A Kantian perspective on the Ramayana
Part 3 of 5
IMMANUEL KANT AND THE “CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE“
One nearest possible comparable definition of Dharma in the subtle and philosophical sense in which Rishi Apasthamba meant it, can be found in the work of the philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It is called “the categorical imperative” and it is a very intelligible and insightful thesis made famous through his book on the metaphysics of morality titled, “The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality“. Morality for Kant could be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, and from which all duties and obligations of man are derived.
An imperative may be defined as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be absolutely necessary. Kant argued that the supreme principle of morality is a standard of rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI) and distinguished it from “Hypothetical Imperative“.
Hypothetical imperatives apply to someone who wishes to attain certain ends in life. (For example, “I must drink something to quench my thirst” or “I must study to pass this exam”).
Kant proposed as an axiom of Morality what we ourselves may understand to be a Dhaarmic “categorical imperative”. It is an “imperative” because it is a command addressed to those who could follow it but might not. It is “categorical” because it applies unconditionally and without reference to any goals or desires. “Do not steal,” for example, is categorical. Under no circumstances would it be considered acceptable to steal. On the other end of the spectrum are hypothetical imperatives (HI), which are associated with desire. Following the same example, “Do not steal” is rephrased to become an HI, “Do not steal if want to stay out of jail.”
A categorical imperative, thus, denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that must be obeyed in all circumstances and is justified as an end in itself. Kant characterized the CI as an objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle that we must always follow despite any natural desires or inclinations we may have to the contrary. With that view on Morality, he set out to seek the foundational principle of a “metaphysics of morals,” a system of a priori moral principles that apply the CI to human persons and their actions in all times and cultures.
One such a priori principle of Kant was:
“Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness“.
And as if in answer to the next question that we might ask:
“How may one make oneself worthy of happiness?” Kant came up with another axiom on which human action, he said, ought to be based:
“Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature”.
What Kant meant by acting “through your will…” was this:
Not every command to act in certain way, and out of a certain desire, is in the form of a hypothetical imperative. “If you’re hungry, go to the store,” for example, does not count as a hypothetical imperative because the command (“go to the store”) is not an inevitable or probable outcome based on the action (“hungry”). Whereas the action of stealing often does invariably lead to the probable outcome of going to jail. For Kant, therefore, willing an outcome involves more than desiring; it requires committing actions to obtain it as opposed to passively wishing or hoping for it. Such actions to him indeed constituted the highest morality.
THE KANTIAN “CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE” AND THE “FOUR PURUSHAARTHAs“
Long before Immanuel Kant had formulated his profoundly metaphysical question on morality, the great Vedantic thinkers of India’s ancient past had already thought about it and had framed it all in their own very special doctrinal way. They asked:
“Have you made yourself worthy of the highest “purushaartha” in life?” and where “purushaartha” was akin to what became later in Kant’s thesis the “categorical imperative”.
In essence, what the Vedantic philosophers were asking was the same Kantian question but expressed in terms of a more developed, nuanced and complex conceptual framework of psychological motivations underpinning human morality. It was called the four-fold “purushaartha“, “Dharma, Artha, Kaama and Moksha”. All of Man’s actions and moral choices are shaped and guided, they said, by these four imperatives while he went about pursuing ultimate fulfilment in life, Happiness.
Dharma is finding fulfillment through Perfection that is born of Virtue or Righteousness;
Artha is attaining fulfilment through gaining earthly Wealth;
Kaama is finding fulfillment through the earthly pleasure-principle.
The fourth imperative, Moksha is “parama purushaartha“, or Salvation, but it is not of this world. It is a supra-mundane “purushaartha”. It can be realized only in the world beyond — in the eternal realms of the spirit where Happiness is permanent.
Now, actions of Man seeking fulfillment through “Artha” and “Kaama” would fall under the Kantian category of “hypothetical imperatives” while actions that conform to “Dharma” would fall under the classic Kantian concept of the “categorical imperative“. The will that impels a man to “Moksha“, however, is in a unique class of its own… one that that, in Vedantic metaphysics, is held as transcending both the categorical and hypothetical imperatives of morality ( the pith of the message of the Gita that says, “sarva dharmaam parithtyajya….etc.)”.
To be able to appreciate the very subtle but very real connection between Vedantic “purushaartha” and the Kantian concept “categorical imperative”, one might find it useful to employ the old Socrates method of reasoning.
“The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates once, meaning that the pursuit of lasting happiness in this world requires us all as human beings to examine how we live and what enduring goals in life we pursue. But then the next question that stares starkly at us in our faces is how should one go about examining one’s life?
