The two questions recently posed by prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to the
philosophers of India seem to merit some response. The Prime Minister, who is reported to have refused to inaugurate the Indian Science Congress readily inaugurated the Diamond Jubilee celebration of the Indian Philosophical Congress (Hyderabad University, December 1985 ). In his address to the two hundred professional teachers of philosophy, he made it clear that there was no alternative available to India in entering the twenty first century, except to adopt modern technology. This was necessary in order to banish poverty, ignorance and ill-health from our land, and was not a question to be debated. The questions were not about the scientific technological path versus other alternatives. He raised two questions:
- Is There an intrinsic conflict between the Indian heritage and a technological civilization?
- If we want to keep the best values in our Indian heritage along with a technological civilization, what are the values to be particularly cherished and encouraged?
Since Rajiv Gandhi did not himself seek to answer the first question in any detail, which he left to the philosophers to discuss: we will begin with some which he did provide. These comments are relevant to any answer to the first question.
I. Significant Values
Speaking from Rajiv Gandhi's personal experience, he gave two instances of values he regarded as specially significant to him in his work as Prime Minister. Both are derived from the Bhagavadgita.
The first was that of Nishkama karma or action without desire for the fruit of the action. For him, it was important to act in the right way, out of a sense of duty and rightness without worrying too much about how many votes the action would gain or lose, or about whether other people would applaud or deplore. Obviously our Prime Minister had acted in this way, though he himself did not say so, both in the Punjab accord and in the Assam settlement. The political Issues, at least for the time being, seem to be quite heavy. Yet the issues were settled, perhaps only temporarily. And settled in such a way that the opponents of his own party gained the short term political victory.
The other value to which he referred, tracing it also to the Gita, the Prime Minister put rather felicitously: ''Equanimity is the better part of valor". He meant to say that in order to take courageous action in a moment of crisis, the most important need was not to be flustered. This is one quality of Rajiv Gandhi's which has been widely acclaimed -- his unflappability |in the face of crisis.
These two illustrations he gave from personal experience raise several questions.
The first is how are these values to be interpreted in our democratic context? In the Gita, the value of nishkamakarma proposed to Arjuna the warrior in the field of battle, by his charioteer, the Lord Krishna. Arjuna faced the moral dilemma between defending the righteous, and for that purpose, killing his own cousins and relatives in battle. The lord's advice to him meant essentially the exhortation to do his duty as a warrior prince without worrying about who gets hurt. Can this be accepted as a value for a modern democratic state, where the will the people seems claim priority over what is right. Can the head of a democratic state simply take tho right action without considering what the people want, and without calculating the political cost? In is true that both in the Punjab dispute and in the Assam question, the majority of Indian people approved the actions taken by the Rajiv Gandhi government, though later there were second thoughts for many. But the question remains: In a democratic state, is it possible to apply the principle of nishkamakarma, when the democratic process demands that political costs be taken into account?
If Rajiv Gandhi can demonstrate this righteous principle consistently, he may be maying the foundations of a new rajaniti, and who knows, the people in general may support him despite a temporary loss of votes. If dharma, which is rightness of attitude and action, can thus be the basis of a democratic rajaniti, we may be opening a new chapter in political history, one that gives the lie to the principles of Machiavelli's The Prince, which now dominates politics.
About the other principle of equanimity in the face of crisis, this would not be a new principle, but is in fact the crux of western diplomacy as it is now. One need not even go into the Vedas or Epics of India to find this principle, which is fairly universally accepted, even by criminals and great deceivers.
The second question is: On what grounds does one choose certain values and reject others from one's heritage? What is the criterion of selection? Is it just usefulness? Such an approach would be a denial of the Indian heritage. In the Gila as well as elsewhere in Indian tradition, nishkama karma is an integral part of Karmayoga, the way of seeking unity with the divine through right action, without desire for its fruit. In other systems like jnanayoga, nishkamakarma is preparatory or propaideutic for seeking fulfilment through sravana, manana and nidhidhyasa through heeding, contemplation and disciplined meditation as a way to seeking mukti. Can nishkamakarma be severed from its yogic context and made a principle of political ethics simply because one finds it useful? Why leave out sravana, manana and nidhidhyasa and accept only nishkamakarma as a principle? Are we not doing violence in the principle itself by doing so? This is not rhetorical question, but one that needs to be discussed.
