3
Life, Death and Beyond
I
Life as Phenomenon and Reflections on It
My studies in and reflection on life and death are intended to be scientific and philosophical, theoretical and practical. When I say scientific what I mean is meta-scientific. Because, strictly speaking, I am not a trained and professional scientist. My familiarity with the ideas of science is mediated by philosophy, reflection and, of course, experience.
To start with, I propose to refer to some scientific views on the nature, origin and development of life. Naturally this discussion of ours will take us to different views on death. Both life and death, as we know, may be and have been discussed both impersonally, that is, purely on the basis of scientific findings, and in a personal vein, that is, with reference to this or that life, and on the basis of tradition and history, biographies and autobiographies. In the task of reconstruction of past life we are understandably obliged to fall back upon the concerned literature, language, archeology and even mythology.
The so-called berated disciplines like mythology, rightly understood, are speculative attempts to explore different aspects of reality itself. In preliminary attempts to map reality, the importance of speculation and myths is analogous. In different mythologies found in different cultures the prevalent world views, including the views on life, death and the beyond, are presented in a somewhat pre-critical and pre-scientific manner.
It may be pertinently mentioned here that the terms like ‘precritical’, ‘pre-scientific’, ‘scientific’ and ‘critical’ are highly relative, that is, culture-specific and age-specific. Extending this view, one may safely anticipate that the science of this age and this culture is destined to be a part of history of science, if not of ‘pre-science’, in the centuries to come. This seemingly puzzling view of scientific and philosophical history is the fallout of the passage of time or, one may say, time-as-history. Due to the passage of time and progress of human knowledge the distinction between myth and metaphysics, and that between metaphysics and science, steadily narrow down. Similarly, it may be pointed out that the difference between archaeology and history is not strict either. That explains why in some contemporary studies on archaeology the discipline has been described as history, rather past history. It is well known that for the reconstruction of the present-day history, archaeology, like historical linguistics, provides essential inputs.
Before I submit my views on life, love and death from a reflective and comprehensive point of view, perhaps, it is intellectually incumbent on me to state, in brief, what are the basic minimums about the said subjects that we can get from the present state of scientific literature.
II
Death as Phenomenon and Reflections on It
The concept of life, like various other concepts, may be studied and presented in very many ways. Scientists, particularly biophysicists and biologists, first through speculation and then through careful research, have brought to light many things about the nature and origin of life. Psychologists and sociologists, among others, have highlighted numerous aspects of increasing differentiation and complexification of different forms of life. Religious thinkers and philosophers are primarily interested in identifying and defining the different aims and objectives of life in general and of the human life in particular. Broadly speaking, my concern with life is basically reflective and to lend it a scientific and concrete shape, I feel, we should take into account different scientific views about the nature and origin of life.
The view that reality is basically life—neither matter nor spirit—has come into existence rather late in the evolution of human thought. Ordinarily, naturalism or materialism is believed to be the earliest expression of the human thought on the subject. The kind of naturalism or materialism we are speaking of was cosmological in scope and speculative in character. Of course, some philosophers of science had been consistently maintaining that in every culture, primitive or modern, a sort of distinction had always been drawn between experience and experiment. Neither experimentation nor speculation is peculiar to any culture or age.
In the Indian, Chinese and Hellenic histories of philosophy, for example, various ancient cosmological accounts are available that affirm that ultimate reality is (i) water, (ii) air, (iii) light or fire, (iv) earth and (v) space (vyom). We have every reason to believe that similar views had been there in other cultures as well. It is necessary for us now to bear in mind that when these views started appearing and taking increasingly finer forms, the modern science started recognizing a new distinction between science and philosophy. The new distinction between philosophy as primarily speculative or experiential and science primarily as experimental was not there initially. But as said before, some kind of analogies of this distinction marked human thought all along.
To make it minimally intelligible, a distinction was drawn between the nature of life and that of the matter. Even this precritical distinction has been consistently and differently questioned. It has been argued that matter contains in it the potentiality of life. And in support of this view the main logical argument that had been offered is somewhat like this. If in matter those properties and powers were not present, in some form or other, that could make the origin or emergence of life possible, then the view that life came out of matter makes no sense. In that case, expressions like ‘life out of matter’ become untenable. Out of nothing something cannot be said to have come unless nothing itself is deemed to be something positively ontological.
While there is no difficulty in affirming that a higher organism is alive, there is no unanimity on the question as to what characteristics would be required for the existence of the most primitive organisms enabling us to call them living. The reproductive ability is generally recognized as the most outstanding characteristic of living organisms. Besides reproduction, another characteristic that is ascribed to a living organism is that it must obey a law of low rate of mutations that are transmitted to its progeny.
For a long time two main views about the origin of life received the most pointed attention of man. One is that the origin of life is due to God or some God-like principle. The other view has been that the generation of life is spontaneous. Till the middle of the nineteenth century, the main argument in support of the theory of spontaneous generation of life had been that both generation and decay of life are due to changing composition of the concerned micro-organisms. But the experiments of Louis Pasteur and J. Tyndall proved that germ-free air does not lead to decay of food as a form of life and that it was experimentally possible to prove this scientific hypothesis.
Well before the works of Pasteur (1822–95) and Tyndall (1820–93) received recognition in the scientific community, several other scientists, particularly Charles Darwin (1809–82) and A. R. Wallace (1823–1913), had been independently working on the issues having bearing on the origin of life and its mechanism. The contributions of Darwin and Wallace, understandably, associated primarily with the theory of evolution, had in them elements about the origin of life in it. Both tried to use their views on evolution to account for the gradual transformation of the different forms of organism, from the simplest single-celled organism to the most complex plants and animals, including man. So by the middle of the nineteenth century the main problem of the origin of life shifted from the area of species-specific development of life to the more general question as to how the first living organism came into being. To answer this question, a number of hypotheses have been proffered. First, in various religious literatures, Vedic, Hellenic (or Pagan) and Christian, particularly in the first chapter of Genesis, it had been claimed that all living organisms were created by a direct act of God. All different forms of life were said to be due to God’s will.
The second hypothesis about the origin of life was that it was substantially same with the origin of matter. Strictly speaking, the origins of both matter and life are not only intimately related— both in terms of their origin and in terms of their development—but also believed to have their essential identity. To put the matter in another way, life is nothing more than a state of matter. This naturalistic view of the identity of matter and life, though simple and attractive in principle, apparently failed to account for the differentiation of different forms of matter like solid, liquid and gaseous, and different forms of life unicellular and multi-cellular, invertebrate and vertebrate, plant life, human life and the subhuman (animal) forms.
The third view, which was floated later on, held that the earliest living organism arose from inorganic matter by some very improbable event. It was not easily explainable how in an inorganic environment a complex synthesis of cellular components like carbon dioxide, water, and other inorganic nutrients could be synthesized in a co-functional manner. The present state of biochemical knowledge shows that even the simplest bacteria are extremely complex and the probability of spontaneous generation of an organic cell from different inorganic compounds was highly improbable.
The fourth hypothesis, relatively more plausible, was that life arose spontaneously in the oceans of the primitive earth. The main supporting consideration behind this view was that large quantities of organic compounds substantially similar to those which are found in living organism had been there. In the speculative forms of cosmologies of the ancient India and the Hellenic world water had been frequently claimed to be the ultimate reality. During the last century a modern scientific formulation of this view has been offered by A. I. Oparin (1894–1980), a Russian biochemist, who argued that given large amounts of organic compounds in the ocean of the primitive earth these organic compounds could react to form structures of greater and greater complexity and that finally a structure arose that could be called living. According to this view, the synthesis of first living organism involved many non-biological steps, each of which was highly probable. This view of Oparin received support from the theory of H. C. Urey (1893–1981). He argued that the reducing-atmosphere theory had in it a synthesis of methane, ammonia and water in the stable forms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Oxygen could be there because of an excess of hydrogen in the cosmic dust clouds from which the earth, it is believed, came into existence. Studies in different planetary atmosphere seem to lend support to these hypotheses.
The essential characteristic of living organisms is its ability to duplicate itself. It is believed that the first living organisms were simply strips of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that, in conjunction with the necessary enzymes, had the duplicative capacity. Virus also was found to be structurally similar to strips of DNA surrounded by a coat of protein. There is reason to believe that the first forms of life were similar to the present forms of organism in their basic chemical composition. For our limited purpose we need not go into the processes of development of the simple bacteria, algae and protozoa.
But it is necessary for us to remember that all living organisms are required to have a source of energy to propel the biochemical reactions that synthesize the various structures of the organism. Animals obtain their free energy from the oxidation of compounds by molecular energy. Plants and other photosynthetic organisms get their energy from the energy of light. It is conjectured that the evolution of multi-cellular organisms took place after the development of photosynthesis. With the increasing complexification of the evolution of primitive multi-cellular organisms, it seems, the stage of development of sexual reproduction came into being.1
All organisms, including the very simplest and the most complex, broadly speaking, consist of two aspects ordinarily known as the germ plasm and the soma. The germ plasm, consisting of genes, passes on from one generation to the next, and the soma consists of the body that may be reproduced as the organism develops. In modern terminology germ plasm is identified with DNA. In DNA remain in an encoded form the instructions necessary for the synthesis of the other compounds of the organisms and their assemblage into the appropriate structures. In the whole collection of other compounds are proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc. and their structural arrangement making metabolical functioning of the organisms, that is, soma, possible. The fundamental issue of biological development requires us to understand the interplay between the genetic instructions and the mechanisms by which those instructions are effected. Hereditary instructions are of two types—genotype and phenotype. Genotypic instructions are passed on from one generation to another in the genes. Phenotypic instructions are to be found in the functioning organisms produced by the genetic instructions. Biological development is basically phenotypic. Even the phenotypic development is influenced by inter-generational relationship.
Generally speaking, biological development is viewed under two types, quantitative and qualitative. At times, development remains structurally the same and differs only quantitatively. In the case of qualitative development, an alteration in the very nature of the system takes place. There are various other ways of viewing biological development, viz., (i) progressive and regressive, (ii) single-phase and multi-phase, (iii) structural and functional and (iv) normal and abnormal. Man exemplifies a single-phase development: the organs that appear in the early stages persist with minor variation throughout the whole of life. Both in animals and plants we find multi-phase development marked by alternation of generations. Structural and functional developments are two aspects of all processes of biological development and are differentiated only conceptually. The distinction between normal development and abnormal development is defined in terms of the range of conditions, which, compared to plants, the eggs or seeds can tolerate. Organisms are ordinarily found to be more variable in the course of their development.
Ageing is common to all forms of life, although, for understandable reasons, we are more concerned with the ageing process of human beings. Ageing consists of the progressive and regressive changes that take place in a cell or organ of the total organism with the passage of time. Growth, decay and death are basically influenced by two sets of factors—environment and food, and physical exercise and freedom from diseases. The study of ageing, or gerontology, has been defined as the science of finitude of life as expressed in the three related ways—longevity, ageing and death.
Life may be instructively viewed, broadly speaking, from two different but related standpoints. Life scientists, as we have seen, study life-related phenomena from the outside or in a detached way. One may say that this gives them, and through them to us, a spectator’s view of life. But, strictly speaking, no spectator can be utterly disinterested in his observation and experimentation. His empirical research is influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by his presuppositions, orientation and aim. In brief, in this discourse I am primarily interested in lived life, not how it is studied by life scientists in the light of their observation and experiment, preferably under controlled conditions. While I am aware that the said two views of life cannot be entirely separated, we must draw a line of distinction, however thin and shifting it may be, between the two and focus our attention on the aspect of lived life.
