Guest post by SASHEEJ HEGDE

Don’t ask for the meaning, ask what’s the point. (Ian Hacking).

Nizar Ahmed, Metaphysics and the Politics of Compassion: An Indian Perspective (Kozhikode, Kerala: InsightinPublica Printers and Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2023, pp.93, Rs.300/-).  [ISBN – 978-93-5517-340-9]

1. Introduction

It is no easy task to resist such a forceful and persuasive intervention in a genuinely problematic area of metaphysics and the emotions, as it were, complicated furthermore by the fact that it strives to articulate ‘an Indian perspective’ on the same. The work, emanating from a reclusive philosopher from Kerala and published by a ‘small’ publishing house in the region, requires some attention, yet – and, I attempt to do so without coming across, hopefully, as condescending, or even paternalistic. I must confess, though, that the author Nizar Ahmed (henceforth, NA) is a dear friend for many years now, indeed from the time of his Ph.D. in Philosophy from IIT-Kanpur and taking up a faculty position in the School of Social Sciences at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam (from where he moved to the Sree Shankaracharya University of Sanskrit at Kalady, Kerala, and retiring eventually from that posting).  Dare I say it, NA remains a ‘legend’ in critical circles in Kerala, although he actively resists the attention that his work (both in English, and even more in Malayalam) commands.

With reference to the book that I am here commenting, I will resist a temptation to simply summarize and repeat, and instead move as quickly as I can to pick up a few threads by which to test NA’s argument. Before I do so, however, a few words about the book itself: some typos apart, the book is attractively produced, with its cover and dustjacket reproducing an artwork by Riyas Komu, ’Eighteen Steps to Nasreen Mohamedi’ (2022).  The book, notwithstanding its theme, is a small one, just 93 pages long, divided across three chapters, and prefaced by a brief note by the General Editor (Dileep Raj) of the ‘Differential Humanities’ Series under which it issues. Indeed, it is the sequencing of the three chapters – with the first setting up the problem as announced by the book’s title, and the next two chapters straddling aspects of the Madhyamika tradition of Buddhist negative theology as a kind of denouement or passage through the problem – which provokes the question that frames my foray here (even as I strive to answer it in ways that NA may find unconvincing and/or distracting).  All the same, I hope to harness the reader’s attention to the issues that could resonate with our present, howsoever conceived.

2. The politics of compassion

I must reiterate that I am no philosopher – although I take philosophical thinking seriously – and am still in no position to fully evaluate the course of thinking as represented by NA.  I am not also fully equipped to seize the orders of ‘metaphysical thought’ either generally or even contextually amid the diverse strands of Indian philosophical thinking. All the same, I hope my summary is an effective one, one that captures key integuments of NA’s thinking and sets up a viable intellectual dialogue for us to think through and explore in the Indian context.

Let me, then, summarize the argument of the book, and I am prompted to do so pithily as follows.  First, and most generally, if there is a future for metaphysics in the Indian context, it may well lie in a proper juxtaposing of ‘Advaidic’ (I am using the label as spelt in the book) thought with strands of Buddhist thinking, which for NA (as urged) is carefully accomplished by Sree Narayana Guru (even as the latter, that is, Narayana Guru, marked out his own version of Advaida). Indeed, as the General Editor’s note reminds, the current book needs to be read in tandem with NA’s ‘Unmayute Itayan’ (Narayanaguru: The Shepherd of Being), which, being in Malayalam, eludes me.  At any rate, NA is in the current work clear that, even as both Advaida and Buddhism allude to the ’groundlessness of being’, this element is ‘more pronounced’ in the latter (Madhyamika Buddhism, as represented by Nagarjuna).  Strictly, I am not competent to assess this move, but what strikes me is the supposition underscoring NA: that Sree Narayana Guru, in his version of Advaida, laid the basis of a ‘politics without grounds’ – a circumstance of ‘mutual caring’ (samabhaavana), whose ‘outcome will not solidify into a script either, i.e., for future politics,’ but which will entail ‘actors [being] obliged to dispose in a certain way and subjected to a source of power in some sense’. This brings me to the second point of summation.

