Light Thoughts Over A Dark Matter

Most words that we use refer to some discernible object, phenomenon, event or process, but there are some which do not do so in a straightforward manner. Take the sentence, ‘I did not go to office’. The word ‘office’ refers to a building which I can indicate with my forefinger, but what does the word ‘not’ refer to? For another instance of how some words fail to pick out objects in an unproblematic manner, consider antonyms such as light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. It is clear that the first term in each pair stands for something ‘objective’, but what about the second term? If asked for the meaning of the word ‘light’, we may direct the interlocutor’s attention to the sun, a torch, a candle, and other sources of light; but in response to a request for the meaning of ‘darkness’, what do we point out?

This, in turn, raises another question: do we define darkness as the absence of light or do we explicate the meaning of light as the antonym of darkness? That is, should we hold that light is the primary or original ‘thing’, and darkness is whatever is lacking in it, or that darkness is the fundamental substance whose absence we call light? Now we can take our enquirer to a dark field under a pitch-black moonless sky, and say, ‘All of this is darkness’. But the disanalogy now becomes clearer: in the case of light, we can indicate an active source, but with darkness, we are compelled to talk in terms of an absence, a deficit, an inadequacy. To the question, ‘What is causing this light?’ we can respond, ‘the sun’; but the parallel question, ‘What is causing this darkness?’ does not elicit such a reply. We can at best say, ‘the lack of sunlight’.

Consider how we teach numbers to children in school. First, we introduce them to the so-called natural numbers 1, 2, 3 and so on. After some weeks or months, we tell them about negative numbers which are formed by adding a negative sign to the former. So from the series 1, 2, 3 … we form the mirror-opposite one of -1, -2, -3 … In other words, to put forward a tautology, negative numbers are called so precisely because they are negative, that is, they are placed in negation to the positive numbers. However, this is not the only way to go about doing things. We can very well imagine a pedagogic system which advocates the following pattern. Children will first be taught the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 … Only when they have understood this series will the natural (or ‘positive’) numbers be introduced to them. In this alternative system of learning numbers, children are taught that it is negative numbers that are primary for here the positive numbers are defined in terms of what the negative numbers lack (and not the other way round).

The same goes for the polarity of light and darkness. Light is usually regarded as a positive entity, and darkness is understood as the absence of light; but there is nothing illogical in starting with darkness as the positive entity, and defining light as what darkness is deficient in. If we find this state of affairs somewhat hard to conceive it could, to some extent, be an accident of our evolutionary history which has been guided, among other things, by copious amounts of sunlight. But consider a planet where the sun shines for only one hour in a day, so that the remaining twenty-three hours are steeped in blinding darkness. Life-forms have evolved on this planet to survive under such conditions which we earthlings would perceive as the nonexistence of light, but they as the presence of a positive entity called darkness. It should, therefore, not be very surprising if its inhabitants follow the convention of defining (and experiencing) darkness as the basic substance, and light as a deficiency of darkness.

However, let us not stray too far into the realms of sci-fi, and instead remain grounded on our planet. We note that the terms ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ are not merely descriptive but also evaluative. For instance, darkness is associated with death, corruption, disease and bestiality; in India at least nobody would turn up at a wedding, unless s/he wanted to offend the hosts, dressed in black. Children (and often grown-ups too!) are routinely admonished: ‘Don’t harbour such dark thoughts! Don’t give in to negative thinking’. In contrast, light/colour is the glue that holds together an entire constellation of images of beauty, life, vivacity and vitality. Therefore, given the traditional belief (or more precisely superstition, if you will) that widows are dead to the world, Indian widows were (and still are?) not allowed to wear colourful, or shall we say lightful, dresses. These polarized images are brought together, and their evaluative distinctions clearly marked out, in an ancient hymn in which the speaker prays that he be led away from darkness to light and away from death to immortality. This invocation clearly emphasizes what we might call the priority of being (symbolized by light) over non-being (symbolized by darkness).

