Hegel and India
This paper shall be two-fold. It shall, on the one hand, look at Hegel’s engagement with India or “Hegel’s India” (Mohapatra and Rathod, 2017); and on the other, read India’s present political understanding of its past through Hegelian dialectics. The paper engages with Hegel’s understanding of the Oriental (especially India) as well as the Hegelian absolute as a methodology to bring the subjective (or particular) and the objective (or abstract) forms of human existence together. The latter is a road map to understand the ‘whole’, the ‘absolute’ that carries the cracks within it. The paper in a way looks at the contradiction within Hegel too; the fissures within Hegel in his journey to reach the absolute truth of India. It also studies the contradiction within the Indian conservatives to look at India’s past as a seamless register i.e. without external invasions except by the Muslims (Arabs) and the British.
Mohapatra and Rathod (2017) call the length of Hegel’s writings (approximately 80,000 words) on and about India “astonishing”. What may have been Hegel’s source of interest? Was there something in Indian thought that attracted him? “Indeed, an attentive reading of his India writings tends to suggest that Indian thought haunted Hegel somehow. …it represented a sort of nagging twin that he badly needed to shake off throughout the development of his own philosophy” (ibid., 4). There perhaps lies something hidden behind Hegel’s urge to characterize India as “antique as well as modern, stationary and fixed, land of imaginative aspiration and idealistic” (Hegel, 2001: 156). Hegelian philosophy stood both with and against Indian philosophy. On the one hand, the conception of Brahman was very close to the absolute and on the other, was the caste system that Hegel detested as it defied his pivotal motif of freedom. Hegel’s attention to the East coupled with his Eurocentric judgement found greater intensity in the early 1920s. In the Philosophy of World History Hegel writes, “The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit-Man as such-is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free. They know that one is free. But on this very account, the freedom of that one is only caprice; ferocity-brutal recklessness of passion, or a mildness and tameness of the desires, which is itself only an accident of Nature-mere caprice like the former. That one is therefore only a Despot; not a free man” (1822: 18). It may be important to ask which of the Orientals is Hegel referring to? Is he possibly referring to the aboriginals (the indigenous) who have largely remained outside the state making process to restore their freedom, and yet followed an age old governance system that is largely democratic? (Kriti, 2021) In 1826 when Hegel (re)read the Bhagwad-Gita(1) he perhaps managed to forge some relationship with Indian philosophy (Nanajivako, 1976), thus, partly freeing himself of Eurocentrism – managing to look at India from his own methodology of dialectics in reaching the absolute. In his account on the Mahabharata he said, “One cannot but remark that the fame of Indian wisdom belongs to the most ancient traditions in history. Where one discusses thesources of philosophy, one ... points ... especially to India” (Hegel and Humbolt, 1826:3). Hegel also critiques the Bhagawad-Gita because it had been written by the Brahmins (the priestly class that proclaims to be most superior among Hindus). Hegel also complaints that Indian philosophy is not dialectical or progressive. He had to thus frequently face the apparent stasis of Indian thought. Change, negation, mediation, and hence time are important factors for Hegel. He defines History as the “development of Spirit in Time” (1822: 72). Does static necessarily mean non-movement? How must we think of homeostasis – a principle balancing the universe, always in action and yet static? “Stasis naturally presents itself as an antagonistic trope. In classical Indian philosophical thought, it would appear that the concept of stasis predominates in certain ontological systems: the eternal, immovable, unchanging, permanent, and the timeless is termed as the absolute, and all change, transience, modifications are said to be subsumed within it. Here, the idea of sthitaprajna, the cognitive state of being sthita (static or steady), provides a parallel. In the Bhagavad-Gita, this tranquil, changeless disposition would in fact apply to the ideal human being, someone who has vanquished fear, desire, and attachment, is content and thus free or liberated. This resonates with the old question: What is the “end” of philosophy? If the answer is Freedom, then what is its impregnable connection with time or change?” (Mohapatra and Rathod, 2017: 5). The question then is: does sthitaprajna represent a Hegelian contradiction; does Indian philosophy represent a Hegelian contradiction in Western philosophy?
