary, in svadharma (“one’s own duty,” or “one’s personal duty”) there is a notion of duty at work irreconcilable with a Kantian sort of duty.

i.e. duty as rationality- stuff which if you don't do, you are irrational, in the opinion of a stupid pedant.  

Kṛṣṇa levels a whole battery of arguments against Arjuna’s unwillingness to fi ght. Some of these can be implied from the name-calling that is supposed to humiliate Arjuna into going into battle. For example, “Do not act like a eunuch, Pārtha, it does not become you! Rid yourself of this vulgar weakness of heart, stand up, enemy-burner!” (II.3) It is not fitting for Arjuna to act “unmanly”; perhaps it would be suitable for someone who was genuinely weak, ill-prepared, or accustomed to other sorts of tasks to back out of the battle. But none of these is true of Arjuna. Hesitation now, in the final hour, is specifically a “cowardice unseemly to the noble” (II.2).

But saying 'sod this for a game for soldiers' and striding off is fine. That's what Krishna's elder brother does. He himself is a non-combatant.  

The final name Kṛṣṇa applies to Arjuna evokes the sort of quality that is properly his—“enemy-burner.” Naturally, in the context of epic verse, it is common for persons to be addressed by a multitude of names, many of them descriptive. But the choice of that description here emphasizes that it is of Arjuna’s character not to leave his enemies standing; and that it is unseemly for such a person as Arjuna is to walk away from the battle.

D'uh! 

In Arjuna’s case, to walk away now would be to play the eunuch—

which he had done for a year 

to act the role of someone he is not.

which he had done- as had all the Pandavas.  

Recalling Arjuna to himself, as grounds for entering into the fray, does not just take the form of appealing to his particular personality, however. While Kṛṣṇa argues that killing is irrelevant, for the killed are not destroyed, he directs his argument specifically to Arjuna as having a certain place in society. Arjuna is the generic “strong-armed prince” (II.26). Twice, he is appealed to specifi cally as the “son of Kuntī” (“Kaunteya,” II.15, 88

Which reminds us that Karna is the senior most Kaunteya.  

 and twice as Pārtha, the son of Pṛthā (another of Kuntī’s names,17 II.21, II.42).

Prtha could also mean virgin. Like Christ, Arjuna is born to a virgin. But so is Karna.  

As Kṛṣṇa moves from this argument into the niṣkāma karma doctrine, via an argument about the importance of “singleness of purpose” (II.41), Arjuna becomes the “scion of Kuru” (II.42), or literally “bull of the Kuru (clan/family/race).”18 Again, the claim is not that it is somehow extraordinary that Kṛṣṇa should call Arjuna by his patronymic, or in this case metronymic; rather that just these epithets are used here in order to recall to Arjuna his social situatedness—he has certain relations within a particular family, he is a son of just this woman and no other. This place he holds within a certain family, and particularly as the son of just this woman, has a claim on him. It is as the son of Kuntī that Arjuna should “rise up, resolved upon battle” (II.37).

Because that is what the senior most son of Kunti wants.  

It is as the great hope for the honour of the Kuru race, as the bull of the Kurus, that he should be unhesitatingly resolved to act. In the same 35 couplets, before the “desireless action” doctrine is introduced (II.11–46), Kṛṣṇa three times addresses Arjuna as “Bhārata,” identifying him as a descendant of the universal monarch who gave his name to the people arrayed on both sides of the battle lines, thus calling attention to another aspect of Arjuna’s social identity (II.15, II.18, II.28), and perhaps recalling to him the expectations and mores peculiar to his people.

Bharata, son of Shakuntala, is the son denied by the father (who has forgotten he had espoused his mother). Smara- which means both love and memory- is linked to the forgetfulness by which knowledge of past lives is lost. An Ethics based on Karma has nothing to do with one based on a conception of Rationality which denies metempsychosis.  

These epithets are finally accompanied by an explicit appeal to the values of his station. For Arjuna is a prince of the warrior class. And for him, it would be a great evil to live in shame, although it may not be a great evil for another sort of person: “for one who has been honored, dishonor is worse than death,” says Kṛṣṇa (II.34).

But the audience knows that there is a tradition in the family of the senior claimant giving up his birth-right.  

“There is nothing more salutary for a kṣatriya than a lawful war. It is an open door to heaven” (II.31–32). It is appropriate to recall that Arjuna’s objection to fighting was that it must be unlawful to kill one’s kin, even if they have wronged you, humiliated you, dispossessed and tried to assassinate you.

But we know that, in this case, the war goes ahead only according to Karna's will.  

By insisting that the battle now with the offending kinsmen is a lawful one, Kṛṣṇa implicitly recalls their offences. In arguing for war, Kṛṣṇa is arguing also that these offences committed against Arjuna and his brothers require punishment by Arjuna. Especially humiliating to Arjuna is the thought that, if he turns away from the battle now, people will not only say that he is a coward: his “illwishers will spread many unspeakable tales about [him], condemning [his] skill—and what is more miserable than that?” (II.36) Arjuna is the star pupil of the foremost archer of his time; his bow, Gāṇḍīva, is a gift from the Gods in honor to Arjuna’s skill.

