About the Work
This is a collection of essays by Humayun Kabir, written in the middle of the twentieth century and gathered together with a short preface dated New Delhi, May 31, 1955. The book brings together pieces of different origins and occasions. Two of them, “Science, Democracy and Islam” and “Freedom, Authority and Imagination,” had appeared in volumes published by Messrs. Allen & Unwin and are reprinted here with that publisher’s consent. Three others appear in book form for the first time, though two of these had earlier lives as addresses to the Indian Philosophical Congress: “The Study of Philosophy” was delivered as a sectional Chairman’s paper, and “The Welfare State” as the General President’s address at the Congress’s Silver Jubilee Session, held in Ceylon. “Reflections on Gandhian Thought and Practice” grew out of a paper presented two years earlier at an international seminar on Mahatma Gandhi. Kabir notes in his preface that the essays were written amid the distractions of administrative work, a remark that quietly tells us something about the author’s double life as a thinker and a public official.
“One God meant one universe and therefore one law, Belief in the unity of Godhead was, therefore, one of the conditions for the emergence of Science, but by itself it was not enough.”
The volume’s contents run from a long opening essay on science, democracy, and Islam through chapters on the concept of democracy, the rights of man, and the welfare state, then to a meditation on freedom, authority, and imagination, a piece on the study of philosophy, a discussion of the East and the problems of education, and a closing set of reflections on Gandhian thought and practice. The range is wide, but the concerns are tightly interlocked: the relation of the individual to society, the meaning and conditions of democracy, the place of reason and imagination in human affairs, and the question of what the modern world, with its enormous states and its machinery of propaganda, is doing to the human person. The essays are expository and argumentative rather than narrative; they move by analysis and illustration, drawing on the history of science, on Islamic thought, on political theory, and on the author’s reading of Gandhi. The book belongs to a genre of mid-century reflection in which a writer trained in philosophy addresses the political and educational predicaments of his time, and it is written in a plain, unhurried prose that prefers the carefully distinguished concept to the rhetorical flourish.
Context
The essays were composed in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the early years of Indian independence, at a moment when the world was absorbing two catastrophes within a single generation and when the new states of Asia were working out what democracy and welfare would mean for them. Kabir writes as an Indian, and the Indian setting matters throughout. He speaks of universities in India where philosophy teaching has been curtailed or abolished, of students turning away from metaphysics toward economics in the hope of material gain, and of a country that was once a foremost centre of philosophical study now showing diminished interest in it. He writes, too, as a man familiar with administration, and his preface’s apology for writing amid administrative distractions is more than a courtesy: the essays repeatedly test abstract principles against the practical business of governing, planning, and educating.
The intellectual context is equally important. The book engages with the great political vocabularies of the age—democracy, socialism, the welfare state, human rights—at a time when those vocabularies were being contested with unusual violence. It engages with the Marxian interpretation of politics as a reflex of economic organization, with the totalitarian states that had turned propaganda into an ornate ritual, and with the new world bodies and charters through which the postwar order hoped to secure a basic minimum of human requirements for everyone. It also engages with the longer history of ideas: with Greek political thought and the original meaning of democracy as the rule of the demos, with Aristotle’s logic and the Islamic philosophers who resisted it, with Plato’s banishment of the artists from his Republic, with the Romantic assertion of individual rights, and with Freud’s account of the unconscious. The book’s frame of reference is thus both very old and very immediate, and its characteristic move is to bring the two together—to ask what the ancient problem of the one and the many, or of the universal and the particular, has to do with the price of food, the size of the state, and the education of children.
Structure of the Book
The book opens with a preface and a table of contents, and then proceeds through a sequence of essays that can be read as a single extended argument even though each piece stands on its own. The first and longest essay, “Science, Democracy and Islam,” sets out the conceptual foundation on which much of the rest depends. It begins with the conditions that made science possible—belief in a homogeneous universe, belief in the uniformity of natural law, and an insistent belief in the value of the individual instance—and then traces these conditions through the history of religious thought, from the many gods of earlier religions to the one God of the Semitic faiths, and from the miracle-loving temper of earlier religion to the scientific demand for verification. From there it turns to Islam, arguing that the Islamic emphasis on the unity of the Godhead, on the reality of the individual, and on the unity of all aspects of life bears a remarkable resemblance to the presuppositions of science and democracy, and that the continuity of scientific progress since the advent of Islam suggests a causal connection between them. The essay closes with a discussion of equality, marriage, inheritance, and the abolition of tribal and family names as instruments for enforcing equality within the community.
The second essay, “The Concept of Democracy,” takes up the ambiguity of the term itself. It asks why the same word can mean such different things in different ages and to different people, examines the objection that democracy may be used without any definite meaning at all, and argues that while some ambiguity is inevitable in any concept, there is nevertheless a core of meaning that divergent uses must not destroy. It distinguishes the actual from the normative in political concepts, notes the emotional charge that attaches to ideals, and discusses the difficulty inherent in language itself. The essay then moves to the relation between means and ends, arguing that the two cannot be divorced without violence to the meaning of each, and concludes with three summary statements about democracy as a continual attempt at equalization, as a process without a foreseeable end, and as a unity of means and ends. It ends with a discussion of toleration, of the distinction between opinion and action, and of the conditions under which a one-party system could conceivably reflect a democratic society.
The third essay, “The Rights of Man,” proposes a modern charter of human rights securing a basic minimum of food, clothing, housing, education, and sanitary services for all individuals in all communities, and asks what degree of control and interference by the state is necessary to secure those standards. It argues that political democracy is the basis on which the structure of all human rights can be raised, and that the corollary to a world charter of human rights is the creation of some world authority—while acknowledging that there is no immediate prospect of such an authority being set up.
The fourth essay, “The Welfare State,” begins with a meditation on man as a denizen of two worlds, subject to general laws as an object in the universe and responsible for his actions as a centre of self-conscious experience, and on his simultaneous uniqueness and sociality. It then examines the nature of political obligation, the relation of politics to economics, and the Marxian interpretation of the political structure as a reflex of economic organization. The essay defines the welfare state as an organization in which an impersonal entity, the State, concentrates all social functions and services in one common agency, and it identifies centralization as an invariable characteristic of all welfare states. It warns of the risk that the welfare state may identify the good of those in power with the good of the community, notes the inconsistency by which the state seeks to influence thought and feeling while measuring welfare in merely material terms, and closes with an account of Gandhi’s concept of the welfare state, arrived at not from individual rights but from the individual’s obligation, and with a warning about the dangers of centralization.
The fifth essay, “Freedom, Authority and Imagination,” opens with the experience of two World Wars within a quarter of a century and the crisis of a civilization whose achievements are crashing around it. It develops the concept of society as an organism, carefully distinguishing the social organism from a physical one, and then analyzes the crisis as a conflict within and between individuals and groups. It introduces the distinction between social order and social content, argues that maladjustment between them is almost inevitable, and describes the law of inertia of social forms and the identification of society’s interests with a particular group’s as the factors that increase resistance to change. It discusses the dangers of violent revolution, and then turns to the insufficiency of intellect alone in education, the need to educate instincts, emotions, and will together, and the role of art and imagination in reconciling freedom and order. The essay closes with the argument that a critique of imagination is an essential prolegomenon to any metaphysics.