Gerontology, or study of the ageing process, makes one more or less conscious of one’s own lived life, past and present. Even the future of one’s own life becomes ‘present’ in one’s consciousness in terms of hope, imagination, intention etc. None of us can live our whole life, every part of it, past, present and future, its surface and deep structures and all the details that, at least in principle, are available there. When one, following a serious cerebral or cardiac attack, slips into deep or irreversible coma, clinically speaking, he cannot be immediately pronounced dead. In a very strained and technical sense of the word life he is living, in spite of his being on a life-supporting system. But our reflection on life and their expressions basically pertain to the lived life. As said before, even our death is a part of our lived life. The expressions like ‘let us not die hundred times before our death’ are not purely metaphorical in a very trivial sense. These have their solid literal base. In different forms of literature this aspect of death-in-life has been brought out by great writers and musicians by their extraordinary powers of creative imagination founded on deep experience.
The emphasis on lived life is not meant to make us forget the ideas and experiences of unlived life. The expression ‘unlived life’ may be understood in various ways. The accounts of life and death that are received from diverse disciplines like anthropology, history, different systems of religion, law, ethics and medical science cannot be easily brought together and given a unified or general theoretical form. Both life and death, it has been said by philosophers and theologians, have their own (but different) modes of being. If the expression being-towards-death has a sense of its own why, we may ask, being-towards-life cannot have its own distinct, or at least distinguishable, sense and mode of being. About the positive characteristics of life, highlighting the conditions required to make life more livable, marked by happiness, reducing or, if possible, eliminating all sorts of pain, misery and suffering, have been extensively discussed from the standpoints of science and psychology to those of, ethics and religion.
Instructively enough, the views about death found in different forms of mythology and theology of different cultures remain very relevant to our understanding of the issues pertaining to death forever. For example, in Hinduism heaven (svargaḥ, suralokaḥ and devalokaḥ) is often believed to be the veritable destination of pious persons or liberated souls; and hell (narakaḥ, adholokaḥ and pātālaṁ) is regarded as the destination of the wrong-doers or irreligious persons. But, interestingly enough, Yama as Dharmarājaḥ is recognized as the final judge of the righteous persons and the wrongdoers, and it is for him to assess the worth, positive or negative, of the results of their actions. The multiplicity of recognized gods in Hinduism like Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Maheśwara, Indra and Yama tends to create confusion in the minds of the people who are not initiated in the depth and details of Hinduism. The ultimate reality or God has been said to be One but the learned people have named it differently. If this interpretation of the Hindu pantheon is accepted, then the cause of confusion is substantially removed.
Death has been referred to also as the result of human guilt or as the outcome of a wrong choice or as the result of a divine conflict. Various other views on the subject are available from the vast literature on cultural anthropology. In Christianity, for example, death has been described as a punishment for disobedience of God. It has been indicated that originally God intended Adam and Eve to live in the paradise forever. But they were explicitly instructed not to eat the fruits from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. By violating that instruction of God, it has been said in the Bible, they had eaten the forbidden fruits and fell from the heaven’s height to the dust of the earth. But the symbolic words that they, Adam and Eve, uttered: ‘shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow…Dust you are, to dust you return’ (Genesis 3:19).2
About the relative importance of life and death, ordinarily regarded as biological and medical phenomena, different religions have been taking different views. This fact has been often used to highlight the relevance of sociology or cultural anthropology as something very important for the purpose of understanding of life and death. By implication, then, life and death cease to be subjects of central importance only to religions. In some such religions as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam we find a persistent preoccupation with death and it has led to the conviction that life after death must be taken as of far greater importance than of the life on the earth.
III
Life, Body and Lived Life
Life after death has often been interpreted as eternal life and not subject to restrictions and limitations of time. If this view is accepted literally, the life eternal has nothing to do even with our lived life. For in lived life there is a drive beyond the life as we live it. If time has really nothing to do with the eternal life or being-as-eternal, then existentially or phenomenologically life and death are unbridgeably separated. More radically speaking, in that case the eternal life and the lived life, whatever they stand for, cannot be deemed to be two modes or modifications of one and the same being. If there is no passage whatsoever from this life lived on the earth in time and that supposed eternal life, which has nothing to do with life on the earth and in time, the latter is bound to appear as an utterly empty abstraction.
However, it is undeniable that the mental outlook and moral judgement of millions of people, cutting across the religious denominational boundaries, are strongly inclined to perceive an intimate and deep relation between life and death. One need not be particularly religious or philosophical to have this inclination for this purpose.
Most of the Indians, particularly Hindus, of our time, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, take and follow a highly relativized view of life and death. But as modes of being, these are recognized as different. Even those who believe in the eternal life do not necessarily take immortality as a common belief. Neither Christianity nor Islam accepts eternal life as synonymous with immortality. In various other cultures we find that life after death is also subject to the law of decay and death, that is, finiteness and terminability.
Purely from a logical point of view, we are obliged to address the question that how death, as an event believed to be due to God, enters into this world. There are many views on this issue. First, man dies because of his guilt or sin. That keeps one very important question open: how and why guilt could enter into human being? Is it because, as Christianity maintains, Adam and Eve, defying God, had eaten the forbidden fruits of the tree of knowledge? Could not God give them the good sense of obedience to God’s command? If so, why this fault called guilt, leading to their fall, was there at all in the scheme of God, all-knowing, all-powerful and gracious God? Second, death has been conceived as a natural destination of man as a part of the primordial will of God himself. Third, death has been conceived also as a result of a wrong judgement or a wrong choice made by man himself. There are many other views about the origin of death. For example, in some myths it has been said that the death of God himself or some such mythic being has given rise to the origin and existence of death in the human world.
Both life and death are so insistently ‘present’ in human experience that in every culture, particularly in the related fields of ethics and religion, the concerned humans are obliged to express their views about and value-attitudes towards the same. In ordinary sense it is admittedly true that death is not and cannot be present in life in the way other different modes of life are or can be presented to it. Death, to human consciousness cannot be said to be absolutely nothing. It has its being or reality only to the life of man. It may also be described as a kind of a unique presence that makes itself felt in our consciousness by its compelling absence. Otherwise, every culture in every age would not have so many views, myths or philosophies about it.
Scientific discourse or experimental proof is not the only evidence of man’s inescapable concern about death. When the dead bodies are mummified (or burnt) to release their supposed souls, the underlying belief is that in some form or other the being of the souls survives. Also, the practices of leaving dead bodies in sacred rivers or holy places are also rooted in the belief that the immortal souls of the mortal frames continue to survive in some form or the other. In some religions and cultures the survived souls are deemed to be eternal. In some other religious cultures, these souls, though immortal, are believed to be going through periodical cycle of births and deaths. There are still other cultures according to which some souls by the high quality of their deeds during their embodied lifetimes can and do attain a stage from which they are not required to return again to the stage of rebirth and, therefore, redeath. Under each one of these categories of cultures, beliefs and practices are too numerous to be exhaustively enumerated and described. From the available diversity of beliefs and practices it may not be instructive to make any sweeping generalization about the relation, if any, between life and death. Instead, we may note some other interesting point in this context.
First, life and death, in all cases, seem to be somehow related, directly or indirectly. The nature of relation is found to be determined by the acts of commission or omission of the concerned persons during their embodied lifetime(s). Among the acts of commission or the factors and forces relating to life and death we find, or so does it appear, love, compassion, benevolence, self-control and similar other ethical beliefs, dispositions and actions. I find it impossible to logically justify (‘justify’ in the strong sense) why the (culture-specific) recognized ethical and/or religious actions and dispositions are given more weightage than the so-called unethical and/or irreligious ones. Must we be more committed to ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘just’ etc., than to ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘unjust’? Are we all, that is, mankind, each member of humanity, irreversibly and univalently committed to a sort of ethical absolutism that leaves no real freedom for us to judge objectively what is ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, or ‘unjust’ for others irrespective of our and their cultural affiliation? Does this view not require us implicitly to believe in absence of free will—will to be bad, will to be wrong, will to be unjust?
To illustrate the diversity of ethical relativity in the context of life and death, it may be recalled that while some cultures lay emphasis on hedonism, in its moderate or radical form, most other cultures commend a life of moderation, advising not to indulge into the excesses of sense pleasure. Also notable is that class of moral beliefs and practices that encourages asceticism. The ascetic view of life, in its radical form, seems to be critical of the very fact that living beings are embodied. In other words, body, in that case, is regarded as expression of or invitation to what is bad, wrong and evil. If this view is accepted, then many aesthetic modes of experience like appreciation of the beauty of nature, in its micro and macro forms, are excluded from the very purview of human life itself and, by implication, it is suggested that even aesthetic experience, somewhat like the fruits of forbidden tree (allusion to the fall of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden), are strongly disapproved. Another implication of this view would be rejection of works of art.
Human body seems to be the veritable seat of the life of virtue. And, by implication, it remains also the seat of vice. When I say vice I do not mean by the term only such things as immorality, evil, wickedness, turpitude, depravation and all that is condem-nable or unbecoming for a normal human being living in the civil society. In my intended sense vice includes also fault, error of judgement, failing, frailty, infirmity, inequity and their surrogates.
Unless one is a mental being, embodied mental being, he or she cannot be recognized as a legal person or moral agent. The words and the concepts underlying the terms that I have indicated can be appropriately and defensibly predicated only of legal persons and/or moral agents. Neither morality nor legality, rightly or objectively understood, can be one-sided, associated only with those human attributes that are positive or the opposite attributes that are only negative and condemnable, deserving criticism and disapproval. Unless we accept these implications of the concept of embodied human being, we are logically obliged to deny our freedom of will.
It is true that human will may be strong or weak, vigorous or feeble, but the term human will as ordinarily used and understood cannot be literally or strictly prevented either from doing what is virtuous or what is vicious. Any will, which is phenomenologically understandable, and which is located in our human bodies, can hardly be unidirectional or univalent. If the concept of body is completely dissociated from moral, legal and logical, that is, verity-related bivalence, then the concept of body cannot have any extra-physical significance.
In that case, there remains no ascertainable distinction between the concept of physical or material body and that of human body. Also it takes away the line of demarcation between the recognized or insistently supposed distinction between what is real and what is illusory. The tenability of the distinction that we usually draw between (i) the world about which we read in the books on the subject or from the learned persons or people of reliable common sense, or our own senses and (ii) the view(s) described as mythical or proved to be unscientific and not available to any kind of human experience, personal or impersonal. Tenability in these cases is extremely dubious, if not utterly unsustainable.
Moral experience, be it bivalent or multivalent, presupposes a human body, living human body. This presupposition for similar reasons can be extended also to aesthetic experience. Human body qua human body or human body as such, devoid of the capacity of experiencing anything, cannot be credited with the ability of discriminating what is beautiful from what is ugly. The term ‘aesthetic agency’, like ‘moral agency’, makes sense only under the presupposition that the being who is capable of this kind of experiences does also have linguistic or some other expressive/communicative capacity.
To hold this view is also to hold that there are at least two types of discernible experience—experience that is not expressible in language and linguistic experience. If we say this, we stand committed to the view, irrespective of its kind of formulation, that experience itself is possible and also recognizable as experience without any language. But, ontologically speaking, this is an extremely problematic claim.
But can it be really so? Is it really possible? If I say it is possible, then do I not require a language that has modal expressions like ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’, ‘impossibility’, ‘apodicticity’, etc.? Does not even this very expression, a linguistic expression, presuppose some or other language in which expressions of this sort are available or can be made?