A third question is, how are these values, once chosen from our heritage, to be inculcated in the people? If is clear that the values for which Rajiv Gandhi was asking were not to be limited to the head of the administration. It must apply equally to president, Prime Minister, all ministers and government officials, as well as to all the people. Values cannot be inculcated by precept and preaching alone. . Rajiv Gandhi may be justified in believing that his own example could have a multiplying or emulatory effect on the rest of the government and the people. His namesake Mahatma Gandhi showed us the extent to which this can be true and not true.
At this point there is no need to belabor the point that Rajiv Gandhi's new rajaniti will have to be assessed by future generations, not so much by its theoretical consistency as by its capacity to transform the negative ethos now prevailing both in the government and in the apparatus of the ruling political party as well as others. There will need to be more than precept and example. Can nishkamakarma or equanimity be infused in others through discipline? Perhaps yes, but this will have to be demonstrated again. How does one get these values into the present political ethics, which is dominated by the opposite principle of seeking personal and group gain even at the cost of justice and integrity? How do we bring these values into the educational system? Is it not much more difficult and demanding than introducing computers and modern technology into the school system?
II. Values and Technology
After having briefly raised some questions in relation tot he values suggested by Rajiv Gandhi, we are now ready to move into the question whether there is an intrinsic conflict between the values of our Indian heritage and those of a scientific technological civilization.
The answer of that question depends largely on our analysis of the intrinsic nature of the scientific-technological civilization and its fundamental features. Since we cannot attempt such a comprehensive analysis here, we can only point to some select features which are relevant to our question.
First, there is need for a clarification of what we mean by modern science, technology and a scientific technological civilization.
The philosophy of science has discovered that science cannot be defined a priori, in such way that we can use the definition to distinguish between what is science and what is not science. Science is no longer defined as objective truth, since all scientific theories are subjective creations hypothetically proposed by the scientific observer and not directly yielded by objective reality. It is a subjective theory tested by subjective-objective praxis. Neither is science proved truth, for every scientific hypothesis has the unspoken qualification "in the right of our present knowledge, and subject to reformulation in the light of other data". Godel's theorem has conclusively shown us, by mathematical demonstration, more than fifty years ago, that no science can be a completely self-consistent and self-contained system.
Quite apart from the problems of definition or demarcation criteria, and those of proof and objectivity, there is the further preliminary question about the distinction between science and technology. This is a distinction easy to maintain in theory and illustrate by example. But in practice the distinction is fading. What is known as pure science or scientific knowledge which is an end in itself or independent of technology is fast disappearing.
First there is the phenomenon that most of scientific research is financed by people or institutions with an interest in putting that knowledge to some technical use. Very little scientific research is pursuing knowledge for its own sake.
Second there is the fact that advanced technology is today an integral part of scientific research. Take away the electron particle accelerator, the computer and a few other advanced technological devices, advanced scientific research would come to a virtual stop.
Third, there is the somewhat disturbing fact that at least at the micro-level, the technological measuring instrument determines the momentum or position of particle, and knowledge of the particle independent of the technology of the measuring instrument is denied to us.
As for modern technology, it is common knowledge that it is totally dependent upon modern science, and the integral relationship between science and technology has become so extensive that it is more useful for thinking to coin a term time ''scitech'' than to make theoretical distinctions between science and technology.
That point needs to be clarified in order to make us see that the technological civilization we are talking about is a sci-tech civilization, rather than just technological. In taking a ink at this sci-tech civilization, we recognize first the fact that historically it arose within European culture and that it bears the marks of its historical cultural origin. We are already seeing that the sci-tech civilization has fundamentally altered the cultural values of the West, but also radically transforms all cultures wherever this sci-tech civilization is introduced.