Later when Yuddhishtra gets angry and accuses Arjuna of being a slacker, he demands possession of Gandiva. Arjuna had vowed to slay whoever tried to take the bow away from him. He has to kill Yuddhishtra but feels he must slay himself for doing so. Krishna says 'dharma is subtle. You guys don't know it.' The solution he proposes is that Arjuna make a condign criticism of his elder brother (thus inflicting 'social death' on him) before uttering condign praise of himself (thus killing himself in the same way).  

From such renown and accomplishment, to be  reduced to cowardly and incompetent in the mouths of men is insufferable. Moreover, in bringing these thoughts forward, Kṛṣṇa asserts that it is not wrong to take such “personal” considerations into account. It would mean something for Arjuna to turn away from battle, that it would not mean for an ordinary foot-soldier to do the same. And this difference in meaning must be taken into account as one of the real factors determining the rightness of a course of action.

Not by us because we know the whole story.  

Thus one of the reasons why Arjuna should fight is that he has, through no choice of his own, the stature to act as an example to others.

Krishna gets Barbarik to kill himself because any coalition he joined would be victorious. This is an early example of 'backward induction'. Interestingly, this type of 'consequentialism' can generate a purely deontic calculus.  

“For it was by acting alone that Janaka and others achieved success, so you too must act while only looking to what holds together the world. People do whatever the superior man does: people follow what he sets up as the standard” (III.20–21).

This is Tardean mimetics. The problem is that the inferior men can get together and pull down the superior dude. 

These questions of station, of reputation and skill, of family, amount to “one’s own law”—svadharma.

No. One can defy one's 'kuladharma' or the duties of one's 'station'. It is fine to abandon your family and go off to the Himalayas to practice austerities.  

They ground the duty or duties binding upon Arjuna in particular. He is not the exclusive author of his own law; the social order into which he was born, the place he was born into, the endowments with which he came to it, and even his personal history (where this refers only very partially to his own choices), wrote a “law” just for him. It is in virtue of these that he has a fate, or destiny, which is appropriate to him, and not merely the workings of a capricious but inexorable necessity.

Only if he chooses to stick to this position. Krishna says you can do what you like. No doubt, this will have consequences but so does doing nothing.  

It is to his own, his proper, duty or law (svadharma) that Arjuna ought to look (II.31), and it is svadharma which he betrays in refusing to fight (II.33).20

Unless he decides to separate from his family and his profession in order to do something else.  

It may be that to act contrary to duty involves an irremediable loss of self, of integrity or dignity. Or it may be that it is just plain wrong. It is not entirely clear from the arguments Kṛṣṇa gives;

No. It is as clear as daylight. Indeed, the thing is obvious. If you are a soldier, you have to fight unless you resign from the Army.  

he suggests the latter rather than the former when he says of action motivated by self-interest: “From this interest grows desire, from desire anger;

the irony here is that Arjuna will kill his eldest brother while in grip of dark anger (Manyu). We might say this was Karna's desire. After all, there is an unfair element in Karna's slaying. If you are a great warrior, it is a comfort to know you were only defeated because your opponent did something underhand.  

from anger rises delusion, from delusion loss of memory,

which is why most of us don't remember our past lives. Arjuna did not know he was the incarnation of Lord Indra.  

from loss of memory the death of the spirit, and from the death of the spirit one perishes” (II.62–62).

Not 'spirit' but 'intelligence' (buddhi)  बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति

I do not think it an accident that these frequent reminders of Arjuna’s social, and particular familial relations should so immediately precede the introduction of the argument for desireless action, nor that the resolution of the dilemma should lead directly into the considerations of the nature of the self for which the Bhagavadgītā is best known.

Krishna is reacting to Arjuna's Vishada by suggesting that his mind is clouded. The truth is warrior's tend to be meatheads. Obviously, when dueling with great warriors, your mind must be unclouded. You can't be worrying about what will happen to Aunty and Uncle.  

I had suggested earlier (sec. I, p. 84) that there are two different ways we might understand the “improving” power of right motivation.

It is irrelevant. Some of the warriors are mercenaries or have only turned up because of FOMO.  It is foolish to suggest that superior soldiers with an inferior motivation are bound to lose.

Right motivation might just be a good in itself;

Sadly, it is irrelevant when it comes to fighting. I may have a very good motivation for knocking out Tyson Fury. But it aint gonna happen.  

or it might be something through which, and in virtue of which, we are able to properly assess our overall situation, and discern which relations, obligations, and potential consequences ought to weigh with us, and to what extent.

Sadly, right motivation won't make you smart in that manner. It also won't give you the ability to levitate.  

Naturally, right motivation could be improving for both reasons, and the emphasis Kṛṣṇa puts on the devotional quality of action without a view to reward suggests the former rather more than the latter.

