by Sambarta Chatterjee We are witnessing a period of profound transformation of the world, from a Western-led order to what must be called the age of humanity. Faced with the inevitability of this realignment, the loss of its empire, the Western world is unraveling from not only a political crisis of legitimacy, but also a crisis of meaning. As liberalism, from its political theory to its philosophy of man, proves itself inadequate to meet the strivings of the modern human being, the Western intellectual seems incapable of philosophical renewal. The result is chaos and confusion, with ordinary people categorically rejecting the outdated thinking of the elite. This crisis is civilizational, with all touchstones of Western civilization, from the authority of the Church, to the outlook on life and human freedom in white culture, to the unquestioned dominance of the world, in great turmoil. This is an existential moment, not just for the West but for world humanity, because the transformation of the world necessarily implies a transformation of the human being. This is a time ripe with new possibilities, the advent of a new stage in the history of humanity. It is also ripe with the possibility of our own renewal, if we can face our time. It is clear that the future will be shaped by a rising Asia, home to over half the world’s population and the overwhelming majority of the world’s youth. The emerging Asia will undoubtedly interact with the West, but for the first time in the modern world, on its own terms. The future of humanity will rest on the modern Asian man and woman’s conception of him/herself, of their civilizational basis of modernity, and their place in the world as an agent of history. This will require a serious study of Asia, its social philosophies, systems of thought, and its people, who have leaped from the premodern to the modern through two hundred years of colonial rule and the anticolonial movements. Therefore, a sociology of modern Asia, a study of human potential, acquires a new urgency. It is with this aim that we must study the thought and life of the revolutionary Indian sociologist, Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Born in 1887, the arc of Sarkar’s life traversed the Japanese defeat of czarist Russia, the World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Indian and Chinese anticolonial struggles. He was a freedom fighter and a scientist, who held the firm conviction that the hope of mankind lay in a scientific study of history, which must be informed by the study of man, sociology. Sarkar revolutionized modern sociology by reconstructing the field as the scientific investigation of the whole of man as a social, psychological, political, and historically constituted being, and centered its scope on the human striving for freedom. As such, he broke epistemically with Europe in the throes of positivist, determinist philosophies of man and science. He not only championed the demands of Young Asia, but theorized a Critical Philosophy necessary for a colonized Asia to understand itself and chart its future. Finally, he studied the sociological content of the Indian revolution, the revolutionary remaking of society through the transformation of the ordinary human being, whose path toward, and vision of, modernity is distinctly different from that of Europe. An epistemic break in modern sociology Sociology in the 19th and early 20th centuries is generally associated with the thoughts of British and French empiricists Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and others. The essential aspect of Comte’s scientific framework was that: the real, external world of natural and human phenomena, can be known, in its entirety, by our internal sensations, feelings, theories, in short, by our attitudes. He proceeded from the general attitude of Europe of his time – shaped on the one hand by the brief period of the liberal revolution that began with the Renaissance and culminated in the French revolution of the last century, and the experience of slavery and colonialism on the other. The unprecedented success in establishing the largest empire on Earth, the industrial revolution, the trans Atlantic slave trade, and colonialism, demanded the attitude that the hard-earned liberal principle, the inherent worth of the individual human being, was compatible with Empire and degradation of dark humanity. Therefore, the general attitude of Europe, white supremacy, could not afford to study the human being, because it would reveal the humanity of darker races. Comte, thereby, sought to study Society as an abstraction of human life and action, determined entirely by ‘laws of nature’ akin to classical physics, laws of social institutions. His scientific framework insisted that the general attitude, that human beings are unworthy of study, implied that human beings are impossible to study, systematically, coherently, scientifically. This epistemology, Comte’s positivism, established the first scientific white supremacist sociology. He claimed, without studying human beings of his own or other civilizations, that the history of human civilization was neatly categorized into ‘theological’, ‘metaphysical’ and ‘positive’ stages. He based his claim on the history of