Reason Unreason

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Democratic liberalism without nationalistic xenophobia, Enlightenment without totalitarianism, free will without an imposed moral order (or erratic chaos); globalisation without self- enclosed national pride; a borderless world without fortified borders, secularism without communal feelings, a wordless prayer in peace without voluble violence and all such binaries like life and death are inconceivable in the world: For that is the inscrutable mystery of life. Nature, society, civilization also consist of internal contradictions seldom resolved. Nature's plenitude and the deprivation  of social beings too cannot and have not been reconciled. In fact nothing in life and world can ever be solved, resolved or reconciled as long as the individual mind thinks not in conformity with the cosmic mind or social psyche but in terms of a personal - private  cosmos. The individual always thinks as though he is pitted against the world. All relationships are his/her own and he is  or tries to be the master. He has no time for 'peace' for peace is a negative state, dull and uninspiring. He wants his energies to be on a white hot pitch to create, invent, build and call everything his own. And here we come face to face with the primordial debate between reason and its twin unreason. If rationality is the holding principle of the world, irrationality is its romantic countermeasure to disturb the equilibrium of the holding principle. If reason creates order, irrationality creates chaos as a contrapuntal balancing rhythm. The universal human is always poised against the individual who makes the world his own playfield of imaginative aspirations, thereby creating his own rationality which may be construed as irrational but it has its own logic and self justifying myth. Thus the obvious binaries are reinforcements of the perceived idea or phenomenon by the other dimension of the same perception. Order and chaos do not cancel each other out rather they project the complex balancing of perceptions or things.

Good and evil are not mutual exclusives like Spirit and Matter (we presume they are different); Good is meaningful in the context of evil for these two are always in mutual engagement. If good is the spirit of the universe it contains evil and always tries to dominate to give the process of history a forward movement for its own self-fulfillment. If the spirit or Good is blocked history becomes directionless. Therefore the spirit discards, by whatever means, the 'matter' or the impediment for its course correction. The Hegelians view it as the Freedom of the historical process of the self- defining  order of the  universe. In the Bhagbad Gita the Idea of Spirit is Dharma (not religion by any stretch of imagination) and this Dharma is the principle which holds the universe together. If the balance is tilted by Adharma the result is chaos. Dharma is moral reason which controls the irrational projection of the self on the World Soul, that is , the Spirit of the life force. But how does this happen? In the Gita there is a clear suggestion of an external authority, call it God or a Supernal Spirit which intervenes when the moral balance of the universe is tilted. This authority is either God or the Prime Mover and it is outside the world. Therefore Krishna says " Yada Yada hi Dharmasya Glanir Bhabati Bharata ...Sambhabami Yuge Yuge."  Whenever , in whatever age the moral reason is flouted to deeply hurt the orderly progression of the world of life and matter, (I) the controlling spirit takes form and shape on the world to save Dharma, to protect the  good and honest and to destroy the evil transgressors to finally restore balance so as to reinvigorate the free movement of life.

But here comes the question: If Dharma is the responsibility and duty of human beings to follow truth, order, social good and non interference in the freedom of beings in the world why does it have  the brittleness to crack when the self projects  another "Dharma" of heroic temper to privatize the world by deceit, brute force and manipulative logic? Is Dharma not capable of self protection that an external Authority must take Avatar to rescue it from the clutches of the transgressor? Without going into the details of the  Dharma - Adharma combatants of the great epic Mahabharat I may say that Dharma and Adharma are both almost  indefinable terms. If Dharma fails when the self displays ambitions to dominate the order by chaotic forces how is  dharma a superior moral design of life and world management? And this leads me to ask further, why are the good and life friendly elements in this natural (manifested) world come and go? Spring comes and goes. The sun sets every evening , the hopes always end (almost) in despair. Nothing is permanent. The sick get cured  and the healthy get sick. If this is the Dharma of life and nature, Dharma - Adharma are too impermanent to register a moral norm.

History's only lesson is change. If Trumpism is bad for the triumph of reason so was Ashoka's (Buddha's  and Gandhi's) inadequate for the triumph of reason. We may take consolation from the fact that both tyranny and benevolent kingship are shortlived. If one thing is adored and admired as good the contrarian idea raises its head in no time. If the rational is liberal democracy, the irrationality of Ji Jinping's expansionism  and attempts at world domination is irrational. The pity is they exist simultaneously. Ji is doomed to fail not  because he is irrational, he will fail because no idea, system or 'dharma' is permanent. The world is such that binaries will always dissolve into unity to again lapse into internal conflict. The problems of the now world after two decades will appear in different forms and the future intellectuals will again launch tirades against unreason. This world will be in perpetual conflict for that is our fate. Order and chaos are the human  conditions, we may reject to display our incomprehension of reality.