Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System—Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri

Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri speaking at Jamia Millia Islamia.

[This is the full transcript of the Keynote Address by Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri delivered at the symposium “Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System” on 24 September 2026.]

I am not speaking here as an expert on textual tradition, but as a sociologist interested in how knowledge is built, and it has an inextricable connection to the context which we must remember. As someone who has had a long interest in gender studies, and who looks at knowledge also from the perspective of a gendered view, it is important to share certain ideas that we have about gender-knowledge studies. Like most people located in the global south, we are deeply aware of how colonial rule and global inequalities has had a long-lasting influence in the manner we practice our disciplines institutionally and intellectually.

I have mentioned colonial rule and persistent global inequalities, because we are still inhabiting an unequal world, and the point that—where do we publish, what is the point of citation, all of it is located in an institutional context. So, in that fundamental sense, we cannot talk about knowledge, its construction, Indian knowledge systems or western knowledge systems without locating it within the institutional context or where we are located.

Now, there are four parts which I want to look into in my presentation:

1.     What do we mean by epistemologies in a particular term, and gender epistemologies in specific?

2.     The second point that we need to look at is—what happened in the very ancient past? Where is the legacy to that tradition? It is important to know what happened in the last 200 or 300 years—how our predecessors including social scientists, poets, freedom fighters, and theorists in the 19th and 20th century, negotiate with their pasts in a colonial context, in which we were situated in?

3.     The third point is that—we need a comparative perspective. India is exceptional in some ways because of its diversity, that we sometimes don't even have to go outside to have a global perspective, because there are multiple forms of knowledge within the country only. But because we live in a globally connected world (connected often in very violent and non-violent ways), we do need to have comparative global perspectives, particularly because there are other societies (just like South Asia) like Latin America, Africa, who also had a history of colonialism and a certain kind of dominance of western knowledge systems. How did they negotiate?

4.     And finally, how do we bring in all this in our everyday practices, in our classroom? That is, epistemological always sounds very heavy and profound. Classroom teaching sounds very ordinary, but there is a deep connection between the epistemological and the routine.

Understanding Epistemologies and Gender Epistemologies

Now, if we go back a little more systematically, what do we mean by epistemological? Epistemology is a theory of knowledge. There are some fundamental questions whose answers you try to seek:

-       How do we know what we know?

-       Who is the knower?

-       What are the practices of inquiry and how do we justify knowledge? 

There are various kinds of epistemologies. For people who come from a sociological point, the questions which are debated in our methodologies are—from where did we know what we got to know? In sociology, we begin with a small distinction between common sense knowledge and sociological knowledge. A commonsense knowledge is also often described by the knowledge which we have acquired just by living—from our parents, from our neighbours, from the kitchen, ordinary and everyday knowledge, etc. How is it different from modern social science knowledge or natural science knowledge? The difference is that in the question of modern social science knowledge, there is a certain compulsion to explicate how did we get that knowledge. It could be a laboratory experiment in natural sciences, but in social science, you have to tell:

-       How did you find out this was true?

-       How did you choose your field work?

-       How did you choose your sample?

-       Can you describe the context within which that knowledge emerged?

-       What is the way they expressed their knowledge? 

Let me put it in another way. I think all of you would have had that experience. Many of us come from middle class background. We have people to help us in running our domestic work. Sometimes if you are sitting and chatting with the person who helps you in your house; you try to ask them a very direct question like—where were you born or where were your parents born? They would answer the way we know how to answer—so and so date, so and so birth year, so and so place. We are used to know the precision and the specificity of the cities. Because if I say 1952—1952 means the same year in Jamia as it would be in New York or as it would be in Nigeria. You could say that this is a Christian date and it can be translated in other forms.

But when she speaks and you ask her, where was she born, first there would be ambiguity. She would be having the clarity and then she would bring in other kinds of forms of reference. For example, she says that, 'my mother told me—it was the year when there was a flood.' So, what I am trying to draw attention to is that there are different forms of knowledge and there are different forms of citation. I would give a lot of emphasis on both; and I would also say that every form of knowledge may have a different kind of epistemology and ontology and you have to enter that sphere in a certain sense to figure out what is happening. But that acceptance of morality is important. And even within that acceptance of morality, we should be trained to say: "How did I know? How did I get to know?" That I think is important.