empire in Europe, from the Holy Roman Empire to the White Supremacist Empire, when Europe had reached the epitome of human development characterized by the supremacy of ‘scientific’ experience. A relatively young civilization, Europe had still been figuring out basic civilizational questions of unity of human beings in spite of differences in colors of hair and eyes and such. White supremacy theorized this primitive attitude into the modern concept of race, and produced a Spencer, who went on to posit ‘social Darwinism’ – the biology-informed white supremacist sociology. His science further inspired natural sciences in phrenology and eugenics. Finally, Durkheim canonized his precursors’ methodology into a distinct sanitized field of scientific enquiry after collective ‘social facts’, with no place for, or theory of, the individual human being who constitutes society. Sarkar was a revolutionary who found this affront on humanity unacceptable. As a science, he saw it as woefully inadequate to comprehend the complexity of the time - colonized Asia breaking into modernity. The anticolonial movement demanded, and produced, a new type of human being who must believe in his own individual worth. That belief must be based on knowledge, on scientific study of Asian human beings, and their capacity for revolutionary change. Asserting that sociology must begin with a correct understanding of the human personality, he wrote: It is not nature, region or geography that in the last analysis determines man’s destiny. It is the human will, man’s energy, that recreates the topography and natural forces, humanizes the earth and spiritualizes the geography. Then, again, it is not the group, the clan, the nation or the society that ultimately forces the individual to submit to the social milieu, the group moves, the tradition, and the status quo. It is rather the individual personality that compels the moves to change and the milieu to break, that subverts status quo and reforms tradition.(1) Sarkar was an organic intellectual. He saw intellectual activity as the lifeworld of all human beings, and especially the poor whose daily life involves the scientific assessment of his conditions, and informs his aspirations. He radically recenters science and scientific thought on the human potential of ordinary lives. In a series of conversations with his students, he said: To be human is to think. Therefore, every human being is a philosopher, a scientist…Literacy is not a precondition for political franchise, because every human being is a political scientist. The illiterate reasons daily between right and wrong, in the workings of one’s locale or health or one’s livelihood. Therefore, I see no difference between the so-called educated and the illiterate…The only measure of man lies in experience, in work. The intellectual writes, the ironworker works iron, the potter works clay, the weaver weaves cloth, so on. Work builds the mind of man, therefore it is the worker who is educated.(2) It is this innate conviction in the worth of the human being, that Sarkar’s sociology proceeds from. In his methodological development and ideological maturity, he was influenced by the German continental school, especially Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Kant’s revolutionary idea was that the external world of natural and human reality could only be partially known by our attitudes (phenomena), but there are aspects of the world whose knowledge may be incomprehensible to our current attitudes (noumena). This was the starting point of Hegel’s dialectical science, which learned from the scientific experience of the liberal revolution, that human knowledge perpetually advances human attitudes. Therefore our sense of the world interacts with, and is informed by, the world in-itself. Sarkar further found Kant’s conception of Man as a moral agent, not overdetermined by natural, scientific laws, as a step forward in human knowledge, a ‘transvaluation of values’. Sarkar’s sociology thus involves the scientific search for principles of social organization, a search that must be informed by the study of the individual human personality. The human personality can be known, partly, and our sense, our attitude toward human personality, ever approaches fuller knowledge. A Critical philosophy of Emerging Asia For Asia, colonialism ushered in a unique period in her long history, when military, political, and economic domination was sustained by an entire system of philosophy and science. The white supremacist sociology of Europe paved the way for the Oriental school of social philosophy, whose principal task was to scientifically theorize non-white civilizations in their entirety – their religions, social systems, culture, philosophy, science – so as to justify their subjugation. The Oriental school concluded, in simple terms, that Asia was a civilization of retreat from life and struggle, in Comte’s ‘metaphysical’ stage, whose only path to modernity lay in a rejection of their civilizational achievements, and aspiring instead to the standards of Europe. Sarkar proudly asserted that the futurists of Young Asia must discard this ‘entire scientific machinery’, and free themselves from the delusion that the standards of Europe were anything but a testament to Asia’s degradation. His theorizing of a Critical Philosophy for Young Asia must be seen as part of the revolutionary consciousness of the Indian people of his time, whose fight for freedom involved a cultural renaissance, a re-evaluation of their civilization on their own terms, and the creation of modern revolutionary art and science rooted in civilizational achievements. His Critical Philosophy proclaims that: If it is possible to generalize the diverse intellectual currents among the Turks, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese of the twentieth century into any suitable formula, probably it should be called the “critique of Occidental Reason”.