Philosophical Musings and Ruminations - Part Dos - On Swami Vivekananda's Speech

A few days back I came across Swami Vivekananda’s speech at Chicago of 1893 (the full speech). It was a pretty good speech. He talked a lot about the Hindu philosophy and the Vedic principles. Certainly, if I were there among his audience, I would have extolled his speech and venerated him for my life. I do respect him and his thoughts and I also respect the Hindu philosophy which he exalted at Chicago so beautifully. But as I read through it, I wondered whether it was correct to conclude that those thoughts were the final arguments for the existence of God. If it helps my case, even the Rig Veda, in the Nasadiya Sukta (Creation Hymn) has mentioned that question of a creator can’t be addressed. “Who knows whence came creation or whence the creator came. Whether the creator begot this creation or creation begot the creator.” (Not exactly accurate, since I write only what I can recollect, but the message is intact). When the originators of the philosophy are themselves skeptical, why shouldn't be we?

Although, I can't ratiocinate with the Vedic philosophy (which is his speech’s later half) because it is just a philosophy or a theory at best (like other theories e.g. relativity, evolution) and can’t be held as the ultimate truth, I wasn’t very much satisfied with his initial half. I have picked up the relevant lines from the speech and tried to answer them to the best of my ability.

Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? – The laws of physics as we know hold true only within our universe, one can’t calculate anything outside and before our universe based on the present laws of physics, classical or quantum. One can’t and shouldn’t comment on anything unknown. Even if one comments, one shouldn’t try to fill that gap with the God rhetoric.

Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation. – First off, he asserts that God dying is an absurd phenomenon and hence rejects it as impossibility. Even accepting his predisposition, he says that it is possible for things to have no beginning at all, like the Vedas and the soul. So if there never was a beginning, we wouldn’t require a beginner or creator, hence no point of existence of god. If he didn’t create us then he holds no authority over us.

Argument about the Ontology of Thought - When he talks about monism, he evokes a very wide and contested dialectic that has been going on since the time of Socrates. The arguments of monism which he uses sound more like metaphysical dualism to me just like the Cartesian arguments (if he quoted the Vedas, the Vedantas give the concept of only absolute monism, they are not dualists). He tries to mix the thoughts of two very different schools namely Idealists (only mind is real) and Materialists (mental and spiritual can be reduced to physical). Further, he uses the presence of “essence” as an argument supporting god, and apparently fell for the round-trip fallacy by implying that the “absence of proof” of its material origin is a “proof of absence” of its material origin. When one uses science as one’s support, there can never be a “dead end” argument. Who knows what might unfold tomorrow! After all, there have been times when people believed in full earnestness that the world was flat and the earth was the center of the universe. They killed people who said otherwise!!

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. – Evoking the “Law of Affinity” is plain cherry picking to justify his statement. Even if we assume Law of Affinity pervades all matter (which it does not and in the parts it does, it has various versions; in some instances likes attract, then some instances show that the opposites attract and some complex cases may present a combination of the two, a male and a female may be attracted to each other but they are physically the opposites), and having previously drawn a distinction between matter and spirit, how does he justify that the same scientific laws will apply to the spirit in the same manner as they apply to the matter? Diagonal application (between matter and spirit) is a far cry. Further, he subsequently claims that soul is a part of the almighty, an “abject”, deluded manifestation of God itself, this would mean that God itself is subject to the same laws, which would contradict the Omnipotence of god.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up-try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life. – Well, the debate on reincarnation is another long and tedious thing to go through. The Hindu philosophy holds that a soul has to repay its debt through this continuous cycle of birth-death-rebirth. Being a pantheist, it also believes that a soul can be born as an animal depending on its behavior and conduct in the previous life. Plato was a vehement advocate of reincarnation. Christianity rejects reincarnation. Oriental philosophies believe Karma to be the sole evaluation criterion for reincarnation while some western belief systems hold that the subject has a choice in the matter. Whatever, we still haven’t reached a point in our intellectual journey so that we can even attempt to examine this alleged phenomenon. Assuming that reincarnation does happen, there have been several studies by psychologists in which their subjects somehow remember their past lives. OK. But it is a very peculiar observation that none of them has ever lived an animal’s life (but we saw earlier that souls can be reborn as animals), and the important people (parents, siblings, lovers etc.) in his/her previous life also occupy important positions in their present life, though the roles are swapped.