Let us move a step further, but in a somewhat different direction. We have noted that ‘light’ is usually regarded as the fundamental stuff, and darkness as its negation, lack, denial or contrary. However, this is not to imply that darkness is nonexistent per se. Though it may not have the absolute degree of reality that we would like to impute to light, it still exists somehow, maybe in the shadowlines of life, in the peripheries of brightness, in the penumbras of existence. Think of a hole in your wallet (literally, not metaphorically). In a certain sense, this hole is not something positive, it simply marks an absence in the texture of the wallet. In another sense, however, this lack can have real effects, as for instance when your money falls out through it. Likewise, darkness, which seems to belong to an ambiguous zone of half-reality, has very real consequences, for there is a lot that happens and gets done, as we say, because of the cover that darkness provides us.

Images Of Order

What lies at the deepest level --- order or disorder? It is possible to divide human beings into two groups: in the first are those who believe it is 'order' and the second comprises those who are convinced that it is 'disorder'. Why do we, in any case, use this vocabulary of a deeper or the deepest level? Is not the world just one homogenous uniform expanse to which these contrastive terms do not quite apply? Looking out through the window, we see the sky, the sun, trees, birds, grass, humans moving to and fro, dogs loitering around, and so on. Are they not all at the same level, and, indeed, is not the very attempt to speak of ‘levels’ misleading in this context?

One reason why we do speak in certain contexts of 'levels' (or sometimes 'degrees') of reality is our proneness to illusion, deception and error. When we discover that we had been deceived in believing in the existence of a certain object XY, we believe that somehow XY could not have been truly (or 'really') real. So, for the instance, the traveler in the desert sees a water body in the distance, though later he realizes it was a mirage. However, during the few moments when he was under the deception, the water body was indeed a real object that he perceived. Subsequent reflection leads him to assert that it was, however, not quite real, it is not really ‘out there’. Or, to move into the domain of interpersonal relations, we may arrive at the conclusion that a certain person is cruel and ruthless towards his friends. On knowing him more intimately, we may be forced to revise our perception, and led to believe instead that he is 'really' a kind-hearted person. We then use the contrastive terms 'superficial' and 'deeper': while at the superficial level he seems or appears to be brutal and pitiless, when we dig through the crust of these upper layers and arrive at the subterranean deeper levels, we realise that he is in fact compassionate and benevolent.

Extending this discussion, we may now ask what lies really beneath the world around us. Those in the first camp will reply that there is a deep order, harmony and tranquility underneath the multiplicity, plurality and chaos that strike us on and from every side in our daily lives. This order is not simply a product of our subjective fantasies; in some sense at least it is really out there. For instance, even before human beings appeared on earth, the planets in our solar system moved smoothly in accordance with Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is true that this law was discovered at a certain point in time (in fact, quite late after the emergence of homo sapiens) but the planets, so to speak, did not have to wait for their Newton. And the same applies to many other cosmological processes that would not break down if humans were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow. All these processes can be explained in terms of and subsumed under, it is hoped, some very simple laws, and it is the task of the investigator to unearth these laws. Therefore, according to these investigators, there is no randomness or arbitrariness at the ultimate or deepest level of reality: everything happens for a reason (even if that reason is not known to us, and even if it will forever remain unknown). If some event or phenomenon turns up which is apparently accidental or haphazard, it is believed that someday in the future we shall we able to explain it in terms of a yet undiscovered law. In short, there is nothing that is ab-surd; everything can be, sooner or later, be fit into our conceptual schemes or intellectual frameworks through which we explain why things happen the way they do.

Those in the other group oppose this contention that the world is ultimately explainable through theories which depict reality as an ordered system and encapsulate its structures within their ambit. They contest that the deepest level is a murky zone of the inexplicable, the meaningless, the illogical and the unsystematic. It is true, they hold, that at the superficial levels at which most of us conduct the everyday business of living, there is some degree of order and organization. After all, the building in front of which I am standing does not disappear into thin air for a moment and then reappear the next. Aeroplanes fly through the air along their normal courses; water boils when it is heated to 100°C and human beings die when they are deprived of oxygen. However, our ability to explain such macroscopic phenomena should not lead us to believe that the world is explicable all the way down. We are so habituated to the seeming order around us that we (mistakenly) transpose our images, categories and concepts of order onto the deepest levels of reality where, in fact, there is nothing but sheer flux, change, transition, instability and randomness.

