Cultures Differ Differently

Selected Essays of S.N. Balagangadhara

S. N. Balagangadhara, Jakob De Roover, Sarika Rao, Jakob De Roover, Sarika Rao

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000477733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

This volume brings together a collection of essays by contemporary thinker and social scientist S.N. Balagangadhara which develop an alternative theoretical framework for a comparative study of Western and Asian cultures. These essays illustrate how 'decolonisation of social sciences' is a cognitive task and offer novel hypotheses about human beings and society. They demonstrate the implications of cultural difference in the study of domains such as psychology, political theory, ethics, religion, sociology, translation, law, Indology, and philosophy.

The book addresses new questions in the study of Western and Indian culture and social sciences, and discusses themes like selfless morality and the moral self; knowledge and action; critical representations of Indian traditions and classical literature; law, religion and culture; translation and interpretations; and varna and social systems.

Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this interdisciplinary volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy, philosophy of science, ethics, religious studies, postcolonial studies, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, literature, comparative studies and Global South studies.

1
Selfless morality and the moral self^*

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229445-3

A disquieting suggestion

Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaces his book on oriental thought and moral philosophy, titled Mysticism and Morality (1972), with the following words:

The factual beliefs [that the civilizations of the East] take for granted are … too alien to our [the West’s] representation of the world to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their moral systems are unavailable to us.¹

The factual ‘beliefs’ that Danto talks of are not about the structure of DNA molecules or space-time singularity in the region of black holes or even the laws of conservation of energy. Rather, they are beliefs about the social world. Suppose that Danto is right and that the truth of his claim is independent of the culture of the audience to whom it is addressed. Suppose furthermore that thinkers from the East take this suggestion seriously as well. What would they say?

They would say that the factual beliefs that the West takes for granted are too alien for them to be grafted onto the beliefs that the East holds, and in consequence, the moral systems elaborated by the Western thinkers are unavailable to them. This would mean that systems from intuitionist to utilitarian ethics, from Kantian to contractarian ethics, from deontological to consequentialist ethics, would all be unavailable for Eastern civilisations. That is not all. The very terms in which Western thinkers conduct their ethical discourse cannot be adopted by the East: the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’; terms like ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’; the concept of ‘moral rules’; or the very idea that ‘moral rules’ are universalisable. Consider just one more extension of these implications: all moral systems which recognise that human rights are inalienable moral rights, possessed by all human beings, become unavailable to Eastern civilisations.

Even though more consequences follow from Danto’s suggestion, let me leave these blockquote for the time being to look at the issue from another point of view. Whether or not these consequences indeed follow from his suggestion depends, inter alia, upon whether the civilisations in question hold different factual beliefs that are relevant for the case. One such relevant factual belief concerns the nature of the human self. Do the civilisations of the East and the West have different notions of self? If yes, is it possible to assess the relevance of this difference with respect to the moral phenomenon? How does the notion of moral agency affect the construal of the moral domain? In this chapter, I would like to explore the answer to these questions. I want to look at the extent to which the moral systems of the West are unavailable to those of us who are from the East. In other words, I intend to describe Western ethical systems against the background of some of the factual beliefs that we hold in the East.

The structure of the chapter

This chapter has four sections. In the first, I outline the conceptions of self in the East and the West and briefly contrast them. The next two sections deal with the notions of morality as I perceive them to be present in the West and the East. The final section contrasts these two views. The concluding part of this chapter reflects upon some of the methodological issues raised by such an exercise.

It has not been easy to communicate the intuitions of one culture within the language of another. This essay bears the marks of this struggle in more ways than one. As a transitional piece within an unconcluded project that I am working on, it is caught in the half-way house of framing the concepts of one culture within the confines of another. This could create confusion in the reader, but I have not been able to do it differently despite the best of my efforts.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to a methodological point. Even though I am aware that many conceptions of the self and morality have been put across in the West by scholars working in several domains, I will speak of the Western model of self and ethics, because I believe it is possible to pick out one dominant conception of self and morality. The same applies to the East as well. The purpose of this chapter is not to present the views held by some group of thinkers at some period of time from either of the two civilisations, but to explicate the conception of the self and the ethical domain as they are present in the folk psychologies of these two cultures. Such must be the nature of these conceptions that it allows those who have them to make intuitive sense of the variety of social institutions and practices that exist in these two cultures. This stance, however, is nowhere defended explicitly.