Two of these changes have to do with the process called the Enlightenment which provided the matrix within which sci-tech developed in the West. This was largely an eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomenon. Though modern science was born much before that, its great expansion and development took place in the context of the European Enlightenment which soon dominated the culture of Europe. The Enlightenment reaffirmed and highlighted the main elements of European modernity - namely the repudiation of traditions and the affirmation of the full autonomy of human reason. Along with this came the affirmation of secular humanism as destinct from christian humanism, that man is both the measure of all things and also the potential master of all things through the proper use of reason through science and technology.
The repudiation of the authority of tradition and the exaltation of human reason as the arbiter and authority for knowledge and values, the twin principles of modernity and the European Enlightenment, effected a new revolution second only to the Copernican Revolution. An understanding of this second revolution could provide us with a clue to answering Rajiv Gandhi's questions.
Europe likes to see its intellectual and cultural history in three stages - medieval, renaissance and modern.
The medieval period was one in which the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was affirmed, though not always acknowledged to be supreme in all matters of European life - political-economic, scientific-technological, moral-cultural. Here there were three realities in the world-view -
- God as supreme Ruler and Judge
- the church magisterium - not the whole church, but excluding the vast mass of ordinary believers, and with the Pope or the Bishop of Rome, as the bearer of God's authority as ruler and judge, and
- the ordinary sacculum with its people - the laity: the princes, nobles, the world as a whole.
It was the structure of this medieval Christendom that was progressively challenged by three interrelated processes -- the European Renaissance, the Protestant reformation and the European Enlightenment or Erklaerung. The Renaissance was powered by the rediscovery of the Greek classics) the Reformation was a repudiation of the religious authority of the Church magisterium; the enlightenment repudiated all traditional authority including that of the christian scriptures which Protestantism has counter-posed as the source of authority. Where Protestantism affirmed the authority of the individual believer's conscience to interpret the scriptures, the Enlightenment insisted on the individual reason as the only source of all authority in all matters.
In this process, the three realities if the world-view of medieval Christendom were replaced by two realities:
- the human person whose reason was the final authority in all matters - knowledge and values, and
- the world, which was to be known, understood and brought under control through sci-tech.
Though modern science began within the process of transition from the medieval to the modern worldview, it found full freedom to develop only as the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries provided the matrix of a rational world-view.
The question before India is as follows. We did not, thank God, have in India something like the medieval church, claiming divine authority for one particular religion or one particular set of religions institutions. We had an extremely pluriform culture in which not only many religions coexisted, but within each religion there was room for diverse points of view. There was also more or less full freedom for thinkers and groups of people to repudiate all religious authority and to develop secular systems of thought like the Carvaka, Lokayata, Sankhya and Baudha systems. With the advent of the Moghul Empire, our system, if any, had become even more pluralistic than before. New religious systems like the Sikh religion could arise and flourish.
The coming of the British and the impact of western intellectual systems powered a renaissance for us in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more or less simultaneous with the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment itself was rather late in coming to India, mainly through the educational system which was based largely on western liberalism.
If there was one movement that galvanized the nation and gave us new vitality as a people, it was the freedom movement. This movement received great impetus from the socialist revolution, and by the time we got to our national independence, the Congress party, under Nehru's leadership, had already accepted several planks of a socialist platform. Unfortunately however, these planks soon became largely verbal, as the middle class began to dominate the Congress party, throwing out most of the leftists and socialists to form separate, but largely ineffective smaller parties. Technology, such as we had, went in two different directions. One, in the public sector, helped create the basic industries related to steel, coal, rail transport, irrigation, power and food production. The other, in the private sector, concentrated on consumer goods production largely for the fast growing middle class.
Technology created, primarily through the private sector, a new class of people, with a set of values unrelated to our heritage. Efficiency in management of production and marketing became the supreme value.