The sixth essay, “The Study of Philosophy,” begins with the paradox that India, once a foremost centre of philosophical study, now shows diminished interest in it, and asks why. It discusses the value of philosophy, the defects in existing courses, and the nature of knowledge as a process of continuous growth in which what seems knowledge in one context is later seen as error when the context widens.
The seventh essay, “East and the Problems of Education,” and the closing “Reflections on Gandhian Thought and Practice” complete the volume, the latter returning to the themes of duty, social service, and the organic unity of society that run through the whole book.
Inside the Book
The Preface and the Volume’s Occasion
Humayun Kabir opens the collection by explaining what binds its essays together: they address both the internal problems of a nation and the international questions of the age. He acknowledges Messrs. Allen & Unwin for allowing two pieces already published under their imprint—”Science, Democracy and Islam” and “Freedom, Authority and Imagination”—to appear here, while three others are printed in book form for the first time. Of those, two had earlier lives as addresses to the Indian Philosophical Congress: “The Study of Philosophy” began as a sectional chairman’s paper, and “The Welfare State” was delivered as the General President’s address at the Congress’s Silver Jubilee session in Ceylon. “Reflections on Gandhian Thought and Practice” grew out of a paper given two years earlier at an international seminar on Mahatma Gandhi. Kabir notes, with a touch of candour, that the essays were written amid the distractions of administrative work, and he dates the preface from New Delhi on the last day of May, 1955. The contents then lay out the sequence the reader will follow, from the opening essay on science, democracy and Islam through considerations of democracy, human rights, the welfare state, freedom and authority, philosophy, education, and finally the reflections on Gandhi.
Science, Democracy and Islam
The first essay argues that three beliefs are basic to the growth of science. The first is that the universe is one homogeneous whole, not carved into separate realms governed by divergent laws. The second is that nature’s laws are uniform, immune to change or mutation. The third is an equally insistent belief in the value of the individual instance. Where any of these conditions is missing, general scientific progress becomes impossible, even though isolated great scientists may still appear. The first two beliefs are really two faces of a single fact: without a monistic universe there can be no universal law, since a plurality of worlds would rest on distinction and be governed by different laws. The belief in uniformity can be violated in two ways—by imagining rival gods contending over separate domains, or by splitting the natural from the supernatural, which implies two sets of laws. The insistence on “One World” is therefore essential to scientific thought.
This conception of unity first expresses itself in religious faith. Earlier religions recognised rival gods over distinct regions—of the mountains, the woodlands, the sea—and the Old Testament still shows traces of such thinking when prophets appeal to the “God of our fathers” and seek help against the gods of others. In time the multitude of gods gave way to one Supreme Being, Lord of all creation. All religions show this tendency, but nowhere so markedly as in the Semitic faiths born of desert lands, where vast brooding skies and unbroken plains impress a sense of unity in which all individuality is lost. One God meant one universe and therefore one law. Yet this alone was not enough. Earlier Semitic religions still clung to the miracle, and the essence of a miracle is that it defies the general run of law; to recognise one is to deny nature’s uniformity and to rely on faith rather than reason. Both Christian and Jewish thought accepted miracles and supernatural manifestations as essential to religious faith, and their prophets were men of extraordinary deeds whose departure from natural law was taken as further proof of supernatural gifts. Such an attitude may feed religious fervour, but it cannot nurture a scientific temper. The scientist cannot rest while an exception stands unexplained; science advances precisely by pursuing the seeming exception until it reveals a wider, more general law.
Belief in the unfailing uniformity of nature is thus essential, and it must extend to the yet-unknown world as much as to the known. But even a uniform world, with no division between natural and supernatural, is not enough. There must be equal emphasis on the value of the individual instance. If uniformity alone sufficed, science would have developed as soon as belief in one God arose, and it would have been a purely deductive discipline deriving conclusions from general premises. Science, however, is essentially inductive. Advance came only when general principles were wedded to brute facts, when observation of particular instances led to general theory. The empirical had to acquire a new dignity before science could emerge, and man’s attention had to turn from unearthly glory to the familiar world, from speculation on transcendental truths to observation of the perceptible world’s variety and grandeur. The importance of the individual appears again in the constant demand for verification of every general law—the essence of the inductive or experimental method.
The Scientific Temper and the Democratic Spirit
The scientific appeal to verification is at the same time an appeal to the individual instance, asserting the particular against the claim of general law. In democracy, the individual’s claim to liberty is likewise an assertion of his importance against the dictates of the community. The homogeneity of the universe demands no preferential treatment for any group or individual; applied to human conduct, this yields democracy, in which all men are equal in the eyes of the law. What appears as scientific temper in thought appears as democratic spirit in politics. The greatest triumphs of science and democracy have come since the seventeenth century, though anticipations are visible from the beginning of the present millennium. Progress in this period is almost continuous, and continuity is itself an essential characteristic of scientific advance, each generation inheriting and adding to what its predecessors achieved. A sudden breach would suggest the absence of a scientific climate, though even then a genius might achieve magnificent results. Continuous progress over a thousand years suggests that some new force changed men’s attitude toward nature.
Islam and the Unity of God
Analysis of Islam’s basic concepts reveals a remarkable similarity to these principles, and the fact that science’s triumphant progress follows soon after Islam’s emergence suggests a causal connection. What lends this plausibility is not the number of individual Arab scientists but the unbroken continuity of scientific development since Islam’s advent. The first presupposition of both science and democracy is a unitary world, and Islam emphasised the unity of the Godhead in a manner rarely equalled: “There is no God but God.” Islam carried this urge so far as to deny any religion but one. Each country and age had its own prophet, preaching to his own people in his own language; language, people and period differ, but the religion was the same. Islam repudiated the idea that any individual founded a religious faith, holding that Muhammad is only one among many servants of God, and Muslims reject the European description of their faith as Muhammadanism, insisting it is equally the religion of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and a hundred other named and unnamed prophets. Islam’s claim to universality follows from this emphasis on God’s unity: as a religion valid for all times, it must reveal the eternal nature of truth. Truth cannot change, though time may overlay it with accretions that hide or distort its real nature, and removing these is the prophets’ main function. Basically all religions are the same; they appear different because they have been distorted differently in different countries. Ideas do change in the course of time, and philosophy’s effort to fix thought in stable forms is doomed to failure, since concepts change in the very process of articulation. Islam’s contention that religion’s nature has changed repeatedly is therefore not surprising; what is surprising is its claim to be the final form, needing no more prophets—but of this, the essay promises, more hereafter.
The Individual, the Empirical, and Islamic Philosophy
Emphasis on God’s unity, and therefore on nature’s unity, broke down the distinction between natural and supernatural. In religious experience it led to the breakdown of the distinction between secular and religious. Islam is noted for its emphasis on the unity of all aspects of life; it recognises no distinction between politics and religion, between economics and worship. In the Qur’an’s words, the whole of the universe is a place of worship. Denying the distinction between the phenomenal and the transcendent, Muslim religious thought values nature not as a symbol of hidden truth but for its own sake. When the reality of the empirical is recognised, the particular comes into its own, for the empirical is always revealed in particular facts. The highest development of the particular is the human personality, and the Qur’an says that man is a trustee of the free personality which he accepts at his peril.
