Books

SECULARISM, IDENTITY, AND ENCHANTMENT by Akeel Bilgrami. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014.

Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment by Akeel Bilgrami, represents an ambitious project despite its own modest descriptive label as ‘the moral psychology of politics’. The book is a collection of twelve essays with overlapping concerns around the issue of the relation between religion and politics. The significance of this issue cannot be overstated, which has become more and more contentious with the progress of the Enlightenment thought. Despite its original assurance of the separation of religion and politics, it is now witnessed that the place of religion in the public sphere, associated with questions of identity, has produced even more potent grounds to engender violence physically and epistemically.

The concept of secularism, as we commonly understand it, is in conflict with identity (particularly religious), which is grounded in the framework of a disenchanted Enlightenment worldview. One of the major issues tackled in this book is precisely to challenge this genealogy of secularism, and to reconfigure the grounds for this concept, and further the liberal democratic ideals, in the light of the dissenting intellectual tradition and a history of European Romanticism, and thereby, to discuss what may be termed ‘radical’ Enlightenment. An important consideration in this regard is that the understanding of this tradition is not historically bound, but relies on an eclectic expansion and interpretation of the intellectual and conceptual contours of this tradition by the author. This reconfiguration of the tradition then, can accommodate figures like Marx, as well as Gandhi, both belonging to the same dissenting lineage in their critique of the modern Enlightenment world.

This intervention by Bilgrami is quite significant, especially with regards to the perspective and method of analysis, regarding Gandhi in mainstream western philosophical traditions. Outside the domain of social and political theory, where there are significant contributions in the assessment of Gandhi’s thought as a theoretical alternative to the Enlightenment worldview, within the philosophical discourse1 at best, Gandhi is viewed as an ethical thinker and someone with moral integrity; however, Bilgrami’s claim is far more radical, and argues for a philosophical integrity to Gandhi’s thought, which includes abstract epistemic, as well as methodological commitments. This is not an ordinary task, as presenting a consistent philosophical picture of Gandhi’s thought, especially in the context of the western philosophical academia, is not aided by Gandhi’s own writings, which at one level are considered scattered and ‘inconsistent’, and at the other, devoid of ‘philosophical technicality’, which can distract one from their intellectual depth and originality. Bilgrami’s assertion then, that Gandhi is perhaps the only philosopher, apart from Heidegger, to achieve a sustained integration of political, moral and epistemological themes (118), is crucial to not only the study of Gandhi as a philosopher, but also to Bilgrami’s own argument in this book, which in part, seeks to carry the insight of Gandhi’s philosophical critique of modern western civilization for a reconfigured conception of secularism and democratic ideals, outside of the established lineage of Enlightenment. It is this aspect of the book that will therefore be the focus of the review.

As part of Bilgrami’s argument, the question of the integrity of Gandhi’s thought is critical to addressing his insights as a philosopher. What becomes particularly pertinent in this regard is the issue of epistemic commitments, which is the most contentious issue. According to Bilgrami, Gandhi’s notion of truth is exclusively an experiential and moral notion; and this articulation of truth for Gandhi serves to repudiate the cognitive notion of truth, which is the paradigmatic view of truth within the scientific outlook. The dominant status of the scientific worldview and rationality, that has come to be the lasting legacy of Enlightenment, is what allows the world to be seen as a resource and therefore, as controlled and mastered. The cognitive notion of truth that Gandhi rejects refers to the descriptive property of propositions and statements, which at their core have a detached, ‘objective’ and purely ‘descriptive’ perspective of the world. There are two critical issues that need to be addressed here – one has to do with the philosophical dualism of fact and value that is inherent in the notion of truth characterized by Bilgrami, and the other, based on this dualism, is the stance ascribed to Gandhi in terms of his epistemological commitments, which truly are not epistemic but something akin to a moral state of mind, at best commendable, but not illustrative of any contribution to our understanding of fundamental epistemic issues.