(3) Sarkar believed in the fundamental unity of all humanity - therefore a science, ‘Occidental Reason’, which “proves” the opposite, must be discarded. He identified the principal contradictions of empiricist sociology and the Oriental school in its comparative, interpretive, and chronological methodology, which must give way for new theory. First, the scientific method must compare the same class of facts, whereas Europe’s empiricists “compare the superstitions of the Orient with the rationalism of the Occident, while they ignore the rationalism of the Orient and suppress the superstitions of the Occident.” Second, he rejected the psychological interpretation of the same class of social facts in Europe, which in Asia were interpreted as civilizational characteristics. He saw that the epistemology of empiricist sociology was being deployed for an anthropological purpose - to theorize Asian civilization in a way such that colonialism was compatible with the liberal doctrine of man. Therefore, Asian civilization was ‘proved’ to be passive, mystical, ‘spiritual’ and unconcerned with Freedom in this life. Finally, Sarkar found the final fundamental flaw of ‘Occidental Reason’ in its inability to properly conceptualize Time - Europe’s inability to assess the nature of change in its society before and after the industrial revolution, a period that saw the revolutionary transformation of all its social institutions, mores and attitudes. The Critical Philosophy of Young Asia must study the development of societies, social institutions and ideas in movement, as they change with time, in response to the changing world. It cannot afford to doubt the fallibility of Europe and empire, because it is informed by history, before geography was invented. Sarkar saw in Occidental Reason, a narrow ‘rational’ empiricism upheld by an imperial world order, the ultimate justification of liberalism as the most advanced system of thought. The ideological history of the West had reached a peculiar point where an entire philosophical system, over a hundred years old, was no longer critically examined – instead it was bolstered by the largest empire in the world. Instead of facing the contradiction between the liberal philosophy of man and slavery and colonialism, the doctrine of white supremacy was invented and sustained by new theory and science. The only logical outcome therefore was the rationalization that the ends of empire must be that of liberalism. At the turn of World War I, with the defeat of Germany and czarist Russia as imperial competitors to England, he wrote: Nay, democracy has thus been granted a safe asylum among the children of men! For, in sooth, is not the expansion of Britain in naval power, commerce, colonies, and protectorates, or those new-fangled mandatories tantamount to the conquest of liberalism, liberty and law on earth?...When therefore the bullion power of the United States determined to enter the lists of the Armageddon as the St. John the Baptist of world democracy, on what other political psychology could the quixotic adventure be based except on the postulate that the world is safe for democracy, civilization and humanity as long as it is safe for the British Empire?(4) Today, the unraveling of the world order is the West crumbling under the weight of this contradiction, with humanity asserting itself on the threshold of a new stage. As Western imperialism seeks to destabilize and control Asia in a desperate attempt to delay its demise, it still does so as the bastion of liberalism and liberal democracy. The war-weary world however looks toward Asia to show the way forward toward Peace and genuine democracy. This calls for the working out of a new philosophical system, a new theory of Man, which is not only incompatible with war but which can create new values, new aspirations, new meaning for Man. Sarkar’s demand for Young Asia rings truer than ever today: Humanity is in the sorest need of an emancipated Asia, independent of foreign control, unhampered in any legitimate line of activity. Every inch of Asian soil has to be placed under a sovereign state of the Asian race, no matter whether sovietic-communal, republican, monarchial, democratic or autocratic.(4) Only then, in the event of Asia recovering its natural rights from the temporary aggressors and illegitimate usurpers, will sanity prevail in the deliberations of the great Peace Council convened by the Parliament of Man.