I suppose, motivation does matter- for some people. The American actor is depicted as being unable to hand the heroine her handbag without knowing their 'motivation'. The Director has to explain to them that they had a troubled childhood and a brief problem with substance abuse before finally being able to turn their life around. Currently, they are working in a Department Store so as to save up money for College. Thus, their motivation is to hand the handbag to the heroine so as not to get the sack.  

But the appeal to family and position immediately preceding the introduction of desireless action returns explicitly, when it is realized that acting with a certain motivation, or quality of heart, cannot on its own determine which course of action one should (devotionally) embark upon. Thus after the explication of desireless action, and of the ultimate immortality of all beings, Arjuna still wonders what words and deeds are right. “What does one whose insight is firm say? How does he sit? How does he walk?” (II.54).

In other words, what are the outward and visible signs that one has attained a particular inward state.  

Even was he to master the principle of acting devotionally, rather than for one’s own happiness, Arjuna still would need to know whether he should kill his kin “desirelessly” or walk, without desire, away from the battlefield.

But, if he needs to know this, the last person he should ask is his own charioteer because the job of the charioteer is to keep up the car-warrior's martial spirits. It's like asking a prostitute if you should have sex or should save your money. 

Only Arjuna can decide to fight or walk away.  

Proper motivation, as thus far understood, is not enough. In Kṛṣṇa’s own words: The wise man “has no reason at all to do anything or not to do anything” (III.18?).

Because he is self-sufficient. However, a wise man, like Krishna, may choose to take on certain duties quite gratuitously. Equally, one might say, that the enlightened person performs only supererogatory functions.  

If, however, we couple the principle of acting without desire for reward with the injunction to attend to the self, Arjuna begins to get an answer to his question (III.1: “Why urge me to this fearful action?”). For although ultimately, the self which he should recognize is the eternal self which can be a part of the divine, for practical purposes, the immortal self of Arjuna is embodied and embedded in social life in a particular way. And it is looking to this complex self, or the self as it is implicated here and now, that Arjuna should consider the question of whether to enter the battle. “Even the man of knowledge,” as contrasted with the man of action (III.3), “behaves according to his nature” (III.33).

These aren't 'knock down' arguments. The whole point of the Gita is that it shows there is no 'natural' or 'absolute' deontic logic. However, as in intuitionistic logic there can be a 'witness'. Arjuna, given 'divine eyes', himself becomes that witness. In other words, previous philosophers failed to understand the Gita because mathematical logic in the West had not developed sufficiently. However, there can be no excuse for anyone born after 1920 or 1930 to repeat this type of nonsense about the Gita.  

While the life of the mind may lead to correct insight and action, so too may the vita activa; and, although Kṛṣṇa does not say this explicitly, presumably what Arjuna is supposed to know about himself, when he comes to consider the question, is that he was born and bred for the active life.

That is irrelevant. Anybody can chose an active life regardless of how they were brought up.  

All of Kṛṣṇa’s epithets and arguments up to this point have been reminding Arjuna of this.

They aren't knock down arguments. Only if Arjuna wants to remain a soldier- but one who won't show up for the battle just in case Uncleji or Auntyji would dislike the outcome.  

Active engagement with worldly concerns belongs to him properly, while other types of worthwhile life do not. And it is for this reason that he would be doing wrong to walk away from the battle in meditative absorption. Kṛṣṇa again appeals to Arjuna’s particular obligations: “It is more salutary to carry out your own law poorly than another’s law well; it is better to die in your own law than to prosper in another’s” (III.35). 

This is obvious. If you are hired to fix my toilet but choose to sing Bhaja Govindam instead, I will say you are a bad plumber on Yelp. I won't pay you and you will soon go out of business. 

It is appreciation of a situation as a whole, with judgement unclouded by desire for profit (III.37–43), which provides one with the ability to discern what is the required action, here and now, from less worthy alternatives.

This isn't what the Gita says. Lust clouds the mind. Stop watching pornhub and your brain might start working properly. Nobody can 'appreciate the situation as a whole'. But, no question, if you stop wanking incessantly, you'll be able to understand you need to get  a fucking job you miserable little shit.  

Regarding a situation without concern for personal gain will allow one to see it clearly, and will resolve doubt (V.25).

In this case, hedge funds would hire saintly nuns to do portfolio choice. It simply isn't true that conquering lust or not caring about money gives one super powers.  

“The knower of brahman who stands upon brahman is steady of spirit and harbors no delusions” (V.20).

But this does not mean he gains mental super-powers.  

This perspective is attained by those who “have tamed their thinking and know themselves” (V.26).

Alas, knowing yourself doesn't mean you know whether the Mochizuki proof of the abc theorem is true or false.  

And while knowing oneself will of course involve knowing oneself as related to God, it will also involve knowing oneself as related to one’s fellows, and as related to the whole order of creation (XI.1).

This is omniscience. Perhaps, as the Jains say, all beings will eventually attain this 'kevalya gyan'. However, that isn't what Krishna is saying. It is obvious that he is merely talking about how to overcome 'Vishada'.  