The over-riding unity of God seems challenged by the individual’s uniqueness, and Arab thought faced this difficulty. The Wajudi philosophers continued the Platonic tradition with a pantheistic picture, against the prevailing spirit of Islam. According to Islam, the individual cannot be a mere element in a universal system but has independent status. The Shahudi philosophers held that the individual is real and maintains identity even when confronted with the Absolute, illustrating this by stars shut out by sunlight—the sun’s existence cannot cancel the stars’. This emphasis on the individual’s reality distinguishes Islamic philosophy from earlier schools. Islamic thought was greatly influenced by the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, yet despite its reverence for his Logic, Muslim philosophers could not accept his emphasis on mere deductive reasoning. Ibni-Taimiya tried to refute Aristotelian Logic because it does not recognise experience’s contribution to knowledge. He pointed out that empirical knowledge is invariably direct and immediate; we recognise the particular not through inference but the knowledge of the particular makes inference possible. He rejected Aristotle’s schema of major and minor premises as superfluous to reasoning.
There is thus no doubt regarding the affinity between Islam’s basic concepts and the principles governing science, which explains why scientific progress has been almost continuous since Islam’s advent. That the relation has not always been seen is due to the incursion of extraneous elements into Muslim religious thought. Despite recognising the change and mutation to which all human thought is subject, Islam sought to make an exception in its own favour. Muslim rationalists sought to explain this seeming inconsistency: Islam changed religion’s basis from faith to reason. So long as religion rested on unquestioning faith, it was subject to variations arising from differences in individual character and temperament, and changing times made changes inevitable. When religious faith was based on reason, the scope for variation was ruled out. Reason is universal by nature; what reason once accepts as true must always be true. With the shift to reason, Islam had done away with the need for repeated rediscovery of truth by successive prophets. The line of defence is attractive and plausible, the essay concedes, and one may grant it much.
Equality, Zakat, and the Erasure of Family Pride
Islam introduced freedom of marriage among all adherents, which the text calls both a test and a guarantee of democracy, and the Islamic conceptions of Zakat and inheritance also contribute to this end. The abolition of tribal and family names is stressed as an instrument for enforcing equality within the community: inequality of wealth tends to ossify into classes and castes, but this tendency is minimised or checked by eliminating the marks that perpetuate distinction. A family name is a sure harbinger of family pride; it places the individual and defines his status by accident of birth rather than by personal qualities. Abolishing tribal or family names obliterates such marks and concentrates attention on the individual.
Science, Democracy, Islam: A Common Movement of Thought
A close analogy between the basic concepts of science, democracy and Islam is briefly indicated. Differences in emphasis exist, and the basic principles were not always worked to their logical conclusion, which accounts for a time-lag between their manifestations. These must be regarded as a common movement of human thought, in which the impulse toward generalisation and unity was matched by an increasing realisation of the importance of the particular and the individual.
The Modern Charter of Human Rights
The argument turns first to what a modern charter of human rights would actually require: a basic minimum of food, clothing, housing, education, and sanitary services guaranteed to every individual in every community and country. Since this cannot be achieved without planning and control, individual rights must be subordinated to the community to the extent needed to secure those claims—but once the minimum is assured, the individual must be free to press for further claims without interference from state or society. The crux lies in deciding what the minimum is and how much state control is permissible; wide disagreement on either point could wreck any formulation unless differences are resolved without conflict or violence. Hence the decisive importance of political democracy: the community as a whole must determine both the minimum and the degree of authority vested in the State. Without political democracy, the very possibility of social and economic democracy is destroyed, so political democracy becomes the basis on which the whole structure of human rights can be raised.
The same logic applies to the relation between the group and the world. It must be the world that determines the content of the four fundamental requirements and the method of securing them, while in all other matters each community remains free to pursue its own highest values—subject to a world authority, democratically based on the will of all groups and individuals, to guarantee fundamental rights. Science is making the world one, breaking down separate systems of authority, so the corollary to a world charter is some form of world authority. Since no such authority is immediately in prospect, the practical step is to define the minimum requirements and the permissible degree of interference with liberty, and ask all States to accept and enforce them—confining the charter to the content of the four rights and the limits of state control.
The Welfare State: Man’s Dual Nature
Chapter Four, “The Welfare State,” opens with man’s perennial quest to understand the meaning of his life. He is a denizen of two worlds: as an object in the universe he obeys immutable natural laws, while as a centre of self-conscious experience he is responsible for his actions in a way without parallel in the physical world. This duality is complicated by his being at once a unique individual and a member of society—unable to survive without co-operation, yet solitary in his inmost being, since his most significant experiences cannot be shared. His uniqueness is like the centre of a circle, a point with position but no dimensions, graspable only by reference to the circumference; it can function only in a social milieu. That is why ethics, economics, and politics have from the beginning formed essential ingredients in man’s study of the self. Politics and economics both deal with group activities, and both may ultimately be regarded as ethics applied to the problems of the group. Politics has also sought to explain why the individual must subordinate his interest to the group—the central fact of political obligation. Neither the imposition of the strong on the weak nor the theory of a mutual contract can explain why a man agrees to sacrifice himself at society’s behest; all explanations in terms of individual self-interest must fail, for political actions have significance only in a social context. The close relation of politics to economics underlies the Marxian interpretation, which treats the political structure as a reflex of economic organization and sees continual struggle among members of society over limited resources.
The Centralizing Tendency and Its Risks
The Welfare State is defined as an organization in which an impersonal entity—the State—concentrates all social functions and services in one common agency, and this tendency to centralization is an invariable characteristic. Limited resources must be deployed in the best possible manner, requiring a central agency to select among competing claims and to prevent any group or region from taking a disproportionate share. Planning and centralization are therefore essential features, though they carry the risk of a totalitarian State. The Welfare State seeks to replace the prophet and the priest, the law-giver and the jurist, the family and the community, catering for every conceivable need—but because it operates only on a mass scale, its services are generalized and follow patterns expected to apply despite individual idiosyncrasies. The warning follows that the State is an abstraction operating only through a Government of a small number of individuals, limited by their own individuality. The wrong identification of State and Government is dangerous everywhere, but in a Welfare State the correctives supplied by non-governmental agencies either do not exist or are only partially effective, so those in power may mistake their own good for the community’s.
Welfare, Behaviour, and the Reach of the State
The concept of welfare is often left unanalysed, assumed to follow automatically from the provision of amenities. But amenities are judged by how people react, and reaction expresses itself through behaviour, which is all a State can deal with; not even the most powerful tyrant can be sure of controlling thoughts, and feelings are impervious to regulation. Yet the State has never fully recognized this limitation. Police States of the past, concerned only with law and order, still sought to influence thoughts and attitudes, framing systems of education according to State requirements and reinterpreting history. Because behaviour is the outcome of thought, feeling, and motive, and because thought and action cannot be sharply demarcated, the State seeks to impose uniformity of thought—generally without complete success. This encroachment has become more insistent because the world is more closely interlinked, and more dangerous because the State’s power to influence thought has increased manifold: propaganda has been raised to a fine art, and radio, television, cinema, and newspapers enable the State to whip up enthusiasm for almost any cause. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 is offered as a striking example: Nazism, having risen on condemnation of the Treaty of Versailles and the anti-French feeling it bred, decided during the Games to promote goodwill with France, and the machinery of propaganda was turned on full blast until the French contingent received the heartiest welcome from the populace. In totalitarian States, turning propaganda on or off has become an ornate ritual.
Material Comfort and the Unasked Question
A curious inconsistency marks the Welfare State: while it attempts to influence thought and feeling, it never raises the question of the psychological constituents of well-being, measuring welfare programmes in merely material terms. Communications improve, better houses are built, education expands, diseases are eradicated, hunger and poverty reduced; the commonest citizen of an advanced Welfare State enjoys comforts beyond the dream of the mightiest potentates of the past. The drudgery of household work has been eliminated, machines substituted for human labour in difficult and unpleasant tasks, and social insurances secure equality of rights between men and women. Yet it cannot be categorically stated that all this has increased the individual’s happiness. The growing emphasis on personal rights and privileges has weakened social bonds, and individuals who fought to assert themselves have at times found that in doing so they lost the very satisfaction they sought.
Gandhi’s Reassertion of Duty
The individual finds satisfaction only by behaving as a member of a society in which each regards every fellow’s good as equal in value to his own—both means and end, realizing his own good only by promoting others’. The Welfare State therefore imposes limitations on the individual only in the community’s interest, and since the community is the totality of individuals, ultimately in the individual’s own interest. Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of the Welfare State holds special interest, distinguished not so much by its content as by the steps by which he reached it. Almost all previous concepts stressed individual rights and were meant to safeguard individual interests against society’s claims; Gandhi arrived at the Welfare State from considering the individual’s obligation, convinced that all rights to be deserved or preserved came from duty well done—that the very right to live accrues only when we do the duty of the citizenship of the world. This emphasis on duty was a reaction against the unqualified assertion of individual rights that had dominated political thought since the beginning of the Romantic movement, an assertion necessary at the stage when it was made but eventually pressed to a point where it threatened society’s stability and hence the individual’s welfare. Gandhi’s reassertion of duty as a cementing bond of society was a restatement, in modern terms, of society’s organic unity.
Safeguards Against Centralization
The modern world has special reasons to guard against the risk of centralization inherent in a Welfare State. Enormous powers of mass propaganda seek to iron out individual differences and convert human beings into standardized units, while increasing mechanization and the specialization that follows the division of labour tend to turn men into automatons. These factors are reinforced by the enormous increase in the size and power of the State, so the individual feels more and more like a mere cog in a huge machine. Gandhi sought safeguards: he wanted to limit the machine’s use so it would be man’s slave, not master; he opposed large-scale industrialization as reducing individual freedom and offending against dignity; he disapproved of the enormous increase in the State’s power and functions; and he pleaded for decentralization in industry and politics, since only in small units can human relations be retained and developed. Any organization extending beyond an optimum size tends to become impersonal and almost inhuman. Gandhi’s concept accepts society as an organism in which each member must act for and in the interest of others, so that concern for society’s good is neither an imposition upon nor contrary to individual interests; because of mutual give and take, ends are determined by consent and planning results from co-operative effort. In his own words, realization of Truth is impossible without a complete merging of oneself in, and identification with, this limitless ocean of life; hence there is no escape from social service, no happiness on earth beyond or apart from it, and social service must include every department of life.
Freedom, Authority and Imagination
Chapter Five opens on the experience of two World Wars within barely a quarter of a century—a warning ignorable only at our peril, and evidence enough of the world crisis. Achievements of the human spirit built through centuries are crashing around us, and the tragedy is greater because it is deliberate yet futile: had an earthquake, flood, or volcano overwhelmed us, there would be consolation that destruction came from non-human agencies beyond our control, but this devastation is no visitation of nature but the wild frenzy of men using all their energy, craft, endurance, and courage for mutual carnage. To find a way out we must understand the nature of the society in which such crises arise, and understanding society implies understanding the individuals who constitute it. Society and individual are inseparable though distinct elements of one organic fact; treating them separately for analysis is necessary, but failure to recognize their indissolubility leads to error and disaster. Reason and will must co-operate for the barest preservation of life: the will may not determine reason’s truths but gives reason direction and urgency; reason may not fully control the will but supplies content and prescribes the periphery within which the will operates. Reason without will is impotent; will without reason is blind and empty.
Society as Organism, and the Anatomy of Crisis
The concept of society as an organism is the basic fact, but the analogy with physical organisms must not be pressed too far. In the physical organism, the whole is the fact and its limbs mere moments, their importance mainly functional and determined by the organism’s purposes. It is different with the social organism: its units are centres of individuality and independence, refusing to be regarded as mere components. Society claims allegiance, but the very fact that the claim must be made and may in certain circumstances be refused proves the limbs-to-physical-organism analogy cannot express the real relation of individuals to society.
The Limits of Intellect and the Case for Imagination
The argument turns on a claim about education: intellect alone cannot educate a person. Instincts, emotions, and will must be trained at the same time, because an education confined to the intellect defeats its own purpose. The intellect works through concepts, and to classify something under a concept is the simplest act of generalization; when intellect is made the centre of education, all experience is conceptualized, and the split between thought and the uniquely particular side of our nature grows worse. The result is inner conflict, and social conflict is both its effect and its magnified reflection.
Such conflict can be resolved only by a principle that unites the general with the unique. If concepts were the sole instrument of generalization, harmony would be impossible and man would be doomed to inner strife with disastrous outward consequences. But other kinds of generality exist. The world of feeling is as real as the world of reason and has an immediacy thought often lacks; feelings are unique, yet they can reach a universality that no concept can express. A second non-conceptual generality lies in the will: every decision is unique, yet the same will appears in each. The will’s relation to its decisions cannot be explained as a universal applied to particulars, because the conceptual link is indifferent to particularity—whether instance A or B is chosen makes no difference—whereas the volitional link presupposes that each instance is unique, since one decision cannot replace another. Besides the world of particulars that conceptual analysis handles, there is a world of individuals whose nature abstract thought cannot reveal.
These considerations confirm the hypothesis that modern problems centre on the individual. Reason, being universal and necessary, cannot express the individual, who is what he is through unique possessions rather than shared features. In art, where feelings are uniquely embodied, and in morality, where will appears in unique decisions, true appreciation depends on the significance of the individual—most briefly described as the unique universal. Imagination penetrates uniqueness and achieves aesthetic or moral universality, so a critique of imagination is essential.
Art also expresses emotions and instincts, the only expression mankind has achieved. Intellectual judgment leaves instincts unexpressed; they recede into the unconscious and influence conduct from behind the scenes, so conscious behaviour is often a projection of what has not been expressed. Emotions cannot be totally suppressed: pushed back in one quarter, they spring out elsewhere. Complete suppression and uncontrolled orgy alike bring unhappiness; art, which expresses yet orders emotion, is a constituent of civilization.
Freud described the unconscious as a chaos impervious to time; the repressed is timeless and vital, which explains the universality of the artist’s appeal and of mob behaviour—men who are responsible as individuals behave irresponsibly in a mob, whose savagery mere absence of responsibility cannot explain. Expression marks the passage from unconscious to conscious and is at the same time communication; self-expression is self-socialization. Unexpressed emotions are unsocialized, unchecked, impervious to time, and possess a primeval savagery; in a mob, the surrender of responsibility plus psychophysical sympathy communicates repressed feelings without expressing them.
This explains art’s demand for novelty: expressed feeling is socialized, so repetition cannot excite; the artist brings unexpressed instinct to consciousness, disturbing conventions and established reality—hence the artist as eternal rebel. Plato, more philosopher than artist, banished artists from his Republic, seeking the order and precision of the abstract concept, identifying the State with society, so that the individual must conform to the social pattern. Plato condemns art as the expression of undisciplined nature. But suppression fails: unexpressed emotions remain brute feelings, breaking out in orgies of passion. Failure to raise psychophysical expression to conscious activity brings individual neuroses and social chaos. Art reconciles freedom and order, weaving instincts into conscious reality; our fundamental problem is maintaining the individual’s value in an ordered society, and art has solved this in its own sphere.