Second, and somewhat more specifically, that the action issuing from ‘mutual caring’ is ‘political’ in that (again, to echo NA working off Sree Narayana Guru) ‘[s]eeing through the entanglement that afflicts the bodily existence, being awakened to the absurdity of such existence, awakened state becomes compassionate.’  Strictly speaking, the way ‘compassionate politics’ plays itself out must do, less with the ‘materialization of the wellbeing,’ than with ‘the way in which one acted and not what comes out as a consequence.’ The ‘politics of compassion,’ we are told, involves ‘movements of awakening’ that will ‘come through only when they are compassionately scaled.’  Thus, as NA makes clear, this position marks a certain usurpation of the space of the political, where, as with the metaphysics of Narayana Guru and that of Nagarjuna, ‘indeterminacy’ (the groundlessness of being’) is taken to mean ‘the openness of the outcome, where the politics is unscripted and therefore do not burden the future.’

3. Margins of departure

This is certainly a stimulating perspective, but one might well ask about the question anchoring our essay – namely, ‘Is the ‘politics’ of compassion transcendental?’ – why pose it in those terms at all?  Partly, it has to do with the two other essays that form the basis of the book.  Having set up the ‘politics of compassion’ in the ways recounted, NA takes us into an involved exegesis through two chapters encountering the metaphysics of Nagarjuna – somewhat repetitively ordered, I need add, although, as the general editor alerts, ‘the repetitions have been retained on purpose.’ Thus, NA works through Nagarjuna’s critique of thinking as part his (Nagarjuna’s) interest in ‘ontological commitment’; and then, in a subsequent chapter, devolves on ‘an Indian critique of essentialism’ as epitomized by the same figure. It is, precisely, the contours of this traversal as presented by NA which provokes my titular question. In what follows, I will try and restate the ground of my construal, while also taking a thread or two for another recuperation of the ‘politics’ of compassion. This is certainly not a repudiation of the space of NA’s thinking; it is a kind of supplement.  [I realize the word ‘transcendental’ is capable of various meanings, and it may help to clarify the same.  But space constraints pitch in, and hopefully the further ground of my traversal will be quite helpful in lighting up my usage of the word.]

Broadly, the ontological ground of ‘commitment’ oversees NA’s engagement with aspects of Nagarjuna’s thought, while also sustaining his (NA) passage through the ‘politics’ of compassion as presented. Importantly, the recounting of the chapter sequence suggests so, even as the word ‘compassion’ hardly recurs through the two chapters that follow. The reader must proceed inferentially, although the two chapters can be made sense of independently of each other and separately from the first chapter. My titular question – Is the ‘politics’ of compassion transcendental? – accordingly is striving to bridge the divisions internal to the book, while also positing a sort of unity to the work in question. I am struck by the fact that NA raises the question of the ‘politics of compassion,’ even grounds it ontologically and traverses a ‘transcendental’ order of appraisal as a matter of necessity. The ‘philosopher’ in NA may well have a point here – indeed, the ‘Indian perspective’ of his work’s sub-title seems to suggest so – but there are genuine problems and difficulties too.

Surely the suggestion that any ‘politics of compassion’ must follow from specific ontological commitments (like, for instance, that bodies do exist, even as they undergo a process of disintegration and/or that the flow of existence need not have anything intrinsic to it, and so on), is a robust one.  Indeed, in the ways recounted by NA, the fact that the ‘ontological commitment’ that can – or ought to – participate in such a ‘politics’ must be sourced to a Buddhist metaphysics necessarily is important (and I am here reminded of a parallel gesture underscoring B. R. Ambedkar in his The Buddha and His Dhamma [1956], a body of work that forms the basis of my current order of research).  But arguably, the over-emphasis quite displaces the argumentative fecundity of Ch.1, key aspects of which were foregrounded in our previous section, particularly the effort to combine the metaphysics of Sree Narayana Guru with that of Nagarjuna.

4. The challenge of the supplement

Quite frankly, I am more invested in questions of anthropology (the anthropology of ethics, specifically) and metapsychology, Indic or otherwise, as can be brought to bear on the question of compassion per se. Again, it is not as though NA is oblivious to this track, calling attention as he does to Nagarjuna’s use of terms such as ‘bhava,’ ‘bhaava,’ ‘svabhaava’ and, yes, ‘suunyata’ – I call attention, specifically, to the last term, given my own preoccupation with Ambedkar’s Buddhism, which necessarily engages the idea and re-evaluates it – although Nagarjuna himself, as recounted, turns the reflection inward and in an ‘epistemological’ direction (albeit ‘relativised’, as NA tellingly reminds, ‘to ontology’). This latter directionality also implies that NA is concerned primarily to inflect Nagarjuna’s critique of extant styles of ‘perception, inference, comparison and verbal testimony’ (broadly styled as the ‘Pramaanaas’) transcendentally, avoiding explicitly the ethical route available (incidentally, one that Ambedkar embraces quite fully) to ground the founding discussion of the ‘politics’ of compassion. Allow me some further elaboration, before I get to conclude the broad order of my supplement.

NA, of course, is aware (pace Nagarjuna) that the ‘Pramaanaas’ do not transcend either the conditions of the subject or that of the object’ – in that ‘all knowledge of the external world is threatened by immanentism’ – and that ‘modern science’ has always sought ‘to exceed the limits of human subject in order to arrive at a knowledge about reality that is beyond the phenomenal’ (what Nagarjuna would regard, vide NA, as ‘instances of immanentist realism’). If the former point – about all knowledge of the external world being threatened by immanentism – is not convincing enough, the latter point about ‘modern science’ appears (to me, at least) to give up any pretence of an interpretation. The problem or difficulty for me, then, is NA’s own commitment, given his own philosophical training, to a ‘transcendental’ order of reflection to ground the ‘politics’ of compassion.  To be sure, the model of ‘transcendental’ reflection ordered here, given its embedding in the ways reiterated above and in the previous sections, is not quite ‘whether knowledge is possible or not,’ but rather: ‘whether the knowledge has a foundation outside … the circularity of knowing’ (the latter taken to describe a relation where the ‘known bears the imprint of the instruments of knowledge’ even as ‘the instruments of knowledge have conditions of satisfaction in the known.’ Indeed, this is taken repetitively forward in the following chapter alluding to ‘an Indian critique of essentialism,’ yielding at once a non-committal answer to the question ‘Is [Nagarjuna] ontologically committed in the metaphysical sense?’ and thereon translating into a summation of the ‘Madhyamaka position’ (echoing the words of Nagarjuna himself) that ‘The Buddha did not espouse either the substantialist viewpoint or anti-essentialist viewpoint.’

Whether or not this model of reflection can help us toward a plausible understanding of compassion – even of the ‘politics of compassion’ – I cannot quite determinedly say.  But I do think there is something in the order of reflection here which we can bring to bear on our intellectual histories of the present, particularly as it concerns figures like Sree Narayana Guru or even B. R. Ambedkar (to limit myself to our allusions above) and the imperatives of social transformation and justice that they sounded. The ‘public philosophy’ that these figures espoused also issued from, and translated into, deep philosophical questions that we need to engage.  But let me quickly return to the overture that I sounded at the very start of this section.

I had said that my own disposition – even in the face of the intellectual histories of our present – is towards the anthropology of ethics and metapsychology (both Indic and otherwise). I do not quite have the space to articulate fully the order of this position.  All the same, to the extent that what is at stake – specifically here in a complex emotion/virtue like compassion (quite apart from the ‘politics’ of the same) – are questions about basic categories of understanding, the order of my reflection would certainly involve the activity that most would associate with ‘philosophy’ or philosophizing (namely, the critical analysis and even the generation of concepts).  [NA, and most of my interlocutors, would, of course, nod in assent.] But the pathway that I seek into conceptualization can – and must – be disembedded from all arguments about ontology. This partly explains my anthropological sensibility – the activity, really, of turning ethnographic materials into concepts (as represented in contemporary scholarship, among others, by Veena Das, one equally at ease with normative texts from the Indic field as with ‘life’ in the urban milieu of the poor in Delhi).  The challenge, clearly, is one of a kind of conceptual intervention that arises, particularly, in situations where we reach the limits of our own capacity to describe our material (whether hard philosophical texts or ‘life’ and living, generally).  ‘Compassion,’ as also the ‘politics of compassion,’ may yet require this intellectual aesthetic to hold sway and have their measure.

Coda

I realize that I have not given a conclusive answer to the question anchoring our review essay.  But I must, yet, suggest a modification to the thought from Ian Hacking that forms the epigraph of our foray.  To repeat, Ian Hacking had enjoined in his The Social Construction of What? (1999), as part of his sounding of the limits of ‘social constructionism’ in the humanities and social sciences: ‘Don’t ask for the meaning, ask what’s the point.’ I would, in the light of our review essay, urge a simple modification of this injunction: ‘Don’t ask [only] for the meaning, ask [also] what’s the point.’  I hope, at least, this part of the messaging is clear enough.

Sasheej Hegde teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad, and is in the final leg of his long and enduring stint there.  He can be contacted at: <sasheej@gmail.com>