It is important because when we celebrate our past, we also want to celebrate our future at the same time and if we have to celebrate our future, we have to know where we are standing. So, I am very glad that someone has mentioned that it begins with questioning. The moment you don't question and you are forced to accept the given as sacred, there is a problem. In most religious traditions, very interestingly, you have what is called the interrogative tradition of how do you interpret this? Are there multiple interpretations or not? This quest for knowledge in terms of interpretation and reinterpretation is central. So, when we talk about gender epistemologies, first we have to know this 'epistemological' question about theory of knowledge and its relationship to the other big word 'ontology' which is about theory of being, i.e.,

-       who are we?

-       how do we understand human nature?

-       how do we understand the relationship of humans and the animal world?

-       what is our relationship to nature, to the forests, to the water, to the rivers (that even becomes more important today in times of global warming)?

Historical Legacies: Knowledge, Colonialism, and the Past

And that also has a long history in traditional writings. Can we go back and look into it? So, epistemology is important. Fundamental to epistemology are two aspects:

1.     One is the source of knowledge. Now we talked about AI and internet and it becomes very dangerous to figure out what is valid and what is not. I was trying to figure out what is happening in the terrible wars that are taking place and I want to switch on the YouTube and I do not know which video is recorded when. I do not know who is the author of that video. I am totally confused because there could be a video which is actually after the event but it can also be before the event because you are also presenting a discourse. Now in a modern university like Jamia or any other modern university, it becomes very important whether you are in the social sciences or in gender studies or the natural sciences—to train our younger people to figure out the source. How do we know where does it come from? That training becomes very critical. Like I was trying to figure out—can I find out quickly gender epistemology on Google and I will have two forms of answers given by AI and when you see the AI, there will be a source. It could be Stanford Encyclopaedia or philosophy. So, it is better to go to the source. Do not restrict yourself with a summary. In the summary, you will make errors. I am not saying do not use it but use it in a fashion which is scholarly, which will know where you may go wrong. When you go to that, then you will get alternative critiques and you may be following the right but that has to be freed to our very students. So, conception of knowledge, practices of inquiry, justification, and legitimation are important—which knowledge is legitimate and which is not? And that becomes very important in any unequal context like the whole buzz for decoloniality; unequal because obviously even now the global north has much more power to tell us what is knowledge and what is not knowledge.

But also, in other forms of inequality like gender, whether knowledge by women (under-educated women) will tell us how to save seeds for agriculture or various kinds of medical information for health which is widely spread across the world that women have that knowledge. Since they are under-educated, they do not know when they were born. So, do we listen to that? And if we listen to that, how do we again validate? How do we cross-check? Because even that knowledge should not be accepted as given. Because criticality is central to any form of serious epistemological inquiry. I'm bringing the question of inequality because there are different forms of inequalities. Global, geopolitical, strategic, gender, class, caste, different kinds of hegemons—which community is more dominant or not—which will be different in different countries or State. The institutions also become very important as no knowledge can be done without kind of inequalities.

So, the first aspect that we have discussed is about:

-       What is epistemology?

-       Source, criticism, legitimacy & validity of knowledge and acceptance of diverse sources of knowledge.

-       To train to figure out the sources and the methods (Don't take anything as given—whether it is folk, Indian, or American).

-       Forms of inequality.

2.     The second point is that, very often when we talk about Indian knowledge system, the first reference becomes textual. In the ancient past, it could be the Upanishad, the Vedas. Now again, as a sociologist, we are very familiar that there is a debate in sociology between the text view and the book view, i.e.,

-       How do we read the text?

-       Is the book view the one corresponding to the text?

More importantly, when colonialism came to our country, this was a direct challenge which was not the case prior to that. You had multiple forms of knowledge in our country. So, what happened was that—our reformers in the 19th century had to take this challenge and therefore had to revisit their past. So, the most interrogative questions of all religious texts and religions were raised during the 19th century:

-       Was this practice always there?

-       Is it something which came later?

-       Was something which was legitimate or not?

-       Was parda something always given or did it come from somewhere else?

