Why Sci Fi turned to shite

    Once upon a Time, Science tuned men into machines and drained magic from the world. Those were the good old days- the Golden Age of Sci Fi.

    At that time it seemed Science had no limits- what was very small was like what was very large- Time itself had been spatialized- Man could boldly go everywhere he hadn't gone before and make it as banal as a brothel and as exotic as Crystal Palace.
 
    Then came Planck's constant which spawned the queer quantum world and a cap on the speed of Light which spawned General Relativity and Black Holes and Big Bangs, and then Bells' inequality and Higgs bosons and Multiverses and Sting theories and suddenly Science was adding more and more Magic to everything while cutesy GUIs, like kids with Williams Syndrome, tended to leave us feeling smarter, but less empathic, less human, than the computers we use.
 
 So, quite suddenly, Sci Fi turned to shite. It saw, perhaps too clearly for its own good, that now only Maths was Magic and Mankind boring, it had not farther horizon than allegory and gesture politics.

 Frankly, it now gives prostitution a bad name.

Newsflash!- Sankara wrote the Gita!

I don't know whether this is meant as a joke-
'The Gita has, in popular belief, symbolized the rejuvenation of Hinduism after a thousand years of Buddhist domination. It was the book that apparently struck the last nail on Buddhist thought by a thirty-something Adi Sankracharya. '
The author  is named Bhupinder Singh and his post, which can be read here , is either a heavy handed satire on the ignorance and mendacity of the hysterically anti-Hindutva  Soft Left-  intended, perhaps, to show that the hopelessly corrupt BJP Govt. in Karnataka is redeeming itself by forcing Schools to teach the Gita- or else it is something the author actually believes on the basis of a reading of Kosambi and immortally funny for that reason alone.
After all, the author tells us that the Gita is dated around 150-250 AD.  He thinks Sankara comes after a thousand years of Lord Buddha. So, either he doesn't know Lord Buddha's dates or he has gone one step further than Kosambi (a Brahmin) and invented a new type of Mathematics.
Perhaps, he believes, to be perceived as Dalit, he must appear brain dead. Suddenly, our humorist doesn't seem so funny after all.

Gita is Sita- in epoche

    Epoché means ‘suspension’- pausing and standing back to question one’s fundamental beliefs and values. The Gita’s dramatic appeal is that it marks a suspension of action- the two armies have assembled, clarions has been sounded on both sides, hostilities are about to commence, but, suddenly, the relentless forward thrust of the narrative is arrested, not by the Cassandra cry of a clairvoyant, nor the chastened counsel of a Seer; but, utterly unexpectedly, by impetuous Arjuna who, for the first and only time in his life, confesses himself daunted, not, it is true, by the imminent hazard of death in combat but rather by an immanent prevision of the wretchedness of a Victory that can only be secured by the unrelenting carnage of those so near, if not dear, in blood.

     Arjuna’s hesitation parallels that of Hamlet.  Neither Hamlet nor Arjuna is afraid of being killed or suffering damnation. Nor are they tempted by Power or Pelf. Still, one may argue, Hamlet’s dilemma is quite different from Arjuna’s. After all, the murdered King's ghost might be the Prince of Liars, in disguise, trying to get Hamlet to damn himself by killing an innocent man- one to whom, moreover, he owes a triple duty of obedience as nephew, step-son and subject.

   Indeed, it is tempting to see both our puzzled Princes as cursed with what might be called the blighting Gandharva gift of 'backward induction'- id est, the anti-Epimethean criterion for judging action's cascade by working backwards, testing for optimality, from the final consequence . If Hamlet kills his Uncle, while the latter is at prayer, the end result is that the King gains heaven while the Prince is damned for all eternity. Similarly, Arjuna's victory means his cousins gain Heaven, for slain in battle in accordance with their warrior code, while the Pandavas, as the heads of the clan, become responsible for the misery, loss of status, and perhaps prostitution and miscegenation of the womenfolk left behind.

                     
   However, the moment Hamlet articulates the eschatological consequence of slaying the King at prayer, it immediately seizes to be binding- he himself can't be damned since the action's intentionality is to send his sin-stained enemy to Heaven, by taking his place in Hell. But- and this is Hamlet's Protestant dilemma- the Son thus only keeps with faith with the Father by breaking troth to the latter's Unholy Ghost.
                                     

Thankfully, at least for the purposes of this essay, this objection does not hold water.

    It's like the Examination question 'was Hamlet mad, or merely pretending to be mad?' which maddened three generations of my male ancestors. already mightily over-strained in their wits by the universal scramble to secure- what?- a but humble Babu's berth, at so many Rupees per mensem.

    The fact is, Hamlet viscerally believes the ghost to be telling the truth. He is stirred to the very depths of his soul to act and act immediately reckless of consequences. Yet, he does not act. We feel there is something of the malaise of modernity, something neurotic or Oedipal, some amphibolous or sceptical ‘unhappy consciousness’, at work in Hamlet’s febrile brilliance in devising a further empirical test to establish something he already knows in his bones to be true. Shakespeare emphasizes Hamlet’s great intellectual and imaginative power to show that, at some level, our scholarly Prince, to whom the name Pyrrho would not be unknown, must understand that this further empirical test, too, yields not certainty but doubt. Perhaps, at the staging of Hamlet's 'Mousetrap'- what appalled the King was actually some apparition sent by the Devil or, more prosaically, the sudden realization that his nephew suspects him of the foul crime of fratricide. Thus, for Hamlet, dutiful son to a Father who is also Unholy Ghost, Pyrrhonian doubt and delay yield not ataraxia, that is tranquillity, but a disorder of the phrenes, a sort of madness, less medicinable for feigned.

