Rorty and Ramu Hesitation, hope and happenstance

When Hitler will be fast asleep.
Gandhi in deep trance,
spinning his wheel.
That's when,
We shall play hide and seek.
– Sindhi Poet Vimmi Sadarangani

Two of the more remarkable philosophers of our time passed away recently. On 8 June, at his home in California, Richard Rorty succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He had been fighting the disease for a long time, and his departure, at age 75, was not unexpected. Five days later, on our side of the globe, Ramchandra Gandhi quit his own haunt unannounced, without leaving a forwarding address for his limited circle of admirers. The 70-year-old was found dead on 13 June at the India International Centre in New Delhi.

It is unclear whether Rorty and Ramu (as they were known to their peers) ever met one another, but they shared some similarities. Rorty drifted from analytical philosophy to the humanities and then on to comparative literature. For his part, Ramu went from teaching to dialogue and conversations, before turning to hybrid fiction to express his most profound thoughts. According to the theologian W L Reese, Rorty once proposed that, in place of building theories about 'reality', attempts should be made to "poetize culture, rather than rationalize or scientize it, celebrating not truth but play and metaphor". Meanwhile, Ramu did just that, through his plays and prose.

Of the two, Rorty was better known as a public intellectual. Though reviled equally by critics from left and right, his eclectic output intrigued the press. He opposed Western ethnocentrism, but supported the idea of promoting democracy and human rights around the world. He prophesied that democrats in the US would be forced to support the war in Iraq declared by George W Bush due to the "terror" of looking effete, but continued to oppose it all the same. It may not have been his motto, but Rorty affirmed Walt Whitman's famous declaration, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

Ramu's assertions were subtler, but they emerged from a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his extraordinary lineage (he was grandson of Mohandas K Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari) and unusual circumstances. For his last few years, he had lived the life of a nomadic intellectual – an academic without perch, a philosopher without sponsor, and a writer without regular publisher. But he remained engaged through his public lectures, occasional books and regular contact with the literati of New Delhi. The fact that he was not quoted very often in the media says more about the state of the market-oriented Indian press than about one of the most erudite philosophers of the Subcontinent.

Age of uncertainties
Children love to play hide and seek, for the sheer pleasure of hesitation. Is she in that nook or the other corner? Is he hiding behind the arch or pretending to be the pillar? In a way, discovery and disappointment are both immaterial – the game is an end in itself. There is no objective truth, only relative positions of almost equal significance. Such equivocation infuriates traditional philosophers to no end. Bertrand Russell dismissed pragmatism as "shallow philosophy" suitable only for an "immature" country such as the United States. But the end of certainty has made doubt acceptable. The philosophy of hesitation propounded by Jacques Derrida has made pragmatism respectable, although this did not happen overnight.

Ironically, the end of superpower rivalry did not result in the acceptance of diversity. Rather, it merely gave birth to two coterminous wordplays: the 'clash of civilisations' formulation of Samuel Huntington, and 'end of history' forecast of Francis Fukuyama. But the centrality of the US was an inalienable part of both propositions. The committed pragmatist that he was, Rorty saw through the games of those in Washington, DC who were masquerading as philosophers: intellectual spadework was preparing the ground for pax americana.

But unlike many of his peers in the fields of relativism and pragmatism, Rorty refused to accept that the West had no business promoting its own brand of democracy and human rights in the rest of the world. He was unrepentant to be an American, even in the age of hyperpower paranoia; he continued to insist that the messages the empire needed to carry were those of Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson. In the interim, how to cope while struggling was the crucial question for humanity.

Pain is an integral part of being. Civilisation has been built through efforts aimed at lessening human suffering. It was the West that first discovered ether, aspirin and morphine, but the non-West too deserves to benefit from these discoveries. Rule of law, freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, right to education and access to public services are similar socio-political devices that need to be spread throughout the world. The West need not be apologetic about supporting those struggles that seek to establish democracy and human rights anywhere in the world. These were Rorty's suppositions. To Huntington's position that "It would be immoral of the West to shove its stuff on the rest of the world," Rorty supported the retort of Roy Mottahedeh: "It will be immoral not to!"

When Rorty visited Kathmandu in September 2001, the Maoist insurgency was in its ascendancy. In the intense discussion that followed an interesting presentation on the philosophy of pragmatism, he pointed out the importance of hope in all human struggles. Then, it is the stage of hesitation: is the struggle the only way out of the morass in which we find ourselves? Certainties inevitably lead to violence. Doubts and reflections allow the mind to get over the passions of the moment. The inherent contradiction between hope and hesitation is the most difficult phase of struggle. This is where happenstance becomes the decisive factor.

We all do what we can do; some of us can manage to do what we want to do. But ultimately, Rorty noted, it is the mere quirk of circumstance that actually decides what has been achieved by what we have done. Such a sentiment sounded fatalistic back in 2001. In hindsight, however, his prognosis about mass uprisings seems breathtakingly prescient. As with individuals, societies too need to adopt devices of lessening pain. Just as nirvana is unachievable to most, the perfect society is a utopia. It is the search that matters. And we need to carry the social and political equivalent of morphine derivatives to lessen the pain along the way.

Journey to unknown
On the face of it, coupling Hitler with Gandhi, even in a poem, as Vimmi Sadarangani does in the verse that begins this column, is nothing short of sacrilege. But these two figures merely represent binary opposites. One inflicts pain; the other is a healer. 'Dead certainty' is Hitler's motto; 'unending doubts', Gandhi's credo. One sleeps, the other walks. What better metaphor could one find to depict darkness and light, to create some space for playing the game of hide and seek that is human life?

Those who can cope, survive. Learning to play the game lessens the agonies of living. But if there is a God, Nature, Destiny or History, what does He do when Hitler is not sleeping? With the irreverence of pragmatists, Rorty would have dismissed the question of truth, and pointed out the primacy of struggle. Ramu, on the other hand, would have probably woven a story around a mythological figure to establish the importance of hope, as he did with Sita's Kitchen in 1992, to cope with the consequences of the Babri Masjid tragedy. Both would have depended on happenstance to see what happened to their interpretations.

Kabir talks about the contradictory facets of truth – kagad lekhi (accumulated knowledge) and aakhan dekhi (life experienced) – and proposes submission to the divine as an escape from the confusion created by these two. Richard Rorty, a pragmatist, and Ramchandra Gandhi, an adherent of Vedantic adwaita (the non-dualism of 'not this, not that'), lived and died to show that the trail we take for the journey of life is for us to choose and build. There are no easy escape routes. John Dewey, the patron saint of pragmatism, defines philosophy as "a catholic and far-sighted theory of adjustment of the conflicting factors of life". Ramu probably found that definition quite agreeable, and lived to deal with it as best as he could.

What will Rorty and Ramu do if they meet wherever it is that they have gone? They will probably play hide and seek, a game that best exemplifies the discipline called philosophy.
 
 
    
C K Lal  is columinst for this magazine and Nepali Times