Reality and Transcendence

Karl Marx’s view that reality precedes idea, referred to economic reality which he saw projected into life entire. As such it has been found inadequate though the great importance of the economic factor could not be belied. Particular ideas grow out of the compulsion of particular economic conditions but such ideas do not constitute the whole realm of idea. There are ideas common to and independent of all economic circumstances. Among them must be classed such ideas as the human desire for freedom, love, friendship and man’s natural proclivity towards music and the arts. Economic conditions do affect the shape of these ideas but do not and cannot override them. These ideas are as much part of reality as economics is and must affect action on reality. Hegel’s famous dictum that the real is rational and the rational is real, placed reality on the basis of necessity. “Everything that is, is real” because necessity changes and with that, reality. Thus does reality achieve solidity. Yet reality is always reaching out to supra-reality and in order to reach the latter, man, both individually and collectively, tries to transcend reality. That is a matter of common experience though the understanding of it is not very common.

An understanding of it is however necessary, for, by such understanding alone we can understand life as both individually and collectively lived. Understanding life is necessary for the purpose of doing justice to life. Man does try to transcend reality but without an understanding of reality, often gets bogged in reality and is unable to get beyond it. Over and above that, men’s ways are interlinked and react on one another. Social progress is the sum total of interaction: so is national progress and ultimately, progress of humanity. Progress includes in this context periodic retrogression. The Indian who is even in this age rooted to casteism, reacts on his fellow-countrymen and puts a brake on their progress. His effort to transcend reality is bogged in reality. Rather, he imagines transcendence in permanence. He quotes Western scholars in support of caste without regard to the historical perspective of scholarship. Indians and Pakistanis have inherited a legacy of communalism which many among them have raised to the status of nationalism. Many an Indian equates Indian nationalism with Hindu suzereignty and traces its birth from the epochal question Bankim Chandra Chatterjee put into the mouth of the devotee in Anandmath: “Won’t my desire be fulfilled?” But that question also epitomised the self-questioning of the erstwhile dependent Indian’s aspiration to be free. It germinated, at least partially, revolutionary endeavour. Between these two trends Indian nationalism desperately tries to maintain itself on the secular plane. The Hindu nationalist sees no great reality in that but considers his creed to be the sign-post for humanity for all time. The Pakistani is bred on communal nationalism as the great reality that has been derived out of the unreality that, according to him, Indian nationalism was. Yet there are people in Pakistan who feel called upon to transcend that reality in order to try to reach secular nationalism without which life seems incomplete to them. That is a move towards supra-reality. One is always trying in personal life to attain what one believes to be progress. Not unoften, however, one resorts to chicanery and meanness for that purpose. One tries that way to get the better of one’s kith and kin. An approach of that kind to progress is inhibited by reality. It is not capable of transcending reality.” But it may seem to secure material advantage and the question might then be asked where the inhibition is. For, apparently, in this case it has not worked. Reality appears to have changed for the better. It is not the transcendental which man fundamentally tries to attain. He considers it progress because he has been, unknown to himself, dehumanised. He corrodes the self-estimation that mankind has built itself into, through centuries of culture and civilization. He who wants to transcend himself in love, sometimes strays into lust or some such perversion. He is then a prisoner of reality. He runs counter to social purpose and is himself held . The anti-social man is at war with his environment because he is at war with himself. The communalist man is thwarted, mutilated, incomplete. A nation that yields to communalism, parochialism or chauvinism bars its own way to fulfilment. It rots in reality just as water finds its own level.

There are tides in the affairs of nations as of men. The Indian nation is now in doldrums, short even of food. Its northern neighbour has laid it low. Yet it tries to transcend reality. It pursues desperately plans of defence and development. Jawaharlal Nehru initiated and led that endeavour. Because we could not be up to him, we developed in regard to him an inferiority complex which fed itself on his supposed sins of omission and commission. These sins, far more of omission than of commission, were themselves derived out of the very large canvas of his perspective. Thus it was that the unity and integrity of India were his only concern; he did not give enough and timely attention to the demand and commitment for linguistic states, with the result that there was great trouble. He relied on China’s age-old culture and peaceful ties with India and was not prepared for the gross treachery which that country perpetrated on us revealing that communism, with the help of which she regained solidarity, was but new wine in old bottles and a catalyst for revival, from the depths of ages, of her demoniacal expansionism. Jawaharlal Nehru must have had limitations as everybody has, but it seems in looking for them we are only succumbing to our own limitations. That is definitely not the way we can transcend ourselves.

It had been easier when Mahatma Gandhi issued the call to us all Indians, to raise our heads high and stand up to the iniquities of foreign rule. That was the consummation of a historical process of self-assimilation of our people into emerging nationhood. It drew unto itself forces of the human spirit, both native and foreign. It released our pent-up energies into a rebirth of self-perception. The resultant rally of human entities was phenomenal. The struggle in non-co-operation with the foreign government claimed a legion. The self-immolation of thousands in the revolutionary movement was also superbly transcendental. Violence and non-violence alike were a people’s essays in the conquest of reality. Conflicts arose, however, as soon as the country developed an image of the reality that was coming. Through them emerged the task of creating and stabilizing a new reality. Consolidation of the new reality involved strains and stresses the burden of which fell mainly on Jawaharlal Nehru. It falls on us individually too and almost makes us go under. Willy nilly, however, we must establish ourselves in new, evolving reality for, to rest where we are means to perish. Also the collective compulsion prevails over individual deficiency. There are efforts, however, to divert the compulsion into particular channels: socio-economic or religio-cultural. There secularism fights communalism, capitalism is challenged by socialism and democracy will fight to the last ditch for survival. The struggle of life is itself transcendental and might yet salvage us out of the self-pity in which we are involved today.

But what is transcendence? Where is its base? If it is merely an abstraction, it will always elude us. It might be said that the march ahead is itself transcendental. The individual life progresses from stage to stage; so does the collective, the national, the universal. Transcendence also must therefore be reality. It might be called the Grand Reality. The lover’s wait for the beloved the ascetic’s search for self-realisation, the explorer’s adventure, the scientist’s research for truth and the writer’s effort to encompass the realms of experience and intuition–all come under the quest for the Grand Reality. These are realities as much as the mundane, humdrum and cut and dried sorts are realities. The pilgrim through the ages as whom Tagore describes India in her national song, is no mere imagination calculated to enthuse the imaginations of her people. It is the collective entity of the people which has its ups and downs and treads the tracks of time. It is the historical personality composed of the individual personalities which have traversed the past, are traversing the present and will traverse the future. That it is no mere poetic fancy is apparent from the fact that just as a nation lives on common memories, the individual has roots in the lives of generations at his birth-place. One who has lost one’s roots at that place, treasures its memories irrespective of the fact that the human context, one knew there, no longer exists. The refugee sighs for the place which he has found himself compelled to quit. An integral relation between him and that place is a reality. So the universal man who has crossed over from pre-history to history, is also no figment of imagination. He has his existence in history and the knowledge that everything has an end and makes room for new experiences, gives him an unlimited perspective for the future. That is the point where according to Karl Jaspen existentialism means humanism; but it is for the individual man the point of departure for infinite self-expansion. Jawaharlal Nehru’s odyssey for the discovery of India was also projected through the ages. No greater reality could possibly be imagined. His own life and death are a stage in the fulfilment of that history.

This then is reality reaching within the confines of reason to transcendence. Nothing supernatural is involved in it. Broadly its base is materialism or as M. N. Roy put it rather more aptly physical realism. But transcendence is worked largely by idea of which reality is the spring board. There are strands even in our physical existence which come to life only in transcendence. Such is our response to music and other arts which enable us to reach unsuspected heights and depths in ourselves. The current habit of harking to the lives and sayings of the great people of the past might also be traced to a sub-conscious anxiety to find in what is believed to be the historically caused vacuum of the present, our foothold in the legacy of past generations. It is all right if it enlivens our sense of living in the present. We are parts of history and are conditioned by it. In our individual ways we also help to make it. Rooted to history and feeling himself an active participant in it, man derives self-confidence in making his future. No fates are involved except destiny and the effort to make it. Man needs be made accordingly self-conscious. What he objectively is he needs subjectively know that he is, so that he might direct himself to its realisation. To make him know is the task of education. Even theology does not bar man from self-transcendence. Those who believe God to be the arbiter of human destiny also want man to work out that destiny. Education needs be so contrived as to make him conscious of that end. The conscious individual will constitute the conscious society, nation and ultimately, humanity. Possibly he will help the solution of many of the problems besetting the world. Anything that mutilates life by meanness or discord makes man less of a man. If and when conflicts are unavoidable, they need be resolved by natural justice so that they do not debase and degrade humanity. Man serves himself best and most by always trying to get out of the rut which seeks to envelop him. There are occasions on which he rises to heights when he loves, worships, sacrifices or dedicates himself. But it does not last and when he deviates, he brings society down with him. There is no disregarding reality but there is no reality that could but find release in transcendence.