There was another factor which created new values from the technocratic managerial system. Government had put a large plethora of controls and restrictions on the private sector and had imposed fairly high tax rates (excise, income and sales taxes) on private industry. Evading controls and restrictions and taxes became the new value of the managerial class. They were prepared to bribe, to falsify accounts, and to make large contributions to the political party in power.
Efficiency, one can say, is integral to the technocratic process of production and marketing of goods. Are bribery and corruption also intrinsic o the technocratic process? The answer is that it is more so in so called democracies than in disciplined socialist societies. As the political process in our so called democracy became more and more dependent on a share of the profits made by traders, manufacturers, civil contractors and defence contractors, the degree of corruption, bribery and tax evasion simply grew enormously. Was this the fault of technology? Clearly technology had a share in the disintegration of values, for they were willing to bribe politicians and officials in order to gain their ends, rather than take it to the people as they should have, in a truly democratic society. It is no comfort to say that such large scale bribery and corruption exists in the advanced industrial countries like USA., Japan, West Germany and France. This simply demonstrates that in a soft society with western liberal forms of so called democratic governments, technological civilization does undermine the values of integrity mud probity. Even in a small state like Singapore, where disciplined society was for a while able to arrest the onslaught of bribery and corruption, the opposite trend has already begun.
The People's Republic of China, a disciplined, socialist society, recently attempted to create certain zones where foreign investment and private sector economic activity were allowed. The result was seen to be disastrous. All the old values of integrity and probity soon broke down and there was large scale bribery, corruption, smuggling, alcoholism, prostitution and all the rest.
It is reasonable to draw the conclusion that what affects values is only in part the work of technology, but in large measure the combination of private sector production and soft administration with technology.
Our Prime Minister, in his Hyderabad address, pointed to Japan as a model for India to emulate in entering a fully technological civilization. He gave expression to the view that in Japan the technological culture had not undermined traditional Japanese cultural values. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Sensitive Japanese observers are extremely concerned about large-scale erosion of Japanese culture as a result of the introduction of a technological civilization. We will do well to make a more thorough study of what has happened to the Japanese people and culture as a result of their wholesale adoption of western technology.
We should look briefly at two west German interpretations of what has happened to European culture before we conclude with an Indian perspective on Rajiv Gandhi's question.
Heidegger's View
The first critique is radically negative towards science and technology from Martin Heidegger. Heidegger has shown us how all thinking occurs within a given tradition, and the intellectual horizon opened up by it. No man or woman thinks absolutely, in the heavenly sphere of absolute truth, without presuppositions. A person can think only here and now, in the light of questions opened up by a tradition.
Heidegger opens up a new horizon for us -- namely to look at the western intellectual tradition as a whole from the Greeks to our day. His view is totally different from that of Hegel, who saw western thought, particularly Hegelian thoughts as the culmination and fulfillment of all thought in all cultures and all religions of the world. Heidegger on the other hand considers the whole western enterprise as a colossal mistake, straying away from the truth. It is the attempt, beginning with the Greek philosophers, on the part of human persons to stand "outside" being, and to understand it objectively. Heidegger focuses on what happens to human psyche itself in the process of development from philosophy, through science, to technology.
Let us try to be concrete in illustrating this transition, which has a great deal to do with Rajiv Gandhi's question, which is the focus of our concern in this paper. Take a mountain for example. "Primitive man" sees the mountain as a reality with which he lives, and on which his life depends.
Andes and develops attitudes towards it -- not as an object, but as a quasi-subject. He weaves it info his religious understanding through myth and ritual, thus entering into a relationship of reciprocity with it. The mountain impresses him and his total being responds in awe and wonder.
Its majesty and grandeur speaks to his depths as an aspect of the reality in which he participates. His psyche responds, not in the scientific quest to analyse and understand, but in the deeper human response of poetry and art, myth and ritual. It is a subject which stands with him and before him, not an object which has to be understood and overpowered. The mountain is a friend. the source of the rivers that wafer his laud and breed the fish he eats -- an awesome friend, nevertheless a friend after all.
