The late Daya Krishna, aptly described as a Socratic gadfly, was one of the pillars of philosophy in India, and a great believer in samvad or dialogue The late Ramu Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, was perhaps best known for his lifelong explorations into the notion of self, for his pithy one-liners, and for the chair he occupied at the India International Centre.
A small meeting on “samvad and swaraj” was organized at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla in memory of the two. I attended to pay homage to the memory of these two, and to continue an incomplete dialogue with Daya ji on ethics.
Here is an extract from my paper, followed by an abstract.
The Harmony Principle
I once wrote to Daya ji about what seemed to me a paradox in contemporary Indian philosophy. It is one thing that Indian philosophers don’t engage with science, or even with its history and philosophy. It is quite another thing that they don’t engage with ethics. Ethics, after all, is at the core of philosophy. In the absence of an explicit normative ethical principle one often does not know how to respond to something fundamentally new, such as the bewildering variety of new developments in science and technology which impinge on our daily life. I was disappointed that Indian philosophers remain engaged in studying Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and the like, or they were immersed in Sanskrit texts—neither of which provide much guidance about new developments. Few philosophers have been willing to address the philosophical problems of mundane life in contemporary times. When a new law is passed by parliament, such as the Cyber law, no one considers it necessary to consult any Indian philosopher to ask whether the law would be compatible with current ethics. However, it would be regarded as inexcusable if our lawyers failed to consult similar laws formulated abroad—which formulation might well have assumed altogether another ethical context. Philosophers seem to have made themselves irrelevant to our society.
So I wrote to Daya ji complaining that Indian philosophers had never put forward a normative ethical principle. How could there be any sort of real philosophy without ethics, I wondered?
In his usual way Daya ji responded promptly. He said that one Banerjee had proposed a normative ethical principle in 1935. I did not, of course, find that very satisfactory. My letter to Daya ji was in the context of my book The Eleven Pictures of Time. In the book I had dwelt on the latest military strategy, propounded by Huntington. This strategy aimed to promote Western dominance by expanding the “soft power” of the West. Soft power involves controlling human behaviour by inculcating in people a desired set of values.
The use of values as part of military strategy is a novel and dangerous idea, but it is a natural extension of the idea of using religious beliefs to achieve political dominance.i Almost any desired “values” can be inculcated, provided the indoctrination starts at an early enough age. Huntington’s logic is that human behaviour can be conditioned through values, just like machines can be programmed. (It helps if there is a peer group which keeps reinforcing those values.) Now, I have no doubt that human beings are not machines, and it is possible for individuals to ask awkward questions, and thereby transcend their past indoctrination. However, statistically speaking, this seems to happen only occasionally: I must admit that only a few individuals I know ever manage to get rid of what they they were taught in childhood. So far as Huntington is concerned, in a situation of electoral democracy, a 50% success rate is good enough!
Religious extremists are the most visible example of the success of such attempts to “program” human beings through values. However, my concern was with the mainstream, which appears to be similarly “programmed” through values. My other concern was that the non-West in general, and Indian philosophers, in particular, have had no say in the formulation of these values; they don’t even seem to have reflected on them.
Therefore, I was not satisfied to hear about this Banerjee and his ethical principle about which few people have heard. Many philosophers have come and gone after 1935. How was it that no new thinking about ethics had emerged since then?
Abstract
The new ethical principle that I had proposed, called the “order principle”, appears to have been misunderstood. To continue an incomplete samvad with Daya ji, and because ethical autonomy is the essence of swaraj, this paper clarifies the ethical principle, and the meaning of “order”.
By way of background, my analysis of the ethical models in common use (both utilitarian and religious) showed that they were all anchored in various beliefs about time. Most of these time beliefs are physical time beliefs, which may or may not cohere with the understanding of time in current physics. To ensure coherence with mundane time beliefs (used to formulate the criterion of falsifiability) I had proposed to modify current physics to allow a “tilt” in the arrow of time. A “tilt” is not a new physical hypothesis; rather it is a rejection of the common physical hypothesis of causality. A “tilt” does, however, involve a radical new mathematical understanding of existing physics (time evolution according to mixed-type functional differential equations). One can now ask the question in reverse: what sort of ethics flows from this revised time belief?
To understand this, it is first necessary to understand some key physical consequences: a “tilt” leads to a non-mechanistic and irreversible physics. Apart from resolving the classical paradoxes of thermodynamics, this helps to physically characterize living organisms as those capable of spontaneously producing negentropy or “order”—perhaps better renamed harmony. This “spontaneity” should not be confounded with something superficially similar like “chance” from which it differs fundamentally: chance (time evolution according to stochastic differential equations) has long been believed to create disorder or entropy. Spontaneity also differs from “indeterminism” (in the usual sense of either epistemically or ontically broken time). The traditional notion closest to time evolution with a tilt is paticca samuppada: coorigination conditioned, but not fully determined, by the past.
This new (non-mechanistic) understanding of physics also entails a new understanding of biological evolution with spontaneity (rather than chance) as the key driving factor for mutations. This revised picture of biological evolution provides a purpose to life, and an ethic (harmony principle), which transcends biological survival—but does so without appealing to any religious or metaphysical entities like a creator-god.