Hegelian Contradiction
Hegel finds faith in ‘process’; process that unfolds contradiction. Process, contradiction and philosophical truth function in a triad. A mere statement of truth is philosophically misleading. Philosophy is rather a movement towards truth, one that consists of ruptures, failures, and errors. Hegel interpreted the core of philosophy to be in contradiction, in dialectics – the unique ability of philosophy to undo itself from within. For Hegel truth is a product of such conflict. Truth is thus part of a system, there is no truth in isolation; and to arrive at truth one will have to undergo mediation (a form of becoming). Absolute truth is a coming together of several inconsistencies specific to the truth; it is a trajectory underscored by contradictions. It has no end point or starting point; one is as if always involved in the making. Given there is no transcendental absolute for Hegel, there is also no substance with independent existence. Hegel redefines substance as primarily self-divided. He asserts the key to all philosophy is that there is no original unity but only an original self-division. Substance is divided like the subject and explains the content of the world is always in a movement towards truth. Substance and subject together help in grasping the truth, they together also explain the self-division in life. This self-division is not explicit in case of substances in world, to explain which, Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit (1997). He says that a system (a whole that can unfold movement) must be created such that its truth (the truth of its hidden contradictions) can become evident. Another means that Hegel takes to explain unity and separation is through understanding and reason. Where understanding breaks down reality into smaller entities, reason, brings the separate entities together such that they can be made sense of within the broader structure of a whole. These entities must come together in a specific format. It cannot be in the format of an ordinary proposition; the subject and predicate cannot be fused. Their difference has to remain alive. Even if the content of this subject and predicate is the same their form will always differ (given their history of formations differ). This enables a transition from ordinary philosophy to speculative philosophy. Hegel thus does not lapse into an uncritical fusion or sameness, it creates a new methodology of the dialectics.
The Idea of India:
How does one look at the idea of India, post-Hegel? Post the reading of Hegel developed by Kojeve-Lacan-Zizek-Mcgowan; post the development of an absolute wit(h)nessing of contradictions? Does the re-writing of the absolute as marked by contradictions, that which is split and that which is not sublated into a transcendental One/Whole engender an idea of India very different from the hegemonic idea of India? This is also to work through both
the “rejection of Hegel” as Orientalist and
the fascination with Hegel because of the “uncanny proximity between India’s ancient wisdom and Hegel's speculative thought”,
and arrive instead at a contingent emergent evanescent third marked by the critique of both “Eurocentrism and historicist relativism", of both rootless western universalism and clinging Indian particularism. We “either accept or repeat the judgments passed on us by Western culture, or we impotently resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own, wrung from an inward perception of the realities of our position” (Bhattacharya, 1954 [1931]: 104). It becomes either a kind of “unthinking conservatism” or “an imaginary progressiveness merely imitative of the West” (Bhattacharya, 1954 [1931]: 104). Critical Theory in India is required to be premised on a bidirectional or dual critique of both the hegemonic Occident and the Occident’s hegemonic description of the Orient. It needs to be a critique of both: the West’s hegemonic principles, and principles (emanating from either the West or the East) that hegemonize the East (see Dhar, 2014).
This paper, building on the Zizekian re-writing of the Hegelian absolute [to be a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the superfluous burden of some metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin from the beginning” (Zizek, 2013)] hence revisits the idea of India. It tries to see how the seamless idea of India (Bajpai. 2011) could be put to a kind of complexity by learning to begin from the beginning. It builds on an understanding of the Lacanian Real where the Real is not the remainder of the “thing-in-itself” but the very void, the impasse or the impossibility at the heart of the thing-in-itself, that displaces, skews our access to the Indian thing-in-itself or India as an thing-in-itself. Building further on the Hegelian Limits of (Absolute) Knowledge, one can argue that post-Hegel the idea of India opens up to a productive recognition of one’s limitations (as against metaphysical self-assertion about the identity of India and the Indian), the recognition of a limitation which is “absolute” (absolute because it is not a “relative” limit to our knowledge). This is however not to lapse into subjectivism. But to acknowledge the irreducible fact that one can know India only from within the idea of India; one cannot step outside of the idea of India to know India; one cannot arrive at an Archimedian distance and observe the idea of India “objectively”. One is embroiled in the idea of India as one ideates about India.
Footnotes
(1) Bhagawad-Gita, after Enlightenment, became widely recognized one of the foundational texts of the Hindu religion, cosmogony, theology, mythology and philosophy. It is supposed to be authored sometime between 200 BCE and 300 BCE as a guide to the question of “how to live and how to engage with moral dilemma (dharma sankat”.
References
Bajpai, S. (2011). A History of Hindu India: From Ancient to Modern Times. New Delhi: Himalayan Academy.
Bhattacharya, K. C. (1954 [1931]). “Swaraj in Ideas”. Visvabharati Quarterly. 20. p.103-114.
Dhar. A, (2014). “Swaraj in Ideas: From Third World to World of the Third” in Journal of Contemporary Thought – No. 40, Winter – ISSN: 0971-4731.
Kriti, Swarnima. (2021). Chinhari—The Young India: The Praxis of Feminizing Democracy. Ed. Ray, M. State of Democracy in India: Essays on Life and Politics in Contemporary Times. New Delhi: Primus Books.
Hegel, G. W. F., & von Humboldt, W. F. (1995). On the Episode of the Mahābhārata known by the name Bhagavad-Gītā by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) ISBN 0-19824597-1
Nanajivako, B., "Hegel and Indian Philosophy," Indian Philosophical Quarterly. 3(3) (April 1976), 295-324.
Rathore, A. S., & Mohapatra, R. (2017). Hegel's India: A reinterpretation, with texts (ed.). India: Oxford University Press.
Zizek, S. (2012). Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. Verso Books. (See https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/zizek-on-hegels-absolute-knowing-2/)
Photo Credit to Andrea de Santis