Bilgrami critiques the ‘Humean moral psychology’ wherein the perception of values is entirely a projection of our mental capacities and dispositions, and therefore by implication, nature in itself is brute and valueless. It is only our imagination that ascribes value and meaning to nature. This view of nature as entirely brute, in the British Romantic critique, is ascribed to the emergence of Newtonianism, despite the fact that the emergence of the scientific worldview predates Newton, with figures like Bacon and Hartlib. Bilgrami argues that this move reflects the transformative impact that the Newtonian worldview brings in with regard to the self-conscious worldly alliances forged between scientific organizations, commercial interests, and the latitudinarian Anglican establishment (188). This discussion hinges on the relation between fact and value. The Humean worldview posits values as a function of human mental capacities and therefore, largely subjective in nature; whereas Bilgrami is trying to argue for a value-laden aspect of nature that has been destroyed by a political move, i.e. nature bereft of value is not a function of science (epistemology) itself, but of the ideologues of commercial interests and power (politics).

To substantiate this stance Bilgrami explicitly articulates Abrams’ thesis of ‘natural supernaturalism’ to present the value-laden nature of the world without resorting to values being a function of our subjectivity. This thesis broadly asserts that nature is not exhausted by a scientific description of it. Values and meaning are properties of which the natural sciences have nothing to say and nature therefore, cannot be exhaustively addressed via a study of the natural sciences. However, these values are not just ‘supernatural’ because they are immanent yet perceptible in nature, and make normative demands on us, and that is precisely the reason why they are articulated as ‘natural’ (183-184). Thus, in a single act of perception why is it not possible to admit to the presence of H2O in a river, as well as having a value and meaning aspect to it? Bilgrami admits to the presence of intractable philosophical considerations that emerge from this articulation, which due to their complexity have been left unaddressed in the Humean philosophical tradition and the stance of the subjective aspect of value is taken up (185).

The co-presence of natural properties and value properties in the act of perception of nature, seemingly bridges the relation between fact and value, however, invokes another underlying intractable dualism, which is that of theory and practice. Is a fact or for that matter even value, given to us in nature or is it constituted within the framework of a theory? A response to this question goes back to Bilgrami’s characterization of Gandhi’s notion of truth as a purely experiential and moral notion (a question of practice and agency in the world). In considering Gandhi as having abstract epistemic commitments and yet repudiating the cognitive value of truth, a charge that Bilgrami makes against Gandhi, all that Gandhi is left with is truth-telling (118-119), which by itself is an unimpressive ideal for epistemic commitment. It illustrates at best only what ought to be done and not how to know what is to be done, and more importantly, it does not address the question of how to determine the truth that is to be told. What is unaddressed theoretically, in this formulation of Gandhi’s position on truth, is the constitutive role of practice in determining cognitive truth itself – a line of thought being pursued in the contemporary debates on skill and know-how. This is also evident in Bilgrami’s assessment of Gandhi’s act of spinning cotton as merely a symbolic act (117), whereas in Gandhi’s own articulation it is an act of emancipation for the world, grounded in ‘Shastra’ (philosophy).2

In the essay ‘Gandhi (and Marx)’, Bilgrami puts Gandhi and Marx together in their conception of the ideal of an ‘unalienated world’. Further, with regards to Gandhi he makes a careful analysis via four questions of the conceptual transformations that take place in critiquing the modern sources of alienation. These questions are: ‘(i) How and when did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources? (ii) How and when did we transform the concept of human beings into the concept of citizens? (iii) How and when did we transform the concept of people into the concept of populations? and (iv) How and when did we transform the concept of knowledges to live by into the concept of expertise to rule by?’ (133)

Through these questions the picture that emerges of Gandhi’s intellectual depth is far more potent than what has been encountered so far in the book. The trajectory of exploration via these questions, details some of our worst fears about modern civilization. However, on the question of the transformation of human beings into the concept of citizens, Bilgrami attributes Gandhi’s critique to his pessimism and his shrewd genealogical understanding of the emergence of European politics (146). This analysis of Gandhi does not address the question of political theory in terms of the very conception of human nature. The very assumption about human nature in Enlightenment political theory, as something that needs to be constrained, legitimizes the state and its control on civil society and therefore, disallows self-governance, or in the vocabulary of Gandhi, swaraj. Therefore, this is not an assessment of genealogy, but one of fundamental assumptions about political theory.