V. DESTINY & INTEGRITY A closer consideration of the reasons Kṛṣṇa gives in the first part of the Gītā thus suggests that it is because Arjuna is just the person he is, with just the particular family, social status and history that he has, that it has become Arjuna’s duty to fight.

No. The real question is why Krishna does not take the obvious course which is to say 'the Kauravas have a bigger army. They have heroes like Bhishma and Drona who can't die save by their own will. Don't be so bloody cock-sure. Just say 'look, we are going to lose. I don't want to die in a doomed cause. Some people may taunt you. Let them do so. Go somewhere else, gather soldiers and conquer your own kingdom. If your brothers want to die, let them do so.' 

The problem here is that Krishna knows (because he is omniscient) that Arjuna has an unvested boon of 'chaksushi vidya'. That is probably the reason he gained a vision of the horrific outcome of the war. Very often, the boon given by a demi-god or fairy turns out to be mischievous or counter-productive. If you grew up on stories of this sort, this is what you suspect as you listen to the unfolding of the epic over successive nights in your village.  

To be sure, Kṛṣṇa is not arguing in terms of what will please Arjuna or make him, or anyone else, happy—in this sense, his argument is no more consequentialist than it is Kantian. Rather, Kṛṣṇa seems to think that duties are generated in idiosyncratic ways,

nonsense! They are generated by oikeiosis, paideia, aptitude and employment. This is 'common knowledge'. Krishna wasn't a stupid pedant teaching worthless shite to credential craving cretins.  

depending upon the particular relations in which individuals stand to one another,

Nobody knows what those relations are 

and depending upon the irreducibly particular past which shapes a person and a situation into the individual he, she or it is.

This is nonsense. There is nothing 'irreducible' about our past. Any repentant sinner can change it.  

When Kṛṣṇa enjoins Arjuna to “look to your own law (svadharma)” (II.31), he resembles nothing so much as a moral particularist.

No. Krishna never resembles a shithead teaching stupid nonsense. Any moral principle is defensible by anybody and in any way at all. It is a different matter that it is defeasible- i.e some stronger, or more expedient, principle may prevail.   

This is in keeping with what B. K. Matilal

a cretin 

has said in defense of Kṛṣṇa’s “deviousness” throughout the Mahābhārata.

I am welcome to say that God fucking hates me because he gave me a tiny dick. Nobody needs to defend God from the charge that he has a particular animus against me. Anyway, it is my tiny brain which I should be complaining about.  

21 Kṛṣṇa is not unprincipled, if by that one means unscrupulous or wanton. He has a keenly developed sense of what is to be done

No doubt, the author will also say that Jesus had good bowel control. Personally speaking, I shit myself the moment anybody starts nailing me to a cross. But, surely, Jesus's bowel control is not the chief thing we remember from our reading of the Gospels.  

—it is uncompromising, he feels himself bound by it, and difficult though it may be to articulate in advance, the constraints on what is and is not to be done are fully captured neither in consequentialist, nor in deontological terms.

Which is why only stupid pedants teaching nonsense talk in those terms.  

Justice must be done, and that means that oaths must be kept and the greedy punished;

No. The folk theorem of repeated games applies. Provided there is a way of keeping track of an agent's actions, 'reputational effects' or direct consequences- e.g. getting stabbed if you break a contract- are enough. 

Justice is merely a service industry. A stationary bandit may provide it if a profit can be made thereby. However, the greedy are not punished unless they actually break a contract or a law.  

honest Yudhiṣṭira must lie,

No. He chooses to do so. The legal principle here is 'exigent circumstances' or 'Apadh Dharma'. But the fact that a principle is defeasible, does not mean it is not defensible.  

thus betraying himself

that is merely a manner of speaking 

in order to save his brothers and kingdom, just as he had betrayed his brothers and wife through gambling them

there was no betrayal. He was entitled to gamble them away provided they did not object. His wife did and so the outcome of the dice game was set aside. One reason for this was that the wife's father was a great King. He could claim the throne on the basis of the right of his (at that time unborn) grandson whom he could adopt by 'putrika putra'.  

and their kingdom away. And Arjuna, foremost archer, bearer of Gāṇḍīva, embracer of battle and of role, must fight.

Unless he really doesn't want to. No doubt, this lady could say he was betraying himself or sodomizing himself by chopping off his own head and shoving it up his arse.  

 CONCEPTIONS OF VIRTUE Thus the sort of particularism I attribute to Kṛṣṇa

Because you are stupid. Krishna, like other learned Hindus, knew that principles which normally apply are defeasible under exigent circumstances- i.e. Apadh Dharma is sound law.  

—and to Arjuna insofar as he is responsive to the arguments Kṛṣṇa gives, rather than merely to the fact that it is god giving them—is as distinct from “hard case” particularism

There is no 'hard case' here. A soldiers job is to fight. He may resign or run away because he does not want to be killed. But, in that case, he won't be paid or he will lose his martial reputation.  

as it is from “Sartrean particularism.”

which is baroque nonsense 

On the one hand, one might make the weak claim that there are some cases of moral judgement for which there is, and can be, no universal rule.