    Hamlet has a friend in Horatio but, poor Yorick being dead, no interlocutor of equal intellectual stature. Thus, Hamlet is a tragedy and doubly a tragedy for this Prometheus fetches no fire for Mankind by his foresight. Our Epimethean Arjuna, on the other hand, has not just a friend but something like an equal for interlocutor- Krishna. Thus, the Gita is a Divine Comedy. It is a ‘balanced game’. Both Arjuna and Krishna have supernatural knowledge of the outcome. Both are acting not as principals but as agents. Arjuna is obeying his eldest brother, actually Karna, who, however, if not a brother, is the loyal friend, of Duryodhana, chief of the Kauravas. But this means Arjuna will end up killing not just his own people but the partisans of the side which, but for Karna's decision regarding Righteousness, he himself would have considered right.

    Interestingly, Arjuna's chakshushi vidya (second sight) is constrained by his true master, Karna's, Dharmic decision not to disclose that he is the eldest of Kunti's sons so that Yuddhishtra is not obliged to give up his claim. Be it noted, however, this Dharmic decision- which precipitates not just the Kurukshetra war but also the destruction of Lord Krishna's people- is the decision of an agent rather than a principal. Interestingly, Karna's promise to Kunti to slay only one of her sons reflects Arjuna's own scruple against shedding the blood of his own kin. In the end, whether Arjun kills Karna or Karna kills Arjuna, the number of Kunti's sons is conserved as 5.

    One may argue that Arjuna, unlike Karna, has a moral objection to killing. Unfortunately, this notion is not supported by the text. Arjuna's qualm is against killing his own people- for whose womenfolk he will become responsible for on their death- that too for mere material gain. This is pure Hamilton's rule kin selection- not a Conscientious Objection to War at all. Unlike Karna, who does not have chakshushi vidya (second sight), Arjuna  knows he will survive- not so his cousins. Karna merely believes that he will win against Arjun but, otherwise, holds death in battle to be the surest path to winning Heaven. This is a case of loser takes all. In any case, Karna's friendship and obligation to Duryodhana arose in the context of the latter's determination to crush his cousins by force of arms. Indeed, by choosing to fight mighty Bhima rather than goody-goody Yuddhistra in the final duel of the MhB, Duryodhana confirms to us that Karna's Dharmic decision was consistent with Duryodhana's own preferences.
    Indeed, Duryodhana's war aims makes perfect sense politically. Men become Kings and Kings become Emperors by crushing potential rivals pour encourager les autres . Empires are a good thing- they move a fracitious people from thymotic, tribal, heteronomy  towards a Universal, Bureaucrato-legalistic, autonomy thus yielding a great advance in material Civilization. Yuddhishtra's repeated acceptance of a challenge to a dice game, as part of his bid to be recognised as Bharat's primus inter pares, put paid to his own, more traditional, more Brahminical, bid for Empery. His losing in the second dice game results in an Adullamite exile, during which he is forced to learn Game Theory for himself (Duryodhana outsources his Game Theory) and thus his alliance at Kurukshetra, though numerically smaller, has greater esprit d'corps at the top by reason of lateral ties and community of interest between commanders as opposed to  mere fealty to his own person. In the end, Yuddhishtra is not just a man of pinciple, he is the only actual principal rather than agent in the Mahabharata. After all, Duryodhana's father is alive. True, his father is a Regent, therefore a mere agent rather than principal, not a King. Precisely for this reason, like Bhima, Duryodhana sees the physical crushing of enemies as a legitimate act. He wishes to avenge his father who was passed over for the Kingship despite being Pandu's older brother. Similarly, when Yuddhishtra, despite being elder to Duryodhana, is forced to languish in exile rather than rule as King, Bhima declares his attention to avenge his elder brother by himself utterly destroying the Kauravas, Indeed, this is what triggers Yuddhishtra's Vishada (sorrow), which is only dispelled by hearing the Vyadha-Gita (Vyadha means butcher- Ashwattaman 'speech to Karna in 4.50 shows meat-vendors were proverbial for acquiring wealth through deceit and fraud)  after which he can learn Statistical Game Theory from the story of  Nala.

   Like Duryodhana, like Arjun, like everybody except Yuddhishtra in this Epic, Krishna, too is an agent, not a principal. Indeed, every avatar is an agent, not a principal, only put on earth to fulfil the Godhead's purpose. But, Krishna,in the Gita, is doubly an agent. Unlike his elder brother, Balram who, despite his partiality for Duryodhana, refuses to have anything to do with the blood-letting vishodhana at Kurukshetra, Krishna is committed to serving Arjuna as his charioteer, and thus unaware, by reason of being an agent rather than a principal, that actually Arjuna is none other than the Rg Vedic Hari, or chariot horse ever approaching night (this is the other side of the coin of Madhava’s reading of R.V 6.47.18) and thus His own self-slaying in Visvarupa goes in vain.
   