So, you would have debates on these questions. It became a moment in the 19th century of great scholarship and great debate. Now very often when we talk about Indian knowledge system, we go straight back 3,000 years ago and don't look what happened just 200 years ago or 150 years ago. If you do so, you'll find that there is so much—all the debates on sati, widow re-marriage, education for women, the right to go to public spaces, etc. Why don't we teach them in the curriculum, even in gender studies?

Many of us always think a little more about Nehru, a lot about Gandhi in some senses, and more recently a lot on Dr. Ambedkar but very much less on Savitribai Phule, Tarabai Shinde, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Aurobindo, Vivekananda, etc. What is common among all of them is—they all wrote on gender. And the other amazing thing about these scholars was that they were equally familiar with tradition, traditional knowledge, as well as western and other forms of knowledge. They were cosmopolitan in the real sense of the word.

I always recommend, especially when I speak on gender, that Sultana's Dream of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. On feminist utopia, she even talks about ecology. It's a beautiful story, a story with a protagonist called Sita. And when she falls asleep, there is somebody called Sister Sarah, must be a reference from history, who says, come, let's go for a walk. And they go for a walk, and everything is very beautiful. It's a dream land; it's a lady land—flowers, fruits, meat, green, everything. And she looks around, and she says, okay, but where are the men? I can only see the women. And so, Sister Sarah tells her that the men are in Parda, because they are dangerous. And she said, but how can you look something so unfair by putting them in Parda? And she gives a story and says, supposing there is somebody, an animal, which has escaped from a zoo, and has come into the village, and is attacking children and helpless people, who would you put back behind? The animal who is struggling, or would you put the entire village behind? Now this is a very dramatic, extraordinarily radical kind of statement, where she's basically saying, if you put it in 2026 and ask, why are the streets not safe? You will say, don't go out at night. Instead, she's saying—make the streets safe; don't put the borders on the women or the families; instead, make the streets safe. So, there is also a way by which we integrate the past. But the question remains, how do we bring in this kind of knowledge into the contemporary?

There's another slightly extreme point, which I want to bring in about unequal knowledge, is that I was asked to write something on feminist utopia, for a kind of volume on utopias across the world, not just feminist utopias. And I wrote on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and then I sent it to the editors. This was from Cambridge. And the editors said, are you sure she wrote in 1905? Because there was something like this in Canada, much later in 1935, similar, a little longer. And I was wondering, would I have the courage to ask this question to somebody saying, are you sure? She's asking me, are you sure? And she would be very progressive. She would want me to write for that paper. But the very idea that she couldn't even think about this was sort of extraordinary to me. So, this is the other thing that we have to go back and find.

There's a very interesting story about Sayid Ahmed Khan too. And you would know that in AMU, there was a lot of emphasis on women's education. There was an organization and there was a very interesting dialogue between him and a Western woman scholar. The latter was very open to education and asked Sayid, 'How do you envisage it for Muslim women?' And he said, 'I want an education where they can stare back into my eyes and question, just like you are staring back at me and questioning. I want that kind of autonomy and that kind of power.' The problem is that we don't read them. We don't incorporate the specific writings into our text. That would be the best kind of thing that we could do. The list is endless.

Bridging Epistemology and Everyday Classroom Practices

Now, I'll talk about another point that—what was the contribution of gendered epistemology or gendered knowledge? There's a wonderful session on experience and what kind of knowledge you get from experience. There's also a debate in the Western philosophical sphere between reason and emotion. Now, if you look at it, there is a wonderful text by Gandhi and it's a primer for children for a primary school, which was called Bal Pothi. And the story is about a mother teaching a child on household.

The mother asks her son, 'you should also help in the household.'

Son answers, 'but why should I do it? A boy studies and plays and this work belongs to a girl.'

Sister says, 'but I also want to play and study.'

Then brother says, 'I don't deny that. But dear sister, you have to do housework as well.'

And Gandhi then says, everybody has to do housework—cleaning, cooking, laundry.

Now, was Gandhi then somebody who was really intended to propagate gendered epistemology clearly? And you will see that in this work, there is a particular kind of knowledge. He also looks at the whole question, that very often when he was asking women to participate in the freedom movement, there was a certain reluctance for the men in the family to let the women go out. And he then says, 'look, if these people are saying one thing in public that women should come and not letting their own women come out, then let the list of these anti-union fossils and send them to be published in Harijan so that people know who are double-faced and say different kinds of things.' Now, I would therefore suggest that we need a very serious engagement with even these scholars, because they were engaging with the past and preparing for the present and the future and then incorporate them in the curriculum.

Comparative and Global Perspectives on Knowledge

Finally, the question of comparative. There is an entire debate which was a 'Symposia on the whole question of the category Gender' that—is the word Gender valid for us? And there was an African anthropologist and philosopher who said that many of the African societies were defined not by gender as an organizing principle, but seniority—family, kinship, and seniority; who is the oldest and hierarchy is to depend on age, not on gender. Now, if we take that point, and he said, 'why should that gender be imposed?' I personally have two problems with that:

1.     One problem, even if traditional African societies did not have gender as a hierarchical category, the long years of colonialism would have an impact. Just like, you can't go back and walk into the past. The present has already been messed up by the past. And we have to have austerity about that.

2.     The second point, in the Indian context—we have different positions, we have a very diverse and argumentative tradition. So, we have stories of multiple questions that debate each other, we have stories of Gargi, Maitreyi, etc. And I think the main thing that we had from there is the multiplicity.

We ask, where did all these educated women come from? And were there uneducated women there? What happened to their forms of knowledge? And how do we retrieve that form of knowledge? And we know about various kinds of folk practices, and then we know what global inequality is today.

So, Ayurveda has actually become a big business, from curing people in their home, like the kadha that I made before, to becoming wellness centre globally. We also have to look into those institutional structures here.

Additionally, we have to look into the kinds of writings which took place in the post-75 period, not new. There is a wonderful 2-volume book by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, 'Women Writing in India, 600 B.C. to the Present' [Volume 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century; Volume 2: The 20th Century]. It goes back to the Buddhist saints, and talks about those kinds of questions.

I'll talk a little bit on the kind of resources that we can take, not always from gender. In sociology, there was a debate on the idea of the individual. Take an example of Lucknow School, whether it is Radha Kamal Mukerjee or D P Mukerji—when questions arise like, do we have the same idea of selfhood as we have in the global West? They said that, 'ours is relational. If I am a mother, am I less of an independent woman or not? Our kingship ties become more central. Whether I have my obligations to my family, or is my obligation only to myself?' So, we have to look into these debates and those debates have to be brought back into the classroom.

There are also wonderful questions in the Bhakti and the Sufi movement. There is one 12th century Kannada Vaishnavite poet, Dasimayya. She tries to talk about gender through one of her poems. She says:

Suppose you cut a tall bamboo in two

Make the bottom piece a woman

the head piece a man

Rub them together till they kindle

Tell me now

the fire that's gone

Is it male or is it female?

Oh! Ramananda.

Likewise, the Marathi poet, Sant Janabai, throws away her clothes, says:

I am exultant, happy in all respects

I am indifferent to distinctions of sex or body

And you say that when we talk about sex and body—why do we have to talk about gender or performing gender through scholars like Judith Butler? Why can't we also look into these texts, which are questioning binaries? And this is not to say that—this is better or that is worse. As this is the most anti-knowledge perspective that we have. There are knowledges from everywhere. We just have to be trained to figure out:

-Where did it come from?

-What was the contestation?

-What are the sources?

I'm keeping on emphasizing sources and methods because sources and methods have become particularly important today with the rise of the AI and our inability to look through the details to figure out, where have they all come from?

Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, in collaboration with Sahitya Akademi, organised a One Day Symposium on the theme “Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System” on 24 September 2026, featuring a Keynote Address by Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri.

Prof. Chaudhuri is an eminent sociologist and the former faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Presently, she is the North-South Dialogue director at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Her early work focused on nationalism, colonialism, and feminism in India. Since the early 1990s, she has been looking at the changing nature of public discourse in the context of both neoliberalism and the rise of majoritarianism.

