Questions of Freedom and People’s Emancipation (Part 1)- Kobad Ghandy

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Hegel had said it was the Germanic people, through Christianity, who came to the awareness that every human is free by virtue of being human, and the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature. While Christianity, like Islam, does say that men freely choose their own actions, this freedom is, to a large extent, negated as God is the ultimate cause of every-thing. Also Christianity (and most religions) inculcate numerous guilt complexes, like the ‘Original Sin’, which keeps man in a perpetual state of insecurity. An insecure person, generated by any means, can never be free; as such weak people become the most vulnerable tool to ANY form of power. Guilt, insecurity and inferiority complex give man a slave-like mentality, destroy his creativity and quash his initiative.

Christianity presents the most excellent values of love, compassion, honesty, simplicity etc., but we find in its practice (in later years) exactly the opposite. It goes so far as to say that “the Meek shall inherit the Earth”, but in the name of the Bible the entire African continent was raped and the indigenous people of the Americas were massacred on a scale never seen before. Today the ‘ civilized’ world perpetrates the worst atrocities.

Then, a few centuries later, came the last major religion of the world—Islam. This contained all the positive aspects of Christianity and even went further. It called for equality of the people and laid down certain economic norms; it spoke of fighting evil not only within us, but in society as well. As the famous poet-philosopher, Iqbal, said: socialism+God=Islam. Islam also produced the great mystic poet-philosophers during the 10th to the 13th centuries like Gazzali, Razi, Rumi etc. Rumi’s entire six volumes (in Persian) is devoted to inculcating the best values within man, told in simple poetry and story form. Throughout history there have, in fact, been numerous Sufi saints that presented the liberating aspect of Islam. But, here too the religion has been corrupted, taking on a fundamentalist form with numerous sects. The Arab Sheikhs, for example, make sure that Islam serves their rule and their billions of petro-dollars.

Both Jesus Christ and Prophet Mohammad lived simple lives, with their supporters amongst the poorest. For this reason their philosophies spread far and wide, in spite of enormous persecution. As with other religions, these too were co-opted by the rulers of their times, distorted, twisted, factionalised, and began to be used as ideological weapons amongst the very masses whom the two prophets sought to arouse.

In India in this period the Hindu religion witnessed probably the greatest retrogression. Buddhism was thrown out and the Charvka influence reduced and with the consolidation of the Magadh state in BC itself, the Manusmriti was written on social relations and the Kautilya/Chanakyan statecraft. The former consolidated and rigidified all the worst aspects in social relations, while the latter did the same for the form of rule. In reaction to this rigidity, particularly in the sphere of caste (besides inhuman untouchability, only the upper castes had access to God and the temples), the Bhakti Movement said every individual could have direct access to God through bhakti (devotion). Though the first sparks of the Bhakti Movement emerged around the 8th/9th century in the South, it took a powerful form and spread widely between 1300 AD and 1550 AD. Interestingly, the bulk of the bhakti saint-poets were from the lower castes.

Though we find that the ideas presented were powerful, positive and had a great liberating impact (whether Christ, Mohammad and, to a much lesser extent, Bhakti), they were unable to sustain as they were not accompanied by radical social change. This entire period saw little socio-economic change where slave relations continued along with the consolidation of feudalism. Not surprisingly, it is referred to as the Dark Ages.

The period that was to follow in the West witnessed probably the greatest ever leaps in the realm of thought as it was accompanied by enormous socio-economic churning.

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The salient feature of the medieval period was an uncritical and blind acceptance of authority and power, over-emphasized by theology, neglecting human freedom and life on earth. Emancipation from the authority of the Church led to the growth of the individuality in man. While the Greek philosophers were more institutional, in the Middle Ages the philosophers were usually monks.

The main landmark of modern philosophy, which distinguishes it from medieval thinking, is its growing faith in the power of reason. The ability to reason, independent of the stifling confines imposed by the Church and State, was in itself a great leap in the realm of freedom unleashing a surge of creativity., Of course, this was possible and sustainable as the period also witnessed big social changes. While the centre of the Renaissance was Italy, that of the Enlightenment was England, France and Germany.

The Renaissance was a sort of bridge between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Three major discoveries added to its impact: gun power, the compass and printing. The first two facilitated colonial conquest in far-off places; the last allowed, for the first time, the wide scale spread of knowledge.

Just the 50 years from 1490 to 1540 in particular witnessed giant leaps in the sphere of knowledge, as also important social changes in society. The latter was reflected in the Reformation, with Protestantism being introduced by Matrin Luther (Germany) and John Calvin (France). These, in turn, were inspired by the writings of the foremost humanist of the period, Desiderius Eramus (Holland).

It was also in this period that Thomas More wrote his ‘Utopia’ as a protest against the abuses of the day. Though he served as the Chancellor to King Henry VIII, he was beheaded when he refused to accept the King pronouncing himself as the head of the Church. It was in the first decade of the 1500s that Italy witnessed the great paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Not only were they among the greatest artists ever, but they were also scientists and philosophers combined into one.

It is also in this period that we see the first steps towards colonial conquest. In the 1490s, Vasco da Gama discovered India and Christopher Columbus, America. In 1519 the Spanish Empire spread to Central and South America. Finally, we see that the Enlightenment was ushered in by the great scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo; the works of the great dramatist ever, William Shakespeare (1566-1616); and the writings of the fathers of modern philosophy, Francis Bacon (UK, 1561-1626) and Descartes (France, 1596-1650).

The period of the Enlightenment, 17th and 18th centuries, witnessed enormous churning in all spheres of life—the socio-economic, political, scientific and philosophical fields. It was a period of transition from feudalism to capitalism. In the sphere of socio-political turmoil there were the following: the 30-year war between the Catholics and Protestants from 1618 to 1648; the seven-year civil war in Britain—1642 to 1649—resulting in the beheading of King Charles I and the establishment of Parliament; the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783. And all these culminated finally in the historic French Revolution of 1789. In the sphere of the sciences there were Kepler’s discoveries in Astronomy published in 1609; this was immediately followed by Galileo’s famous discoveries; in 1628 William Harvey published a description of the circulation of the blood; in 1687 came Newton’s Principa Mathematica; in 1705 the steam pump was discovered; and in 1709 came James Watt’s steam engine facilitating the industrial revolution.

Probably in no other period of recorded history has there been such a spate of well-known philosophers as during these two centuries. It produced three major schools of philosophy—the rationalists, the empiricists and the idealists. While much of the debate revolved around the existential question of the primacy of mind or matter, in their bid to understand man’s relation to the outer world, they also focused on questions of freedom, humanity/justice and happiness. In the rationalist school the big names were Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz; among the empiricists there were Locke, Berkeley and Hume, also Spencer; and the idealistic school of thought was initiated by Emmanual Kant, and followed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These are just a few of the names, there were many more. And together with these the two great French philosophers, Voltaire and Rousseau, propounded the concepts of freedom, equality and justice, and their views had a major impact on the French Revolution.

It was, in fact, Origen who was one of the first authors of this period to write a treatise on freedom. His famous work, De Principiis, is a remarkably profound and systematic work on free will. According to Origen, men are free; truly man is everywhere in chains, but it is, in Origen’s opinion, his own responsibility that is the cause of his enslavement. Origen asserts that Divine Providence allows man’s free will full scope in his cooperation with God. He says that if a believer takes away the element of free will from virtue, he destroys its essence.

Here, not only does the author make a break with the fate-centred concepts of most religions, but also links the question of humanity (virtue) to the question of freedom.

Acquinas distinguishes between the free choice of humans and the natural instincts of animals. Descartes regards freedom of the human will, or liberty of choice, as so important that he compares it with the concept of Divine Infinity. He presents it simply as having the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not to do it. He holds that the power of free will is the greatest perfection in humans, through the exercise of which we become masters of our actions, and thereby merit praise or blame.

In the sphere of values/virtue, it was Spinoza’s masterpiece ‘Ethics’ that had a major impact on future philosophers like Goethe, Hegel and even Marx. ‘Ethics’ is a work of ethical philosophy, whose ultimate aim is to aid in the attainment of happiness. For Spinoza, all affects were to be divided into passive affects (passions), through which man suffers and does not have an adequate idea of the reality, and active affects (generosity and fortitude), in which man is free and productive. He adds that while reason shows man what he ought to do in order to be truly himself and teaches him what is good, the way to achieve virtue is through the active use man makes of his powers. Famously Spinoza said: “Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself”, and he put forward a ‘Model of Human Nature’ as a scientific concept. He adds that virtue is identical with the realization of man’s nature.

For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive: inasmuch as he grasps the world outside himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. In this productive process man realizes his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language (according to Spinoza) is nothing other than his return to God.

Scientific ethics was further elaborated by John Dewey. Like Spinoza, he postulates that objectively valid value propositions can be arrived at by the power of reason; for him, too, the aim of human life is the growth and development of man, in terms of his nature and constitution. But, his opposition to fixed ends leads him to reject Spinoza’s ‘Model of Human Nature’.

Here, I have in no way done justice to the elaborate views presented by the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries on questions of freedom, humanity (also called ethics, virtue etc.) and happiness. Here, I have tried to present a small sample of the type of thinking taking place in these spheres during this period. There was a deep search for the meaning of life within life itself. In the earlier period, the search was mostly within the realm of rapport with God. Now, though Divinity often still played some part with most, the emphasis was to find answers within society itself.

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And as we come into the 19th century, we could say one has shifted from the ‘Age of Reason’ to the ‘Age of Science’; and this has continued uptil today. The advances in sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries would be greater than all hitherto history put together. Capitalist production demanded continuous scientific research to increase productivity, and big powers required continuous upgradation of weaponry. So, scientific advance has literally reached the moon, nay the Mars. The positive aspects of this was it developed a scientific temper. With it God was given a back-seat, only to be utilized as an opium of the masses. The scientific temper demanded no longer mere ‘reason’ but concrete evidence for any postulation. Though this approach was also put forward by the empiricist philosophers of the earlier period, it was not so clear-cut. Scientific discoveries one after another widened man’s horizons beyond anything earlier imaginable. (It is another matter that science has wrought unimaginable destruction as well—in wars, of the environment, and even of man. However, that was not the fault of science per se, but of those who wielded it.) But, somehow with all this scientific fever and ever new gadgetry ethics was lost, values were considered old-fashioned, freedom was merely reduced to the free market and right to vote, and happiness was, de facto, equated with pleasure. Market fundamentalism and crass consumerism reduced philosophical materialism (primacy of matter over mind) to vulgar materialism which added to the destruction of man’s spiritual values—his emotions, feelings, and his very humanity. No doubt there has of late been a reaction to this materialism; but this is as bad as the former. It is in the form of religion; religion minus its value-system, with a fundamentalist, intolerant and hate-oriented form. This is to be seen in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, even Buddhism (as in Sri Lanka). So, humanity has been lost by both the ‘materialists’ and today’s religionists.

Now, coming back to the philosophers of the early 19th century, we find that most of the answers to the existential questions raised by the earlier philosophers was found by Marx. But, even before Marx we find utopian socialist idealistic views presented by philosophers like Fourier, St. Simon etc.; the dialectics of Hegel; we see the materialism and humanism of Feurerbach; as also the political economy of Adam Smith and Ricardo. Marx took much from these past philosophers and economists, but he did not confine his views within the framework of their debates; he took a major leap in the realm of thought by interlinking the concepts of freedom, justice, humanity, happiness etc. with a scientific analysis of the prevalent capitalist system. For, Marx sought not merely to interpret the world but to change it Change it did with socialism sweeping one-third of the world during the 20th century. But, by the end of that century all those huge changes were reversed. So, were his views utopian? Well, during the recent financial crisis it was reported that there was an upsurge in reading Marx to understand the crisis. But, that is regarding the present system; what about the future?

In the 1990s, it was postulated that with capitalism we have reached the ‘End of History’. But even these authors have revised their views since the unending crisis beginning 2008. Like all human endeavours and scientific discoveries, however great, they will have the limitations of time, existing knowledge and prevalent conditions. If Marx’s writings are turned into some infallible gospel, Marxism de facto becomes a new religion. But here I seek to bring out Marx’s understanding of the concepts under discussion—freedom, humanity, happiness—to better understand not only the causes for the reversals, but also the impact of the lack of these values in today’s prevailing existence. I will not dwell on his concepts of justice as those are well known except, of course, in their interconnection with the above concepts.

Very often Communists give a crude understanding to the term class struggle, totally negating the individuals who comprise the “class”. This sort of thinking results in economic determinism on the one hand, and, on the other, it sees only the forest and not the trees. It tends to reduce people into mere instruments/tools of change, forgetting that change is for those very people themselves. It tends to put everyone into straitjackets where any sign of emotion, feelings etc. are ‘bourgeois sins’ and ‘class’ rigidity is the only virtue, even if it entails the “Mani syndrome” (who in Kerala said we kill all those who dissent/oppose). So, humanity is said to be non-class; so also freedom and happiness. Once this was said about caste as well.

In further articles we will see how these are not only misconceived and blinkered views, but precisely those that resulted in reversals to socialism. For the present, I will restrict myself to briefly mention what Marx had to say on these issues. I will have to be forgiven for quoting at length. As these views of Marx are little known, if I do not quote the original I may be accused of misrepresentation. Under normal circumstances it would be best not to quote too much as that is the method of dogmatists with a tendency to lose creativity.

Here I will just present the basic concepts on these issues in brief. Later I will try and develop these, while applying them to alienation today and also the socialist reversals.