    Thus, it becomes apparent, the whole of the Gita is a, so highly cerebral as to be hilarious, proof  or demonstration that agents, as opposed to principals, neither kill (even themselves) nor are killed and thus are exempt from Philosophy which, as Socrates pointed out, is nothing but a practising of Death.  Which is another way of saying the Gita aint Hamlet, it’s friggin’ Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

     Hamlet’s dilemma- which is Agrippa’s trilemma- viz. how prove your belief is true when any proof anyone finds acceptable is still only a matter of belief- is actually pretty productive, not in deontic fields (stuff about ethics and values) where it cashes out as some sort of historicist hermeneutics, but alethic (positive, Scientific, factual) disciplines where it fuels the drive for more and more finely grained empirical instruments and observation.

     For ‘Second Order discourse’- i.e. Philosophy- it is noteworthy that Western Phenomenology and Occassionalism arise out of this trilemma. The former excuses its existence as follows- ‘I’m human. I see the world not as it is but as a human being. Yet, though human, I’ve got the concepts of doubt and certainty. So there must be some human ‘work’ I need to be doing before I can say ‘I’m certain about this’ or ‘this is a matter inherently riddled with the infirmity of doubt.’
     The problem here is that the Phenomen/Noumenon distinction, once its central concern is grasped, becomes immediately redundant- it is a distinction without a difference. Take that last sentence. It’s not actually a statement about what everybody believes. It’s a statement of what I believe. Surely, I should have said ‘In my opinion, the problem here is that....etc’. But, to constantly prefix every sentence I write with ‘in my opinion’ is simply a waste of words. It’s redundant. I mean, I sign this ‘Vivek Iyer’ though I know very well that it is only in my own opinion that I’m ‘Vivek Iyer’.  Mum, for example, is under the impression that I’m actually chamatha ‘good little’ Bikki whereas, less embarrassingly,  for my doting Dad, the words ‘badava’ (not from Urdu for pimp but ancient Aztec for ‘handsomer than Shah Rukh’ who, I may tell you, was my junior at School) and ‘rascal’ (ancient Maya ‘brilliant boy bound to become a Supreme Court Judge’) suffice to define me.

     As for Occassionalism- the notion that the set of things which lie far beyond the human ken- i.e. what we call God precisely because we can’t know what we name- is the actual efficient cause of everything and all the explanans we use either don’t exist or can’t exist, remaining incapable, in any case, of ever actually interacting with anything, thus cutting us off from being able to account for, or even properly perceive, causal processes- this notion, qua Philosophy, too is redundant. I suppose, in some cultures, it is de rigueur to prefix ‘God willing’ to any statement that implies agency- ‘Okay, you treat me to choley batore and your Hindi homework will get done, God willing’- but, it’s semantically redundant and serves a purely phatic purpose.

    In calling the Gita an epoché, quite obviously (in the idiot savant tradition to which all writers in Western languages on the Gita belong) I am systematically replacing any actual free reading of it with a fractious, and fatuous for fiercely reductive, reading into it- which is why, as you perusing this post, have already determined, I receive no soteriological benefit from it whatsoever- other than that of a Reverse Mereological, or Post-Modernly Meropean,  muddying of the Geeta’s waters providential to save my own self-fathered Caliban community which remains exclusively concerned with, though dying of thirst, not glimpsing its own reflection in that peerless and pellucid pool.

    What? Sorry, didn't quite catch ... Oh! You’re saying ‘No, no dear fellow- you are not muddying the waters of the Gita at all! Nor is anything you write difficult to follow. Perish the thought! This essay of yours is itself that Liriopean lake enriched by Narcissus’s love-struck gaze. Indeed, Vivek, as your esteemed Father says, you are truly a badava (in post-modern Urdu, not pimp but broker) enabling every Caliban to attain the beauty of Narcissus, at least in his own eyes, by gazing at the Pierian spring-fed pool of your Prose.’

    Well, you said it- not me! Still, I must admit, in your artless way, you have hit the mark.  Arjuna’s Agrippan Trilemma or Vishada- the fact that.backward induction renders every intentionality untenable- is nevertheless a starting point for a Grothendieck Yoga- uniting eidetic fields, such as sight and foresight, on the basis of greater generality by, not an abstract Husserlian reduction, but something purely human and existential- viz. the fact that Man is as an alethic fact and his deontics matters for his alethic survival and propagation. In other words, the Mind Body problem is solved by the fact that Minds can be evaluated by the degree to which they help or hinder Bodies to survive.

    Which in turn leads to Game Theory-which Yuddhishtra, lacking a Sakuni for Agent, himself has to learn as Principal- not to mention Evolutionary Biology, Mathematical Politics and all the other usual idiocies of our Age and idols of my tribe.

     To summarise, the fact that the Gita is structured as an epoché- but one in which both Krishna and Arjuna have certainty re. alethics (what will be) but not deontics (what ought to be)- is a necessary and sufficient condition for its elaboration of an Occassionalist doctrine. However, precisely because we can predict or explain its appearance, this Occassionalist message is not gratuitous and substantive but strategic and instrumental. Thus, it can't be its own meaning because it lacks ‘apurvata’. As a correspondent of mine informs me ‘  According to Mimansa hermeneutics, only those injunctions are Scripturally valid which have no worldly explanation or merit in that they point to invisible results beyond human understanding. Thus, if the Law Book says 'the King, modestly clothed, should listen to petitions while facing East'- the phrase 'modestly clothed' has a common-sense explanation, viz. that the King should not over-awe the petitioner by appearing in rich garments. Thus the King may omit this requirement without sin. However, since the injunction 'while facing East' has no common sense explanation, the King commits a Sin if he hears petitions in any other posture.’