IV
Life and Its Language
This enquiry, it seems to me, may be further radicalized in a regressive direction. The very term expression or its synonyms are available only in language. Does it make any sense if one says or if I myself say, ‘There is a surrogate or synonym of expression which itself is not linguistic’? In other words, can there be two ‘things’ or ‘objects’ of which one is linguistic and another non-linguistic? But for practical or theoretical purposes, including expression, utterance, articulation, communication, etc., can these be used interchangeably? When this sort of supposed, ‘radicalized regressive’ enquiry is further pressed, that is, further radicalized, where are we landed? Are we not, even in that case, moving, circularly or otherwise, within the realm of some language or metalanguage? We must bear in mind that metalanguage is also a language of another level. Are we, then, inevitably thrown back to the position that we as human beings cannot really get out of the charmed circle of language.
If this is so, is it a corollary of the definition of man as a semiotic being or sign-using animal? What about the animals themselves? Are they themselves not committed to or condemned to move within a charmed circle of ‘language’ of their own? For the time being let us set aside the question of relation between humans and language and look into an issue that may be titled as ‘animals and communication’. Let us not forget, for the sake of argument, for the sake of regressive enquiry, that we, humans, are also a species of animals. Don’t we have strong intuitive or strong common-sense reasons to believe that animals within each species or between different species can and do communicate? The experts on animal life or wild life, in and through their writings and films, show us how in a variety of ways animals communicate between themselves. Have we ourselves not strong evidence with us to believe that from primates to birds, ants and bees have their own means of ‘communication’. In some sense or the other, these means of communication must have their symbolic or signifying capacity. Otherwise some of the animal activities like flight of long-distance migratory birds, movement of whales, building of beehive and anthill could not take place. These facts or acts do take place and have been witnessed by human beings since the time immemorial. Does it not logically oblige or compel us to believe that some sort of language-like communication systems had been and still are there?
Will it not be preposterous to maintain that since this (so-called) regressive enquiry is being carried out in language or by means of language, we are still moving within the charmed circle of the language and failing to get out of it?
From this sort of (hypothetical) position if some of us jump to the view that we, human beings, without ceasing to be human, cannot get out of the world of languages, does it mean that there is a plausible position like linguistic solipsism?
When I raise this question, do I not stand implicitly committed to the acceptance of some ‘standard’ or ‘commonly used and understood’ views of such words as ‘world’ and ‘solipsism’? But our access to and availability of different meanings of these words do not appear to be inter-translatable, certainly not in an identical sense. The word world itself is found to have different meanings not only in different languages but within the same language. If we take dialects of a language as inseparable or integral part of the concerned language, our problems become more acute, because in many languages the meanings of a word differ in terms of their use, in terms of pronunciation and, as we find, in terms of their age-specificity or even context-specificity of uses. To illustrate this particular point let us look into the meanings of the word world into different Sanskrit-rooted languages of India or South Asia. Of these Indic words jagat, loka, carācara, bhuvana are well known. There are several other words like jīvādhāra and prapaṇca, which have been and are also used as synonyms of the word world. The difficulties and relative inexactitude of these supposed synonyms increase when we draw the distinction between ‘ordinary uses’ and the etymologically or/and grammatically ‘derivative meanings’ of the concerned words.
If we are bilingual, familiar with the uses of English words for ‘world’ like ‘universe’, ‘earth’, ‘a planet of the solar system’, ‘a part of humanity’, a particular sphere or range, of organized activities, occupations, interests, are interchangeable. World is used also as one of the divisions of natural objects, for example, we speak of ‘the scientific world’, ‘the world of sports’, ‘the world of commerce’, ‘the animal world’, etc. One of the hemispheres is also referred to as ‘world’. For example, after the discovery of America it used to be referred to by the expression ‘the New World’. Various other uses of the word world are available. The concerned diversity is so bewildering and baffling that if we try to bear the same in mind, our intended communications tend to fail. The fact that we can successfully communicate both at the common-sense and scientific levels about the world shows that in practice we are not literally baffled or totally fail in our efforts to communicate.
The complexity of the issue further increases if we take into account the Greek and Latin roots of different words denoting world in European languages. The history of the European languages also shows how the concerned words standing for the world have changed over a long period of time.
Also in this context we must look into the Latin root of the word solipsism itself. It is traceable to the Latin word slace or alone, lonely and ipse meaning ‘he himself, self’. The English words solitary, solitude, sole are obviously kindred to the Latin root. Language, as we use it, is neither ordinarily used in solitude nor it is private in nature. The modern analytic philosophers of language highlight the point that private language is a contradiction in terms.
We have, till now, used mainly two arguments—of body and of language—to establish and relate the main three themes, viz., life, love and death. For the convenience of the reader we may briefly recapitulate the connecting threads of our arguments.
First, unless we, humans, are born as embodied beings, grow, undergo the process of ageing and die, the discourse remains hopelessly incomplete.
Second, unless we are embodied the questions of living and loving make hardly any coherent sense. To give love and to take love, body is an ineliminable foundation. It is true that memory, picture, tomb, epitaph and similar many other things of the dead persons bring their lives back to our mind. But, it is plain and simple that unless we ourselves, speakers and writers of these views, can meaningfully express and communicate the same, the idea of disembodied life turns out to be empty.
Third, the basis and the circumstances that make birth and disappearance or death of human life possible are essentially social. The society, as we understand it, is a relatively durable entity and relational network that has a life of its own, and does outlast the lives of individual human beings who enter into and go out of it in course of time. It is more durable but not everlasting in character.
Metaphorically speaking, the society has its both life and body, which have their literal basis. In such different branches of human studies and social sciences as archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology and sociology we get the narratives of life, achievements and death or disappearance of these entities that are essentially human.
The terms like birth, procreation, progeny and the related terms are rooted in the human sciences like biology and sociology. Birth or janma means the act of bringing forth progeny or offspring. The related terms in English are extraction, lineage (vaṁśa in Sanskrit), origin, and their surrogates. It is clear that these terms assume meaningful character only in some socially organized structure within which concerned humans can enter into some definite and recognized relationship.
In many languages words like life, in their archaic or modern form, have close relationship with body. In this connection we may recall Old English (līf), Middle English (līf), Old High German (līp), Modern German (leīb, body), and Old Nordic (līf, body). These words are derived from a base, leīp or līp, meaning to last, endure and remain. These base words are traceable to Greek leipein, meaning to live, remain, etc. It is instructive to recall that in many Indo-European languages the root word for life is found to be gwei- or gweye- or gwyé/ó. In Sanskrit it is jīva. So is in Avesta; in Lithonian gyvas, and so on.
V
Some Anthropological, Ontological and Cosmological Excursions on Death
In order to understand the many-sided significance of death, as said before, we have to study it in and through life. Here by ‘life’ we mean ‘social life’. The pictures of social life that we have from history, archaeology, philology in the modern age, are so varied in their import that to make any sweeping generalization that we may try to make about it is bound to be unfair to the ground level reality. For the biological and medical points of view, it is true that death is associated with some scientifically ascertainable general characteristics. But the beliefs about death do not lend themselves to any uniform treatment or explication.
To start with, death has been and even now may be profitably discussed from two main points of view. The first approach about it, broadly speaking, may be stated in this way. We may carefully look into the beliefs about the reasons of death as available in different cultures and religions. From the works on anthropology we can know of a very limited number of cultures. Further, within every culture there are local variations in the beliefs about death. Archaeology is still in its relative infancy. Though in the last 150 years much work has been done in this area and as a result of that archaeological excavation has brought to light many hitherto unknown facts to our notice. And these records enable us to infer that the relics of many more past civilizations and their cultures are still lying buried, unknown to our scientific knowledge and scrutiny. When, in due course of time, we come to know more and more about the past human beliefs about death, our enquiry is bound to be not only expanded in scope but also qualitatively enriched. Somewhat unlike medical and biological findings of death and the generalizations based upon them, this approach through the social existence of the vanished peoples is likely to be more informative and interesting. Another point that needs to be added here is this. Even the relics of the vanished civilizations are studied with special reference to different ages. Our findings are likely to prove additionally enlightening because apart from the variations detectable in the same or similar civilizations, we are likely to have new details about the interaction between different civilizations, proximate and not so proximate.
In many disciplines of knowledge dealing with material objects, plant life, animals, humans and gods, we find the idea of death and, in many cases also of rebirth, is very common. It may be mentioned here that we, of the modern age, exposed to modern science and philosophy and other human studies based on rationalism, as we understand it today, find it very difficult to believe that there had been times in many cultures when the distinction between the living and the non-living and that between matter and spirit were not known. More correctly speaking, from their point of view, the whole existence was animated or endowed with some all-pervading spirit. In a way their cosmology was monistic. Explicitly speaking, to many peoples, belonging to and authors of various cultures used to maintain that the life and death are common to all ‘things’. To them the modern distinction between the thing-world and the being-world was unknown. According to them both are identical at bottom.
In many old languages of the world the word thing and its cognates included object, event, whatever happens at a time, whatever is available at a place, and so on. Thing comprised any object that exists or thought to be as existing. Under this conception fact, idea, all things of the intellect and the good things of life used to be viewed. It is interesting to note that in many ancient languages it was a common belief that if any being that ‘lost’ its mind turned into a thing. Conversely, thing also could be transformed into being.
From the above line of inquiry we arrive at a cosmology in which thing-world and being-world, inanimate things and animate beings, get merged or fused. From this philological line of inquiry emerges a common cosmology. To put the matter from the other end, one may affirm that one and the same cosmology expresses itself in two different ways. By radicalizing this point one may go further and affirm that one and the same reality, whatever that may be in its essence or nature, is expressed in innumerable ways.
If numbers are not recognized as basic ontological constituents of the world, the same may be regarded as mere tags attached to things and beings by human beings. This supposed interchangeability of things and beings raises one more interesting point. Instead of saying that ‘mindless or consciousness-less beings are things and mental or conscious things are beings’, we, thinking and language-using beings, are driven to seemingly two different world views—materialist and mentalist/spiritualist. With mentalism or/and spiritualism many famous names of scientists and philosophers, including Śankara, Leibniz and Schrödinger are associated. From the other end, it may also be pointed out that with materialism equally famous names of many philosophers and scientists, including those of Kapila, Īśvarakrsna, Democritus, Hobbes, Marx and Einstein, are associated.
It must be mentioned here that many scientists and philosophers who do not believe in the existence of God or any Supernatural Intelligence are not willing to be described as materialist. To them perhaps more acceptable description would be scientific realism. It may be recalled here that even Marx was keen to distinguish his version of materialism, Scientific Materialism, from what he called Metaphysical Realism defended, among others, by the French Encyclopaedists.
It is worth mentioning here that many great scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Descartes never explicitly publicly disowned their religious faith. The same may be said of many Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish philosophical and scientific thinkers. During the ancient and medieval ages, as we find, there was no sharp line of demarcation between the scientist and the philosopher. In the modern age most of the working philosophers and scientists prefer to maintain discrete silence on religious issues. A good number of them affirm that that there is mental and material phenomena may well be explained without being committed to some such principles as Matter and God or Spirit.
Once it is admitted, implicitly or explicitly, that the fundamental principles of physics, biology, epistemology and the disciplines concerned with the abstract entity like mathematics and musicology are not different in their fundaments. Without committing themselves to some or other reductionism they claim to explain and relate all these domains and levels of entities—entities of thing-world and being-world.
Those of us who do not find good reason to maintain any hard and fast distinction between the thing-world and the being-world, are objectively committed to a kind of gradualism. Positively speaking, I find no compelling argument in favour of reductionism, materialistic or spiritualistic. By implication, I maintain that quality cannot be reduced to quantity and that the expressions like qualitative difference are not meaningless. In other words, the sort of qualitative difference, difference in degree of quality, which is insistently available to our sense experience, can hardly be dismissed lightly. In addition, the qualitative difference, which escapes our limited reaches of sense experience, maximal and minimal, but detectable by highly sophisticated machine and expressible in mathematical language, needs to be taken seriously.
One most important consequence of the gradualistic ontology is to recognize the untenability of dualism between the thing-world and the being-world. A thing like a book or even a hammer, as pointed out by Heidegger, can be put to various uses. For example, a book may be used to incite revolutionary fervour among the people and the same book may be used as a paper weight or even to hit a person. Everything, one may rightly say, has a being of its own. The very word ontology, as we know, is rooted in the Greek root óntos, ón, ‘being’, signifying relation either with a being or individual, or with being or existence. If one follows in depth the philological roots of such crucial terms as existence and essence, it is impossible to draw a line of distinction between what they stand for. For example, in all Indo-European languages, for instance, in Sanskrit the expression as-mi, means ‘I am’ and in Greek eimi for es-mi. Further, in Latin, es, means ‘thou art’, and est means ‘he is’. Similar expressions are available both in Old English and Gothic.
Besides comparative philosophy, another very important route to the understanding of beliefs in death and death-related rituals is found in comparative anthropology. For example, many primitive tribes spread all over the world believe in some or other form of totemism. Totem, presumably traceable to some American Indian tribal beliefs, stands for a class of natural phenomena, or objects, particularly a species of animal or plant, between which and himself/herself, or his/her family, or tribe, the primitive persons believe that an intimate and mysterious tie exists.
The more sophisticated and comprehensive version of totemism is panpsychism. Both totemism and panpsychism maintain that between the so-called thing-world, consisting of different kinds of things, and the being-world, consisting of different species of beings, animal, plant and human, proximate and distant, is internally related. These primitive beliefs and their philosophical counterparts are of very many types. For example, some primitive Basque people used to believe in a simulation of death and resurrection, entailing an exchange of life or souls between the primitive person and his/her totem.
Comparable examples of supposed death and resurrection are available in many other primitive tribes of the world. In this connection on the authority of James Frazer (1854–1941) reference may be made to Wonghi/Wonghibon tribe of New South Wales, Australia, the Unmatjera tribe of Central Australia, the Ualaroi tribe of the Upper Darling River, and the Coast Murring tribe of New South Wales. In all these cases the religious rites are performed when lads attain puberty. Similar rites are claimed to be found in the Yabim, Bukaua, Kai, and Tami tribes of northern New Guinea. In all these cases circumcision is the central feature and indicative of the beginning of new life and the end of previous life. The said circumcision is conceived by the concerned peoples as a process of being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical monster, whose voice is heard, so it is claimed, in the humming sound of the bull-roarer. All these tribes of New Guinea, Frazer writes, ‘apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the (mythical) monster, who is supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful roar is represented by the hum of the harmless wooden instruments’.3 Comparable rituals of death and resurrection have been noticed not only in Australesian countries but also in many other parts of the world.
In the region of the Lower Congo, among some Indian tribes of North America, similar rituals of death and resurrection have been noticed and recorded by ethnologists like J. G. F. Riedel, Captain Jonathan Carver, John R. Jewit and Franz Boas. According to Frazer’s theory wherever totemism is practised, a simulation is made of killing and bringing to life again the persons concerned. What is more, it is further claimed that the concerned souls are deposited in some external objects like animal and plant. The exact explanation of these beliefs cannot be extracted from the authorities referred to by Frazer.
It may be mentioned here that Frazer though is famous as social anthropologist, folklorist and classical scholar, himself did not do wide and intensive field studies.4 Many of his views have either been thoroughly assimilated or else superseded by subsequent field research. In this connection the works of Evans-Pritchard and Edmund Leach may be profitably consulted. This is not to deny the importance and influence of Frazer as a pioneer anthropologist of stupendous scholarship. While we, the modern social scientists and philosophers, have good reasons to be sceptical about many views of Frazer, this should not lead us to the opposite extremism of the French anthropologists like Lèvy-Bruhl, who in their works deny the very capacity of logical thought to the primitive peoples whom they referred to, in a rather derogative vein, as savage and uncivilized.
VI
Return to Scientific Physics, Determinism and Place of God in the Deterministic World
The critical scientists may remind us that every theory, however empirically founded and vigorously formulated it may be, is refutable and subject to supersession in the light of new findings and arguments. But, it is generally agreed, metaphysical or theological views on death and rebirth are not open to refutation in the strict scientific sense. It is true that some parapsychologists and philosophers who, without committing themselves to the scientific claims of parapsychology, believe in rebirth have gathered an impressive corpus of empirical findings that are confirmable, though perhaps weakly in the scientific sense. A vast literature on the subject is now available.
The moot question regarding the scientific claim of parapsychology relates to its subsumability under the laws of Physics, the discipline which is ordinarily recognized as the paradigm of Science. Since the times of C. D. Broad and H. H. Price, the two noted professional philosophers who took serious academic interest in paranormal psychological phenomena, and, particularly from the research and publications of Rhine and his colleagues in the Duke University the debate on the relation between science and parapsychology has been assuming added significance. Joseph B. Rhine opened his laboratory at the Duke University in 1930 and made such terms as extra sensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis current in the proclaimed scientific study of parapsychology.5 He also favoured the use of statistical method in this branch of knowledge in order to minimize the weakness due to lack of causal uniformity in this emerging branch of knowledge.
Also, he tried to identify the factors and forces responsible for inhibiting or facilitating parapsychological experiences. It may be mentioned here that in the Indian and several other philosophico-religious traditions like Shamanism and Buddhism some kindred epistemological concepts as alaukika pratyaksa (super-normal perception) and yogaja pratyaksa (perception rooted in yoga) are available in detailed analytic forms. These types of perceptions, it is claimed, satisfies the basic requirements of psychological perception and provide the cognitive content of the object of perception.
In the modern cognitive science some of these claims are being neurobiologically examined with rigour, trying to bring the results following the rigorous method of science. There is no easy and universally acceptable answer to the question whether by psychokinesis humans can alter or influence the nature and course of the physical environment. If by human will natural environment can really be influenced, then such phenomena, designated as psiphenomena, poses a challenge to the scientific sovereignty of physicalism.
The relation between the psi-phenomena and natural course of events is problematic from various points of view. The so-called psi-phenomena, it seems, are not identifiable and analysable within the framework of ordinarily acceptable physical explanations. Only their effects may be indirectly brought within the purview of physics. It may be pertinently observed here that physicalism is a very comprehensive doctrine and its scope cannot be equated with the requirement that every physical thing can be explained within the confines of physics. There are many theoretical concepts in physics, including the extension of quantum physics into the areas of astrophysics, which are not reducible to physical observational terms. If this is regarded as the one horn of the problematic dilemma, the other horn consists of such questions as what the physicists gain by denying that psi-phenomena are physical.
Obviously, this theoretical question is intimately related to determinism versus indeterminism, different forms of dualism and materialism in the area of philosophy of mind. All these questions and their implications have distinct bearing on the issues of immortality and rebirth.
The initial problems that arise in any serious and in-depth discussion of determinism and indeterminism in the context of life and death may be, in fact have been, understood and interpreted, in very many ways. Among the important ways the few that, to my mind, deserve special mention are either pro-deterministic or anti-deterministic. Second, many scientists and philosophers are opposed to draw a sharp line of distinction between determinism and indeterminism. Determinism may be local and also global. It may relate to ascertainment and enumeration of the conditions that determine a particular event or a particular action, mental or physical or both.
In the process of explication of even of this elementary formulation of determinism and indeterminism experts have differed in the past and continue to differ even now, notwithstanding the changing career of science and ways of doing philosophy. Third, the thinkers, be they philosophical or scientific or both, have expressed their views in ambiguous or mixed ways that lend themselves to different interpretations. One may affirm that the very terms, determinism or indeterminism, strictly speaking, cannot be stated very clearly, enabling us to express our views on them in a definitive manner. The argument, which is often offered in support of this difficulty, may be stated thus.
We, the thinking human beings, including philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists, are ourselves embedded in this system or system-like arrangement of things and beings, micro and macro, and to the laws governing the same in such a way that it is not possible for us to be rightly aware of the nature of our relation with this supposed system and its laws. This systemic impossibility has at times been attributed to the indefinite relation between ourselves, comprising both things and beings, on the one hand, and the reality as a whole, whatever that might be in its nature, on the other hand. It is not surprising that in the face of this questions and problems of this nature some thinkers, seeking truth seriously, confess that this type of fundamental or ultimate questions cannot even be correctly expressed in language, still less formulated logically or scientifically. To make this problematic situation somewhat open to satisfactory solution, the absolutists of the idealist persuasion maintain that knowledge in its highest reaches is a matter of realization, an inexpressible realization, and not a subject of philosophical controversy or scientific debate.
There is no necessary connection between absolutism and determinism. Referring to the absolutists like the Vedantin in the Indian tradition and the Hegelian in the European tradition, the sort of determinism that we arrived at does not negate freedom. On the contrary, in their systems of thought freedom occupies a very important, if not the most important, position. Brahman of Śaṅkara and the Absolute Spirit of Hegel know no determination, are free from all sorts of negation, and therefore claimed to be absolutely free.
Many critics of Advaita Vedanta,6 including Ramanuja and other Theistic Vedantins, Logical Realists, the followers of Nyaya, and Buddhists, criticize what they call all-comprehensive determinism. But detailed analysis of the views and arguments of the concerned thinkers show clearly how widely they differ among themselves in their understanding of such key concepts as freedom and determinism. In the Western tradition, Cartesian dualism, Newtonian deism, and Kantian dualism have been invoked and used for contrary purposes, both for supporting determinism and also for vindication of indeterminism. For example, Descartes’ concept of extended body and the spontaneity of mental consciousness are said to be quite compatible and, what is more, claimed to be consistent with the main teachings of Christianity. Descartes’ religious writings, as available to us, try to reconcile his basic views on physics and religion. Newton also found no inconsistency between his belief in the deistic conception of God and the subjection of all natural phenomena to the basic laws of physics as enunciated by him. His biographers and historians of ideas have also referred to his sympathy toward, if not belief in, parapsychological phenomena and entities.
It is also instructive to recall here that David Hume, methodologically opposed to Newtonianism and basically a consistent non-believer, vigorously argued against the possibility of miracles as these, according to him, are violative of the validity of deterministic or exceptionless natural laws.
Extending this discourse on the relation between freedom and determinism one may profitably recall Kant, who is consistently determinist in the context of the phenomenal world but passionately keen to defend freedom in the areas of law and ethics. Committing himself to the bounds of ‘pure’ or ‘theoretical’ reason, he leaves enough ‘practical’ space for God, Freewill, and Immortality as postulated ideas having no existential import.
With reference to Hegel also we find widely different interpretations. While writers and thinkers like L. T. Hobhouse and Karl Popper criticize Hegel as ‘enemy of freedom’, both individual and collective, many right-wing Hegelians of Europe in the nineteenth century praised him for his philosophical system. According to them, it provides valid ground for genuine freedom of the individual, and also of the increasingly concrete collective entities like community and the state. It is precisely on these very points the left-wing Hegelians, particularly Karl Marx, argue that his philosophy provided theoretical justification for the rise of political absolutism, suppression of freedom of the people in general and of their weaker sections in particular. This controversy, developed in different forms, continued, approximately speaking, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
VII
Science, Body-Mind Dualism and Free Will
During this period the concept of determinism, mainly under the influence of phenomenally developing natural science, strongly propounded a form of determinism associated with the name of Laplace (1749–1827).7 Laplacean determinism was so thoroughgoing that it left no room for God and that, so goes the story, led Napoleon to ask the philosopher-scientist why there was no mention of God in his work: equally famous is the reported response of Laplace that he did not need the hypothesis of God to explain his (deterministic) world view.