In science, the perspective changes, with consequent changes in the human psyche itself. The search is now to understand, in terms of how it came to be by geological processes, to measure its altitude, to analyze its strata and its vegetation, its mineral content and causal relation to other phenomena like rain and flood. It becomes an object for the understanding, something to be explained and described independently of its relation to us. Sometimes that relation is also studied but not subjectively, but in the context of a pursued objectivity. Already, says Heidegger, the human psyche is alienated from the mountain in the attempt to eliminate all subjectivity in the understanding.
Then technology comes along, and the human psyche again shifts its perspective. The mountain is no longer an object to be merely understood. The scientific understanding is used to visualize it as a potential resource -- as a source of timber for our paper mails and furniture factories, as a deposit of mineral ore to be mined and milled for industrial purposes. The technology is then developed to exploit the mountain, to dominate it and make it our slave, serving our will and purpose. Even climbing the mountain becomes an act of overpowering and domination. The subject-object relation leads to a master-slave, or owner property relation.
To the scientist the mountain is nothing but the result of geological processes. Do the industrial technologist, it is nothing but a resource to serve him, to be controlled and exploited by him. Here, in this transition from understanding to overpowering, there is the second alienation in the human psyche.
All this change in human attitudes is often justified and validated in religious terms in the Christian west for examples in terms of the god-given vocation to dominum terrae or domination of the earth, as given to Adam and Eve by their Creator. As the ecological crisis looms large, the dominum terrae doctrine is questioned and sometimes accused of being responsible for all the troubles of pollution, resource depletion, and disruption of the delicate balance which sustains the life-world or bio-sphere.
Heidegger sees the whole western intellectual-industrial enterprise as a single whole from the post-Socratic Greeks to our time. The secular-scientific-technological adventure of western humanity has its roots in the original stance of Greek philosophy, which unlike Socrates, stood apart from beings and questioned Being from that stance. From Thales to our day the western attempt has been to get at universally valid synthetic judgments about what is really there.
According to Heidegger, philosophy certainly strays from its path what it takes a supposed stance outside the totality and seeks to understand it through synthetic inductive judgments. He would find fault with those of us who use philosophy for some kind of a cultural synthesis or universal philosophy which can serve as a basis for some planetary culture. Such a universal philosophy may even try to synthesize the various philosophies of the world-- Chinese, Indian, African, Middle Eastern, European and Maya-lnca. But such a universal synthesis would still be continuation of the western project to form universally valid synthetic judgments about what realty is there.
Philosophy's task today according to Heidegger is to question the very stance of separating the human consciousness/will and its objects, and of demonstrating the severe limits of verbal or conceptual language in approaching the truth. I believe this is relevant for us.
Juergen Habermas' View
The most ambitious project to find a system of universal synthetic judgments has been launched by our other Germen contemporary, Juergen Habermas, formerly of Frankfurt school of Social Research and the Max Planck Institute. It would indeed be audacious on my part to sketch here the main lines of this colossal system of universal pragmatics. His main writings are now available in English, almost all published by the Beacon Press in Boston: Massachusetts. I would draw your attention especially to Knowledge and Human Interests (1968/71 ), Theory and Prctice (1971/73 ), Legitimation Crisis (1973/75) and Communication and The Evolution of Society (1976/80). (The first date refers to the original German work, and the second to the English Translation.) A compendious summary of Habermas has been provided by Boston university's Thomas McCarthy in his The Critical Theory of Juergan Habermas (Hutchinson of London, 1978). If you find McCarthy forbidding, go to Garbis Kortian's Metacritique: The philosophical Argument of Juergen Habermas, (Cambridge Univ.press, 1980). Kortian is superbly lucid and penetrating.
Habermas takes a different direction from that of Heidegger. He wants to pursue a critical theory buttressed by metacritical critique of the theory itself. Habermas is anxious not only to keep theory and practice together, but also to give primacy to practice. He follows Marx's metacritique of questioning Kant's separation of pure reason and practical reason with primacy given to mind over will. He follows Marx also in rejecting Hegel's attempt to resolve contradictions in the realm of reflection rather than in social reality. But he questions Marx in his underplaying the role of reason in the emancipation of humanity.
Habermas thinks that while Hegel capitulated to metaphysics in postulating his philosophy as a universal science, Marx and the Marxists have capitulated to its latter-day counterparts, scientific positivism. In order to find out what is wrong with Hegel and Marx, Habermas goes to the antecedent Kantian critique of a threefold analysis -- pure reason, the moral will, and the aesthetic Judgment. The Kantian critique has been substantially altered by the thought of Hegel and Marx. But the issue today is to come to terms with the phenomenally successful world of the physical sciences and the human science. In both areas the epistemological issue today cannot be stated in the Kantian categories which in a sense are pre-empirical. Today we should focus more on the categories of validating or certifying knowledge, rather than an on the mental process of knowing. These categories of validation cannot be the same for the physical sciences and the human sciences. Neither can either of these sciences by its own method provide or justify the categories of validation.
But epistemology itself cannot be reduced to method, as positivest tries to do. It has to reflect on the nature of reflection itself, something which positivism fails to do.
Such reflection on reflection, Habermas claims, cannot be contained within the methodological ambit of either the physical sciences or the human sciences. If is a third level of investigation, which Marx wrongly tried to subsume under the category of political economy. What is now pursued as philosophy of science and philosophy of history are not simply part of the methodology of science or the historical method.
Both the physical sciences with technology arising out of them, and the human sciences with categories of moral principles of human social interaction, have their antecedents in something pre-scientific, ice., the question of the interests implied in all knowing. These interests are perennially human and therefore not to be left unexamined or rejected as pre-scientific.
All knowledge is bound by interests-- that is the thesis of Habermas' seminal work on Knowledge and Human Interest. This interest is dual -- not singular Marx pre-supposed. Marx recognized the practical interest in all theoretical knowledge, but he interpreted that interest as exclusively instrumental. Marx was right in defining the specificity of the human as distinguished from animal as tool-making homo faber. It is by tool-making that human beings, unlike animals which adapt themselves to the environment, began adapting the environment to their interest aud purposes. It is out of this tool-making activity that human persons became interested in knowing and changing things. They saw the possibility in the stone of becoming an axe, and proceeded to shape the stone to suit the human interest.
But this tool-making or instrumental interest was but part of the whole human interest in knowing the environment. Human persons found the environment as conditioning or confining their existence. When confronted with the fish in the flowing stream or the running animal in the woods, human beings were unable to catch the fish or kill the animal with their bare hands. They found themselves conditioned and limited in their capacities.
It was necessary to be emancipated from this limitation. Their interest in tool-making was motivated by the desire to overcome their limitations and be emancipated from the conditioning or limiting element in themselves. This emancipatory interest precedes the tool-making interest. Knowledge thus has a twin interest, instrumental as well as emancipatory, the one arising from the other. They learned the sharpness of stone and the power of the bow and the sling, in order to emancipate themselves from their own conditioned-ness.
Knowledge itself is an event in the process of material exchange with nature, according to Marx. But the adult male or female does not fall from the sky. The formation of a human person does not begin or proceed in a purely individualistic context.
The human child is born helpless and dependent on others, as for example on the parents. The child is formed and comes to maturity in a double process -- handling things with its mouth and hands, which is the beginning material exchange process, and the socialization process within the family where it acquires its knowledge and skills. It does not become a person merely by material exchange, but also by social interaction with other persons -- parents, siblings etc. In this process too there is a movement from dependence to autonomy or emancipation. Even the autonomy is not total; the dependence relationship in material exchange and social interaction goes side by side with the process of emancipation from material conditioning and from parental dependence.
Along with the material exchange and the social interaction arise the contradictions, not only of knowledge but also of existence and relation, which have to be overcome or resolved. The emancipatory interest thus continues both in the material exchange and in the socialization process, ie. in the overcoming of contradictions in both theory aud practice.