      The corollary is that if a textual simulation of one Philosophical blind alley occasions, as its  corrective, the traversal of another, especially if that cul de sac is Occassionalism, then, clearly, the meaning of the text can’t be taken as anything but a ‘plague on both houses’ so to speak.

    I'm not saying insha (deontics) doesn't cash out as khabar (alethics) or that we can never get an is from an ought or vice versa. What I am saying is you can't get either deontics or Theology out of the Gita. This is because, as in the case of Phineas slaying Zimri and Kosbi, the halachah revealed is halachah vein morin kein (a Law such that knowledge of it forbids the very action it otherwise enjoins). Why? Phineas is agent simply, not principal. Hence his elevation to the status of Kohain by Ha'shem.

      Thus, my conclusion is, the Gita as epoché shows there is a symmetry between Phenomenology and Occassionalism- they are duals of each other but redundant and empty save in the context of their unmeaning duel in which neither can slay or be slain because both are mere agents, mere instrumentalizations, of their own univocal Principal. This impasse, as much as epoché, both yields and illustrates the Supreme hermeneutic Principle that the meaning of a Text is always what can’t be explained, anticipated, or instrumentalized for any paltry purpose of pedagogy or polemics.

    You disagree? No. You don’t really.  I know the truth about you. That humiliating truth hidden in your heart’s deep cave. I know your shameful secret. What is it?

    I will tell you. Not because I want to humiliate you but because no one, and there are many people inside your head, no one except you will understand what I’m saying.

     You think your mother’s face is Beauty.

 You are rushing to see her and tasting the delight already.

     But, when you see her, you realize you never saw her before. You never knew what is Beauty. She is saying ‘Eat now. Don’t look at my face. Look at your plate. What is wrong? OMG! Still a child even at this age? You want I should feed you with my hand? Ooof oh! Enough already. Can’t you see, guests have come. Go look to them. What’s wrong I say? Why this tear in your eye? Oh.... must have lost that fancy job abroad and come back crying... Good. Thank God! I always knew it would happen. I said, go not abroad.. But who listens to me? Anyway, now you are back- your life will be Gold.’

But, you haven’t lost your job, nor have you really come back.

    True, you never listened to Mum- tho’ Mum’s words are the Gita- but now you realize you never actually even properly looked at that Sita.

Her Beauty.

Sita shoba kahe bhukane?

Mukh bin nain, nain bin bane

Of Sita’s splendour,only hacks have sung

 Tulsi, tongue lacks eye, eye lacks tongue!

Buddhism is a protest Religion targeting the anti-casteism of the Hindus.

A truly terrible situation arose two and half millennia ago. A bunch of evil Hindu priests- known as Brahmins- were providing a route out of the Caste System and Untouchability and Gender inequality and so on. How they did it was by chanting some mantras or feeding some butter into a fire or other such ghastliness before declaring anyone with a bit of money or power or reputation for generosity or sadism or whatever to be whatever they wanted to be- a King, a God, a Priest, a Sage, a guy who gets to go to Heaven without first dying, a guy who gets to go to a nicer Heaven than everybody else, a guy who gets to go to Heaven, fuck God's wife and what's more, force God to watch  till God is like all- 'no, please, not  ass to mouth again, Jeez this is horrible... worse than Sex in the City 2... could someone just fucking shoot me?''

Buddhism developed as a protest against not just the Brahmins- but the whole concept of getting ahead by acquiring titles, honours, memberships in graded sodalities, guilds, etc. Buddhism did this by saying 'You really think you're getting ahead? That's sweet. Good thing you don't know success just puts the karma monster on your trail. Boy are you so called successful people fucking yourselves up big time.'
Since a lot of urban, or semi-urban, Brahmins, by reason of their profession, led a miserable self-loathing existence as cloak room attendants to Secular Success, they immediately thrilled to the Buddhist message. Indeed, Buddhism was never anti-Brahmin. Lord Buddha himself granted one sub-sect of those beggars direct entry to Monastic status.

What Buddhism does is create a bunch of people- Monks- who are superior to everything that can be imagined. Everybody has to get re-born as one of these Monks to escape suffering. The Monks do nothing but live off the fat of the land telling everybody else how fucked their lot is.

Of course, Buddhism hates Social mobility, Gender equality and so on, coz that gives people a sense of achievement and happiness and gives the lie to their atrocious notion that not being one of themselves is equal to unending misery. True, Buddhism works hard to make not being a fucking Buddhist head monk a fucking unending misery but, lets face it, the hardest work a fucking Buddhist monk is capable of is still just sloth and idleness by any objective standard. Still, some people are fooled.

This is a link to an article which claims that Tibetan Buddhism put a lot of artisan classes into the untouchable category who previously, or simultaneously in non Buddhist areas, enjoyed a higher status.

The revival of Buddhism in India is linked to the Constitutional creation of a privileged status for the caste from which the guy responsible for the revival- who also wrote the Constitution- comes from. Coincidence? Perhaps. What is undeniable is that a huge number of statues of the guy are going up all over the place.

For which I, personally, blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Is Dharma a Virtue Ethics?

Suppose we find that everybody who talks about a certain subject is either a fool or a knave or both, what can we properly conclude?
1) Not that the subject has a tendency to deprave or render stupid- it may be that fools and knaves alone are attracted to the subject.
2) Not that only fools and knaves take up the subject- it may be that someone neither a fool or a knave is forced to comment on the subject and only by doing so is shown to be either a fool or knave or both.
3) Not that someone neither a fool or a knave forced to comment on the subject, and thus shown to be a fool or knave or both, is actually commenting on the subject- one may be forced to do something but end up doing something else which suffices to end the compulsion. This would be the case if the force which compels one towards a particular course of action can not itself distinguish between that action specifically and some other action which appears the same to the compelling agent but not so to others.

This last point saves us from having to conclude that all talk about about Ethics, Duty, Dharma etc, is only indulged in by fools or knaves or both. I'm not saying this isn't empirically true. Indeed, for any possible world one may care to specify, one could, in general, prove that this is a necessary truth. However, once we admit that people who speak of these things may have been compelled to do so and that what we mistake as the usual foolish, knavish or both foolish and knavish verbiage is in fact merely a simulacrum with an opposite illocutionary force- i.e. it is a savage parody and indictment of the brutish stupidity of the sort of fools and knaves who force people to talk about Ethics, Duty, Dharma etc.- then a new vista is opened for us.
Indeed, we now have the possibility of taking a more charitable view of our fellow creatures. We can imagine that their foolish, knavish or both foolish and knavish babble about Morality proceeds, not from their irremediable stupidity and knavishness, but from some brutish and merciless force constraining them to such revolting behaviour.
Obviously, words like Morality, Duty, Ethics and so on only become interesting, only register as something other than phatic, when, in their name, some particularly stupid and knavish action is performed.
Let's say I become friends with some guy and do something nice for him. Well, you might commend me for my friendly character and felicitate me for my deftness in performing some particular pleasing action. What you wouldn't do is uphold me as an exemplar of a higher morality, a sterner ethics, a more than mortal attachment to Duty.
 Well, you wouldn't, unless you were a knave with an ulterior motive or a fool who thought it remarkable that I should find pleasing a friend a source of satisfaction to myself.
On the other hand, if I meet a guy, befriend him and then beat him to death though it causes me pain to do so- clearly I have acted from some motive of Morality, Duty, Ethics or other such shite. To the degree that you are a knave or fool, or both, you are now obliged to hold me up as an exemplar and gas on in philosophical vein.

BK.Matilal has written some foolish or knavish or both foolish and knavish shite on the topic of  'Ethics and  Epics'. Was he forced to do so? Dunno. Maybe. Let us say that being a Professor forces one to do shite  things of this sort. Still his shite on this topic sets higher than mandated standards of stinkiness because he won't even entertain the possibility that the guys who wrote the Epics were forced to drag in talk about Morality, Duty, Ethics and so on.
Let's face it.  Interesting stories are of the form- x liked y but fucked y up something rotten though it hurt x to do so. Boring stories are of the form- x liked y and did something nice for y coz x was a nice guy that way.

What about meta-stories? I mean a story about story telling? The Mahabharata is such a story. We know, in advance, the authors are going to be constrained to talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite- coz. for the heroes to retain our interest they're gonna have to fuck up for some high minded reason every so often-  but we don't know whether the Epic is going to take advantage of its meta-linguistic structure to fuck up the vile and brutish force compelling the mention of Dharma, or whether that fucking black hole is going to turn the writers in to fools or knaves or both - or even only the simulacrum of such scum.

In order to find to determine the outcome of the Mahabharata's meta-story, I'm first going to have to formalize the terms fool and knave.
Briefly, a fool is someone who wastes information. A knave is someone who steals it. The reason that all talk about Morality, Duty, Ethics etc is either foolish or knavish or both is because such talk loses information. But if information is lost, something is no longer being conserved. But if something is no longer being conserved, then a symmetry has disappeared. If a symmetry has disappeared then a Game has become unbalanced.
Let us look again at the Mahabharata- if it is nothing but a chaotic mass of interpolations and priestly longeurs then it can't be preserving symmetries, it can't be conserving any Principles, it's merely a dissipative system- in which case, why read it- unless you're forced to?
Since the Mahabharata can look like a dung heap of precisely this sort, stupid or knavish people- Professors for example- who are forced to read it, are then compelled to say foolish and knavish things about it- e.g. 'It conceives of Dharma as deontological' 'Nope, it's all Virtue Ethics' etc.

However, when the MHb's object language- i.e. what the text says happens-  is looked at as a non-dissipative, highly symmetric, Balanced Game sequence  (which, by reason of its redactive heuristics is precisely what it is) then, it becomes clear that, as meta-story, it achieves the most praiseworthy of objectives- viz. rigorously fucking over that vile and brutish force which compels people to talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite without in any way getting meta-shite upon its own dick.

To summarise- only fools or knaves talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite. Why? Because these concepts actually set out to lose information, to conserve nothing, to efface symmetries, to ubnbalance Games. Thus fools, who waste, and knaves, who steal, whatever they get their hands on, are the necessary tools for this foulest of forms of shitting through the mouth.
The Mahabharata, as meta story, by a powerful heuristic which conserves symmetries, balances Games and never throws away information in its object language, so to speak, is able to use its Second Order, meta-linguistic illocutionary force to do the work of sanitizing, by rendering entirely ironic, the obligatory shite about Ethics and Morality and so on.

To, conclude, the correct answer the question- is Dharma a Virtue Ethics?- is shhhhh! I'm trying to watch Svetlana.

Why circumcision in Islam is compulsory 5 times a day

Guest post
by Osama bin Laden Jr.

Gotta prune back on the python dude! Five times a day be sure to take a machete to that monster. Be right with Allah y'hear me?!

The Gita, Occassionalism and Deontology

The Gita, Occassionalism and Deontology

Occasionalism, in philosophy, is the doctrine that God alone causes everything. If I shoot an arrow at you and it pierces your heart and you die, I am not the cause of your death. On the contrary, what actually happened was, God transported the arrow to your heart and then caused it to stop beating and then caused you to die.  

In Islam, the school of Ghazzali is occasionalist while, in the West, from Descartes onwards, occasionalism has been one solution to the Mind-Body problem (i.e. the puzzle that mental and physical processes seem so different that it seems impossible that they interact.) In Ethics, too, if we consider the disjunction between deontics (values) and alethics (facts), occassionalism of some sort or another is bound to crop up. Indeed, Game theoretic approaches to Evolutionary Biology, in conformity with the extended phenotype principle, are currently attempting precisely such a re-foundation of Ethics so as to ‘de-Kant’ (as Prof. Binmore puts it) the subject.

Buddhism and Vedanta, in India, had no need for a full blown occasionalist doctrine. In the former, the doctrine of kshanika-vada (momentariness) meant that, since the Universe only exists for a moment, causation and identity are delusions simply. For the latter, the doctrine of Maya-vada- irreality of all phenomenal appearance- once again made causation and identity and so on utterly meaningless.

This is not to say that Theistic Vishnavism, from Ramanjua, through Madhava, to Vallabhacharya, did not develop a full fledged occasionalist doctrine such that the Lord alone had agency, nor that there were not some very heated (and hilarious) polemics exchanged between the Sagunas (Dualists) and Nirgunas (Monists) which polarised along sectarian- i.e. Vaishnav vs. Saivite- lines. However, the great poet-Saints had no difficulty reconciling the differences of the doctrinaire by simply instrumentalizing the doctrine of re-birth. Indeed, the variant epistemologies and ontologies of Jainism, Buddhism and so-called Hindu schools were reconciled by an appeal to re-birth. Once Umasvati, the Jain Scholar-Saint, clarifies that all beings become perfect upon the path of re-birth, and once it is seen that the liberated soul in Jaina ‘kevalya’ is indistinguishable from the ‘extinguished’ soul of the Buddhist Pratyeka or the ‘United to the Lord’ soul or the Hindu jivana-mukta, then, Nagarjuna, Sankara and Umasvati become complementary rather than competing. Contra Max Weber, reincarnation is not the Indian theodicy (i.e. the explanation for why God lets bad things happen to good people), because, quite simply, for Buddhism and Vedanta, the notion that something transmigrates is pure illusion and nescience. As for Jainism, the very second you decide to be self-reliant and work to perfect yourself, immediately, you are absolutely assured that for infinite Time you will be in the blissful Kevalya state. What does it matter if it takes ten births or ten million to get there? Eternity is infinitely longer than even ten billion years. An Auditor would tell you, the sum is not material. It’s like saying to Bill Gates- my dear man, I have found out that you owe ten dollars to the Dry Cleaner- you are not as wealthy as you thought!

Tulisdas, for example, puts ‘casteist’ arguments into the mouth of the crow, Kakabhushandi, who had incurred the curse of his Guru in a previous life because he was so bigoted an upholder of the Saguna position. The greatness of Tulsidas is that his ‘maryada bhakti’ (respectful Theism) involves obeisance to all equally. Clearly, this is the opposite of an endorsement of a feudal, hierarchical, view of society. Ultimately, Tulsidas declares the name ‘Ram’ to be higher than any merely ontic truth or deontological method. In other words, Tulsi tells us that Ram’s name is higher than both whatever exists and anything we can imagine or predicate of ‘Ram’.  This is better than Western Christianity’s slow weaning itself away, even with Islamic tutelage, from Platonic ‘reals’ to Aristotelian ‘nominalism’. However, this was not a thorough going nominalism, like Tulsi’s, and bequeathed Western Logic all sorts of ontological problems which it struggles with to this day. Briefly, as the works of Quine make clear, any system of logic makes ontological claims. In other words, any rigorous, non defeasible, system of reasoning is based upon a picture not just of the world but how and why the world can change or transform itself. But, from the view point of what Collingwood calls ‘second order discourse’, Philosophy as concerning itself not with facts about the World but a discussion of the world-views those facts might give rise to, this is quite foolish. Why have logic, why have a non-defeasible system of reasoning, if it can generate no truth value at all by its operations but can only reiterate the stupidity of its own axioms, the idiocy of its pauper’s picture of a world?  Wittgenstein, who scandalized Vienna’s Logical Positivists by reading Tagore to them- incidentally, Hitler would soon put a stop to the scandal of a ‘dirty Jew’ reading out the works of a ‘pure Aryan’, like Tagore-  tells us, repenting his own early work, that ‘ a picture held us captive, and we could not get outside the picture because language repeats it to us inexorably’.  Whose language? Not that of Tulsi certainly. Not that of the bauls- Muslim, Hindu or European, like Anthony Firanghee- who lay behind Tagore’s own oeuvre.

For Sufi Islam, as for Hindu Theism, Occassionalism changed the relationship of poetry with the World. It was no longer constrained to be mimetic, a mere imitation of Nature, nor diegetic, i.e. narrate a story, but, instead, it could explore Man’s capacity to receive and generate meaning. In other words, both for Islam and the indigenous Indian tradition, poesis was its own hermeneutics- in other words, the poet, tasking himself with finding new meanings, even if the World pictures they referred to were very far from the common sense perspective, was doing so by showing how more could be read into what had already been handed down. The result is that the Bhagvad Gita, like Ghalib’s Divan, is a book which can never fall open on the same page twice. ‘So fresh and strange it each moment appears/ True beauty’s homage is e’er in arrears’.