From my very brief excursion into the ideas of few famous thinkers of the East and West it should be clear that to speak of determinism, indeterminism and cognate concepts in general terms or in a system-bound manner, does not help us much to get into the heart of the problems and find the possible cues to their solution, if that is possible at all. Instead of author-wise or system-wise discussion of these basic philosophical and scientific issues, I often feel, we will be well advised to follow analytically a particular train of thought on the subject, carefully sorting and sifting out its basic theses and arguments. Otherwise, I am afraid, reference to determinism and indeterminism in a very general way will shed no clarifying light on our main issues of discussions, life and death.
Even by following the leads given by quantum mechanics, generally recognized till recently as indeterministic, does not seem to be very helpful in providing a universally acceptable solution. It is easy to conclude that classical mechanics, associated with the name of Newton, is deterministic but the difference of quantum mechanics from it by itself does not lead us to the solicited opposite conclusion that the latter is indeterministic. Because the very proposal to decide the issue in terms of predictability, on which the defenders of the modern mechanics rely so much, seems to be itself questionable.
One must draw a line of distinction between the property of determinism that isclaimed by a theory and that ascribed to a total system and its all preceding and successive states. While it is true that some theoretical versions of (for example, the de Broglie-Bohm approach to) the quantum mechanics can be coherently described as deterministic, but if this view is sought to be extended and applied to cosmology of the universe as a whole the intuitionist mathematicians, who reject the law of excluded middle and commit themselves to a sort of anti-realism, feel uncomfortable and unconvinced. Because, to them, the distinction between the exclusively rival claims of realism and anti-realism is not logically determinable or decidable. Neither the Laplacean Cosmology nor the Quantum Cosmology, while it claims to take the whole of the universe within its scope, is free from problems. For the question whether the universe as a whole is self-contained or isolated cannot be logically and scientifically decided. In the absence of this decision, and relying only on the assumption that determinism is only a property of a theory, it seems, we cannot reach any definitive conclusion.
These sceptical sketch of our view has its bearing on the theory of karma and rebirth. Also, it is related with the important question whether we, as individuals or isolated persons, can rightly be regarded as moral or immoral. What happens, then, to the view of vicarious suffering or collective salvation? These borderline questions of science and ethics have their obvious eschatological implications. For the time being and without entering into the more controversial question whether the determinism purported to be applicable to the ‘successive’ future states and also to the ‘preceding’ past states, we may take a pause here. Because in order to settle the question justifiably we are required to clearly define ‘states’ and demarcate, if possible, between the mental states and the physical states. Otherwise this question throws us back to the undecidable question of the body-mind dualism, also it is related to the issue of time-symmetry or time-reversal invariance. From the days of Newton and Laplace to our own times, there is no scientific consensus on these very related and highly controversial and important issues. From this seemingly scientific impasse should we rush to the conclusion that these issues are metaphysical and intractable? I wonder.
The views designated under the common caption of body-mind dualism may appear natural as well as counter-intuitive depending on how one looks at it. When we try to think that our mental phenomena like emotion and thinking are like table and stone, our common sense is offended. Desire and thinking seem to be largely free and can be initiated by ourselves. Causal and quantitative categories, as ordinarily understood, do not apply to such phenomena as willing, desiring, intending, thinking, reflecting and remembering. In contrast, objects like stone, chair and refrigerator cannot be credited with will and intention. The functions performed by these objects are attributed to them and not performed by them on their own. From this line of argument we may be led to believe that the physical and the mental, things and beings, are exclusive. Physical and geological phenomena, for example, cannot be explained in terms of psychological concepts and categories.
However, this supposed distinctiveness between the mental and the physical seems to be problematic at times. Gramophone discs and computer floppies may rightly be described as having some properties that are both mental and physical, due to both human activities and physical receptivity involved in the production of them.
The supposed distinctiveness between the mental and the physical gets even more blurred in some areas like biological sciences and consciousness studies. Non-human living bodies, undoubtedly, exhibit some physical properties like extension, generation of heat and subject to the forces of disintegration due to operation of and variation in their thermodynamic properties. One may point out that some of these characteristics are found, in different ways, also in human bodies. The difference of the behaviour, action and disposition of human bodies can hardly be explained without positing something like their underlying consciousness. This possibility of conjunction between the physical and the mental, between what is extended and what is not extended, makes the case of dualism weak.
Another way of showing the untenability of the exclusiveness of the mental phenomena has been highlighted by both cognitive scientists, who believe in the primacy of consciousness, and biological scientists who highlight the conjoint influences of heredity, environment and genetic endowments in the area of life sciences, including plant life and animal life.
Another important point that deserves to be referred to in this connection is this that there are many psychologists, epistemologists and linguists, both in the Eastern and the Western traditions, who strongly maintain that every mental phenomenon or the term standing has for it a property of self-transcendence object-wordness, akanksa dharmita or intentionality, in it. They affirm that this property is the very defining property of what is mental.
Another way of denying or diluting the claim of body-mind dualism is evident from the works of life scientists, in general, and medical practitioners, in particular. Psychiatrists may also be bracketed with the medical practitioners in this context.8 They emphasize the psychosomatic interdependence in defining the relation between body and mind of the human beings. This view of interdependence is found even in the ancient Indian, Chinese and the Hellenic treatises on the subject. A related, perhaps somewhat weaker, version of interdependence between the psychosomatic states, on the one hand, and the physical states, on the other, have been sought to be established by drawing our attention to the well-known fact that most of the human bodies suffering from different types of ailments tend to worsen or deepen during the hours after the sunset and before the sunrise. The same patients are found to be somewhat better off, relatively cheered up and the intensity of their discomfort, depression and pain more or less come down during the day time.
Another related phenomenon may be referred to in this connection. Statistically speaking, all things being equal, the people of polar and temperate zones, compared to their counterparts living in the tropical zone, are found to be more prone to mental depression. This well-known phenomenon is generally attributed to the abundance or the relative lack of temperature and sunshine. However, the qualifying clause ‘all things being equal’ needs to be taken seriously in this context. Because various other factors are at work in the causal collocation and intermixture of effects in this crucial geographical-cum-climatic contexts.
Another argument against the tenability of body-mind dualism has been drawn from physics. According to one of its important laws, only a closed physical system, close to all other physical systems, can retain its energy at a constant degree. If the mental events are credited with the capacity to cause bodily events, then it leads to the conclusion that continuous or even interrupted transmission of mental energy into the bodily system is not only possible but also results in gradual decline of the former and rise in the energy of the body.
As we know, no such process takes place. It is true that when we are mentally very excited or angry, our blood pressure tends to go up. Also we have medically attested cases that show that hypertensive persons, due to intense mental agitation or excitement, do suffer cardiac attack and even die. These exceptional cases, even if accepted to be true, do not establish the central claim of body-mind dualism.
If the issue is approached from the other end, that is, bodily events causing mental effects, the conclusion is not favourable for body-mind dualism either. Long hours of strenuous work, long distance running, and similar other body-induced and energyconsuming phenomena undoubtedly strengthen the human mind. But that does not dis-establish body’s capacity, under normal or even many abnormal circumstances, to retain its required level of energy at a relatively stable condition. If the twin theses of mental causation and somatic or bodily causation are pressed strongly, some patently counter intuitive consequences follow.
First, the reality of free-will, the basic plank of morality and legal culpability, tends to collapse. A corollary of the unreality of free-will is negation, partial or otherwise, of self-control. Obviously it is difficult for us to believe that we do not have self-control. Strength or weakness of will is not counter-example to the truth of the basic thesis of self-control. On the contrary, it indicates the openness of our will-world to other forces without entailing radical negation of the freedom of will.
Many materialists of the reductionist persuasion, who in principle are obliged to proclaim the primacy of physical causation, do not press their case very hard. On the contrary, several of them formulate their physicalism with numerous qualifications. In explicating this qualified version of physicalism they are obliged to rely much on the concept of reason and its cognates. While they do not hesitate to explain many human or socio-political events in terms of causation, they use the term by qualifying it in various ways so that enough intellectual space is left to account for legal culpability and moral responsibility. In an indirect or roundabout way they recognize the reality of free-will. Of course this recognition is rightly hedged by several conditions. In other words, the absoluteness of freedom is questioned and it is relativized to some neighbourhood conditions that are not quite external nor are they quite internalizable. All these considerations support the thesis of graded difference between the mental and the physical and reject the body-mind identity thesis. It also questions, by implication, the view that mind is a mere epiphenomenon of body, like a flame of a lamp.
By this I do not deny the possibility that humans can have sensations with the properties that can be described in scientific terms by the external observer. For example, when the physicians, particularly the neurologists, describe a patient in deep or irreversible coma as living. While the concerned patient is not clinically dead and, therefore, in a sense continues to be living, the concerned person himself/herself does not know that he/she is alive. In this sort of cases one and the same person lends himself/herself to be described in two different, seemingly irreconcilable, ways. The patient as the first person cannot be credited to have the knowledge that he/she is alive. At the same time, the attending physicians or other third persons, are not professionally or scientifically or even legally entitled to pronounce him/her as dead. These considerations, attested by many medical cases, show that we are yet to have a comprehensive theory of neural processes and/or consciousness that can authorize even the best experts in the field to describe this sort of highly ambiguous and extremely equivocal cases in a way that would be universally accepted.
These facts and arguments show, once again, why the thesis of body-mind dualism, though propounded and defended by the best of philosophers of mind and medical scientists, could not command universal acceptance. Positively speaking, these highlight the difficulties involved in sharply demarcating the conscious mental states from the unconscious ones. The so-called unconscious person or the person in deep coma, in spite of his/her appearance purely as a somatic or physical state of thing, to the external observer s/he may rightly be described as living (though not conscious in terms of strongly testable or repeatable evidence). The cases are not unknown when persons pronounced dead return to or could be brought back to life. To speak of consciousness of a person in deep coma or whose brain is dead is not necessarily ascriptive. The established possibility of the so-called dead persons returning to life is a very important point to be remembered in this connection.
VIII
From Dualism to Gradualism and Spontaneity of Consciousness
Left to myself, I read and interpret these facts and arguments as supportive of the body-mind continuum thesis.9 More clearly speaking, we do not have, till date, any sound theory that can satisfactorily explain the relation between ‘the mental’ and ‘the physical’. The Vedantin and the Leibnizian and several other promonist and anti-dualist views affirming continuity between the physical and the mental have deep insights in them. The claim that body and mind, somatic and psychological phenomena, is structurally isomorphic has a definite point in it.
Also, what seem to be extremely plausible is the Vedantin and the Leibnizian affirmation that all the constituents of reality, from the vastest to the tiniest, from the physical and material to the mental and spiritual, do mirror each other, clearly or obscurely. Clarity and obscurity are to be understood as a matter of degree. These views are not committed, ontologically speaking, either to materialism or mentalism or spiritualism. Both can be shown to be coherently integral aspects of the same reality, differing only in terms of grade or degree. Nor these considerations, epistemologically speaking, can be described as purely idealist or purely realist. The textbook difference between idealism and realism does not stand logical scrutiny. It is not at all surprising that most of these ontological and epistemological questions have been referred to be as metaphysical in a pejorative sense.
Consciousness is basically spontaneous in its character. If materiality does not appear to be spontaneous to our normal senses that do not prove that it is not there in the material world or in the plant life.
A state of consciousness is basically qualitative. If qualitative states are themselves not conscious, we have no problem of understanding their distinction from the physical states of material or botanical bodies. Conscious states, even in their qualitative level, are open to external physical influences, leading to anomalies in their being perceived and described by a human percipient. A mental state is said to be conscious when it is immediately aware of its content, correctly or at least anomalously. Mental states may be conscious or non-conscious. But neither conclusively confirms the thesis of dualism.
Attempts may be made to minimize or eliminate the problems of dualism in two different ways. Either by denying materialism totally or by affirming that everything is in the nature of being, a mental or spiritual state of consciousness, irrespective of its capacity to be self-reflective. This is a sort of panpsychism that, in order to have a scientific character, must have in it a principle or nisus, impulse or energy, to transform consciousness to solidify itself into the ontological levels capable of having physical or even geometrical properties. Eliminativism itself is eliminable because it rests on dualism. The interaction between the physical world, plant life, human life and its conscious and self-conscious states cannot be consistently accounted for unless and until we assume consciousness as the basic matrix of all forms and levels of reality discussed in physical, biological and mental sciences.
Spontaneity is a sort of urge lodged in every thing and every being making it possible to be more than or other than what it is at a particular point of time. Time-related change is the essence of it. It is difficult to think of anything, which is perpetually static, static forever, for all time to come. It is the antithesis of the scientific thesis that neither any thing nor any being can be perpetually in motion. The urge or energy or whatever may be its nature within a thing, making it possible to be more than or less than what it is, changes over time.
It is perhaps most clearly evident from the life of human being. Throughout our life we change, grow or decay, and then, as we say, come to our end. Is our so-called end is end in an absolute sense? Does not ‘end’ has a being or meaning of it which itself is endless or not subject to total annihilation or utter extinction? Can we say ‘end’ has nothing in it further to be disclosed? The whole process may be understood in terms of utter lack of disclosiveness, prakāś. Do not martyrdom, crucifixion, suffering or embracing death for a noble cause, helping or enlightening or benefiting others, have any descriptive content in them? Is their content merely ascriptive or merely a matter of interpretation?
This process is not linear, uniform or monotonic. Certainly some cases of killing or execution are welcome. Equally justified is condemnation of many cases of torturing to death. Martyrdom is at times marked by noble spontaneity. At times it is marked by lack of spontaneity but in terms of calmness and silence. It is also a mixed process of alteration between creativity and dismissiveness.
Life at times is forward-moving, at times backward-moving, at times an unsteady state of holding operation, which is a state of arrest of the process of going down the memory lane, what happened to us in the past, and also arrest the will-to-rush-forward into the unknown or even the known future. This two-way, or many-way, tension makes life tense, or forgetful, or aspiring, or cheerful and optimistic. The gradually declining power of disclosiveness also makes us increasingly conscious of our finitude and mortality.
Related to these traits and dispositions of the human nature we, on reflection, become conscious of many other propensities of our mind and states of consciousness about which we ordinarily are unable to be clearly and correctly aware. Our habits and the day-to-dayness throw a sort of cover, which is partly transparent and partly opaque, over our consciousness. And which make it somewhat difficult for us to identify specifically our covered traits, weak propensities and sleeping dispositions.
That we are always part of the physical world and sustained by it and also, simultaneously, worn by its forces is not ordinarily present in our consciousness. Similarly, we are unable to remain aware all the time that we have many supporting beings and well-wishers around us. Nor are we generally aware of others’ hostility, silent but efficaciously directed, towards us.
How many of us are capable of being conscious of our simultaneous affiliation to different institutions—family, community, ethnic group, linguistic group and various others aggregative entities? In other words, the plurality of our identity is not ordinarily and simultaneously present in our consciousness.10 It requires reflection, remembrance, sense of discernment and various other mental endowments often lost in our day-to-day concerns, preoccupations and actions. For example, to be conscious of our biological lineage or cultural ancestry demands of us to have a particular cast of mind—familial, historical and ethnic.
That our self-disclosure is very limited and fragmentary can be made clear in various other ways. For instance, we cannot go back to the beginning of our being human. Although we believe in and affirm of our being conceived by our mother and of our days of stay as foetus in her womb, but that is entirely a matter of inference from concerned theories and certainly not a matter of conscious perception. This way of knowing of our beginning may also rightly said to be analogical.
Extending this point, first, one can safely assert that all those things that have happened to us can never be recollected even by straining our memory and taking the help of others who have been around us right from the time of our birth. Second, our identity in relation to the rest of the humankind is also more or less a matter of conception or conviction—partly inferential and partly a mental construct. Third, that we have many potentialities within us is rightly believed by some of us and wrongly fancied by some of us. Fourth, our self-perception is almost unavoidably coloured by our pride and prejudice, temporarily entertained beliefs and ideals. Fifth, sometimes most of us claim to believe in something supernatural. But, if we are persistently pressed to state clearly and correctly what is the nature and attributes of that ‘supernatural’, we often fumble or fail or hesitate to say. To some it is Brahman. To some it is Īśvar. To some it is Nirvāṇa. Finally, to most of us it is indescribable in easily identifiable and observational idioms. That there is significant difference between ‘the Supreme’ and ‘the Supernatural’ referred to in different theological texts will be conceded by most of the believers in the world.
In brief, the types of our self-presentation, self-perception, their qualities and timeframe are unlimited. Also seems to be limitless are the modes of our being-towards-others, individually and collectively, and to the world as a whole. These may be friendly, inimical, competitive, co-operative, of jealousy, of hatred, of admiration and appreciation, of withdrawal and so on. Even towards the different parts of the earth as a planet and universe as conceived in astronomy our attitude, feeling and consciousness keep on changing from time to time. Our concern for the people around us varies from sublimity to absurdity. In the moments of our honesty we feel obliged to concede that the number parts of our really lived life are extremely limited in relation to those that are unlived and perhaps, to a great extent, unlivable.
IX
Different Modes of Being Towards Death and Beyond
To make the last point clear to ourselves we will be well advised to reflect on our attitude towards, ideas about and modes of being towards death. Most of us living in the world, given their levels of knowledge, are inclined to believe that there is a sort of life beyond death. About the specifics of that life beyond death, if any, most of us are not at all clear and many of us are not even interested in trying to be clear. The mere belief in a life or successive lives beyond death is not sufficient to shape the nature of our consciousness towards death.
Those who believe that life is full of suffering and death is the most veritable mode of deliverance from it understandably welcome the latter. Recorded evidences are available suggesting, if not proving, that many persons, both lay and spiritually elevated, solicit or even pray for death.
Anthropological and theological findings on the issue are of immensely different kinds—surprising, at times even shocking, educative and informative of the diversity of morals. The myriad of eschatology and soteriology, perceptibly perused, is extremely educative of the multiformity of human attitudes, views and values vis-à-vis death, salvation and afterlife.
Of the many known human views towards death some may be of special importance to us. According to some believers, death, depending on the nature of karmas, quality of the actions performed by the concerned persons during their lifetime, is a gateway to heaven.11 Of course about the description(s) of the heaven all believers are not unanimous. Generally speaking, it is believed to be a place of bliss. According to some others, death is a gateway to hell—a place of suffering, torture and punishment. Still different views are there suggesting that heaven and hell, the supposed worlds (lokas in Sanskrit), are determined partly by God and partly by the fruits of actions performed by the concerned person(s).
For the time being, I am not getting into the question whether actions are performed by persons, embodied human souls, or spiritually free souls temporarily adjoined to a human frame. The difference between all these views and their variants need not be forgotten, at least not theoretically.
Both in religious literature and mythologies of different countries it is found that due to the curse of Sun gods or goddesses even the spiritually powerful and saintly persons, human beings die and after death become subhuman creatures or inanimate objects. In many myths, it is found, after death the cursed souls are forced to live in the underworld and to suffer in very many ways. For example, in India the myth of Ahalyā and that of Sisyphus in Greece may be cited in this context.
In Indian mythology Ahalyä is believed to be the wife of Gautam and spiritual daughter of Brahmä. Indra, the Lord of Heaven, in the guise of Gautam is said to have raped her and she lost her feminine purity and for this supposed fall she was cursed by her husband and as a result of that she was reduced to a stonelike being, and had to live a thousand years without food and lost in deep meditation, yearning for seeing Rama, an incarnation of Viṣṇu. Only when Rāma touched her stone-like being she was free from the said curse-effect and regained her original being and got united with her husband. In Śatapathabrāhmana, Padmapurāṇa and in various other places this story has been narrated. But some philosophers like Kumārila Bhaṭṭa maintain that the whole story is a metaphor. According to him, Indra here is to be understood as the Sun, Ahalyā as night, and nocturnal darkness an act of ravishing or raping. The rise of Sun may be taken to be the touch of the divine Rama.
The myth of Sisyphus is found in the Greek epic, Odyssey. In the Iliad Sisyphus is described as the son of Aeolus and the father of Glaucus. It is said that Sisyphus, the evil-natured king of Corinth, was punished in Hades by having repeatedly to push up a huge stone on a hill only to see it rolling down again as soon as he took it to the summit. This mode of punishment of Sisyphus is believed to be a form of punishment for all the evil acts.
Like the legends of Ahalyā and the myths of Sisyphus we have many legends and myths in different religious and cultural traditions. Simply because the contents of the themes and myths figure under (what we call) legend and myth, we should not minimize their importance, particularly in the context of life and death. On the contrary, these legends and myths are, on scrutiny, found at times to be symbolic or metaphoric.12 This view or interpretation of myth has been expounded at length, among others, by Ernst Cassirer.
For example, the idea of limbo found in the traditional Roman Catholic teaching is significant in many ways. It refers to the postmortem destination of those who have not been baptized and are not guilty of sin. It highlights the importance of baptization without which the salvation of the concerned beings is believed to be impossible. But at the same time it is held that if unbaptized people are innocent they do not deserve the suffering of hell. This traditional belief consisted of two parts—a limbo of the fathers (limbus patrum) and a children’s limbo (limbus infantium). The former often named as Bosom of Abraham, which was a place for the right type of people of the Old Covenant and who had no entry in heaven before the redemption of Jesus Christ. Children’s limbo was a place for unbaptized infants and the young children who leave behind their mortal frame during the early age of their innocence. Such children could not be free from what was called original sin but they were innocent of personal guilt. But ever since Christ’s reported descent into hell or limbo after the crucifixion, it has been maintained, all its inhabitants were elevated to heaven. In contrast, so goes the legend, the babies in the children’s limbo were believed to remain there for eternity.
Baptization and the accompanying ritual of naming of children were very meaningful. The act of Christian baptization infuses new life in the religio-cultural sense. This belief is not peculiar to Christianity. In the Hindu tradition also there is a belief that the rite of putting a sacred thread on a Brahmin child imparts in him a new life. From that time onward he is referred to as twice born (dvija). This reminds the anthropologists familiar with the Eskimo culture that among the Netsilik once an infant girl had received a name it was absolutely forbidden to kill her, although female infanticide was common to many Eskimo groups.
The Indo-European eschatology and soteriology have very remarkable similarities between them. The Avesta teachings suggest that after death the soul can reach heaven or, the Infinite Lights, by passing through three steps—the Stars (symbolic of good thoughts humata), the Moon (symbolic of good words huhkta) and the Sun (symbolic of good deeds hvarshta). This celestial journey was believed to be arduous requiring the soul to cross the bridge of separation. Except for the good souls, this exercise of crossing the bridge was risky and the involved risk was to fall into hell, for the bridge was narrow like a razor’s edge. Similar ideas are found in the Indian philosophical religious traditions, requiring the souls to cross that particular river which separates this life from the afterlife.
It will not be out of place to recall here the Mesopotamian Arallu and the Hebrew Sheol both denoted a great pit of darkness and dust under the earth that was not hell as ordinarily understood but only an abode for the unfortunate dead. The Vedic idea of India, as found in the description of Yama and the fathers of heaven in the Rg Veda primarily referred to the positive destiny of those who performed the prescribed sacrifices and did good works: others passing into the oblivion of non-existence.
The issues like immortality, rebirth, reincarnation and transmigration of the soul, on careful analysis, are found to serve, besides various other purposes, two main related objectives. Broadly speaking, one is theoretical and the other is practical. All these purposes and objectives have numerous forms and received different formulations in different cultures and in the writings of different thinkers over the countries. The close relation between theory and practice is not ordinarily denied by thinkers of different levels— scientific, common-sense, traditional and philosophical.
As we know, it has been persuasively argued by both philosophically disposed historians of ideas and sociologists of knowledge that almost every theoretical discipline, from mathematics and astronomy to eschatology and soteriology, very easily traceable to some or other practical needs of human beings. For example, even those philosophers like the Buddhists and the scientists like the Kantians who do not believe in God, have their own views on the issues like the supposed immortality of the soul and the orderliness of the moral life.
Many philosophers of religion and scientific psychologists, who reject the ideas of soul as substance and the immortality of soul, have developed theories in which mental states are described either as stream-like continuous or, at least, closely associated by certain definite laws. In this connection one may refer to the Buddhist’s account of the self according to which every mental state is momentary. At the same time it has been asserted that even those momentary states are related in a way which, practically speaking, can well account for personal identity and continuity.
In this connection the moral philosophy of David Hume and, particularly, Immanuel Kant, deserves careful consideration. Contributions of these two thinkers to moral philosophy are almost universally recognized as very important, although their philosophical presuppositions and methodology significantly differ. For example, Kant who did not believe in the existence of God, made insightful and extensive use of the Idea of God in his moral philosophy and theory of justice. Moreover, it is to be remembered here that in his personal life Kant, though a confirmed atheist, was extremely moral and respectful to the religious believers. These two traits are evident also in the life of David Hume. He had a lifelong friendship with the Bishop of Edinburgh, his native town.
Kant’s views on the immortality of soul, the freedom of will and God is extremely instructive from a profound practical point of view. Most of us in our ordinary life witness what may be called persistent moral anomalies. For example, the persons who are generally recognized to have lived a very virtuous life are at times obliged to suffer much during their lifetime and, seemingly in contrast, those who are known for their unethical activities appear to thrive and become outwardly successful. If wrong-doers are not punished in some way or other and the righteous ones are condemned to suffer, the moral sense in most of us, the normal human beings, is bound to be offended. In response to this abnormal moral situation the ethical thinkers feel obliged to give an account of the moral world and its underlying rationality. If the moral questions addressed by believers and non-believers are found to be same or strikingly similar at practical level, it is no surprise that their theoretical responses will be more or less kindred in character.
X
Genealogy of the Ideas on Death: Religious and Philosophical
Pre-theoretical beliefs of the pre-historic peoples in immortality of soul are confirmed by archaeological relics and anthropological findings.13 From their bones, skulls, stone tools, grave furnishings, wall carvings, cave, rock paintings and other things the experts have reconstructed their ways and contents of belief about death and their dead ancestors. The forms in which the bones of the different parts of the dead bodies used to be arranged in their graves provide us some important ideas of life and death of the concerned peoples.
Popular beliefs about the peoples who lived in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, in the Iron Age and Bronze Ages, suggest how the concerned peoples used to dispose of the dead bodies of their kinsmen and what sort of beliefs they had about the departed souls or spirits. To try to understand their beliefs and attitudes regarding the dead cannot necessarily be gathered only in terms of the pre-historic periods. During the same periods the views, rites and rituals of the peoples living in different parts of the world like China, South Asia, West Asia, Europe and Africa, differed considerably. Also differed their day-to-day and ceremonial practices, prayers, and treatment of the corpses. Cremation, burial, embalming, mummification and exposure had been among the various ways how they developed their attitudes towards death and the dead.
In several archaeological sites of the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods archaeologists found shrines of different types, tombs of different forms and walls decorated with various paintings purported to describe their everyday objects. In many tombs food remains have been found, suggesting their belief that provisions should be there to support the needs of the souls after their physical death. The practice of cremation was often intended to liberate the soul from the confines of the mortal frame. Exposure of the corpses to the natural forces and other living animals and birds suggest the belief that even after physical death humans have some obligation to their environment—living and non-living.
Mummification was of different types as evident from the practices, for example, of Australian Aboriginals, Andean Incas, and the ancient Egyptians.14 The Egyptian practice was intended to transport the dead person to a god, Osiris, the Osirification ritual was an elaborate and complicated part of their religious system. The Incas of South America used to treat their bodies with different ingredients like honey, resin and herbs and painted the same. Like the pharaohs of the ancient Egypt the Inca kings of the Middle Ages used to be treated with special care and veneration. The fact that the dead bodies of the kings and members of nobility used to be treated differently from those of the ordinary folks even after their death indicates how different was their mental make-up from ours. Unlike them most of us living in the modern age and in the urban setting, generally speaking, think and care less about our dead ancestors and the supposed hierarchy of their souls except on social and ceremonial occasions.
Religious views on death and rebirth varied from religious tradition to religious tradition.15 The Hindu views on the subject as evident from the Vedic literature, Dharmasästra, the Upanisads, the epics, the Gītā, and the Purāṇas, in spite of their generic unity, differed in many ways. First, it is agreed that the soul survives death and assumes new forms according to the qualities of karma performed during the lifetime. Transmigration or rebirth is an inexorable law of saṁsarā that determines reward and punishment according to the results of good and evil action of the previous existences or lives. Under one interpretation of the law of karma, it works almost automatically or autonomously, not decreed by God(s) or supernatural agencies. Under another interpretation, this law of karma as a part of cosmic orderliness, though ordinarily works autonomously, is not entirely free from the occasional intervention of the all-powerful God who can use his power of grace (dayā) for and prem (love) towards the deserving souls.
The terms Karma (Sanskrit) and desert are semantically very related. It must be remembered that in some form or other, many of us, irrespective of our religious or philosophical affiliation and scientific commitment, are inclined to accept in the context of death, birth or rebirth, some or other form of retributive justice. The scope of the justice has been formulated in different ways— with reference to the life of the individual or that of the collectivity. The popularly known theory of the karma (the nominative form of the Sanskrit word, karman) is clearly underpinned by the concept of ethical retribution and related to an elaborate theory of human action.
The Indo-European root of the word karman is kwer, which is related to the Lithuanian word kuriu, ‘to build’, which seems to be traceable to the Latin word, corpus, an act considered in its causal or quasi-causal relations to a person’s fate or destiny.16 The basic idea is that the sum of a man’s acts (of commission and omission), words, and deeds decide his fate in each stage of existence or of life.
One should remember that there is no single South Asian theory of karma. The ideology of Vedic ritualism, the system of Yoga, the doctrine of Vedanta, the view of the Ayurvedic medicine, and the scriptures of Jainism and Buddhism, propound discernibly different theories of karman. At the same time, the perceptive scholar finds that there is a generic unity of these formulations of karman in relation to death and afterlife, if any. It may be mentioned here that all these views of karman do not presuppose divine will.
Many thinkers have maintained that karman was part of an impersonal metaphysical system of cause and effect. For example, Kauṣītakī Brāhmaṇa maintains that a person is born or thrown into a world that he has shaped for himself. In some Upaniṣads it has been stated that the results of the deeds of the father may be transferred to his progenies. The Indian medical texts of the Ayurvedic tradition propound the view that karman is a material entity of a sort that can be passed from one generation to another. Consequently, karman has been viewed as an important factor in medical etiologies. In this formulation one finds an inarticulate anticipation of the modern theory of heredity and genetic endowment. In this connection, the use of the words like vīja (seed) seems to be very significant.
It would be wrong to suppose that all, or even most of the, Indian theories of karman, are divine or God-centric in their philosophical orientation. For example, according to the Jains, who combine in their system a materialistic ontology with a strong streak of ethicism, accent should be on moral ideals and practices. The main Jain teachers, tirthaṇkaras, and particularly Mahāvīra, maintained that the living entity or thing, jīva or life within a human being, is intrinsically blissful and intelligent. They also subscribe to the view that all of the infinite creatures of the world, including animals, plants and rocks, are crystal-like clear in their essence.
It is interesting to note that many authors of the Jain traditions affirm that there is no basic difference between the thing-world and the being-world. The soul or essence of human being becomes increasingly involved in and defiled by desire-prompted actions that attract more and more quantities of karmic matter upon itself. As a result of this process the crystalline character or shine of the soul gets gradually diminished. Thus corrupted and polluted, the soul is causative of its inevitable movement through countless incarnations.
Generally speaking, the Hindu views on the succession of births and deaths are not to be construed in the analogy of physical causation that is marked by necessity, a sort of inevitability. If this change is supposed to be inevitable and the human soul is believed to be incapable of breaking it off or coming out of it by the good quality of his action and living a virtuous life, it leads to a sort of pessimism or fatalism. The Hindu case of rebirth related to the theory of karman is not pessimistic and, positively speaking, leaves sufficient room both for human freedom and spiritual release, moksa.
In the Hindu systems of thought there are many concepts kindred to moksa. These are mukti (release, liberation, or becoming free) and sālokya (the being in the same sphere or world or heaven). Again, it has been said that sālokya (beatitude) is of four forms, viz., sāmīpya (proximity or nearness), sārūpya (being of the same nature or form), sāyujya (intimate union or communion) and sārthika (companion or co-traveller in the same vehicle). These highly nuanced conceptions of liberation appear in different forms in different religious systems—South Asian, Sinic, Judaic, Christian, Islam and European.17
The difference between the Hindu concept of liberation and the Buddhist one, in spite of the affinity of their practical aims, is notably different. This difference is ontologically rooted and articulated in their soteriology. It may be stated in this way. The Vedic, more particularly Vedantic, conception of the world speaks of an eternal entity and an unalterable self (atman). Quite differently the Buddhist highlights the evanescent character of the worldly entities and the fluxist nature of the self-as-not-self. In contrast to the Vedantic ātmavāda (selfism), the Buddhist emphasizes no-selfism (nairātmavāda). The Buddhist view of fluxism is bound to remind the modern students of psychology of William James’ concept of the stream of consciousness. Many thinkers have agreed that in spite of the difference between the Advaita system and Buddhism there is affinity between the Buddhist conception of Śūnya and the Advaita conception of nirguṇa Brahman. Both are indeterminate and inexpressible.
These extra-systemic comparison between and similarity of concepts and theories need to be taken with due care and circumspection. It may be pointed out that the Vedantic ontology has also its own account of the shadowy dreamworld, svapnalok. The entities of that world are evanescent but the Vedantin has taken the pains to account for it and theoretically related it to the eternal and unalterable self or Brahman. Somewhat similarly one may recall that Platonic Ideas, which are ontologically affirmed to be fixed and eternal, are also relatable, in principle, to the world of sense, science and arts.
Even before Plato (c. 427–347 BC), it seems, the beliefs in transmigration were there in many countries like Egypt and the Germanic and the Hellenic worlds.18 The ancient Hellenic people used to believe that Egypt was the source of the belief in transmigration but not in the form as referred to by Herodotus (2.123). The Egyptians in the antiquity believed that at least certain specially chosen souls could transform themselves into subhuman creatures Phoenix, Heron, or Crocodile. But the myths of this type can hardly be accepted as a doctrine of transmigration.
The Hellenic doctrine of transmigration is generally attributed to Pythagoras (born in Samos in the Aegean Sea, c. 582 BC and died in Metapomtum in Italy c. 497 BC) who is mythologically said to be related to Apollo. The authority of Pythagoras has been used by the medieval Jewish Qabbalists who apparently were familiar with the Neo-Platonic ideas regarding human ability of remembering their previous incarnations. The Pythagorean notion of transmigration has been obtained from his contemporary Xenophanes (b. Ionia, c. 570 BC — d. c. 480 BC). Both Pythagoras and Xenophanes were mystical in their philosophical and religious ideas. The Hellenic beliefs in transmigration are traceable to the god Dionysus and Orphism. It appears that Plato and several philosophers of the Hellenic world were influenced by the Orphic tradition, which asserted, among other things, that the biological body of human beings is the prison of the soul and that salvation could be achieved only by following an ascetic life. Many of the Hellenic mythologies of transmigration are notably similar to the Hindu notion on the subject.