A critique of art is thus a critique of imagination. Empirical thinking is governed by the categories of the social form into which we are born; inductive generalizations from past experience are inadequate. We must transcend the mentality of our age and envisage a social order whose dynamic equilibrium charges each social factor with intrinsic potency—impossible while we conform to ways of social thinking evolved from the interplay of unequally weighted forces. In science, progress results from free imagination controlled by coherence and logic; rigid empiricism would have left science where it found it. Philosophy criticizes prevalent social forms through the concept of a perfect, elastic social equilibrium; this concept must be a priori, an imaginative construction. Imagination penetrates social form to its original ingredients, may play with inconsistency, and fuses reason and will in beauty and morality, offering hope of resolving conflict in the theoretical field. A critique of imagination is therefore an essential prolegomenon to any metaphysics that would explain reality in all its manifestations.
The Study of Philosophy
A new chapter opens on a paradox: India, once a foremost centre of philosophical study, now shows diminished interest, reflected in falling numbers of honours and post-graduate students. One university in an area that produced some of the world’s greatest philosophers severely curtailed or abolished philosophy teaching. Even universities with facilities do not attract enough able students—unlike Oxford or Cambridge, where many of the ablest study philosophy for its intellectual discipline regardless of career. The author wonders why Indians, noted for sensitive intellect and interest in the wherefore of everything, show such disinclination. Metaphysics, with its research into first causes and delight in acute dialectics, would seem fitted to the subtle Indian intellect. Many students turn to sociological studies, particularly economics, perhaps mistakenly hoping that theoretical knowledge of money leads to material possession. But this cannot be the only cause; something in the syllabus and organization of philosophy studies fails to satisfy the young student’s love of abstract knowledge or hope of worldly betterment. A restatement of philosophy’s value and an analysis of defects in existing courses may remove the causes of its unpopularity.
The study of philosophy—discovering first causes—is important at any time. No culture flourishes unless it understands its own basic assumptions, which are often regarded as beyond question. Knowledge cannot always be distinguished from what merely passes for knowledge, since error and opinion are never recognized as such until knowledge is attained. Experience is a process of continuous growth, so what seems knowledge in one context is later seen as error when the context widens or alters. The discovery of new facts changes the meaning of previously perceived facts, much as a new tint transforms a whole picture. Because experience is infinitely complex and subject to change over time, the principles operating in experience must be continuously examined.
Such examination is the essence of philosophy: a criticism of its own presuppositions and an effort to make explicit what is implicit in experience, bringing to consciousness what is unconsciously implied in attitudes and actions. The need for this analysis is shown through human activity. Action based on feeling cannot guarantee uniformity or universality, since feelings are essentially relative, and conduct based on feeling would disrupt society; action based on instinct guarantees uniformity of response but tends to the same pattern in the same situation, so instinct is unreliable when situations change. In the modern world of complexity and change, instinct cannot guarantee uniformity of conduct or thought.
The question then arises whether the history of philosophy is justified, and the question extends to history of any type. Human history remains a summation of observed instances; attempts to frame a general law of history or reduce it to a science have failed and are bound to fail. Though history is said to repeat itself, this is true only with wide qualifications: a historical situation has so many elements and ramifications that it cannot be apprehended in its entire complexity. Judging two situations similar rests only on observed similarities, and since many features remain unnoticed, such similarities give no logical guarantee of similar developments. Every historical situation is a sum total of what came before, so strictly no historical situation can be repeated. Nevertheless, history is genuinely valuable for understanding contemporary events, and the present cannot be understood without the past, since the present is largely the result of the past.
The history of philosophy differs from the history of events or of science: in philosophy each philosopher starts almost from the beginning, building his system by criticizing or condemning his predecessors, whereas in science later workers base theories on former findings, and political and economic events show the influence of preceding events, allowing a traceable course of advance. Philosophy rarely shows such direction and progress, and the personal factor plays a more decisive role in formulating a philosophy than in shaping historical events. Yet these differences are ultimately only differences in degree. The belief in the inevitability of progress in human affairs may be doubted; even in science, truths achieved in the past have been lost to later generations, while later philosophers can and do benefit from their predecessors’ experience.
The study of the history of philosophy is integral to philosophy itself. Philosophy’s object is the nature of knowledge and being; to arrive at this nature, it seeks to distinguish the what of a thing from its That—existence, conditioned by space, time and causality. Philosophy thus attempts to understand objects without reference to space and time, making its object in a special sense timeless, so the history of philosophy tends to merge into philosophy. Philosophy also makes time itself an object of analysis, and philosophers may be divided into two classes according to their attitude to time and change: some seek the changeless entity amid change, others reduce all reality to a flux.
Two further reasons are given for studying the history of philosophy. First, it teaches that no belief is sacrosanct and beyond question: acute philosophers have held passionately to beliefs that seem absurd to us, while things self-evidently true to us were rejected by men of the greatest intellect. Second, it encourages a critical and humble attitude—critical because the spirit of enquiry and scepticism is essential to progress in thought, humble because even the greatest genius had blind spots. This combination of curiosity and detachment, intellectual daring and humility, develops toleration important both for philosophy and for the conduct of affairs. Considering alternative hypotheses and awareness that either may contain truth and error creates an attitude in which differences can be accepted without violent revulsions of feeling. This widening of intellectual sympathies helps create a civilized social order: without tolerating differences we cannot recognize the value of the individual; without recognizing the dignity of the individual there can be no democracy; and without democracy society cannot be creative, free and co-operative.
The study of the history of philosophy as a separate discipline is not very ancient. In old Indian or Hellenic traditions, a philosopher built his system by stating and criticizing his predecessors’ positions, but only to establish his own, choosing aspects relevant to his purpose; there was no attempt to study philosophy’s development as a systematic process. One reason may be that many ancient philosophers were primarily interested in action, while preoccupation with understanding for its own sake is comparatively late. A more fundamental reason may be that philosophy until the modern period largely developed through commentaries on revealed texts or on the work of some great philosopher regarded as infallible; even when new wine was poured into old bottles, effort was made to induce belief that the new wine did not differ from the old, so new developments came under the garb of amplifications or explanations of the old. Such undue reverence for authority hampered both individual adventures in philosophy and the emergence of histories of philosophy, which must compare and judge—sometimes favourably, sometimes adversely—all old texts, revealed or otherwise.
The Conditions of a Common Heritage
The book’s argument turns, in this stretch, on a list of four conditions that any humane order must satisfy: physical well-being for all; economic sufficiency guaranteeing the means of survival to everyone; freedom from domination in economic, political, social and cultural life; and the freedom of each person or group to develop to full capacity without infringing the rights of others. Against any notion that human attitudes and aptitudes are fixed, the text insists they can be reshaped through a proper educative process. Education can therefore create the conditions for co-operation among the world’s cultures and serve as its medium, and it must act as the agent of progress without violence. No society stands still; external events and internal processes continually transform the character and composition of individuals and societies alike, and vitality is best measured by the capacity to respond to such stimuli. “To live is to change.” Yet too abrupt a change can shatter unity, so that individuals and societies do not merely change but disintegrate. It falls to education to foster an attitude that permits progress without violent upheaval or abrupt breaks. Where a person’s inheritance was once confined to his own forebears’ achievements, the unification of the world has made him heir to all that has happened to man in every age and clime; surveying the rise and fall of societies, he can learn from history that willing acceptance of change is a condition not only of progress but of survival. Education must therefore cultivate toleration and resilience — toleration seeking to integrate all values achieved by all civilizations into one common heritage for man, resilience enabling each new challenge to be met with a new and creative response.