Unfortunately, Nineteenth Century European Scholars- and their often even more provincial latter day successors- were wedded to a Romantic and historicist hermeneutic according to which there was once some Golden Age  when people behaved ‘naturally’ and sang about things like how Mountains are real high and the Wind blows a lot and Forests have a lot of trees and can be scary at night, and the Sea sure does have a lot of water- and that, for some reason, such songs were actually really good and represented something genuinely worthwhile but, alas!, everything gradually became more and more corrupt and decadent and artificial and deeply freighted with thought. Thus the ornamental aspect of Sufi or Hindu theistic poetry was dismissed as ‘decadence’. But, to be fair, stupid elderly pedants are always obsessed with decadence. They see it all over the place. Don’t talk to me about the young men nowadays. They’re all homosexuals. Result is that girls are running wild. I tell you our Society has become completely rotten and decadent. We are sleep-walking towards disaster. What we need is a War to wake up the young men and get them to quit mounting each other and have a go at the enemy for a change.

Another great fault of the European scholars- who, speaking generally, were good linguists and laborious scholars- but of low general intellectual calibre and deeply Provincial outlook- was that they believed everything they’d been told at Grammar School. Greek tragedy is the highest form of poetry. It isn’t. That’s why the Greeks switched to Musicals.  A great man laid low by a character flaw, or the malice of Fate, is the most noble subject for the poet. This isn’t true. It’s an ignoble subject for a Scandal mongering, gutter Press, journalist. There is nothing particularly elevating about the contemplation of some random rich dude’s misfortunes. As for beating one’s breast at the malice of Fate- why bother? What good does it achieve? Thomas Hardy’s turn to poetry, or Housman’s well-turned lyrics, may sound okay and be on the best Classical models but they are a mere melodious absence of thought, a turning away from the vast new vistas and lifted horizons offered by technological progress and social development.

Both Indian and Islamic philology- in contrast to that of the Europeans- owe their origin and gain traction by being very much part and parcel of economic , technological and social change. For the Greeks, there was no poet like Homer- but Homer described a purely Thymotic and tribal society- whereas, for the Indians, there was the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which describe the transition from Thymotic, tribal, societies to contract-based, mercantile, Universalist regimes in which the Just King sets an example by controlling his own thymotic impulses and emerges from the ethical heteronomy of the Homeric heroes to the ethical autonomy and rationality of Chief Magistrates of urbane, mercantile, communities founded upon not tribal but Universal- or at least metic fostering- values.

For the West, the eclipse of the ‘glories of Greece and the grandeur of Rome,’ and the prolonged nightmare of the Dark Ages, coincided with the triumph of Christianity. Jerusalem stood absolutely opposed to Athens. Classical Philology takes its belated revenge on Religion in the Nineteenth Century by casting doubt on the seamlessness of Scripture. At the time, this might have seemed a victory for rationality. Perhaps the new historicist hermeneutics, founded in Classical philology, really had a role to play. It didn’t. Scripture can always defend itself because it is ‘insha’ (deontic) rather than ‘khabar’ (alethic). The Philologists gradually made bigger and bigger fools of themselves. Max Mueller was a standing joke with his ‘solar myth’ obsession. Nietzche tries to establish a humanist hermeneutics but was chased out of the Academy. Since the fellow was quite mad, he was eventually assimilated to a particularly foolish sort of ‘phenomenological’ philology- incidentally, I may point out that Occassionalism saves from the idiocy of Phenomenology- associated with Heidegger, a bad philologist who used phoney etymologies to read his own nonsense into ancient texts.

Western Philologists are too stupid to understand Western Philosophy- too stupid even to understand that all systematic Philosophy based on indefeasible reasoning is a priori silly- and so, naturally, the establishment of Western hegemony over Indian and Islamic knowledge systems, had the effect of rendering virtually everything being recovered by laborious scholarship radically unreadable as falling well below the standard of intelligence set by a drivelling idiot. Why? Well, important stuff in the text, or the cultural background, like the occassionalism in the Gita or in Ghazzali or whatever, is either ignored or explained away- it’s an interpolation!- or it is taken as evidence of ethical heteronomy and fatalism and evidence of a decadent literary milieu and so on.

Can you imagine a person saying, after reading Valmiki’s Ramayana, ‘you know, I get the impression that Ram didn’t actually have any real feelings for Seeta or for his Dad or anybody else. In fact, I don’t really know what Ram actually felt when Sita was abducted. It’s like the guy was a robot, just going through the motions.’

Prof. Sheldon Pollock has said this- and he hasn’t just read Valmiki but also translated a volume of the Ramayana- these are his actual, published, words ‘Rama's 'true feelings' will remain secret, properly so, for they are quite irrelevant to the poem's purposes.' Indeed, Pollock’s theory is that Rama, like all the other characters in the Ramayana, is ethically heteronomous, he has no freedom of choice and no inner source of values other than blind obedience. Pollock arrives at this conclusion by taking note of the Occassionalist metaphysics propounded in the Ramayana. He believes this fact to be sufficient grounds to conclude that all the characters subscribe to this doctrine and that their every intentional act is conditioned by it. In other words, when a character in the Ramayana eats some food he does not do so because he is hungry or because the food is appetizing but because he believes God wants him to eat the food. However, Occassionalism, as a philosophical doctrine, makes no such claim or demand. One way of looking at Occassionalism is to think of it as a ‘hidden variable’ theory. Intentionality is preserved, free choice remains operational, though some relevant information is not available to the agents involved.

Indeed, in this sense, Occassionalism is of the greatest utility to the Sciences- as well as to second order discourse- because it constantly alerts us to the inadequacy of our explanans- not fire burns wood but energy in the form of heat brings about a chemical change which itself can be more closely analysed and so on.

An oddity of Western thought- the source of its perpetual infantilism- is its cognitive dissonance in the face of propositions cast in logical form but which contain deontic rather than alethic variables. Work on defeasible systems of reasoning are a relative novelty in their tradition. Dialethia and ‘Fuzzy Logic’ are still generally considered beyond the pale. The problem of Meinongian objects (i.e. imaginary objects) or Moore’s paradox (can I believe something I know to be untrue?) continued to puzzle philosophers at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.  The Ghazal poet, as much as the reader of the Gita, on the other hand, have always had behind them sensible answers to these pseudo-problems.

However, in India, the rise of a careerist ‘Revolutionary’ ideology and socially complacent ‘Politically Correct’ agit prop, meant that Western Philosophical hermeneutics, of the most witless sort, had to be systematically substituted for the home-grown product. Since the Government had decided to adopt a historicist judicial hermeneutics, according to which evil upper castes had committed some terrible crime thousands of years ago and hence had to be made to make reparation through all eternity, there was a natural synergy between the agitators and the administrators. Both agreed that all Indian people were stupid ignorant rascals incapable of ever adopting any socially beneficial ideology or  morality on their own.

In this context, Hegel and that old racist, Kant, suddenly became relevant again.

Hegel writing on the Gita said ‘ there is no distinction between religion and philosophy here. No concept of the individual as a moral agent ... their whole thought is preoccupied with the dominance of the One Absolute, entirely unqualified, indeterminate, substance, […] its abstractness (its renunciation of the external world) and the lack of the concept of the autonomous, free individual and its self-consciousness.

‘Knowledge is achieved only by means of abstraction from the sensible and through reflection […] wherein thought remains equally motionless

and inactive as the senses and feelings should be forced to inactivity. […]The Indian isolation of the soul into emptiness is rather a stupefaction

which perhaps does not at all deserve the name mysticism and which cannot lead to the discovery of true insights, because it is devoid of any

contents.’

Hegel, being an ignorant pedant with no knowledge of what we would now call Science, Maths, Logic, General Knowledge, Economics, Politics and so on, not unnaturally had invented some Mumbo Jumbo doctrine according to which Negation was somehow illicit. His complaint against the Indians was that ‘“Too often, they think of Nothing as a necessity”. For this sin, the World Spirit got angry with them and cursed them with backwardness. Since Hegel, clever boy!, had rejected Negation and the ‘Bad Infinite’ and so on, the World Spirit became very happy with Prussia and blessed it and turned it into the bestest place ever which was convenient because Hegel lived there.

In this context, I am reminded of a ‘thought experiment’ from Kaushik Basu’s play ‘Crossings at Benares Junction’- the hero, a somewhat stupid lecturer, wonders what would happen if the world came to a stop for an instant and then, an instant later, everything resumed again. Would that instantaneous occurrence of Nothingness not somehow cancel the whole series and purge it from existence? This is an example of a Hegelian thought. It is utterly foolish. Cellular automaton theory takes such situations in its stride as a matter of routine. 

Recently, Prof. Amartya Sen has had a crack at the Gita. Carrying on a glorious tradition of Indians writing nonsense in English about the Geeta,  he thinks Lord Krishna is propounding deontological (rule based) ethics.  He thinks Arjuna is a consequentialist (i.e. judging an action by its results).  Now deontology is only a good strategy when there is imperfect information. No idiot follows a rule if he has all the information. Let me give an example. If I don’t know who is knocking on the door, I look through the peep-hole. The rule ‘always look through the peep-hole before opening the door’ is a good rule because I have imperfect information.  It is a stupid rule, which no one but an idiot would observe, if perfect information is available. Now, one may say deontology isn’t about rules like ‘always look through the peep-hole’ but maxims such as ‘always do your duty without fear or favour’.  Clearly the word duty here must mean what you understand to be your duty (i.e. it must have an intensional rather than an extensional definition otherwise it cashes out as a consequentialism because you have to go to every possible being and inquire what your duty to them is and then decide how to reconcile all these different duties and so on). But if you already consider something to be your duty you’d be doing it anyway. The maxim is redundant- like saying ‘be sure to exhale after you inhale’ or ‘be sure to obey the law of gravity’. Duty is a ‘revealed preference’. The maxim ‘do your duty’ is only meaningful if a person is having a doubt about what he should do. Such doubts are of 2 types, those arising out of first order (i.e. informational or computational) constraints- here the doubt is resolved by the acquisition of information or a computational technique- and those expressing existential doubts regarding ‘meta-duties’- i.e. what duty it is one’s duty to have- which is a second order, purely philosophical, question.  Here, Sens’s characteristic method of making distinctions without a difference should lead to some philosophical result. It doesn’t. Why? In the Gita, Krishna drops all deontological arguments in favour of a full blown occassionalist metaphysics. Sen knows this. Yet he writes what he writes. Personally, I blame Nathkat Nandlal. He likes to make fools of us grey-beards.

What to do? Lord Krishna is like that only.