Plato’s own ideas on transmigration are found in his works like Phaedrus, Cratylus, Meno, Timaeus, Laws and Republic. The Platonic tradition, evidently influenced the Neo-Platonic and Gnostic systems, travelled to the Roman world and also to the West Asia. The similarity between the Hellenic myths and philosophical views with the Indian counterparts has led to the conjecture at times that the Pythagorean and the early Vedic ideas had some connection between them. But it is very difficult to establish this sort of conjectures in terms of sound reason. Perhaps it would be more plausible to suppose that the similarity between the pre-Christian, Celtic, Germanic and Hellenic ideas on transmigration in the broad sense and their relatable counterparts found in Manichaeism, ancient Hinduism, medieval Judaism and Islamic religion are all parts of a network of views expressive of the early human attitudes toward birth, death and rebirth. On this theme a vast literature is available.19
XI
The Concept of Karma and the Problem of Freedom in the East and West
The Hindu views of karma and the immortality of soul are not identical as found in different systems of thought and not even within the same system over the centuries. But, broadly speaking, there are some general points of agreement that deserve special mention.
To start with, in Hinduism it is maintained that the manifested physical world is not the only world that can explain birth and rebirth of the human soul, which is believed to be immortal. As a part of evolutionary process the soul, after its physical death, and after its liberation from its material bonds and social limits, does not immediately return to its next birth. For the fruition of its actions, karma, and performed by a person, his soul takes some time, an interregnum, before the next birth. Consistently with the different levels of human existence and their vital, mental and spiritual desires, the concerned souls assume their new forms in the next life.
Sri Aurobindo,20 a well-known exponent of the Hindu view of life, with special reference to birth, rebirth and evolutionary reincarnation, maintains that successive rebirths are marked by the progressive transit of the soul into higher and higher levels of the earthly existence. If life-formation and mind-formation have to unfold their fuller significance, he argues from an evolutionary point of view, there must be higher possibilities of higher formations of the human soul. His ideas are basically derived from the Vedic and Upanisadic texts. But his interpretation of these texts considerably differs from others’ in significant respects. Since he believes that the human soul, after death, undergoes an interregnum, he is obliged to explain the nature of other planes that the soul leaves behind before the next birth. His use of the word plane is symbolic of the supposed levels of existence—physical, vital, mental, psychical, over-mental and super-mental. All souls cannot automatically go to the higher, lokas, indicated in the system of Aurobindo. Besides, it may be added here that the concerned souls, depending on the nature and quality of their actions, may have to live in various sub-planes within the same plane. As a gradualist he refuses to believe that the soul of the dead person is exclusively vital or exclusively mental. Often he states that vitality, mentality and even spirituality are interfused in the soul after its physical death. Man’s being, circumstances of life and future are said to be rooted in his own activities, karma, both inner and outer, and nothing is accidental.
In this way the doctrine of karma is presented as free from the blemishes of determinism. Another argument invoked in this context is that the energies of nature and their future courses of unfoldment are being infinite, and the human life being subject to the same, both in this life and afterlife, it cannot be rationally deemed to be developing in the same way. Positively speaking, the doctrine of karma and the variety of the ways of human development after death are many-sided and open-ended.
The main thrust of Aurobindo’s doctrine and arguments is to highlight the compatibility of naturalism and super-naturalism, of materialism and spiritualism. Following the Vedic texts he affirms that even at the level of matter the spiritual reality, Spirit itself, is at work. In a different way he affirms the same theme when he argues that unless the presence of force of consciousness is postulated to be there even at the level of matter, the evolution of life and mind out of the material setting cannot be explained. He goes to the extent of using the term divine materialism, suggesting thereby that God is not only present in materiality but is also active there with an end in view which is super-material and even super-mental.
In this respect his view is strikingly similar to those of Leibniz (1646–1716), a philosopher-scientist and a contemporary of Newton. Aurobindo tries to avoid the sort of determinism that follows from classical mechanics of Newton and in a different way from Leibniz’s own theory of the Pre-established Harmony. Though both Aurobindo and Leibniz are strongly pro-teleological, but while Leibniz’s focus is on the whole of reality, Aurobindo’s accent is on the individuality within the whole, which is primarily a matter of evolutionary unfoldment. When the reality as a whole accommodates and is informed of the reality of its parts and their planes of existence it is designated as integration.
Aurobindo’s view of integral reality is significantly different from Sankara’s view of Advaita or undifferentiated monism. Aurobindo refuses to accept the so-called law of karma as a mechanical change because it appears to him that unless the whole cosmos is deemed to be mechanical the law of karma cannot be logically taken to be mechanical. The freedom that is inherent in mental workings and the supposed spiritual process of the universe as a whole cannot be reconciled with the mechanical conception of the operation of the law of karma. By implication he rejects the orthodox dualist position of the Samkhya and its autonomous and mechanical notion of Nature or Prakrti. Though Prakrti as śakti, the executrix force of God as Consciousness, is frequently highlighted by him; he does not endorse the claim that humans can shape their destiny entirely on their own.
On this point his view resonates divine purposiveness but which is considerably different from the Leibnizian doctrine of the pre-established harmony. Because it allows free play of the individuality of the human personality within the supposed divine scheme of things. For the physical mind of the human beings, which is intimately connected with the laws and forces of the physical world, cannot be credited with the capacity to have a clear idea of the divine scheme of things. It is understandably and primarily determined by environmental forces, both natural and cultural.
Aurobindo frequently uses the terms force and energy witout making clear or even indicating his awareness that in the modern science these terms are often conceived in terms of physics reducible to the laws of physics. In response to this objection his stand amounts to this: It is only the physical mind of man that perceives and formulates these terms along these lines. What weighs mainly on his mind is the word like anna, which in Sanskrit language stands both for boiled rice and (in a mystical sense) the lowest form in which the Supreme soul is manifested. When anna is said to be Brahman, it implies the consciousness-force of the Supreme reality and which is claimed to be present in a very nascent form even in Matter. It is also described as the coarsest envelope of the Supreme Spirit. It reminds one of Leibniz’s view that Material Monad is Sleeping God. In Indian language the word anna, as ordinarily understood, is a form of food and as such nourishing energy. But in the Vedic tradition, which Aurobindo and others like him follow steadfastly, interprets energy as spiritual pulsation, though the modern scientist, due to his physical mind, thinks that it is not consciousness, available in space-time and lends itself to quantitative expression.
Another expression, which figures frequently in Aurobindo’s writings, is personality. In this case his thought seems to have been influenced by the Latin use of the term persona that stands for, among other things, actor’s mask and role. This word is believed to be Etruscan in its origin. In that language it, phersu, means masked figure. Individual human beings are ordinarily identified by us in terms of their physical features, historical date ability, geographical locatability and other external adjuncts or characteristics. But, to the spiritualist, the real personality of man consists of his spiritual essence relating to it, though secretly and essentially, to God and his partly disclosed and mainly undisclosed purpose. Aurobindo’s theory of rebirth of human personality rests on these metaphysical and religious presuppositions. Unless one views it against that background, many of his assertion on the issue of ‘rebirth and other worlds’ do not become clear and understandable. Even when his views are understandable one need not necessarily accept the same without serious modification.
Time and again he speaks of the non-repetitive character of the reborn souls. If life and rebirth are considered predictably recurrent, then, he argues, immortality turns out to be an eternal repetition. Personality, to him, ‘is only a temporary mental, vital, (and) physical formation’ of ‘the real person’, the ‘psychic entity’ which appears outwardly, undergoes creative, ascending or descending, change in its reappearance, repeated reappearance.
In creative reappearance, according to Aurobindo, the human soul, though immortal, cannot and does not carry all its past memories. The absence of past existence in the reborn human soul should not be taken as disproof of the actuality of rebirth. Ascent of the soul to the higher reaches of the supreme Reality as a part of its evolutionary process cannot be plausibly conceived unless the soul is free to leave behind substantially its mnemonic contents of the past lives and existences. Immortality, though entails continuity, does not involve, as said before, endless repetition.
The basic Hindu thesis of immortality, ‘rebirth and other worlds’, leading to higher levels of consciousness and freedom, cannot be presented coherently unless the thesis of personality, as explicated before, is supplemented by drawing a very important line of distinction between the gross physical body and form, on the one hand, and the subtle body (seemingly formless), on the other. If and only if this distinction can be acceptably drawn, only then a coherent account of ‘triple immortality’ purported to reconcile (i) natural immortality complementing (ii) the essentially immortality of the Spirit and (iii) psychic survival of death may be offered. In this account the claim of eternity of the Spirit stands Supreme and the hypothesis of the physical survival could figure only as relative, temporal and terminable.
I have deliberately dealt Sri Aurobindo’s views on rebirth and immortality of the human soul at some length because it appears to me very careful, ingenious and creative. Undoubtedly it is deeply rooted in the Vedic views of reality and knowledge. It has in it some argumentative nuances designed to meet the possible objections in general, and, particularly, of the modern mind working under the influence of the modern science. Aurobindo’s views on the subject have been delineated in many places of his voluminous works.21
The totality of the human life is not available to any human being in his individuality nor is the totality of humanity given to the humanity as a whole. Both may be said to be a matter of gradual disclosure. Neither a particular person can have himself, in all his possibilities, within his lifetime and what is more interesting to note, even beyond his lifetime. I have already referred to the impossibility of total remembrance. The supposed totality of remembrance is only a theoretical construct, extrapolation of what we, at least most of us, can remember of our life—past, present and future.
Even the past of our own life and lives of others are available in history are open-ended. The expressions like ‘contemporaneity of history’ and ‘the futurity of history’ though seem to be puzzling expressions to the pre-reflective mind, these are real even in the lived life of all persons and their aggregates. For example, not only history of different persons, famous and common, may be and in many cases have been written and rewritten. Even the history of the human aggregates, small and large, family, clan, community, nation-state and empire (political or economic) has been and is being written and rewritten from different points of views and dealing with different aspects of the subject. Since the cultural space and historical periods do not have their natural or intrinsic boundaries, the possibilities of rewriting of individual human lives and of their aggregates are even more open-ended. For example, the lives and writings of the well-known poets, painters and political personalities have been written time and again. Equally notable is to remember the point that lives and works of the scientists, who were generally known for the proclaimed definitiveness of their view, are also being written and rewritten.
The case of the history of science has a special importance for our understanding of life, death and transformation of what humans as scientists have done. Like all human beings, scientists both in their individuality and also as members and co-authors of academia and social community, are remembered, re-evaluated and continued to survive in different forms. When the deceased persons, be they famous or obscure, together with their works are remembered, they continue to ‘live’ in us. This view of deathlessness of life is not merely metaphorical. Passage of time undoubtedly brings about change in our life and what we do or fail to do in our own lifetime despite our dedication and earnest efforts. But our actions and efforts, successful or aborted, are remembered, reremembered, evaluated, re-evaluated and, accordingly, written and rewritten. In brief, humans, all categories of humans, ‘live’ in and through their works, ideas and ideals. From gigantic pyramids, stupas, and palaces to tiny tombs and archaeological relics like graves (already excavated and yet to be excavated) have their own stories—though unavailable as yet to us, they have their truth-claim. In retrospect it is clear that these stories ‘told’ by varied human things, arts and artifacts, bring to light new truths and ideas about human beings. Rightly understood, this process is both seamless and endless.