Reflections on Gandhian Thought and Practice
A new chapter opens on Gandhi, observing that rarely, if ever, has a member of a subject nation achieved such position and prestige in his contemporary world as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was honoured in India and abroad not only as a great statesman and political leader but as a leader of thought with a new message for mankind, and even those who opposed or condemned him could not deny the power of his personality. Some admirers attribute his influence to spiritual or super-normal sources beyond analysis; whether or not that belief is justified, it is irrelevant to a discussion of his significance in human affairs, for whatever its origin his influence operated on the plane of material facts and natural events. The strength of the Mahatma must be understood in human terms.
His revolutionary significance lies in his success in releasing the energies contained in the endurance of the Indian people. The masses were widely said to lack energy and initiative, submitting to wrongs and hardships that a more active people would have opposed; their passivity and inertia were reckoned a source of weakness by friends and foes alike, and before his advent an active, dynamic revolution in India was thought hardly possible. Gandhi did not quarrel with these facts; he used them, transmuting the weakness itself into strength. Accepting the fatalism and passivity of the people, he found for them a new political function: instead of an aggressive, militant struggle he built a movement of non-cooperation in which passivity and endurance became sources of strength and energy. This use of what had been reckoned a defect changed the texture of the Indian mind; once the static forces were released, the masses revealed unsuspected reserves of energy and dynamism.
Nor was Gandhi content to change India alone. He believed he had a message for the entire world, regarding the search for truth as his life’s mission and describing all his activities as experiments with truth. The reintegration of India’s social and political outlook was only one phase of that experiment; his more fundamental urge was to evolve a new conception of society and the State for the whole world, reconciling Indian traditions with the requirements of the modern age and finding in that reconciliation a solution to the ills of modernity. His claim to leadership in thought rests on this outline of a new philosophy of life and action.
When Gandhi appeared, it was the age of Western domination, which had launched the modern era of scientific advance — unprecedented technological development on the material plane, nineteenth-century rationalism on the intellectual plane promising that education would resolve all human ills, and on the political plane liberal democracy in the Nation State as its finest expression. Europe was full of expansion, buoyancy and faith in reason, and wherever Europe led the rest of the world followed. Following some of Europe’s most perceptive thinkers, Gandhi challenged the easy acceptance of European supremacy, declaring that the traditional modes of Western thought had led to a dead end, and sought a way out of the prevailing political and social impasse through his experiments with truth. Europe’s malaise, he held, was her inability to profit by her own experience: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had taught that political freedom often conceals economic slavery of the worst type. Political democracy had permitted the employment of children under twelve in hard labour for sixteen continuous hours — permitted, and defended, on the plea of freedom of contract and the individual’s right to sell his labour as he liked, with lawyers, politicians, doctors and even bishops coming forward to defend it.
Non-Violence, the Individual and Basic Education
Gandhi rejected military action and the seizure of power by force, holding that his method must always be persuasion, never violence or brute force, though he accepted moral pressure; the essence of his method was non-violent resistance to evil. He went further, recognizing that even political action has serious limitations and that many problems of the modern world cannot be solved by it alone. Evils must be removed before peace is possible, and removing them requires resolving tensions within the individual and among individuals of the same community; international tensions are often a reflection of internal tensions, just as tensions within society often stem from tensions within the individual.
Hence his immense emphasis on the individual. Every person who solves his own internal tensions becomes an integrated personality, a dynamo of power radiating energy; Gandhi therefore sought to train men and women free of personal tensions who would help resolve problems within society, and lessened social tensions would in turn lessen international tensions. His regard for the individual appears in his emphasis on education and training — there is no limit to what a person can achieve through proper, systematic development of personality. From this comes his concept of Basic education, which aims to develop the individual as an integrated personality, overcome the gulf between work and knowledge, treat the individual as a member of a community rather than an isolated entity, see personal welfare as part of social welfare, and evoke creative responses rather than merely impart instruction.
The Experimental Method and the Training of a People
It is paradoxical but true, the text says, that Gandhi’s attitude is comparable to a scientist’s: he was a student of reality whose method was essentially experimental, owing partly to his unceasing search for truth and partly to an intuitive perception of continual change in individual and society. This shows in his personal life and in the movements he launched; he never repeated a movement. In 1919–20 his emphasis was non-violent non-cooperation; in 1930 salt became the symbol of opposition to Government; in 1940 defiance of the law against assembly was the symbol; in 1942 he raised the slogan “Quit India” with the motto “Do or die,” never deviating from non-violence. His techniques continually changed while his basic principles remained the same, and this flexibility makes them applicable outside India — they acquire international significance only if his experimental, scientific outlook governs their application.
Since the early nineteenth century the Indian intellectual had been dazzled by Western achievements, seeking to transplant European culture wholesale and thinking not in terms of synthesis, holding that India had little to give. By Gandhi’s advent this mood had changed. Too much of a realist to attempt the impossible, he did not believe it would do India good to become an ersatz Europe; he sought to revive ancient Indian traditions and demanded that political workers identify themselves with the starving, naked and illiterate masses in conduct, life, speech, thought, habit, clothing, food and habitation. His own mode of life was hardly distinguishable from the Indian peasant’s, and though the derisive description “Naked Fakir” was applied to him, his decision was a stroke of genius.
The masses responded unprecedentedly, prepared to follow him wherever he led, but he was too cautious to attempt more than one step at a time, leading them stage by stage. Political activity in India had been largely restricted to petitions and prayers; he sought to develop the power of resistance so that demands would carry a sanction. His first call was to overcome fear of arrest and imprisonment; once that fear disappeared he sought to free people from fear of loss of property; the third and final step was risking one’s life, tested first with selected individuals and finally with the people as a whole. The last mass movement’s slogan was “Do or die” — notably not “Kill or die.”
Persuasion, Truth and the Reorientation of Education
His emphasis on education and training derived from his respect for the individual; he believed in winning individuals by persuasion, not compulsion, making him perhaps the supreme propagandist of his age and a pioneer in psychological warfare. He set one limitation: never resort to untruth or even half-truths, believing untruth the greatest evil, harming both propagator and listener. He wanted to undermine the opponent’s morale by appealing to his sense of truth while reserving suffering for himself, on condition that his action cause no injury or hurt to the opponent’s self-respect — possible only because he was convinced his opponent was equally a moral agent. He had not only respect but love for adversaries; opposition never provoked bitterness, since he held that he and his opponents were all searching for truth. This faith explains his fearlessness and his toleration.
Gandhi was not a theorist but a man of action, never asking others to do what he was not prepared to do himself. Training and self-discipline are essential, and the first task of a reformer was the reorientation of education. He distinguished instruction from education: education is the creative response of the individual to his environment, while instruction is the imparting of information or technique. With qualifications this distinction is valid, but it should not lead to neglecting instruction, for without the necessary information or techniques correct responses cannot be evoked — a child cannot respond correctly to a foreigner if taught hatred or contempt for foreign peoples. Reorienting the teaching of history and geography to emphasize the far-flung co-operation of man through the ages rather than clashes between societies, individuals and nations would lay the foundation of a more creative education and improve international understanding.