The self in ourselves

The self in the West

The basic conception of the self in Western culture can be very briefly outlined thus: in each human being, there obtains an inner core that is separable and different from everything else. In such a culture, when one speaks of ‘finding oneself’, one means that one should look inside oneself, get in touch with an inner self that is there inside oneself, and peel everything away that surrounds this core. To such a self, even its own actions can appear strange. As Rousseau put it in his Confessions:

There are times when I am so little like myself that one would take me for another man of entirely opposite character.²

It is possible to be ‘so little like oneself’, to be both one and the ‘same human being’ and a ‘totally different human being’, if there is a self that can be like and not like one’s actions. Rousseau again:

There are moments of a kind of delirium when one must not judge men by their actions.³

The actions that one is ashamed of are performed in moments of such delirium. It is by referring to the inner self that one judges men, not by looking at their actions. And it is thus that one says of oneself as well: ‘This is really me’ or ‘This is really not me’.

These are not just Rousseau’s sentiments alone, but those of a culture. Western culture allows each of us a self: a self waiting to be discovered within each one of us; something which can grow and actualise itself; that which either realises its true potential or fails to do so; etc. Such a self plays many roles: it guarantees identity when philosophers ask questions about self-identity; it acquires an identity when psychologists attempt to describe the processes and mechanisms by means of which a human organism builds an identity; it is the agent of the moral thinkers when they talk of moral agency; etc. Such a versatile self has various properties. One of them is its reflexivity: the self is aware of itself as a self, or it has self-consciousness. Consequently, human beings who are endowed with such selves are self-conscious beings. As we know, most philosophers agree that self-consciousness typifies the uniqueness of human beings and that this distinguishes Man from the rest of Nature.

Involved in the talk of such a self is, first of all, a distinction between human beings as biological organisms and the selves they are endowed with. Secondly, and consequently, human beings do not build a self but create an identity for the self. This already existing self acquires the identity (in the sense of taking possession of it), which the human organism has built up for it. Thirdly, human beings are seen as self-conscious beings only because ‘inside them’ is a self that is self-conscious, and for no other reason.

When I formulate it explicitly in this fashion, you may not be willing to accept the suggestion that such a concept of self is the Western concept of self. Space forbids me from going any deeper into this issue in order to provide plausibility to my claim, but I shall try to do so later by showing that the Western notions of the ethical are simply incomprehensible in the absence of precisely such a concept of self. Or, put more carefully perhaps, this is the only way that I can begin to make sense of the Western discussions on the ethical phenomenon. Let me now turn my attention to an equally brief sketch of the notion of self in Eastern culture.

The ‘self’ in the East

There is no better way to introduce the concept of ‘self’ as it is prevalent in Indian culture, it appears to me, than to contrast the two different ways in which the two cultures talk about persons. Consider the following questions and their answers:

What kind of a person is he?

A. He is a friendly person.

B. He comes home every week to enquire after my health.

What kind of a wife is she?

A. She is a loving, caring wife.

B. She does not eat until everyone in the family has eaten first.

What kind of a student is he?

A. He is an industrious and intelligent student.

B. He listens to everything I say with great attention.

I would like to put to you that the answers marked ‘B’ are very typical of India, often irritating to Westernised sensibilities because they do not appear to be direct answers to the questions at all. The question is not what someone does or does not do, but what kind of a person that someone is. The former may be relevant to answering the question, but that alone does not constitute an answer. This would be one response.

The second response would be to say that these answers do answer the question and do so directly. By picking out some action or the other, they tell us that the person in question is someone who has the disposition to perform these kinds of actions. One of the attributes of a ‘loving, caring wife’ could indeed be the act of eating only after everyone else in the family has had their meal.

There is a third possibility which I want to explore. And that would consist of suggesting that ‘B’ does answer the questions directly, but that it does not do so by speaking about dispositions at all. Instead, the answer is asserting an identity relation between actions and persons. That is, no distinction is made between an agent who performs the action and the actions that the agent performs. An agent is constituted by the actions which an organism performs, or an agent is the actions performed and nothing more. And this appears to me to be the concept of ‘self’ that is present in Indian culture.

In order to better appreciate what is being said, let the dummy letters ‘X’ and ‘Y’ stand for two biological organisms. In this case, the ‘self’ of X is nothing other than the actions that it performs. Even here, the nature and character of the actions that X performs depend very much upon how Y construes them. There is another way of putting this: Y constructs X’s ‘self’ in the same way that X constructs Y’s ‘self’. Y is very crucial for the construction of X’s ‘self’, because in the absence of Y the actions that X performs are meaningless. That is, Y is required so that X’s actions may be seen as some specific type of action. If we were to restrict ourselves to X in order to talk about its ‘self’, so that we may contrast this notion with that of the West, we could say that its ‘self’ consists of a bundle of meaningless actions. Because of this, the ‘self’ of X crucially depends upon continuously being so recognised by Y.

There is nothing spooky or mysterious about this: you are a son, a father or a friend only to the extent you are so recognised. And you can only be thus recognised when you perform those actions which are appropriate to the ‘station’ of a son, father, friend, etc. The presence of these gestalts in the culture of the community not only imposes restrictions upon the way Y can construct X’s ‘self’, thus reducing the possible arbitrariness involved in such a construal, but it also enables X to challenge Y within limits.

East and West: the selves in contrast

Let me now contrast these cultural conceptions of selves, thus elucidating them a bit more. At an experiential level, the Western man feels the presence of ‘something’ deep inside himself, even if he is unable to say what it is. Better still, he intuits a ‘presence’. By contrast, the Easterner would experience nothing, or some kind of hollowness. To use a metaphor, the latter would experience his ‘self’ as an onion stripping off whose layers would correspond to the bracketing of others’ representations. At the end of such an operation, what is left over is exactly nothing, and that would be how someone from the East experiences his ‘self’. This experiential difference is not being mentioned in support of my claim, but only to make it intelligible.

In one culture, human organisms are endowed with selves in whose nature it is to be different from one another. A human organism builds an identity (in the psychological sense) for such a self; the latter, in its turn, is what makes such an endowed organism unique. This means that the self can be individuated, and the criteria for it are precisely its possessions: at the minimum, for example, the body of a human organism belongs to the self whose body it is. In the other culture, the ‘self’ is a meaningless bundle of actions created by human organisms. The psychological identity of such a ‘self’ is a construction of the ‘other’. A human organism that builds such a ‘self’ is conscious, to be sure, but it lacks that ‘self-consciousness’ which is supposed to typify human beings. The dividing line between such a sentient or conscious ‘self’ and other sentient ‘selves’, where it is drawn at all, is of very little moral significance. That creatures other than human beings, under such a view, end up having ‘selves’ is not only not a problem, but also a recognised consequence.

The implications of entertaining such different conceptions of ‘self’ are enormous. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore some of them with respect to one domain, namely, that of morality. Hopefully, such an exploration would also make it obvious why I claim that the writings on the theme of ‘the self’ are no evidence, at least not by themselves alone, for claims about the notion of the ‘self’ as it may be present in a culture.

An ethical problem and the problem of the ethical

Learning to be moral?

Let me enter into the present essay’s theme by trying to solicit your agreement for a shared epistemological intuition: today, we would not be willing to concede that what we know about the physical world is all there is to the world. A physicist or logician or mathematician is someone who is always trying to learn physics or logic or mathematics. That is, we do not call someone a physicist because he has reached a stage where no further physical knowledge is to be had. We believe, rightly in my view, that considerable though our collective knowledge of the world is, we are never finished learning about the world. There are, of course, many reasons for this belief: at least one of them has to do with the complexity of the universe that we are a part of.

Consider now another broad agreement that obtains today regarding moral phenomena, all controversies notwithstanding: morality pertains to the domain of regulating human intercourse. Each of us knows without requiring to be told that human interactions are extremely complex. One way or another, we are busy learning to go about in the world and with our fellow human beings throughout our entire life. Consequently, we are never finished learning to be moral, or so one would think, if our epistemological intuition is applicable here, as it surely must be. And yet, I put to you, such is not the case in Western culture today.

I am not suggesting that Western culture believes that one could behave morally without learning to do so. What I want to draw your attention to is the kind of learning process this is supposed to be. A forceful, if crude, formulation would go like this: learning to be moral involves the process of making some or other moral principles one’s own. In the process of maturing...