There can be a defeasible universal rule for anything at all- including the duty to shit on the head of your Trigonometry teacher. I explained this to the Head Master. Sadly, he felt he had a duty to beat me till my bottom was bloody.  

There are hard cases, and these hard cases show us that morality is not always a matter of universally applicable principles, but is sometimes one of personal judgement.

Judgments are made by persons. A universally applicable principle might be defeated by a one which is equally applicable but stronger, in the circumstances.  Is there some indefeasible principle which always applies in every situation. Probably. But it may be trivial. 

As I have been describing it, all judgements about what is to be done should, according to Kṛṣṇa, be made with a view to “one’s own law.”

Unless you outsource the thing to a smarter dude.  

But this should not be confused with the view that morality is merely a matter of personal judgement—with heavy weight on the word “personal.”

Morality concerns persons. But persons are not 'mere' persons. What a person can do or become is not known to us. It does not depend on what persons have been or have done in the past 

The extreme of this line of thought is frequently taken to be Sartre, who seems to claim that decisions generally are at once constructive of and expressive of who we are as persons—and that is pretty much all there is to be said on the matter of rightness and wrongness.

The man was a hysterical fool. He was pretending that decisions made by people like him, in the Resistance, affected the outcome of the War. He was wrong. France was liberated by Churchill and FDR, though, no doubt, for his own selfish reasons, Stalin too played a role. 

The problem with Existentialism is that existentialists can be killed- or if not killed then denied tenure- with the result that Existentialism disappears. But this would also happen if the Academy stopped catering to the terminally stupid.  

The only standards of success and failure applicable are those used for evaluating the degree to which we “stand behind” our decision, fully and sincerely endorse what we do and therefore who we are, without self-deceit.

Very true. If only Sartre had 'stood behind' a decision to defeat the Nazis rather than surrender to them, Hitler's thugs would never have occupied Paris.  

This is not quite the kind of personhood that Kṛṣṇa’s particularism implies or is interested in.

Krishna makes clear that he is not a particularist. He takes on even the sins of shitheads like me.  

The person who is the locus of individually tailored obligations is not primarily something one constructs through one’s actions, but something constructed socially, historically, and to a certain extent “objectively.”

People aren't constructed. Those who pretend they are should be required to construct a nice girl friend for me.  

One is born a prince, or one is not, and certain things follow or not accordingly.

The probability of somethings following may be greater. But that is correlation not causation.  

One’s elder brother is

Karna, not Yuddhishtra in Arjuna's case 

a scrupulously honest compulsive gambler (not an ideal combination) or not, and one’s teacher has or has not attempted to assassinate and defraud one of one’s kingdom.

Who is the author thinking of? Drona? He didn't assassinate or defraud anybody.  

Finally, this prince of a great kingdom has seen his wife publicly humiliated by one’s cousins, or he has not.

Five princes saw this.  

But if he has, and if his exile has been endorsed by the archery teacher of whom he was the star pupil, and if he twice followed his brother in an attempt to regain the throne, if he learned avidly and excelled all others in the skills appropriate to a warrior, ... and so on, then certain things are his duty that a deontologist could never have imagined in advance.

All this is irrelevant. Arjuna's duty, so long as he remains with his family, is to do as Yuddhishtra commands. The irony is that it is actually Karna's command that he is obeying. 

True, like Bhima- who was ready to separate from his family and just go kill all the Kauravas himself- Arjuna could have pursued an individual project of revenge. But then, he could have beaten the shit out of Yuddhishtra the moment he took up the dice. What we have here is 'revealed preference'. But that has nothing to do with duty.  

Out of the immense weight of the detail of who one is, a destiny arises—the obligation to respond to and enact the future fitting for such a past,

Arjuna has no such obligation while he remains with his family. We may say he had a duty to beat the shit out of Yuddhishtra and make himself a universal Emperor. But that is merely our opinion. 

the behavior and characteristics integral to and befitting who one has become.

 There may be 'thymotic' characters in Iron Age epics of whom we may say 'it is right and fitting that this great hero should conquer the Earth'. 

This might resemble, if anything, the Stoic view of individual duty being determined by our four personae —our rational nature, our natural endowments, the careers 

Oikeosis is based on oikos and is related to economia which is Artha. Nothing wrong in that. Equally, there is nothing wrong with binding yourself by a 'terrible' (Bhishma) vow. But that sort of 'akreibia' can have evil consequences- e.g. the birth of Draupadi and Shikhandini which, one may say, was the true cause of the downfall of the Kauravas. In particular, Draupadi's mocking of her brother-in-law when he visited Indraprastha is mentioned as the original cause of the war. 

we have chosen, and the positions we occupy by chance.

No. By karma- at least in the MhB.  