 

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

"Value, Autonomy, The Social and The Natural"—Prof. Akeel Bilgrami

[As part of the Raza Lecture Series, the Raza Foundation organized two Raza Lecture II events on the broader theme, “The Reach of Truth,” consisting of two lectures. This is the full transcript of the first Raza Lecture II on 'Value, Autonomy, The Social and The Natural' delivered by Prof. Akeel Bilgrami at India International Center on 19.01.2026]

I'm very honored to be here. I'm very sorry that I will be speaking on these rather arcane philosophical issues at a time when there are very much more urgent concerns for all of us. Just this morning, I read that the presiding fascist on the world stage has invited our own local fascist to join a board called the Board of Peace to take over, by a signatory's conquest, the territory of Gaza. So, it's very hard to speak about these abstruse issues in a time like this. We live in a time when even just mere sanity seems like a moral achievement. And I'm going to try and speak about the link between truth and morals, and think of truth as a moral achievement in this paper.

A good way to begin is by pointing out that Syed Raza did some paintings in remembrance of Gandhi, and one in particular of the seven paintings was called Satya, and it has six or seven concentric circles of different colors, under which there's the word Satya in Devnagri script, and you (Ashok Vajpeyi) point out that Raza is trying to capture how Gandhi thought that you have to peel off various layers of masking before the truth is revealed. And that's the difficulty of reaching the truth. But my subject is the 'The Reach of Truth,' the wide scope of truth's reach, which I believe has been masked from us by artifices of our own theoretical doctrines. And if you peel off those artifices, it becomes visible how completely natural it is to think of truth as having a wide reach, reaching all the way to the study of society and the study of art and literature. The standard denial or skepticism about truth reaching out that far has to do with long-standing familiar claims about how these regions of thought are normatively or value-laden and therefore out of the reach of inquiry that pursues truth. Now that's the standard view, the standard skepticism, and it's a view taken by doctrines which are opposed to each other in radical ways, but agreed on this one thing, that any inquiry that is into something which is suffused with value can't really be susceptible to having the predicate is true, apply to the propositions we make about it.

Well, I'm not going to traverse that familiar doctrinal ground. What I'm going to try and do instead is to come to the idea of norms and values through the notion, a notion which is very central to the study of society—the notion of freedom. And I want to argue that the standard doctrines of the political liberal enlightenment view the notion of freedom as not having very much to do with truth, but rather having to do with choice, of exercising choice to make our decisions about how to live, about what norms and values to adopt.

And one of the things that you get to read and see immediately if you read Gandhi's book Hind Swaraj, is that for Gandhi you can question this idea that freedom is a matter of exercising your capacity for choice. And when you see right from the first few pages of that work that he's very keen to say (what's driving him in that work), is that you're not free if you rid yourself of a colonial master; you're not free until you have acquired the truth about civil society and norms about society, politics, political economy and so on. You're not free until then, until you get that right. So, for him the truth about society, politics, and political economy is essential to being free. It's not just a matter of exercising choices, rather you have to exercise the capacity for choices to make the right choices before you're free.

So, here's just an elementary puzzle. All the standard doctrines of the political enlightenment tell you that you're free because of your capacity to exercise your choices and if the state and other agencies leave you alone to exercise the choices, that's freedom. And what I want to assume is a quite different thought, which is, until those choices are exercised in the right way, until whatever reason you have for exercising a choice, grasps what is true, you aren't yet free. So, that's the overall theme that I want to pursue. Now there are cliches in this whole region of thought. You have the founder of Christianity has attributed the thought in the Gospel of Saint John that the truth shall set you free. So, this is a truism, a long-standing truism for over 2000 years. But how is it then that there is this chasm between the theories of the liberal political enlightenment and a truism? If something is a truism, it should be a banal and familiar truth. But all the doctrines we've become used to in the political enlightenment, which is that you're free if you exercise, you're permitted to exercise your capacity for choice. So, there's a gap between where the theories stop and the cliché, and if a cliché is familiar, it's a truism; there's a gap between what's supposed to be a truism and your theories. So, that's what I want to explore, and I want to explore it by a look at the whole intellectual history of the political enlightenment where this thing got developed.

Immanuel Kant is a natural place to begin in looking at the liberal genealogy of the notion of freedom. Like Gandhi, he thought the central concept here was swaraj, or autonomy, or self-governance, and he had a very particular angle on it which became central to the liberal political enlightenment. Kant began the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals by saying that we need to understand how to move from empirical psychology to moral psychology. And his idea here was that human beings have natures, empirically they're given, and they consist of a whole range of dispositions and inclinations. What theorists, philosophers later on began to call desires, wants, and when it got slightly formalized, it began to be called subjective utilities. When desires and wants got to be characterized in degrees of strength, it began to be called subjective utilities, and a whole calculus of desires or inclinations was developed. But that was since Kant. Kant's idea was, we're given all these inclinations, it is part of our nature, part of our psychology. And he says autonomy comes from our capacity to ask a question which is: 'Should we be acquiescing in the inclinations we have (of any one or other inclination)? Should we acquiesce in this inclination?' And he said the capacity to ask that question of what's given to you by your psychological nature is the first sign of reason, because essentially the question is, do I have reason to acquiesce in this want or desire or inclination that I have? And even if I say, yes (I do have a reason to do so, even if I do acquiesce, if I ask the question and answer it thereby acquiescing), then I authorize the inclination, and that's what is a sign of our self-governance. If we authorize our inclinations or reject them, we have asserted our autonomy, we are no longer being ruled by what is given to us in our nature, the rule of the passions and so on. We authorize them or deauthorize them, and that is the first onset of what he thought of as reason and the first manifestation of our autonomy. Now, the political enlightenment emerged when this basic autonomy-inducing question or autonomy-reflecting question in Kant was applied not just to our psychological natures but to our social conditioning.

So, my mother and my sister also would sometimes have said to me as they tried to condition me socially: 'Don't do that. Bilgramis don't do that.' Well, that's a kind of social conditioning. And at some stage, I can't remember at what age, I must have been the onset of Kantian reason, I began to ask, what do I have to be doing that the Bilgramis are doing? And really it was a sign of onset of reason because the question is, do I have reason to be doing what my social conditioning would have me do? And it is the reason of a kind that so far as we know, Kant said, and Kantians of political enlightenment say, so far as we know, only human beings can ask that question. Wolves are socially conditioned by their pack but they can't ask that question of their pack. So, the notion of reason that gives rise to autonomy is the idea, the capacity to ask this autonomy-inducing question about not just our inclinations but our social conditioning. And reason of that kind is what makes us, is the heart of the political enlightenment's conception of our notion of freedom and autonomy. And if we just acquiesce in our social conditioning without the exercise of that reason, questions of that kind, we are merely heteronomous, to use Kant's word.

Now, this is not to be confused with a whole range of other ideas. This notion of reason is not the idea of self-interest. What Kant meant by this autonomy-reflecting question is not the question, is it in my self-interest to do what the pack is doing? That's a very specific development of the Kantian notion of reason. It came much after Kant and got elevated into a notion of reason but that's a very thick development. Kant's notion was very thin. His notion was, is it right for me to do what my pack is doing, what my social conditioning is? Not is it in my self-interest or anything very specific or thick like that. It's a very thin notion of reason. And this notion of reason should not be confused with all the much grander notions of reason which have become the critique of a whole range of criticisms of the political enlightenment, such as most famously Foucault's. There's nothing in this very thin notion of reason that I just mentioned in Kant which has some grand telos in it. There's no grand narrative that it's writing nor is it self-congratulatory. Human beings may possess this notion of reason but bees may have far better capacities in all sorts of other ways, social ways. So, it's not self-congratulatory, it's not a thick notion of reason, of self-interest and it's not generating any teleological story either. So, that's the heart, this very simple elementary heart of the idea of freedom of autonomy of the political enlightenment.

And I want to make clear that Kant himself didn't stop there. A number of other political theorists since Kant have stopped there. And you can get a very good, if careless, survey of it in Isaiah Berlin's essay Two Concepts of Liberty. Isaiah Berlin (Russian-British Philosopher) himself was very anxious to stop where I've stopped in my exposition of Kant so far. But Kant himself wasn't. And Kant went on to say, and he therefore built a bridge to take you from truth as the exercise of your capacity to choose the right choices. Kant went on to say that you haven't really, by authorizing the norms you live by, overcome heteronomy. You have to choose, Kant said, according to the moral law. So, Kant had his own universalist insistence that the truth is necessary for freedom, but it was a very circumscribed, universalist account of what that truth would be. And his idea was that it should be a truth which is unconditional and universal in the sense that you cannot legislate as a moral law, as he called it, a moral norm, to put it in a lower profile, anything that can't be adopted by everyone. So, that was his view of universalizability. There has to be a rational consistency about it. And his idea was a rather deep idea, that if I exercise my agency and autonomy in making choices, then consistency requires, this is part of the universalizability, that I recognize that others have this capacity. And therefore, just by rational consistency, it rules out, for instance, that I can be paternalistic towards you. If you have the capacity to choose, then I must recognize that capacity and see you as somebody who sets ends. And so, I have to respect you as a person, is his technical term for it. And so there is a recognition of others' autonomy at all times. And that means to put it in his terms, I can't treat others as a means. I must always see them as ends and as end setters for themselves. That's part of his universalism.

Now, of course, Kant's bringing together truth and freedom goes beyond the limited idea that I was saying is very much part of the political enlightenment. So, Kant had all the ingredients to go beyond the political enlightenment. But he didn't go beyond it, because he insisted that the truth which you authorize in your norms must take this universalist form, which is the other aspect of the political enlightenment, that it takes this universal form. So, Kant provided both the choice aspect of autonomy and the truth aspect of autonomy, but only in this universalist, non-contextual, unconditional conception of what the right choices could and should be.

But the very fact, I think, that he allowed you to get past the limited idea of freedom as the capacity to choose, gives you the possibility of going beyond the universalist strictures of the political enlightenment. And that is the direction in which post-Kantian German philosophy took Kant. So, the modifications that Hegel and, with the help of Rousseau and Marx, made of Kant are crucial to understanding the limits of the political enlightenment. And here I want to give a little sermon. There is a great tendency among the cheerleaders for the political enlightenment to constantly try and assimilate, say somebody like Hegel, Marx, and Rousseau, into the enlightenment. That doesn't work, that's just wrong. They are quite explicitly, in detail, anti-enlightenment or counter-enlightenment figures. That's precisely why somebody like Isaiah Berlin was made very anxious by them. Isaiah Berlin was a very interesting figure. He was fascinated by all of this romantic development of the notion of autonomy. He was fascinated by it to equal proportion that he was made anxious by it. And I think it's absolutely clear that he was honest in saying that this is the counter-enlightenment which was started by Hegel and Rousseau. And I think that is the right way to think about it. You can't just assimilate everything into the enlightenment and bloat it up so that it means nothing in the end, which is what a lot of thinkers have done.

So, what was this term that most Kantian German philosophy took? I think it's very important to understand that it's a modification of Kant, not an overthrow of Kant, even though it's such a radical modification that it doesn't deserve to be thought of as liberal at all. And the first modification, which is due to Hegel, I think, chief pivotal term of Kant was to say, when you ask the question that Kant asks you to pose—Should I be acquiescing? Should I accept the norms of my social conditioning? Hegel says you have to ask a further question, which is, when I ask that Kantian question, what conceptual resources, what values, norms, beliefs, etc., do I have that I can appeal to in order to answer that Kantian question? And Hegel said you have no resources except the resources given to you by your social conditioning. You can't go off to Mars. There's no Archimedean or transcendent place you go off to. You can only appeal to things that are already given to you in your social conditioning. So, for Hegel, you stand in one place in your social conditioning and get a distance and ask of another place—Should I be doing whatever that other place's conditioning requires you to do? So, you never escape the social conditioning in that sense. That's one major modification of Kant that was first introduced by Hegel. The way Hegel put it was, we are in history and history introduces internal contradictions in Geist, in consciousness. So, his was a diachronic way of putting it. I'm just putting it in a synchronic way by asking, well, at any given point, if I ask, should I be acquiescing in this? I can only answer by appealing to things somewhere else in the social conditioning. So, that's my synchronic version of Hegel's point. That's the first modification.

My own understanding of Hegel's view here is that this generates a skepticism about Kant's universalism. Now, somebody might say, no, it doesn't generate a skepticism about Kant's universalism because after all, there may be some moral norms of the sort that Kant had in mind about means and ends, for example, which all social conditioning provides you the resources to answer. So, there's no reason to be skeptical of the universalism. And I don't think that can be right. And why it can't be right will be fully sort of explicit when I, somewhat later, either if there's time in this lecture or the next one, bring in some considerations from Wittgenstein. But let me just put it in a summary way right now.