Now, Vedanta says, we can all examine our respective lives in terms of the particular “purushaartha” that we seek and pursue through all our actions in a lifetime.
Most men and women of the world are perfectly capable of getting a measure of the worth of their mundane individual existence, but then can do so only in terms of the second and third “purushaartha”, viz. “artha” and “kaama”.
The accumulation of wealth and the sum-total of pleasurable experiences gained in one’s lifetime is an easily estimable index of the degree of fulfilment that men or women attain or aspire to attain in life. As individuals they do not have too much trouble determining for themselves the extent of fulfilment in life if, after having acquired to utter satiety enough of “artha” and enough experience of “kaama”, they can tell at last tell themselves, “I am happy now!”
But Man lives not by wealth alone nor is his happiness fulfilled by pleasure alone. Man strives for Perfection too as an Ideal… as a “purushaartha”. And Perfection can be attained only through Virtue because Virtue — otherwise known as Dharma too — is verily Perfection. In other words, Man aspires for a life of Dharma too… There is indeed a deep and ineffable sense of spiritual fulfilment to be had by which a Man could tell himself, “I have lived a perfect life too”.
Unfortunately, unlike as in the case of the “purushaarthas” of “Artha” and “Kaama”, Dharma or Virtue is an ideal that is greatly more difficult to discern, determine or define. As we all know, at the end of a man’s life, it would be easy for any accountant to compute the net-worth of his estate. It would be easy for any biographer too to recount all the pleasurable events and experiences the deceased has had and enjoyed in his life. But it would never be easy at all for the man himself or for anyone else for that matter, to make any claim with any degree of supreme self-assuredness or certainty and say, “My life has been lived virtuously and my Dhaarmic deeds have all been for the perfection of my soul and of this world too”….
Thus, philosophically speaking, it is truly very difficult to understand and defer to Socrates’s proposition especially since we would not be feel urged to subject our rather pedestrian pleasure and wealth-seeking lives to Socratic examination if we are not fully convinced that they are really worth examining at all.
The unexamined life is not worth living might be a true proposition, but then if an ordinary individual’s life is unworthy of examination because it is difficult to determine its worth in terms Dharma it, and consequently therefore, the individual cannot claim to have lived perfectly or virtuously in Dharma… what is he or she to do?
The answer of the Vedantic seers to such a question is clear and it is this:
Study the Ramayana! If you can’t examine your own life in terms of the first cardinal “purushaartha” of Dharma, then the next best thing you should do is to faithfully examine the life of Rama in the Ramayana! You will then surely understand what true Dharma is … And how abiding in it, Rama himself found fulfilment following his very own “categorical imperatives” in life. And thereafter, strive to live your own life in the emulation or imitation of the Raamaavataara.
MAPPING RAMA’s DEEDS TO THE KANTIAN “CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE”
Now, if we keep both the Apasthambian maxim and the Kantian “categorical moral imperative” firmly in mind while studying the Ramayana, we should perhaps then begin to comprehend at least this much about what is Dharma:
In the many grievous moral circumstances that beset him throughout his life, and in the many different ways he responded to them, Rama was only constantly seeking — through, and by, his very own conduct — what may described (using Kantian phraseology) as “actions that he willed would become a universal law of nature”.
Yes, indeed, through the seemingly impeachable deeds even (and especially through them, in fact!), Rama was challenging every one of the characters he encountered in the Ramayana with that very same question about Dharma’s categorical imperative. And at the same time, he kept posing the same to himself too: “Have you made yourself truly worthy of happiness?“… the corollary of which are also these:
- “Is your conduct which you think is conducive to your happiness,
- “Is it dictated by the “categorical imperative” or the “hypothetical imperative”?
- How did you recognize Dharma and Adharma?
- How did you mark the boundaries between the two?
- If an act is not Adharmic, can it be said to be the equivalent of Dharma?”
In the events and predicaments in the Ramayana, whenever Rama found himself caught between the horns of a moral dilemma, we see that it is to the Kantian “categorical imperative” that he turns — or rather, to Dharma as cardinal “purushaartha” — and not once does he ever turn to the easy expedient of “hypothetical imperatives”.
Here below are a few notable examples of his deeds:
“Dereliction of Constitutional Duty”:
- When he chose to renounce his claim to the throne of Ayodhya, Rama was in a way alleged to be guilty of what in modern parlance may be called “dereliction of constitutional duty”. But in fact, in doing what he did, he was only posing, by implication, the Kantian question to Kaikeyi and Dasaratha : “Now that both of you have upheld the promises and solemn vows which you had for long each owed to the other, tell me have you now each made yourselves worthy of happiness?“
- In the Ayodhya kaanda, when Rama resolved to renounce his claim to the throne, and instead set out to exile himself from kingdom, his brother Lakshmana chastises him for being unworthy of “kshatriya” honor and for even dereliction of “Kshatriya dharma”. Rama remains unmoved. But in what Lakshmana mistook then to be Rama’s intransigence was actually the stark but implied question stated in terms of the hypothetical imperative: “If as you suggest, Lakshmana, I were to abide by what you call “Kshatriya dharma”, and I did slay our father Dasaratha and Kaikeya, or throw them both into prison, just so I could ascend the throne that now belongs to Bharatha, what then? By such a deed of true “Kshatriya-hood”, would I make myself worthy of happiness? And tell me, would you make yourself worthy of happiness by remaining loyal to me after I had done that very deed you suggest?”
- Rama posed the same Kantian question even more sternly to Bharatha too…. when the latter tried persuading him forcefully to return to Ayodhya but he stubbornly refused. In that refusal was indeed the implied moral question about the categorical imperative: “If I returned to Ayodhya now with you and you abdicated forthwith the kingdom’s throne in my favor, do you believe you will be happy and the people of Ayodhya will be happy? Would abdication as a king under these circumstances now make us both worthy of happiness? Would it make the house of the Ikshvaaku-s worthy of its illustrious name and lineage? Would it be true “raja-dharma” to have the crown of this great kingdom being tossed around like this, as if it were a mere toy, between the hands of three different rulers within the span of three days? If the people saw how one son of Dasaratha was acting to uphold the dharma to which the father was committed, while the other son, by his action, was seeking to overturn it… please tell me, Bharatha, would that make the people of Ayodhya worthy of the pride or honor they deserve to feel as citizens?”
Misogyny:
- Then in the forests of Dandakaaranya, in the incident with the seductress, Surpanaka, we see Rama confronting what in modern times would certainly qualify to be a serious dilemma of the “kaama purushaartha”, one that is fraught with gender or feminist sensitivities. But he sticks to his categorical imperative. He, in effect, asks Surpanaka the Kantian question: “If either Lakshmana or I, were indeed to succumb to your wiles and charms, and if one or even both of us were to take turns to indulge you your amorous desires to utmost satiety…. after then what? After the ‘happiness of the moment’ has passed, would you still consider yourself worthy of the same happiness in continuity? And would we brothers, both or either of us, thereafter be able to consider ourselves worthy of continued happiness?”
Breach of Military Ethics:
- It was again the same difficult moral question, that which distinguishes the categorical from hypothetical imperative that was posed, by way of virtuous implication, in that dramatic dialogue they had when Rama and Vali spoke to each other. Vali lay dying, in the valley of Kishkinda, bitterly remonstrating against Rama for the dubious if not dastardly and wholly unjust way in which Rama had chosen to slay him from behind his back when he was engaged in battle with his brother Sugriva. Rama goes to great length to explain to Vali why he had to do what he did in pursuit of a higher Dharma, the categorical imperative. “Having oppressed and humiliated your brother, Sugriva, usurping his kingdom and illicitly cohabiting with his wife…. indeed after all the evil you did unto him, and after having him turn against you as a sworn enemy, ask yourself if you do still consider yourself worthy of the martial honor your sermonize to me about … or of the happiness that you claim is yours by right as king of all Kishkinda”.
Environmental “terrorism”?
- In the encounter that Rama had with Samudra-raja, we see the modern seeming equivalent of “environmental terrorism“. Rama, in fury, threatens to dry up the ocean if Samudra-raja does not cooperate with Sugreeva’s army in their project to throw a great causeway across the waters as a bridge from the mainland to the Lankan shores. But in effect, Rama was only imposing the categorical imperative on the natural forces of the oceans too. He fumed at Samudra-raja, the king of the oceans, who baulked when beseeched to cooperate in the dhaarmic project of the Sethu construction.
Incitement to Treachery and Treason?
- And then Rama asked Vibheeshana the Kantian question when the latter chose to commit what to all of who read the Ramayana even today, seems like an act of unconscionable, abominable betrayal of brother Ravana, and an act of high treason and treachery against the state of Lanka (although to himself Vibheeshana did justify the act as being his own Kantian hypothetical imperative) . We know how the royal scion of Lanka responded… in a rather unusual and unique way to that question. He took recourse to that unique instrumentality of “saranaagathi” which (in the sense of the Bhagavath-Gita), transcends morality, transcends all boundaries of Dharma (“sarva dharmaam pariththyajya...” etc.). Through that simple act of “saranaagathi“, Vibheeshana, as his subsequent coronation upon the throne of Lanka proved, made himself truly “worthy of happiness” indeed.
(End of Part 3 of 5 – to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi