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Humanism and Humanism
A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."1 So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard of excellence to things Indian, India may have other measures, other terms of valuation. Even if it is proved that humanism as denned and under- stood in the West is an unknown thing in India, yet that need not necessarily be taken as a sign of inferiority or deficiency. But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook—the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him.2 It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this however an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps Socrates whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely, the genesis should be ascribed rather to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching. Humanism proper was born—or reborn—with the Renaissance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its
1. Only the other day I found a critic in The Manchester Guardian referring to The
Gita as something frigid (and confused)! Page 160 fundamental character—that which gave it its very name—-was a protest against, a turning away from whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age. The Graeco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, is deeply humanistic, in the sense that it brought salvation and heaven close to the level of human frailty—through the miracle of Grace and the humanity of Christ—and that it-envisaged a kingdom of heaven or city of God—the body of Christ—formed of the brotherhood of the human race in its solidarity. The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove from this type of humanism. It has not the pagan Graeco-Roman humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its spirit can be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake: it surrounds itself with cold floods of abstraction and the forests of solitude. The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; and even his love for the bird, or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred to another receptacle and flowing in another direction. It is a play of the human heart, only refined and widened; there is no change in kind. It goes without saying that in the East too there is no lack of such sympathy or fellow-feeling either in the saint or in the man of the world. Still there is a difference. And the critics have felt it, if not understood it rightly. The Indian bhutadaya and Christian charity do not spring from the same source—I do not speak of the actual popular thing but of the ideal—even when their manner of expression is similar or the same, the spirit and the significance are different. In the East the liberated man or the man aiming at liberation may work for the good and welfare of the world or he may not; and when he Page 161 does work, the spirit is not that of benevolence or philanthropy. The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow beings— men. and animals, the sentient or the insentient, the entire creation in fact—is one of identity in the One Self. And there-fore he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantist was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi is—what may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint—that one loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or thing but for the sake of the self, for the sake of oneself that is in the object which one seems to love. The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way. There is indeed a gradation in the humanistic attitude that rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and nature is what is called altruism, or philanthrope, that is to say, doing good to others, some good that is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally. In altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a matter chiefly of doing but of feeling, from a more or Less physical and material give and take we rise into a vital and psychological sympathy and intercommunion, we have what is Page 162 humanism proper. Humanism is transfigured into something still higher and finer when from the domain of personal or individual feeling and sympathy we ascend to cosmic feeling, to self-identification with the All, the One that is Many. This is the experience that seems to be behind the Buddhistic compassion, karuna. And yet there can be a status even beyond. For beyond the cosmic reality, lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute, neti, neti, into which individual and cosmos, all disappear and Vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanism—it is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights; but in the status of the transcendent Selfhood humanism is totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then in the Bliss that passeth all feeling. The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is a lack or want or deficiency in the human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Boddhisattwa may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God Himself—but that is an inferior viewpoint, that of particular or local interest. It is sometimes said that to turn away from the things of human concern, to seek liberation and annihilation in the Self and the Beyond is selfishness, egoism; on the contrary, to sacrifice the personal delight of losing oneself in the Impersonal so that one may live and even suffer in the company of ordinary humanity in order to succour and serve it is the nobler aim. But we may ask if it is egoism and selfishness to seek delight in one's own salvation beyond, would it be less selfish and egoistic to enjoy the pleasure of living on a level with humanity with the idea of aiding and uplifting it ? Indeed, in either case, the truth discovered by Yajnavalkya, to which we have already referred, stands always justified, that it is not for the sake of this or that that one loves this or that but for the sake of the self that one loves this or that. The fact of the matter is that here we enter a domain in Page 163 which the notion of egoism or selfishness has no raison d'etre. It is only when one has transcended not only selfishness but egoism and sense of individuality that one becomes ready to enter the glory and beatitude of the Self, or Brahman or Shunyam. One may actually and irrevocably pass beyond, or one-may return from there (or from the brink of it) to work in and on the world—out of compassion or in obedience to a special call or a higher Will or because of some other thing; but this second course does not mean that one has attained a higher status of being. We may consider it more human, but it is not necessarily a superior realisation. It is a matter of choice of vocation only, to use a mundane phraseology. The Personal and the Impersonal are two co-ordinates of the same supreme Reality—some choose (or are chosen by) the one and others choose (or are chosen by) the other, perhaps as the integral Play or the inscrutable Plan demands and determines, but neither is intrinsically superior to the other—although, as I have already said, from an interested human standpoint, one may seem more immediately profitable or nearer than the other; but from that standpoint there may be other truths that are still more practically useful, still closer to the earthly texture of humanity. The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its profane and religious aspects, is all "human—too human" as Nietzsche pronounced it; it was for this reason that the Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow, and rise to a superior status of culture and civilisation, of being and consciousness as we would say. Indian spirituality precisely envisages such a transcendence. According to it, the liberated soul, one who lives in and with the Brahman or the Supreme Divine is he who has discarded the inferior human nature and has taken up the superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the apara prakrti. Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism generally has no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human; his being and becoming are the spontaneous expression of a universal and transcendent consciousness. He Page 164 does not always live and move externally in the non-human way; but even when he appears human in his life and action, his motives are not humanistic, his consciousness lies anchored somewhere else, in the Divine Will that makes him be and do whatever it chooses, human or not. There is, however, a type of humanism that is specially known in India—it is not human humanism, but, as it is called, divine humanism. That is to say, the human formula is maintained, but a new significance, a transcendent connotation is put into it. The general contour of the instrumentation is preserved, but the substance is transmuted. The brain, the heart and the physical consciousness not only change their direction, but their very nature and character. And the Divine himself is conceived of as such a Human Person—for the norm of the human personality is an eternal verity in the divine consciousness. Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to the human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms have been more or less symbols and figures having not merely human but a supra-human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila passes not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of consciousness—cinmaya—behind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression. It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the v mystic truth that man is greater than all and surpasses the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not at all the human man, as modern humanists of our country would like" to have. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternal in the super consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts upon earth he does so in manner and measure that do not belong to this plane. Page 165 |