The other very significant aspect of this essay is the articulation of the ideal of an ‘unalienated life’ as the basis of reconsidering the ideals of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. In delineating Marx and Gandhi’s affinities on the sources of alienation in modern society, he finds agreement in their critiques on two salient aspects viz. (i) on the relation between human beings and nature, and (ii) the relations among human beings. He points out that in distinction from Gandhi, Marx’s account was more specific as to the account of labour (151-152), and therefore, he does not address the issues of alienation with man’s own labour and with the products of his labour, in his characterisation of the sources of alienation vis-à-vis Marx and Gandhi.

This exclusion cannot be accounted for as a lack of affinity on the issue of labour; while it is true, the centrality that the concept of labour had for Marx was not there in Gandhi, nonetheless, the law of bread labour is an essential aspect of understanding Gandhian thought, particularly, in terms of a critique of the modern political economy, and also in addressing the dualism of intellectual and manual labour. The question of labour being unaddressed does not allow the issue of technology to be raised, as representing an epistemic relation, underpinned by the universality of the scientific method, between human beings and the world, and not just as a case of bad politics. Marx, Gandhi and also Heidegger, each invoke a distinction between modern technology and its alternatives or its predecessors, through different perspectives.

The epistemic commitment ascribed to Gandhi in this book, cannot be adequately analysed without contending with the issue of the relation between fact and value, theory and practice, in the framework of modern western philosophical thought. Given the framework, Gandhi’s epistemic commitments amount to only having a moralising force, but do not appeal to the framework of an alternative epistemology.

Shriddha Shah

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Hindu College, University of Delhi

 

1. This point is being made specifically with regards to the discipline of philosophy, with perhaps the exception of Anuradha Veeravalli, Gandhi in Political Theory: Truth, Law and Experiment (Ashgate, Chesterfield, 2014), which argues that Gandhi’s approach was conscious and systematic in challenging the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions of modern civilization and post-Enlightenment political theory.

2. M.K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Volume 95), (30 April 1947-6 July 1947), p. 270. https://www. gandhiashram-sevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatma-gandhi-collected-works-volume-95.pdf (Accessed on 24 February, 2019).

 

EAST WEST STREET: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2016.

SOMETIMES in a world, dominated by bestsellers and popular mulch, where the banal outshines the original, one occasionally stumbles on a classic, monumental, multilayered book. It demands that the reader come alive and perform a pilgrimage, an archeology of responding to an act of storytelling, of listening to a study of violence refracted through many lenses. An era is read through many levels becoming a lens, a mirror, a kaleidoscope, a spectrum, a black hole as the reader traverse through layers of evil, all the while retaining his faith in civics and the power of law. East West Street by Philippe Sands is such a book. Reviewers are generally surgical about a book but here one must pause to salute a remarkable work of scholarship.

East West Street is a book haunted by power of memory, by a sense of loss, as Sands searches for his family in the mayhem of WW II. It is this personal quest that anchors the book, to know the fate of each one who died, to tell their story. Photographs and family albums acquire a power in this book. What looks grey, faded becomes a lifeline to memory. Genocide not only erases life, it emasculates memory. Yet Sands is committed to remembering because he sees the act of memory as trusteeship that initializes a return to justice.

East West Street is a narrative, an act of faith which shows how the ethics of memory can anchor the creativity of law. It begins as a search for a family and a city as Philippe Sands is invited to Lviv, a Ukrainian city to deliver a lecture. Lviv itself was a mutant of a city. As Sands observes, the control of the city and its name changed eight times between September 1914 to July 1944. It begins as a fragment of the Austria-Hungarian empire; it becomes successively a part of Russia, Austria, Russia, back to Austria, Ukraine, Germany Poland, and finally becomes the Ukrainian city it is today. As a microcosm of Europe, the city reflects the turbulence of the 20th century, the myriad conflicts that tore the city apart. One walks through the chameleonic city as one walks through an exhibition of mnemonics, where a building, a park bench, a monument, enact different meanings as it moves through different periods of history. When Sands walks through it, he carries maps from three different periods to make sense of what it has been through. The reader is often tempted to do the same, discovering a city in its various incarnations in the process.

