By Dr Satish C Aikant
In the Advaita Vedanta philosophy while explicating the concept of Brahman one takes recourse to the idea of Neti, Neti (not this, not this) which implies that it is difficult to explain the attributes of Brahman as the absolute reality. All probable qualifications and properties are negated, as they are considered limitations. Neti, Neti rejects all dualistic distinctions, such as subject-object, existence-nonexistence, and being-nonbeing. It rejects essentialism, instead embracing the fluidity and complexity of human experience. By negating finite descriptions, one transcends the limitations imposed by language and conceptual thinking. Ambiguity is recognised as an inherent characteristic of existence.
It is difficult to precisely define something since a definition uses language and words which are slippery by nature. A word instead of pointing to a referent in one-to-one correspondence does not have an exact equivalent. A word may have several synonyms which at best only approximate that word in meaning, without fully capturing its essence. The proponents of the theory of deconstruction claim that language is incapable of representing any sort of reality directly since meaning, being non-referential, is endlessly deferred. Though truth matters, the notion of absolute truth comes under scrutiny. It refers neither to things in the world nor to our concepts of things. Wittgenstein says that ‘Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it’.
The playwright Harold Pinter in his Nobel Lecture said: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ If the idea of an absolute, objective truth is untenable, one has to take recourse to a position called ‘perspectivism,’ the idea that there is no one objective way to comprehend the world, only perspectives on what the world is like. This ambiguity causes cognitive dissonance wherein we simultaneously believe two things that are in conflict with one another creating psychic tension within us.
Toward the end of the poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ Shakespeare has a cryptic line: ‘Truth may seem, but cannot be.’ To ‘seem’ and ‘to be’ are two of the crucial strands in Hamlet, the former being defined by Hamlet in his indignant outburst at his mother amidst the gaiety of Claudius’s court: ‘Seems, madam?, Nay, it is; I know not seems.’ Philip Sidney declared in his Defence of Poesy that ‘The poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth’. It was David Hume who remarked: ‘Poets themselves, though liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fiction.’ Hume is more aligned with Plato who wanted poets to be banished from his Republic.
Emily Dickinson in one of her poems, says, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ Her poetics of indirection suggests that delivering truth too directly will only overwhelm the recipient. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ TS Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets. It is an apt aphorism for all times.
Truth-telling, nevertheless, has been extolled as one of the highest virtues in our tradition. Moral dilemmas often arise when an agent is committed to two or more moral obligations, but there may be a case that an obligation to do x cannot be fulfilled without violating an obligation to do y. There is an interesting narrative in Mahabharata. A hermit, Kausika by name, had taken a vow of telling the truth all his life. One day he faced a dilemma. Some bandits were chasing a group of travellers with the intention of killing them. Kausika was sitting nearby at the crossroad. The travellers passed by and requested him not to tell anyone which way they had fled. Soon the bandits arrived, and knowing that the hermit would not lie, asked him about the travellers; and Kausika told the truth. As a result, the travellers were caught and killed. Kausika did not reach heaven (the much-coveted aspiration) after his death since his act of speaking the truth had led to the killing. He failed to earn merit. Although he abided by his principle of truth-telling throughout his life, it came to no effect.
A few years ago, an anecdote was reported in a Kolkata newspaper concerning a gentleman belonging to the Brahmo Samaj. He was asked by a traveller about the location of the Star Theatre. Since the gentleman morally disapproved of what went on in the Star Theatre, his first reaction was to say that he did not know. As he proceeded along his way, he realised that this was a lie. He came back, called the traveller and told him: ‘Look, I know where the Star Theatre is, but I will not tell you.’ Kausika could well have taken this course of action and saved lives as well as his own dignity.
Dharma is a term which is fraught with much ambiguity and multivalence. Etymologically the word is from the root dhr, meaning ‘uphold, support, sustain’. So, its meaning would be ‘that which upholds and sustains’. But this is too general and too vague. PV Kane writes in his monumental work, History of Dharmasastra, ‘Dharma is one of those Sanskrit words that defy all attempts at an exact rendering in English or any other tongue.’ Depending on the context it may variously mean law, justice, custom, morality, ethics, religion, duty, nature, or virtue. There is also the Yug Dharma (dharma appropriate to the times). This almost breathtaking complexity (which is also its richness) of the dharma-concept seems to underline various, often divergent, ways in relating to life’s essential concerns.
Dharma stands for right conduct at a particular time and place. However, understanding of right and wrong changes according to circumstances. The circumstances might demand transgression and reinterpretation of the prescribed dharma that inevitably create moral dilemmas. For such contingencies, the law-givers provide us with alternative codes of conduct, known as ‘apaddharma’, which otherwise would appear as adharma. According to the dictum of apaddharma, a man could act contrary to his svadharma during crisis, without compromising his conscience. Another story concerns the great sage Viswamitra. Once in the ancient times a drought lasting for twelve years decimated the environment and rendered all people desperate and starving. The sage Viswamitra suffering pangs of hunger was wandering around. After unsuccessfully searching and begging for food, the sage saw dog meat in a Chandala’s house and, in desperation, resolved to steal it while the Chandala slept. In the process, however, he woke the Chandala, who was shocked to discover the sage stealing meat as impure as dog’s rump. The great sage and the low-caste Chandala then engaged in a long debate on dharma and the justness of Viswamitra’s theft of the meat. The Chandala tried to convince the sage that his action was wrong, contrary to dharma. The sage answered that a long time had passed without his having taken any food and he did not see any means for preserving his life. He said, ‘This my body is very dear to me and is worthy of the highest reverence from me. One should, when one is dying, preserve one’s life by any means in one’s power without judging the nature of one’s action. I am not, therefore, deviating from my dharma at this hour.’
In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem says to Padma, ‘If you’re a little uncertain of my reliability, well a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women too.’ The apparent ambiguities of literary works are sometimes stigmatised by scientists as expressive of ‘fuzzy’ thought. This however should not suggest that art is the irrational opposite of rational expression. The autonomy of literature can be seen as a form of resistance to the forces of rationalisation that increasingly dominate our techno-scientific society. It is the ambiguity of literature – its refusal to be reduced to one clear, rational meaning – that is its power. The poet John Keats coined the term ‘Negative Capability’, to suggest ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Keats believes that even imperfect knowledge may be somewhat closer to truth than perfect knowledge of fact and reason: ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination,’ said the poet. His remarks express the futility of questing for a verifiable and objective truth, and challenge a positivistic mimetic attitude to art, celebrating instead the power of the human imagination. Even in the realm of quantum mechanics, the Principle of Uncertainty, formulated by Werner Heisenberg, reveals the inherent uncertainty in determining the dynamics of subatomic particles, mirroring somewhat like the Neti, Neti approach.
(The author is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNB Garhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