It is possible to look at the concepts of order and disorder not in such oppositional terms but in more dialectical, that is, inter-related terms. In other words, it becomes possible to speak of disorder only against a background of relative order, and vice versa, we can also reflect on order as emerging from a background of relative chaos. Think for a moment of yourself as am omniscient being whose knowledge, in the form of a deep insight, can penetrate into every form and type of reality. What would you see? At the deepest level, you will see a mass of energy within which there are localized points which you might call particles. From the agglomeration of these rapidly moving particles emerges the relatively stable macroscopic objects such as chairs, tables, cars and skyscrapers. Even these entities, however, are not completely orderly or permanent, for they decay with time and pass away.

At the purely conceptual level, nothing much turns on the question of whether the deepest level is characterised by order or disorder: it is not the type of question over which most of us would lose our sleep (in contrast to, say, the question of whether at the deepest level my spouse really loves me or detests me). The socio-political implications, however, of viewing the ‘real world’ in one way and not the other can be significantly different. Those in the second group argue that the consequences of viewing the surface realities of the world as based on a deep underlying order are dogmatism and authoritarianism. Dogmatism, because if you believe that you have found this order, you will be likely to believe that this is the final solution to the grand mystery of existence. There can be no intellectual pilgrimage beyond this full stop. Authoritarianism follows almost immediately from the former stance, because if you hold your view dogmatically, you will perhaps be queasy about the presence of individuals who disagree with you. You may even feel that you have a sort of moral right to inveigh against your opponents whom you believe are misguided and misled, and whom you need to enlighten, even if forcefully.

One example will clarify the matter. The fact of women's oppression cannot be explained simply in terms of malevolent males and submissive females (although there is no shortage of individuals in these two categories); for even though benevolent males and active females are not so hard to come by, the realities of such oppression are still very much with us. Even as you are reading this very sentence, some woman not far from where you are is being beaten to death for not having paid her dowry. Such oppression is, in fact, grounded in some deep beliefs about how the world really is like at the fundamental level. At this level, the duties, roles and functions of men and women are clearly defined and discriminated in terms of an asymmetric power structure, in which authority can flow from men to women, but never in the reverse direction. Here, then, the opponents argue, is one instance of how the belief in ultimate orders (men over women) can have insidious effects.

In contrast, those who believe that there is indeed some primary or essential order retort that these consequences need not follow (although they may in some cases). First, it is possible to believe both that there is some such order at the deep level and that one's conceptions of it are somewhat mistaken and may require revision at some point in the future. So, for instance, one may believe that at the deepest level the world is indeed governed by a set of basic laws, but that our understanding of these laws, and in fact these laws themselves, may undergo significant modification at some point in the future. Second, the correct way to challenge ultimate beliefs, they argue, is not to jettison the entire vocabulary of an ultimate order but to constantly keep on trying to formulate new visions, images or models of order. Suppose, for instance, we claim that the view of the inherent superiority of men over women is mistaken. We may be pressed to state why we believe this is so. If we stated, ‘Oh, that is just what I like to feel’, we would probably receive the reply: ‘Well, you see, you and I are then in the same boat. You feel that men are not inherently superior to women in the sense discussed above, but I feel that they indeed are. It is simply a matter of feelings. You have not given me any reason why I should feel the way that you do on this matter. So let us keep our feelings to ourselves and go our own ways’. To block such a move on the part of this imaginary interlocutor, it is argued that we must seek some justification for our beliefs, even if such justification is not easy to come by and there are endless debates over precisely what counts as a justification. However, to give up the attempt to offer reasons through which we can persuade or attract our interlocutor towards our vision of order (men-with-women instead of men-over-women) is to plunge headlong into an ocean of mere feeling.

The Hole in the Art

The comparison of social networks to a human body is fairly old, and has a lot to be said for it. Just as a properly functioning human body requires the coordination of its different parts, harmonious social existence is predicated on the broad convergence of interests of the numerous individuals who constitute a society. Take, for instance, the human body. If we consider the legs, the arms, the stomach, the chest, and so on, none of them --- taken alone --- can be said to be the individual. Rather, it is their synchronization that makes human life possible, and the breakdown of this organization readily manifests itself in disease and ill-health. Likewise, it can be argued that harmonious social life needs the organization of its disparate elements, none of which on their own can be the social body. This line of reasoning has led some to regard the human body as a simile of the social body: there are internal lines, divisions and boundaries within both of them, but --- when they are functioning properly --- there is also an overarching unity across them in both.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we may speak of a centre in the human body. Some would call this the heart, others the brain, yet others the mind. Roughly speaking, we may term it consciousness or self-awareness. We are not only aware of the environment external to our bodies but are also aware of our stream of internal life, that is, of our own ideas, sensations, thoughts and images. We know, and we also, at least on some occasions, know that we know. We also have an awareness of somehow presiding over the disparate constituents of our physical body. At times, when we feel dull or lethargic, we may drive our tired limbs to get on to work. In such cases, we become more aware than at other times that we exercise (or can learn to exercise) a sense of control over our limbs. Whether this establishes the dualist thesis that the mind and the body are two distinct substances is not quite the issue at present. There is a grain of truth in this thesis for there are indeed times, say during periods of lethargy or illness, when our body confronts us as almost an alien thing that we have to struggle against.

If there is such a coordinating centre in the human body, could there be likewise an organizing midpoint in the social body? One can think of the latter as a gigantic interconnected web of interpersonal relations and bonds. When one stares at the crowd in a supermarket or a metro station, one can try to imagine the bonds through which every individual is attached to many others. These links are, of course, invisible, and are not quite the chains that tie a prisoner to his cell. Nevertheless, they can be quite as strong as (if not even stronger than) the former; for some people, quite as forbidding and decapacitating, while for others liberating and enabling. Such reflections can lead one to wonder if there is a cosmic spider into which all these bonds flow into, which has spun out these gossamer ties, over-sees their intricate interconnections, and notes (whether with pain, bemusement or indifference) the occasions when they snap.

Now for a slightly different set of thoughts. One of the goals of certain types of practice has been the re-establishment of an underlying union between the inner life and the outer world. The argument is roughly the following. In their deepest essence, humans are integrally connected to the world, but because of various reasons, they have forgotten this umbilical tie, and have become dispersed, scattered, broken and fragmented. They need to recuperate, become con-centrated in themselves, and real-ise once again this fundamental bond. Hence this is not an establishment of something that did not exist earlier, but the re­­-establishment of what they always were/are. The key to this enterprise is to link the inner energies of the human body with the cosmic energies that flow through the totality of everything that exists. Just as there are deep cycles in the natural world, say of the days and the seasons, there are internal rhythms, and lasting harmony is instituted when the two are brought in tandem. In this limiting case, the human body becomes some sort of a super-body, in that it is not limited to the physical, skeletal frame, but becomes so expansive that it is able to receive the inflow/outflow of the entire universe that moves in and out through it. The human body can then be viewed as a channel or a medium for the passage of these deeper forces. It is simultaneously passive and active: passive in that it offers the path of least resistance to them, and active because it is governed by an individual mind that is conscious of this flow. This, then, is another way of looking at the analogy of the human and the social body, without going into the difficult question of whether there lies a cosmic centre that is somehow beyond both these two bodies.

A question mark remains, however, over this attempt. How far can the boundary of the physical body stretch? In the ideal case, as we have noted above, the concord that we speak of is brought about between, on the one hand, the human body, now considered not in its physical limitations but as a sort of a ‘universal’ body, and, on the other, the hidden flows, currents and streams that pervade the universe. However, we live in worlds fractured and disrupted not only by ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, which is manifested in murder, massacre and slaughter, but also in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and hurricanes. Even if we have somehow been thankfully safeguarded from the consequences of these, we are only too aware of the millions of lives which have been marred (sometimes permanently and irreparably) by them. Can we truly attain this deep inner concord in the knowledge that such individuals exist?

One resolution could proceed this way. These disruptions are only superficial, they do not really touch the core. Therefore, the way is open even to these afflicted individuals to re-establish this mysterious harmony of the outer and the inner, and when they succeed in doing so, their earthly travails will become like the distant memories of a half-forgotten or faintly remembered nightmare. Another is somewhat more drastic: as long as I have (fortunately) not been subject to these ills, I need not worry about the existence of others who have been; they do not fall within the circle of my concern or regard; therefore, I can attain this unity at the deepest levels of my being.

Perhaps other resolutions are possible. Or perhaps these resolutions are no more than reminders of the ultimate impossibility to re-solve this matter. In the face of the suffering other who has been incapacitated by various forces from re-establishing the unity that I aspire towards, what am I to do?

The Whole in the Part

A topic that threads itself into some of our conversations is the relationship between the ‘whole’ and its constituent ‘parts’ (even if these precise words are not used). Here is a certain whole, whether it is the society, the family, the nation, or the world, on the one hand, and here are its parts, members, as we say, of the former. What sort of a relationship holds (or should hold) between the former and the latter? Shall we say that the former comes ‘before’ the parts?

A note on this question. When we say that A is ‘before’ B, the word ‘before’ can mean different things in different contexts. So if John finished ahead of David in a bicycle race, we say that John arrived ‘before’ David at the final destination. This is the temporal sense of the term. But there is another, somewhat more intriguing, logical sense. Does the number 1 come before the number 2? Well, in one sense, yes. If you mark the natural numbers on a straight line starting from the point marked zero (where you are placed), the number 1 will be closer to you and the number 2 farther away. Also, a child in primary school would usually be taught the first before the second. But we do not really imagine that before she is introduced to the latter, it does not exist. These two numbers co-exist at the same time, but the former is logically prior to the latter, in the sense that the meaning of the latter can be explicated only the basis of an understanding of the former. Here is another example. Suppose we hear someone refer to a ‘red capybara’. Though we may not know what a capybara is, we can at least presume that it is a red-coloured object. In contrast, consider the phrase ‘capybara red’: unless this is a poetic locution, we would not quite know what sense to make of it. We can explain this distinction by saying that an object is logically prior to its qualities. When we see a ‘red apple’ we see the apple and its redness simultaneously, but the apple is logically prior in that the quality of ‘redness’ cannot be a freely-floating entity haging over it. On the other hand, the apple did not have to be red, it could have green or some other colour.

In certain wholes likewise, the totality is logically prior to its parts. Consider a fully-grown tree, its branches, shoots, leaves, trunk and roots. Which came first, the former or the latter? There is no ‘whole tree’ which is distinct from these constituents and stands over and above them, the ‘whole tree’ is in the latter. If we pluck out some leaves from this totality, what we have is not really a part, because the leaves will shrivel up and cease to exist. In contrast, consider bits and pieces of finely carved wood. A carpenter shapes and moulds them into a chair. In this case, however, we can say that the whole came after its parts. Initially, you had only these parts, and these parts were fashioned into a whole which gradually emerged from them. Morever, they retain their distinctiveness in the whole. For if you were to dismantle the chair, its individual bits would not go out of existence (unlike the leaves in the previous case).

We note, then, a central distinction between these two types of totality. In one, the whole is integrally or, as we sometimes say, organically connected with its parts. So intimate is this union that we can distinguish between the whole and the parts only in thought, but never in reality. It does not make much sense to speak of a ‘leaf’ in abstraction, a leaf can only be a leaf of a tree; likewise for its roots and shoots.

In the other, the whole is mechanically built out of fragments which are the parts, so that there is a temporal gap between the former and the latter. Also, even if one of the part is detached from the whole, it retains its original qualities. The armchair broken off from a chair remains a piece of wood; it does not disintegrate into nothingness. There is a popular way of putting this distinction: the whole is ‘larger’ than the parts, in one case and the whole is ‘nothing but’ the parts, in the other.

Both these examples are drawn from the inanimate and the non-human animate worlds. What happens, however, when we seek to apply these considerations to human social existence? For example, which kind of a totality is society or the family? Is it a totality like a tree which dwells in its parts, or is it one like a chair which can be dismantled into its parts? Is there one life that flows through and pervades all its levels and strata?

Responses will vary from one individual to another; depending on various factors such as age, class, race, affluence, gender and so on. For instance, some groups may feel that they are deeply integrated into the social whole, but could fail to see that many others, who have been cast to the social periphery, experience this whole not as a benign but as a malign force. Whether it is the helots, the slaves, the proletariat or the untouchables, the story is broadly the same in its outline. It is not uncommon for the powerful to try to legitimise their sectional interests by putting forward their views as being in the best interests of all (whereas under ‘all’ they should properly include only themselves).

This is to point out that this question, ‘what type of a social formation do we aspire towards?’, is integrally connected to our understanding of a social whole. Is it one that is structured by relations of domination and oppression or is one that is truly accomodating of divergent forces, interests and opinions? At times, it is hard to discriminate between the two; which is perhaps why the question of whether social existence is a boon or a bane continues to be such a hotly debated topic.