Gandhi held that the application of principles should proceed by stages from easy to more difficult cases. The principle that ends ought to be realized by persuasion rather than compulsion should first apply to conflicts between individuals; once successful there, its field can gradually extend. Gandhi himself sought to reform the individual to reform society, society to reform the nation, and the nation to reform the world — and with this widening circle of reform, from the single person outward to all mankind, the book’s argument reaches its close.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument is that science, democracy, and Islam rest on a common set of presuppositions, and that the history of human thought can be read as a single movement in which the impulse toward generalization and unity has been matched by an increasing realization of the importance of the particular and the individual. Kabir identifies three conditions as basic to the growth of science: the belief that the universe is one homogeneous whole rather than a collection of realms with divergent laws; the belief that the laws of nature are uniform and not subject to change or mutation; and an equally insistent belief in the value of the individual instance. The first two, he argues, are two facets of the same fact, since without a monistic universe there can be no universal law. The insistence on “One World” is therefore essential to scientific thought, and this conception of unity first expresses itself in religious faith, as earlier religions with their rival gods of the mountains, woodlands, and sea gave way to the one God who is Lord of all creation. The movement from many gods to one is visible in all religions, but nowhere so marked as in the Semitic religions originating in desert lands, where the vast brooding skies and unbroken plains impress a sense of the universe’s unity.
But belief in the unity of Godhead, while a condition for the emergence of science, was not enough by itself. In earlier Semitic religions the sense of unity did not overcome the distinction between the phenomenal and the transcendental, and this is seen in their emphasis on the value of the miracle. The essence of a miracle is that it is against the general run of law, so the recognition of a miracle is a denial of the uniformity of nature and evidence of reliance on faith rather than reason. Both Christian and Jewish thought accepted miracles and supernatural manifestations as essential ingredients of religious faith, and their prophets were extraordinary men commanding extraordinary devotion by extraordinary deeds. Such an attitude may be conducive to religious fervour, but it cannot help evolve a scientific temper. Science owes its advance to the observation of some instance that seems an exception, which on closer scrutiny proves to be the manifestation of a wider, more general law superseding the first. Belief in the unfailing uniformity of nature is thus essential, and science permits neither the incursion of the individual to break the chain of causality nor the intrusion of supernatural factors not amenable to human reason.
Even a uniform world with no distinction of natural and supernatural is not enough. There must be equal emphasis on the value of the individual or single instance. If uniformity alone sufficed, science would have developed as soon as there was belief in the unity of God, and it would then have been a theoretical discipline deriving conclusions deductively from general premises. Science is, however, essentially inductive, and advance came only when general principles were wedded to brute facts, or when observation of a number of instances led to the formulation of a general theory. The empirical had to acquire a new dignity before science could emerge, and man’s attention had to turn from unearthly glory to the familiar world, from speculation on transcendental and logical truths to observation of the variety and grandeur of the perceptible world. The importance of the individual is also seen in the constant demand for verification of every general law, which is the essence of the inductive or experimental method.
From this foundation Kabir draws the parallel with democracy. The scientific appeal to verification is an appeal to the individual or particular instance, an assertion of the status of the particular against the claim of general law. In democracy, the individual’s claim to liberty is likewise an assertion of his importance against the community’s dictates. The homogeneity of the universe demands no preferential treatment for any group or individual, and applied to human conduct this yields democracy, in which all men are equal in the eyes of the law. What appears as scientific temper in thought appears as democratic spirit in politics. The greatest triumphs of science and democracy came since the seventeenth century, though anticipations are perceptible from the beginnings of the present millennium, and progress in this period is almost continuous and uninterrupted. Continuity is an essential characteristic of scientific progress, each generation inheriting and adding to its predecessors’ achievements, and a sudden breach of continuity would suggest an absence of scientific climate.
It is at this point that Kabir turns to Islam, arguing that an analysis of its basic concepts shows a remarkable similarity to these principles, and that the affinity, together with the fact that science’s triumphant progress follows soon after Islam’s emergence, suggests a causal connection. What lends plausibility to the suggestion is not the number of individual Arab scientists but the unbroken continuity in the development of science since the advent of Islam. The first presupposition of both science and democracy is a unitary world, and Islam emphasized the unity of the Godhead in a manner rarely equalled: “There is no God but God.” Islam carried this urge so far as to deny any religion but one, holding that each country and age had its own prophet, preaching to his own people in his own language, and that while language, people, and period differ, the religion was the same. Muslims repudiate the European description of Islam as Muhammadanism, insisting that it is equally the religion of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and a hundred other named and unnamed prophets. Islam’s claim to universality follows from this emphasis on God’s unity: as a religion valid for all times, it must reveal the eternal nature of truth, and truth cannot change, though time may overlay it with accretions hiding or distorting its real nature.
The emphasis on God’s unity, and therefore on nature’s unity, broke down the distinction between natural and supernatural, and in religious experience it led to the breakdown of the distinction between secular and religious. Islam is noted for its emphasis on the unity of all aspects of life; it recognizes no distinction between politics and religion, between economics and worship. In the Qur’an’s words, “The whole of the universe is a place of worship.” Denying the distinction between the phenomenal and the transcendent, Muslim religious thought values Nature not as a symbol of hidden truth but for its own sake, and when the reality of the empirical is recognized, the particular comes to its own, for the empirical is always revealed in particular facts. The highest development of the particular is the human personality, and the Qur’an says, “Man is a trustee of the free personality which he accepts at his peril.” The over-riding unity of God seems challenged by the individual’s uniqueness, and Arab thought faced this difficulty: the Wajudi philosophers continued the Platonic tradition with a pantheistic picture, against Islam’s prevailing spirit, while the Shahudi philosophers held that the individual is real and maintains identity even confronted with the Absolute, illustrating this by the stars shut out by sunlight—the sun’s existence cannot cancel the stars’. This emphasis on the individual’s reality distinguishes Islamic philosophy from earlier schools, and Islamic thought, though greatly influenced by the Greeks and particularly by Aristotle, could not accept his emphasis on mere deductive reasoning. Ibni-Taimiya tried to refute Aristotelian Logic because it does not recognize experience’s contribution to knowledge, pointing out that empirical knowledge is invariably direct and immediate, and that we recognize the particular not through inference but that the knowledge of the particular makes inference possible.
Kabir concedes that the relation between Islam and science has not always been seen, and attributes this to the incursion of extraneous elements in Muslim religious thought. Despite recognizing the change and mutation to which all human thought is subject, Islam sought to make an exception in its own favour. Muslim rationalists sought to explain this seeming inconsistency by arguing that Islam changed religion’s basis from faith to reason: so long as religion was based on unquestioning faith, it was subject to variations from differences in individual character and temperament, but when religious faith was based on reason, variation’s scope was ruled out, since reason is universal by nature and what reason once accepts as true must always be true. With the shift to reason, Islam had done away with the need for repeated rediscovery of Truth by successive prophets. Kabir finds the line of defence attractive and plausible, and the argument continues into a discussion of equality, marriage, inheritance, and the abolition of tribal and family names as instruments for enforcing equality within the community. Inequality of wealth tends to ossify into classes and castes, but this tendency is minimized or checked by eliminating the marks that perpetuate distinction. Family name is a sure harbinger of family pride; it places the individual and defines status by accident of birth rather than personal qualities, and abolishing tribal or family names obliterates such marks and concentrates attention on the individual.
The book’s second major argument concerns the concept of democracy itself. Kabir observes that the term has meant different things in different ages—to the Greeks it meant the rule of the demos or the rabble, opposed to aristocracy, and it is a far cry from this to the modern attitude treating the voice of the people as the voice of God. A term differing so much across ages must bear different meanings among contemporaries in the same age, since people are not necessarily contemporaries in thought: some cling to the beliefs of their predecessors, others anticipate their successors. Variety and even contrariety in contemporary views are thus easy to understand, mainly due to historical heritage, but one must still explain why the same term covers such diversity. Prima facie, the same term suggests a core of meaning identical despite variations in concomitant elements. Kabir examines the objection that democracy may be used “without any definite meaning at all” and finds it patently invalid, since whatever evokes an attitude can do so only on account of the connotation it acquires, and a slogan is effective because some connotation has become attached to it. This is not to say that the connotation is definite or fixed; no connotation, even of the most abstract terms, can be absolutely precise.
Such ambiguity, Kabir argues, is inevitable to any process of thought, whose function is to generalize experience. Since experience is always growing, terms must fluctuate in import, and a concept tries to serve as a fixed focus amid the flux of experience. A concept is hardly ever completely intellectual: conception is linked to perception, which carries a penumbra of affection or sentience, and the conative element cannot be ruled out. Most concepts are part concept, part feeling, part volition. In scientific and philosophical terms, conation and sentience are at a minimum, but in political concepts these elements are not negligible, so their content is a complex of feeling, thought, and volition combined in different proportions. This helps explain the ambiguity of a term like democracy: different historical associations in different minds, plus different emphasis on intellectual, emotional, or volitional content. It is thus obvious that democracy is, and perhaps must be, used in divergent senses, and we would not be justified in calling any use illegitimate unless the additional content destroys the core of meaning generally accepted as the term’s connotation. New and divergent uses are permissible only if the divergence does not go beyond a certain point, and applying the term to a country is improper only if the state of affairs there violates or denies characteristics constituting the essence of democracy as generally accepted in that age. Kabir illustrates this with the analogy of white and black: the two may be opposites, but there is gradation from white to black through degrees of greyness, and taken individually a shade may be placed in one group or the other, but taken seriatim, many points make classification doubtful.
Confusion is increased because in a concept like democracy the actual and the normative cannot always be kept distinct. Besides the inevitable fluidity of content, there is uncertainty from the human tendency to confuse ideals with actual conditions. An ideal is a state of affairs not existent but desired and believed capable of achievement—a possibility, not an actuality—and the greater the gulf between ideal and actuality, the more vehemently it is desired, bringing an explosive element to all matters concerning the ideal or normative. Because democracy represents partly the actual and partly the ideal, its emotional charge increases, and discussion often ceases to be intellectual appraisement and becomes violent support or vehement condemnation. There is also difficulty inherent in language: words cannot be confined to a single point of meaning but must cover a more or less wide area of significance, and definition narrows this area but there are limits to definition. We choose a particular meaning by reference to context, and outside its context an isolated term has a bewildering multiplicity of implications and associations.
Kabir then challenges de Tocqueville’s distinction between the liberty of the individual in a laissez-faire society and the constraint of the individual in a socialist state as more verbal than real. In a laissez-faire society the individual is supposedly independent, but this freedom is often merely a freedom to starve, and deprivation of livelihood places real limits on the individual’s supposed freedom. In no society, free or otherwise, can a human being be treated as an undifferentiated unit in a complex. Even an initially free individual is bound by his own act of choice: a man who freely chooses to be a field labourer or a Relativity Physics researcher cannot switch vocations without effort and perhaps disruption of personality. Once he chooses a vocation, he performs social functions and prospers only as an agent or instrument of social policy. Conversely, the scope of individual independence cannot be ruled out even in a socialist state. In socialist and capitalist states alike there must be planners, executives, and executants, and when an individual fully and freely accepts a role, he feels no constraint; nothing gives a greater sense of freedom and creative activity than acceptance of one’s station and its duties. Where a socialist state’s objectives are fully and freely accepted, socialism would act as liberation and release of energies rather than constraint.
The protagonists of democracy and socialism, despite violent disagreement over liberty versus equality, agree in dissociating means from ends. The democrat emphasizes liberty, insisting that the method of taking decisions matters regardless of results, so that so long as a free political decision appears, social justice is immaterial; he is concerned only with means. The socialist insists that equality be established in every sphere, whatever the method, holding that the end justifies the means. Both divorce means from ends, one valuing only means, the other only the end. Kabir states that all such divorces have resulted in contradictions: ends and means together constitute a unit, and judging one independently of the other leads to imperfect or false conclusions. Such attempts rest on the uncritical assumption that all relations are external and elements remain unaltered by context, whereas experience shows that elements are at least partially determined by context. Even if ends are not means, each modifies the other’s character: condemnation of an end must lead to condemnation of the means to it, and indefensible means rouse doubts about the end’s justification. The discussion is summed in three statements: democracy means a continual attempt at equalization of rights and duties for all; it is a continual process whose end cannot be foreseen in any conceivable future; and means and ends cannot be divorced from one another without violence to the meaning of each.
It follows that democracy must tolerate opinion contrary to its own, even hostile to democracy, provided the democratic state reserves the right to oppose or suppress action hostile to its existence. The distinction between opinion and action may be hard to draw but is real: discussing a political concept with half a dozen friends is opinion; the same idea before several hundred in a University Union is a border-line case; before ten or twenty thousand it might itself become violent political action. Democracy must take the risks of tolerating such expression and interfere only when expression merges into action. Denying expression merely because opinion opposes the prevailing temper is unjustified; denying it because it might lead to subversive activities would deny democracy’s nature. Democracy’s connotation is not immutable; its meaning has expanded and is still expanding. The democratic state is justified only in suppressing undemocratic procedures for changing its decisions; so long as changes come through persuasion and majority acceptance, democracy cannot suppress propaganda opposed even to its own values. Suggesting that dissent be allowed only among those accepting democracy’s fundamentals begs the question, since there are phases when those fundamentals are themselves in dispute—for example, whether equality of opportunity extends beyond politics to social and economic spheres.
If democracy aims at equalizing rights and duties, a one-party system can hardly reflect a democratic society unless two conditions are met: equalization of rights and duties achieved, and the party reflecting the will and interest of the whole community. Neither has ever been fulfilled; equalization remains an ideal for ages, and no party has reflected an entire people’s will. On a specific issue unanimity may be possible, letting a party temporarily act for the community, but this is rarely realized. Unanimity is precarious on specific issues and perhaps impossible for broad concepts of social welfare, given differences in history, background, experience, and temperament. Absence of parties other than the ruling one evokes suspicion that differences have been suppressed. Those claiming that scepticism is part of our faith are right up to a point: no opinion is infallible, so no group has a self-evident right to universal allegiance. Admitting diversity is not a lack of faith in democracy but may evidence firm conviction about the democratic principle. Men are most insistent when uncertain; where absolutely sure, they feel no need to stress rightness. People react violently when attacked in weak spots; disputants lose their temper when uncertain of their grounds. Logically, “must”