But it should be clear that the grounds which generate obligations, and determine virtues, should not be restricted to “roles”;

Nothing 'generates' obligations or determines virtues. Anybody who believes otherwise should be required to generate an obligation on the part of all Super-Models to sleep with me.  

Arjuna’s kṣatriya persona is only one aspect of the situation which determines that his path lies in the battle ahead,

it determines nothing. Balram was a Kshatriya. He refused to fight. Nobody thought any less of him.  

and it is an aspect still not sufficiently well-described to be fully determining.

This silly woman is looking for 'determinism' in the Social Sciences. If such a thing exists, there would be no need for law courts or markets or Schools or Colleges.  

This, I suggest, is how we should understand the force of Kṛṣṇa’s appeal to svadharma, as opposed to, say kuladharma (duty peculiar to the family) or varṇāśramadharma (duty peculiar to class).

because you can choose to separate from your family or class.  

The fact that Arjuna has consistently taken on, or embodied in a specific way, what it means to be a warrior, through his own choices and actions, figures in making it meaningful that Arjuna fight this battle, in a way it is not necessarily meaningful for the “generic” kṣatriya.

Nonsense! A Kshatriya can choose not to fight in a particular battle. It is not the case that there is some particular way of being a warrior such that choices available to warriors are denied to you. This is because 'warrior' is merely an intension with a particular extension. It isn't an intrinsic quality. One may say of a particular mathematician that there was only one way she could prove a particular theorem. But history shows this isn't really true. A constructivist may give a non constructive proof while continuing to search for a constructive one.  

Moreover, the way Arjuna has been treated (what has been done to him) and the expectations others have of him also play a role in determining whether it is his duty to fight here and now.

No. It is irrelevant. He is eligible to fight and he has been picked to fight but he can decide not to.  

Thus, when hermit Utaṇka criticises Kṛṣṇa for failing to avert the war, Kṛṣṇa explains that it was out of his hands. “It is impossible,” he says, “to transgress destiny (diṣṭam) by either intelligence or might” (MBh. 14.LII.16).

This does not mean there might not be another way to transgress it. Anyway, in an Occasionalist universe Destiny is whatever God wants it to be.  

Utaṇka is beside himself with outrage at this excuse: “Since, though able, Kṛṣṇa, you did not rescue those foremost ones of Kuru’s race ... I shall, without doubt, curse you! Since you did not forcibly compel them to forebear ... I shall, filled with wrath, denounce a curse on you” (MBh. 14.LII.20–21).

If that is his Destiny let him do so.  

Before revealing his divine identity, and that it would be therefore very imprudent for Utaṇka to lay a curse on him, Kṛṣṇa apologizes for having been unable to avert the war (MBh. 14.LII.23).

In other words, God is nice. He doesn't get a kick out of watching dudes butcher each other.  

Since we see Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā bending over backwards to persuade Arjuna to enter the fray,

because that was the duty he took on. The fact that a guy may have some other reason to perform his duty does not change the fact that the 'big reason' (matsanayay) for doing it was that it was his duty.  

we might be tempted to see Kṛṣṇa’s appeal to fate and his apologies after the fact as disingenuous.

Professors of shite subjects are tempted to say stupid things.  

But if destiny is something constructed socially,

it would be meaningless. Why not suggest that Death is constructed socially?  

through the combination of one’s actions and characteristic with the values and social system, as well as the character and acts of others (Yudhiṣṭhira’s gambling; Duryodhana’s mercilessness; Droṇa’s disrespect for moral teaching

why is this lady so angry with Drona? The poor fellow was just an archery teacher. Oh. Right. He was a Brahmin. Brahmins are very evil.  

), then once the characters have declared themselves, within the context in which their actions take one very specific significance, the die is cast.

No it isn't. Had Barbarik joined the battle, the outcome would have been different.  

As Kṛṣṇa explains it, “When I live in the order of the Nāgas, I then act as a Nāga, and when I live in the order of the Yakshas or that of Rākshasas, I act after the manner of that order. Born now in the order of humanity, I must act as a human being. I begged them (the Kauravas) piteously. But stupefied as they were and deprived of their senses, they refused to accept my words. I frightened them, filled with wrath, referring to some great danger. But once more I showed them my usual (human) form.

So the Kauravas too were granted a theophany but that didn't soften their hearts or change their minds. 

Possessed as they were of unrighteousness, and enveloped by their proper time, all of them have been righteously slain in battle, and have without doubt gone to Heaven” (MBh. 14.LIII.18–21). There are modes and manners appropriate to each form of life, and persons within that form of life are constrained by these. They draw the most general circle around what can and ought to be done.

It is obvious that the sort of body you have constrains you. One may say 'should' implies 'could', but we don't really know what we can or can't do.  

Here, Kṛṣṇa specifically attributes the inevitability of the war to the obstinancy of the Kauravas. There must be many such reasons, culminating indirectly in the duty of Arjuna to fight.

No. They are irrelevant. Either Arjuna severs ties with his family and quits the army or he fights. In the latter case, we may say he is doing his duty. In the former case we say he considers his only duty is to himself.  

Even Kṛṣṇa cannot make the meaning of the lives of each of the persons involved something other than what all the characters and social elements of all jointly combine to make it.

But Karna could. The fact that a particular bloke can't achieve something doesn't mean somebody else mightn't be able to do so.  

Although the obligations falling to Arjuna are specific to him,

No. He has the same obligation as other soldiers. True, he may be assigned military duties on the basis of his special skills. But the obligation remains the same- viz. to fight with might and main and obey the chain of command.  

they are none the less obligations for that. And although they are his duty in virtue of his past, his circumstances, his station and relations to others, including his skilfulness in arms, they are not in any way necessarily his personal wishes.

Unless that is precisely what they are. We feel Arjuna is a happy warrior. He likes fighting. He is good at it. Incidentally, Bhima- and even Draupadi- had spoken against going to war because of all the harm it would cause. 

What it becomes his duty to do in virtue of who he is, is not at all what he would choose to be his duty, and not at all what he would want to do, or can even fully comprehend as right and justified, so long as he thinks in absolute terms, without reference to things that are true of him in particular and no one else.

Nonsense! This isn't a story about a sensitive poet who dislikes the profession of soldier but has been forced into it by his Daddy.  

It is his objectively constructed identity,

If it was 'objectively constructed' there must be some way to create or clone another Arjuna. This lady is refusing even to construct a nice g.f for me. Why is she being so mean? Alternatively, she may be merely bullshitting when she speaks of 'objectively constructed identities'.  

including his current circumstances, together with his past choices (e.g., to try in the first place to regain for his elder brother

his eldest brother is Karna. One question is why Arjuna doesn't see, when he sees all things in the Visvarupa, that Kunti gave away Karna. The answer may be that the Gandharva's boon was that he could see only what he wanted to see, not what he didn't.  

the throne that was rightfully his) which compels certain things to be his duties, and ultimately his destiny.

Nonsense! Kunti tells Karna that his duty is to lead the Pandavas (because the son born before marriage belongs to the husband- unless the son rejects that role). Karna isn't having any of it. Arjun too could walk away if that is what he really wanted to do. No doubt, stupid academics teaching worthless shite may want to pretend that everything personal or social is constructed. This means we should have a Manhattan project for the Social Sciences. Instead of Armies to defeat our enemies we could just re-engineer them so that they bugger each other to death. Come to think of it, the US tried that in the late Sixties with 'Project Camelot'. It failed immediately though some MK-Ultra nutters continued to get funding till Carter put in Admiral Turner to clean house at the CIA.  

And thus he needs persuading to begin the war that marks the beginning of the end of the Mahābhārata; and thus when Kṛṣṇa persuades him, he does so by reference to “duties” and “law”—not to ends, but also not to impersonal principles, or maxims.

Krishna fails to persuade Arjuna. Deontic logic, like mathematical logic, can't simultaneously deliver categoricity as well as completeness. However, there can be a witness for intuitionistic or Gentzen type logic. But even the witnesses of theophany- Vishvarupa- can reject it or forget all about it.  

Kṛṣṇa’s argument relies on an appeal to who Arjuna is.

But it fails. Why can't this silly lady see this? If she had kept abreast with mathematical logic, she would know why a non-trivial Kantian deontic logic must be arbitrary, incomplete or inconsistent. This is because a deontic logic too has a mathematical representation. True, for any particular purpose, we can find good enough 'univalent foundations'. But they are non-unique- i.e. not categorical. Indeed, they are unlikely to even have 'naturality' or 'canonicity' though the reason why this is so may be subtle and not easy to discover.  

His insistence is that Arjuna act according to his character, as well as with understanding of how he fits into an overall structure of a well-ordered universe.

Arjuna chose Krishna as his charioteer at the high price of giving up the Yadava army to the enemy. In the Gita, Krishna does his duty as a charioteer. Since stupid people don't recall that Arjuna had an unvested boon of chaksushi vidya (which by Indian law could vest if he himself became asamika (i.e. not master of himself by reason of insanity or 'vishada') they completely misunderstand the drama and the pathos of the Gita.  

It is, in a sense, an appeal to Arjuna’s integrity. But it is in maintaining his integrity that Arjuna will participate in a war of ghastly destruction.

No. He can say 'I'm joining Balram, your elder brother, for a nice drink of wine. Go scold him, if you like scolding so much'.  

Should we say then that the lesson of the Mahābhārata, and of the Bhagavadgītā in particular, is that sometimes one ought to act out of character?

No. It would not be true. Balram acts in a characteristic way. He is a more rustic demi-god whose weapon is a plough. Arjun is a happy 'shoot 'em up' warrior.  

Perhaps integrity is not so important after all, and Kṛṣṇa is positively wicked in his exhortation of Arjuna to act according to his values, and according to the expectations that are on him (III.29).28 95

Jesus was very naughty for not demanding the banning of dicks even though dicks cause RAPE!  