At a third level, the narrative is a fascinating pursuit of two of the greatest concepts of international law, tracing both the idea of ‘crimes against humanity’ and the term ‘genocide’. As a lawyer fighting cases about Yugoslavia, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Sands was familiar with the words. They marked two different crimes, one violating the sanctity of the individual and one erasing the very existence of a group. The two concepts grew side by side and Sands discovered that both originate in the same city. The scholars who developed them, nursed through the travails of war and the indifference of the state, both studied at the local university, shared the same professor, but never met. Both create the framework of international law as it emerges at the courts of Nuremberg. East West Street becomes a moving biography of the dialectic between the two concepts and the two scholars, who shared an uneasy relationship with each other.

Hersch Lauterpacht, who formulated the idea of crimes against humanity, became a professor of law at Cambridge; Rafael Lemkin who coined the word genocide became a professor at Duke. Sand traces the biography of the concept and the men, weaving it with the history of his own lost family. Biography, genealogy, intellectual history combine to create a sense of scholarship and a salute to the meaning of life. A book that articulates itself in shades of grey retains its optimism till the end. Courage is not about giving up hope and an articulate hope becomes the basis of a new civics. Yet, for all its passion, its ruthless pursuit of memory from morsel to fragment, there is nothing sentimental about the book. It carries a depth of emotion as it outlines loss, recovery, friendship and survival. It looks evil in the eye by making Hans Frank the centre of almost a third of the book.

Hans Frank was not only Hitler’s lawyer but also one of the major jurists of National Socialism, and serves as a conceptual counterpart to Lauterpatch and Lemkin. Frank provided the banality of justification for erasing groups in terms of law. He enjoyed power, he enjoyed the greed power allowed and let his wife trade lives for jewellery and costumes in the ghetto. Frank kept a dairy through these years which became the fulcrum of the Nuremberg trails. Frank was the self-styled legal theorist of the Nazi regime. He anchored Nazism through law, not only by creating the Academy for German Law, but by sponsoring the International Penal and Penitentiary Congress as well. Frank treated Poland as a colony and its inhabitants as slaves. His Dairy in 38 volumes is a chronicle of the eradication of Poles and Jews. It is this part of the book that captures a particular quality of evil that embodied clerical, antiseptic governance which erased populations as a pure act of hygiene and governance. Frank wanted the complete obliteration of Jews as the ideological anchor point of the regime, and genocide which became an everyday act of governance.

Sands’ scholarship and brilliance comes out in these pages. He never dehumanizes Frank, in fact, he captures him through his son’s eyes. Yet, he has a sense of the surreal, as he describes how Frank inaugurates a Baedeker to invite tourists to his new Germany where a million more Jews were erased. Throughout the Nuremburg trial, one gets a sense of Frank toying with the idea of guilt as if it was a costume ball of pragmatic possibilities. He pretended shades of guilt at Nuremberg yet one must remember that Frank was proud to be identified as a war criminal by the New York Times in 1945. For Frank the eradication of Jews, their complete erasure was a test of the integrity and efficiency of the Nazi regime. While tracing the career of Frank, Sands traces the parallel and erratic history of the concepts Lauterpatch and Lemkin invented.

Lauterpatch’s idea of crimes against humanity enters the discourse with a more professional ease. Lemkin’s idea of genocide is treated as alien, and not quite law as it was also seen as applicable to the allies given their ideas of colony and race. Sands comments that genocide has more power in folklore but Lauterpatch shows the systemic notion of such violence, where the target group is first denationalized so it has no claim to law, before it is dehumanized and treated more like vermin than a part of humanity. It was a gradualism of method that eventually moved to complete extremism.

Sands also captures the role of survivor and refugee in this phase of Europe, while tracing each member, one senses the sheer sense of loss, the loneliness and silence that haunts each one. The refugee and survivor become the classic figures of this era. Sands describes them as ghosts in search of certainty and hope. Sands in fact, by fusing the narrative of Lauterpatch and Lemkin, shows that law, international law, links an ethics of memory to an ethics of innovation as hope. Faith in law becomes a symptom of faith in humanity. Without the two, humanity may not survive.

A book to celebrate, gift and learn from. One wishes it was recommended reading for a generation of legal students which sees a career in law as a mix of plumbing and aspirational mobility.

Shiv Visvanathan

Member, Compost Heap; Adjunct Professor, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru