“It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness. It is as if he was reflecting on Arjuna’s confusion at the outset of the Kurukshetra war. “I am confused about my dharma, and am besieged with anxiety and faintheartedness,” Arjuna beseeches Krishna.
But what exactly is this dharma? Traditionally, dharma is taken to mean life affirming “orders and customs”, “virtues”, “righteousness”, “religious and moral duties” or “law”. The term sanatana dharma has found a revival in recent history, and refers to that part of dharma which is eternal. The now famed dictum, “speak the truth, speak it pleasantly. do not speak truth unpleasantly. do not speak untruth pleasantly. that is the eternal dharma”, rather succinctly captures the meaning of santana dharma.
However, as with the English word ‘law’, the word ‘dharma’ has taken on different connotations. This is clear from terms such as laws of nature (prakritidharma), laws of war (yuddhadharma) etc. In this sense, the dharma of one individual in the context of his or her society is one’s svadharma — the code that determines one’s conduct in relation with oneself and with others. A more subtle explanation is expounded on in the Mahabharata. Therein it states, “it is said that dharma is that which is held; (and) held it holds the people. That which holds together; that is assuredly dharma.” And yet in our age, plagued with zealotries of one sort or another, such a unifying vision hardly exists.
The individual, above all
In an age of fanatical revivalism, there has been a recrudescence of elaborate pageantry and ceremonial pomp. The undiscovered individual is squandered in the pursuit of a herdlike faith. How then is the individual to find oneself in this labyrinth of race, caste, creed, and faith?
To that end, the philosophy of existentialism propounded in the 19th and 20th centuries, provided a bulwark against the growing collectivist tendencies of that age. Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a pioneering influence in what came to be known as Christian Existentialism. “The key is to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it’s crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for,” Kierkegaard wrote.
Reeling from the shock of the collective massacre of the Second World War, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir et al conceptualised what is the bulk of the extant existentialist philosophy. Sartre in his seminal lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, contends that, “This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself.” It is this self-legislating aspect of existentialism that finds its intersection with the philosophy of svadharma.
“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards,” Sartre had said in Existentialism is a Humanism. The philosopher was speaking of the primacy of the existence of an individual before all the many layers of identity are superimposed atop. This notion is not new to Indian philosophical tradition.
“In the beginning, this was but the self of a human form. It reflected and found nothing else but oneself. It first uttered, I AM”, declares the Brihadaranakya Upanishad stipulating that identification always comes after existence. Similarly, “Put me in a system and you negate me. I am not a mathematical symbol. I am,” Kierkegaard had said once.
The idea is a perennial one. To find oneself, one must see oneself as apart from the whole and one with the whole in similitude. To be one with all things, one must first identify oneself as separate from the whole; only when this illusion of separation is stultified can one discover oneself in a true sense.
But what happens to one’s choices in a society that is dictated by caste and class and creed, where social forces determine the position of the individual within its vast tapestry?
Identity, within and without
Sartre anticipates this quandary, and responds to it in Dirty Hands: “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born.” The ancient Indian seer Ashtavakra, describes this dilemma in the context not of class but of an age ridden by caste. “You are neither a brahmana nor of any other caste, nor are you at any stage of life (asrama)“ the boy sage stated in his Ashtavakra Gita.
In a single declaration, all social conventions with regards to varna and jati are laid bare. It is the individual human who comes first and social conventions are creations of men at a later stage. “Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able,” Kierkegaard writes in his The Concept of Anxiety.
Referring to a little Parisian scene at a café where a waiter who is “playing at being a waiter in a café”, Sartre declares “the waiter in the café cannot be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell”. These words about the play acting of one’s role in life, reflects Karna’s proud declaration in the 7th century work Venisanhaar, “charioteer or charioteer’s son or this or that shall one be; God decides the clan of one’s birth but my manhood is all by me.”
“When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be,” Sartre writes in the play No Exit almost recalling Karna’s declaration.
How is the individual to operate in this world of competing identities and contrasting ideologies. Nations, the state, caste, creed, religions, faith traditions, races, and even languages, all seem to pull the individual apart. “I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim,” Sartre opines in Existentialism Is a Humanism. This notion that one’s own liberation is bounded with the freedom of others, is an idea that finds a voice in the Bhagavad Gita. “Act must thou with a view to bring the world together” says Krishna in his oration to Arjuna.
A divine question
As a Christian Existentialist, Kierkegaard declared in his Works of Love, “Only by loving God above all else can one love the neighbour. Love for the neighbour is therefore the eternal equality in loving.” For Kierkegaard, the individual’s actions are determined by the knowledge of oneself in his or her capacity to shape and reshape their own self-identity since that freedom is a brute fact originating from God. Nothing binds him to his relationships, and as such nothing binds him to his past actions. In this sense, Kierkegaard preludes to the type of Existentialism, particularly espoused in the early 1940s, which stood on the dictum that “existence precedes essence”. However, the atheistic doctrines that ensconced Sartre and his peers denied the need for a God to provide this freedom. In Saint Genet, Sartre states: “For those who want ‘to change life”, ‘to reinvent love,’ God is nothing but a hindrance.” Does such an atheistic position square with the doctrine of svadharma?
“He who has served and helped one poor man, seeing Shiva in him, without thinking of his caste, or creed, or race, or anything, with him Shiva is more pleased than with the man who sees him only in temples,” Swami Vivekananda had said in his Practical Vedanta.
Absolute freedom
In The Age of Reason, Sartre states: “He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” Ashtavakra renders the same sentiment in this fashion, “neither duty nor obligation exists for the yogin; to the one liberated in life, this life is all there is.”
But leaving aside of all things predefined would be for most people a plunge into desperation. Our relationship with human society and its constituents, our personal history placed in the midst of world history, is the predicate for most people. Their identity as a whole, is defined by these external factors. Giving all that up, knowing that it is a superimposition onto one’s real self, can be a crippling thought for most. “With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all,” Sartre wrote in On Existentialism: A Focus.
“Better to die following one’s own law than to die pursuing the law of another” is Krishna’s dictum for those plagued with the angst of realising oneself being pulled apart by the various forces of identity.
Therefore, two somewhat dissonant concepts, the existentialist vision of freedom and the dharmic notion of liberation in life can exist, and possibly thrive, in harmony.
As Sartre put it: “If I am an incarnation of freedom, it is directed at me; I am the source of it.” The Chandogya Upanishad said: “What a person wills in his present, he becomes in the future. One should bear this in mind and will accordingly.” Kierkegaard illustrates this becoming in a most refined way in his Either/Or, “When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself.”
It is this will to freedom, of which the individual is both the cause and the conclusion, that seekers of freedom must draw towards in this age of competing compulsions.
Published – March 11, 2025 08:30 am IST