But integrity will not be so easily dismissed, and I think to focus on the rightness or wrongness of Kṛṣṇa’s action here distracts from this larger point to be got from the Gītā; and similarly to focus merely on whether Arjuna should in fact (in some impersonal sense) fight, distracts from at least one lesson we might take from his relation to the action of the Mahābhārata.

That lesson is, having a great charioteer is really useful for a car-warrior. Karna's charioteer was a relative of the younger Pandavas and didn't like Karna. 

Lots of people who read (or listened) to the MbH belonged to the warrior class. They imbibed lessons about the need for esprit de corps, the maintenance of morale, and the need to have an 'exit strategy' from particular battle tactics- e.g. chakravyuha.  

Implicit in Kṛṣṇa’s motivations for urging Arjuna to fight, and slightly more explicit in the reasons he gives Arjuna, is a recognition of the central role of integrity in ethical thinking.

If Professors of that stupid shite had any integrity, they would resign and retrain as toilet cleaners. 

Without integrity as a virtue—a fundamental virtue—any moral code, and any world based on such a moral code, will fall apart.

That is not the lesson of history. A very corrupt and hypocritical regime can become hegemonic. One with great integrity may perish because it keeps doing stupid shit.  

For this reason, it may even be more correct to regard integrity as the precondition of any virtue,

if people don't fart they will explode and thus lack bodily integrity. Thus if we regard integrity as the precondition of any virtue, we would be obliged to regard farting as its even more fundamental precondition. 

rather than as a virtue in its own right to be fitted in among others.

Only if farting is a virtue in its own right.  

Full integrity requires in this case a thorough-going commitment to the virtues and values of the heroic code of the warrior.

No. Bhishma has integrity. Warriors are supposed to sire sons. He won't do so. It simply isn't the case that a great general has to be a carbon copy of the military ideal. He may choose to dress in a slovenly fashion and fail to show due deference to his superiors or to the War Minister.  

Unless Arjuna and his brothers, and his kin on the opposing side, follow through completely in their endorsement of, and adherence to, this heroic code, we will not get a critique of that code, and we will be tempted to mis-locate the problem.

The code was simply 'fight if you want to. If you want to become an ascetic, or a Brahmin, or a farmer, or a dancing master- do so by all means. If anyone gives you back-chat shit on their heads or tell them to fuck the fuck off.' Warriors can get away with doing that. Me, not so much.  

If Arjuna had walked away from the battle, more people would have survived—some of them wicked, some of them innocent, and some of them heroic according to the values and expectations embedded in the social world of the Mahābhārata.

We don't know that. Maybe Krishna would have got Barbarik to enroll with the Pandavas by pointing out that they must be the weaker side.  

And had he walked away, we might criticize his act as weak or cowardly;

unless he made it a point to hunt down and shit on those who did so 

we might praise the act as wise and self-sacrificing. The act of Arjuna walking away would be the focus of a debate of whether what he did was ignoble or a noble foregoing of his own glory.

Nobody gives a fart about 'debates'.  

But we would not be forced to question whether the glory itself is a good that Arjuna sacrificed; we would not be forced to question whether the whole code that demands, or would demand, wholesale slaughter in order to be fully lived, is itself the culprit.

These cretins might as well decide to ban dicks because dicks cause RAPE! Why is Biden refusing to undergo gender reassignment surgery? For evil to triumph it is sufficient that good men don't chop off their dicks.  

In apportioning praise and blame within the Mahābhārata, and within the schema of values it represents, each side of the bloody war comes off as well—and as badly—as the other.

The MhB is a great story. That's why we read it. Nobody gives a fuck what these cretins think.  

But only because of this, and because the extreme bloodiness of the battle

nice warriors should give each other kisses and cuddles. Nasty warriors shoot arrows at each other. This is because of dicks. Cut them off immediately! 

is a necessary consequence of the heroic code,

nothing is the necessary consequence of any code whatsoever. That's not how codes work.  

a battle that becomes necessary within the values according to which each of the characters has conducted his life, and within the moral–social climate which prevails—only because the devastation is the inevitable consequence of the demands of dharma as understood by all concerned, can the story as a whole operate as a critique of the whole system of values.

Did you know that Arjuna had a dick? Dicks cause RAPE! Only because of dicks, trillions of innocent bahishkrit peeps were senselessly slaughtered by Neo-Liberalism. Modi sud rejin!  

Because Arjuna lives, and so many die, adhering to the demands implied by a certain moral climate and order can his story itself stand as a critique of that moral climate.

A moral climate where dicks are not chopped off immediately is very evil and complicit in Neo-Liberalism, Islamophobia and body shaming. 

Still, it must be a great comfort for any NATO soldier who survived the war on Terror to be told that his story is a critique of a particular moral climate. Prince Harry is one such soldier. To escape England's horrible climate, he moved to California. Now all he needs to do is to chop off his dick for Professors of shite subjects to hold him up as a moral exemplar.