(3) The Double Quest for Modernity Sarkar’s lifework was an indispensable part of the Indian revolution because he studied the Indian mind in development from ancient to modern times. He theorized its essence as an ‘eternal double quest’ – of self-expression and assertion of its civilizational contributions, in a dialectical relationship with vishwa-shakti, world forces. His historical and scientific investigation of Indian civilization, its religions, social systems, philosophy and science, was matched only by his tireless efforts to introduce and critique modern philosophical systems, science, sociology, economic theories and political philosophies. A career begun with the National Council of Education during the Swadeshi movement, his study of and travels to China, Europe and America led him to establish the Bengali Institute of Sociology, the Bengali Asia Academy, and the Bengali Institute of American Culture. The task he set for himself and the future was the emancipation of the Indian mind, rising from colonialism, to finally examine its own civilization and the modern world on its own terms, free from the ideological assault of the West. If the high task of Asia is to answer humanity’s call for renewal today, what is the contribution of the Indian mind, the high duty of its eternal ‘double quest’? It is in the working out of its unique civilizational contribution to the modern revolutionary process, the unique sociological content of the Indian revolution in a transforming world. Sarkar identified in Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent non-cooperation “nothing but the eternal double quest of modern India.” By this he did not simply mean that Gandhian categories were uniquely Indian, but rather that Gandhi’s method was uniquely Indian, in its scientific synthesis of civilizational touchstones with ideas of modernity. Gandhi’s revolutionary interpretation of the Gita as the civilizational call for selfless action, his revival of the traditional spinning-wheel, charkha, and his complete identification with the masses, brought the Indian people in contact with modern ideas of non-cooperation with the State, dignity of work, and the inherent worth of the individual human being. The ancient philosophical concept of ahimsa was brought into modernity, by squarely facing modern Man under slavery, and forged the non-violent method in the crucible of apartheid South Africa. Similarly, satyagraha, acceptance of Truth as the highest law, was transformed into a modern political method through its revolutionary demand for non-cooperation with unjust laws. It was this ‘double quest’ in Gandhi’s method, a philosophy in action which was India’s civilizational answer to imperialism, that accords Gandhi a unique place among revolutionary leaders the world over. Sarkar wrote: Most political leaders of the world have their day and cease to be. But one of the few that have a claim to rank as a leader of mankind for all ages is Gandhi.(5) Gandhi’s eternal contribution to modern revolutionary science is the complete identification of the revolutionary transformation of society with the transformation of the individual. The non-violent method was a uniquely modern scientific contribution because the most degraded, and disarmed, human being, for the first time, had a direct role in the revolutionary process. Sarkar saw this in Gandhi’s “place as a maker of character.” The courage to rely on one’s own convictions, to look at violence in the eye and to see in it the moral undoing of white civilization, which were exemplified in Gandhi, was infectious because he revealed the possibility of moral transformation for every individual. Sarkar notes: Nothing, again, can be more heartening and reassuring than for a young man to be told that “true morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for ourselves and in fearlessly following it.” Individuality is the keynote of Gandhian ethics and it is on this basis that men and women are taught to obey the call of duty.(5) The Futurism of Rising Asia While political freedom has been achieved in most of Asia, the anticolonial movements of Asia are unfinished, because its futuristic questions demand our answers today. What political philosophies will shape tomorrow’s world in the broadest vision of genuine freedom and democracy? What will be the emerging civilizational touchstones of Asia, that are worthy of modern Asian men and women? On what terms will Asia see itself, and the rest of the world? Let us deal with these questions, with the hindsight of history and in light of the ‘double quest’. First, even though Sarkar was a dialectical thinker and a fighter for the dignity of the working poor, he saw Marxian historical materialism, the overdetermination of human nature by the laws of political economy, to suffer from Europe’s positivism. Moreover, he could not accept the unscientific application of Marxian categories to the revolutionary demands of Asia. Even though he championed the Russian Revolution as the heralder of a new stage of human freedom, he wrote: The class struggle of the West thus becomes anti-alienism or race struggle in the East: because for all practical purposes capitalism is there embodied in the foreign rulers and foreign captains of industry. Until foreign domination is overthrown, the socialists and labor leaders of Asia must have to advocate the tenets of nationalism, backed by indigenous capitalism if need be. Asia’s struggle with her own capitalists is of course not in abeyance for the present, but will be accelerated as soon as the foreign incubus is subverted.(4) Inconvenient as it may be, we are not in a post-white supremacist world, and ‘foreign incubus’ has not been subverted. The political philosophy shaping the world transformation of tomorrow cannot afford to be a dogmatic application of Marxian categories, because conditions of the modern world have progressed beyond 20th century Europe. What is more, ideological incubus runs high where theories, systems of thought and philosophies manufactured within the Empire, by its ideological vanguard produced by the western University, carry remarkable currency among parts of the Indian intelligentsia. Sarkar himself has been a victim of such onslaught, where his critique of European thought is seen as an ideological justification of post-colonial theories. Post-colonial thought, and its close cousin postmodernism, claims to reject the ‘entire scientific machinery’ of white supremacy, but instead rejects everything but. It naturally and politely rejects white supremacist thought of the past, and in turn propounds white supremacist assumptions of today. Like Comte’s epistemology, postmodernism asserts that human beings are mutually fundamentally unknowable, and therefore incapable of arriving at new theory and Truth. Instead of simply white and darker races, post modern theories abstract human beings into mutually exclusive categories of identity – gender, sexual, racial, ethnic and combinations thereof – whose paths to liberation are distinct and a matter of great academic debate. It further, in practice, does great violence to the idea of the individual human being, by insisting that these categories of identity overdetermine human nature. Of course, its objective is to incapacitate the individual from renewing himself, to see himself as part of humanity and fight for its freedom. It does so by obscuring white supremacy in its current forms, which sees the white poor as uncultured, self-asserting Asia as the greatest threat to democracy and human rights, and the African American poor as an incorrigible mass, ungrateful for the ’progress’ that has been gifted to them. While Sarkar noted the “alleged pessimism of the East” of the Orientalists, postmodernism alleges pessimism concerning human nature in toto, by insisting that further human knowledge, and hence human freedom, is impossible. The futurists of modern Asia will have to discard post-colonial theories, and squarely shoulder the problems of modernity in the last stages of neocolonial domination, by engaging with their civilizational contributions to modernity. Finally, rising Asia will have to rediscover its civilizational friendships and renew them for modern times. The historic ties between India and China were modernized through Tagore’s visits to China last century, and the efforts of a generation of Chinese scholars such as Tan Yun-Shan rekindled the spirit of civilizational brotherhood during the anticolonial movement. The Bandung spirit and the Non-Aligned Movement similarly answered the call for civilizational unity during the Cold War period. Today, BRICS is the first step for Asia to come together in assessing the transition from the unipolar moment. However, this moment calls for Asia to understand and assess the white mind, its attitudes and assumptions concerning human nature, and its assessment of itself. In this, Asia will have to see Black America, the only dark civilization that has lived with white civilization for four hundred years, and watched their ways, and whose struggle for freedom created a new kind of human being and fundamentally transformed American society. James Baldwin, the great revolutionary thinker, wrote: My days are not their days. My ways are not their ways. I would not think of them, one way or the other, did not they so grotesquely block the view between me and my brother. (6) In order to see in world humanity its brother, Asia will have to learn from Black America, and be able to see its peninsular civilization, Europe, as her young, misguided, brother who may finally be forced to come into his own. References: 1. 'The equation of comparative industrialism and culture history', in B. Dass (ed.): The social and economic ideas of Benoy Sarkar (28—42). Calcutta Chukervertty Chatterjee and Co. Ltd] 2. (Translated from Bengali) Benoy Sarkar-er Baithak-e: Conversations with Haridas Mukherjee, Shib Chandra Dutta, Hemendrabijoy Sen, Kshiti Mukherjee, Subodh Krishna Ghoshal and Manmath Nath Sarkar. 3. The Futurism of Young Asia, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 1922 4. Asia and Eur-America, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 1922 5. The Eternal in Gandhi, Creative India: From Mohenjo Daro to the age of Ramakrsna-Vivekananda, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 1937 6. Staggerlee wonders, James Baldwin, 1982 Sambarta Chatterjee is a peace activist and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.
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January 2025
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