Déjà vu is another argument. Many people experience déjà vu, including me. But unfortunately my déjà vu is limited to the events about to happen in the near future. I dream about some insignificant event and a few days later the same thing unfolds in exactly the same manner. You might call me a deluded raconteur, but how can you reject my account? There is no way you can examine my brain and question its veracity or mendacity. Strange it is that I would be questioned but a person claiming to remember his/her previous life won’t. In light of all this, I would just say that the concept of karma is important, in the sense, that it maintains a moral thought among people. Humans always fear doing certain things because they don’t want to mess up their after-life. Probably, that was a reason why the concept of reincarnation was brought in the first place, to introduce a “selfish” motive behind a person’s moral behavior for the general welfare, because probably the Rishis had discerned that one’s own welfare is of the utmost importance to a person, if someone truly rises above it, he achieves Moksha, the ultimate emancipation from worldly worries and malaise.

All right, I am talking gibberish. Reincarnation does happen. But then, one must ask, what is the purpose of all this? Why create so many souls, put them on a “small mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” in some dark, obscured corner of the universe? What does the Almighty Creator intend to do with our souls once they reach Heaven? Some say that “From each incarnation the soul takes the quintessence of its experiences. From these different episodes in the evolution of the soul, it is possible to gain a comprehensive understanding of many different experiences.” But what will the soul do after it has amassed so much experience? (Further it begets a paradox. If rebirths are truly meant to teach the deluded souls the ultimate truth by employing the faculty of experience, why do we witness infant mortality? Certainly it is safe to assume that a child who died at an age of, say, 5 years wouldn’t have gained any considerable spiritual experience. Then why first send it to earth and suddenly call the whole thing off? So, does the divine err a lot?).

The Hindu philosophy tells us that the ultimate goal of the soul is realizing that it is a part of something big, something grand and after this realization it finally merges with the omnipresent essence, the pervasive ether. But what after that? If this and only this is the ultimate goal then I find it to be a sheer wastage, which, given the attributes of god would be absurd. If you are still thinking that Hinduism actually tells us about a God, a being with no form, no anthropomorphic attributes and no judgments about our eensy, worldly behavior and conduct (I have faced this argument too) but who is present everywhere and just wants you to learn about the spiritual elation through Karma (that is more or less, Swami Vivekananda’s speech’s rest part), then I would say that you are playing with words now. Because, what you call as God I call a set of philosophical thoughts and as an atheist, I refuse to call it God. As a human, when I look up at the night sky, shimmering with umpteen stars, I wonder sometimes about the vastness of the cosmos and I am simply humbled. But that is, just a feeling, you might call it God, but I won’t, I call it the universe.

I would tell about Existential Nihilism, but as a human, you probably won’t buy it. We have a tendency of finding an explanation, a purpose behind everything which scientists and psychologists call an evolutionary necessity. But it isn’t always helpful, certainly not in these times when we have a Quantum physics which in a way implies that “God” does play dice. I could try to quench your thirst for a theistic explanation by proffering the possibility that, we are just an experiment at best, the denizens of a cosmic flask under precise observations by some cosmic scientist (which you would call god). Which leads to another premise that such a squeamish scientist would not want to interfere in its experiment’s vicissitudes. At best he/she would leave us alone and let us live our life on our own terms. Worrying about the recycling of souls would be far below on his/her list of priorities and so should it be on ours. Live life to the best possible extent and create a more tangible goal for your life. That is the best one could with one’s life according to me. (This is my explanation. I could call it God, but strange isn’t it? You wouldn’t accept it as God. You would call it a deluded, materialistic worldview!! Think again).