If you take the universalism to be vacuous, which is like cases must be treated alike, it sounds as if every set of norms that we are socially conditioned into have something like that common sense injunction. But as soon as you start saying in what respect something is like something else, should one be consistent, you immediately will get very different answers depending on which societies you are conditioned in. So, for instance, if you just take Kant's own idea that you should always treat people as ends, well, if you're in a society in which there are utilitarian values, you're not going to agree to that. You're not going to be conditioned into a norm of that kind. There will be no place to accept a norm of that kind, no reason to accept a norm of that kind. What utilitarianism says is that to pursue social aggregate utility, you should do whatever is needed to pursue social aggregate utility. And you very well might treat somebody as a means to pursue the highest social aggregate utility. In fact, it's very interesting. If you read somebody like John Rawls (American political philosopher) in A Theory of Justice, he has a principle called the 'difference principle' in which he says inequality can be allowed (Rawls is by and large egalitarian) if the same allows you to pursue the upliftment of the worst off. So, that's a commitment of the 'difference principle.' (Inequalities can be permitted if the inequalities help you to promote the upliftment of the very worst off in society).

So, let's paint a scenario. Suppose, I think that Mujahid Habibullah is a man of tremendous talent, more than the rest of us. So, I say, let's pay him a whole lot more than the others so that we can incentivize him to exercise his talent and produce innovations which will improve the political economy, the social institutions and so on, and thereby improve the conditions of the worst off in society. Well, that's treating Mujahid Habibullah as a means. You're not treating him as an end. I mean, if you want to particularly reward him, you should do it because he deserves to be rewarded, not because it's going to promote something else. So, you are treating him as a means. And so even in the pursuit of a Kantian project like 'A Theory of Justice,' Rawls slips into something which is everywhere prevalent, that you can't use people as a means if it has good ends. And so, it's not at all obvious that all societies have the conceptual resources and the normative commitments to yield Kant's moral universalism. And so, I think Hegel's term is basically an anti-universalist term when he raises that question about the social site or source for where you get the resources to answer the Kantian question.

There's a second very important term, a modification of Kant, that comes from Rousseau and gets developed by Hegel and Marx. But it's most vividly and brilliantly, original, profoundly there in Rousseau. And that's the idea that it's not just individual human beings who can ask the Kantian question—should I be doing what my social conditioning is doing? By and large, individual human beings constitute society and ask that question. But what Rousseau's work, 'Social Contract,' allows you to see is that whole societies, whole groups of individuals, communities, can ask that Kantian question, not just individual human beings. Of course, the form of the question won't be exactly the same as it is when individuals ask it. When individuals ask it, they say, should I be doing what the pack is doing? But when whole groups ask it, they take the form of saying, 'should one' (I'm using the word one to include not just human individuals but group individuals, if you like), should one be doing what one's tradition has always done? A whole group can ask, should one be following the traditions one has always followed? So, there's no reason to have a methodological individualism of human individuals alone asking the Kantian question. Group individuals can ask that question. And that was the idea of Rousseau's general will. It was the idea of a group. So, it was a singular generality. A group functioning as an individual. That was the idea of a general will. So, if a group can deliberate and function as an individual, then it's not just you and I as human organisms who have the privilege of asking the question. Groups can ask that question, and that was the idea of a general will. And once you admit to that, you have a whole range of possibilities that, of course, Hegel makes much of with the very notion of Geist being a consciousness of a much larger form. And you find it in Kant's, everywhere in Marx, when he begins to ask about whole groups raising issues about the tendencies of formation, for instance, like capital. So, that's another modification. Who gets to ask the Kantian question doesn't have to be an individual human organism. It could be a social group who asks it. And, by the way, this point was made by Condorcet (French philosopher, political economist, politician and mathematician) to show that the nature of voting is irrational, which was then given a beautiful formal theorem to show that voting is irrational by Kenneth Arrow (American economist and mathematician). And that is all in the direction of showing that voting, which is done by individuals, to make a decision need not be the only way. In fact, it's often irrational, as Arrow demonstrated. And the only rational way sometimes may be to do it as a group, which is the notion of consensus. This is really the whole underlying debate about voting versus consensus as a form of decision-making.

I've given you this part of intellectual history to tell you the modification of the political enlightenment central question in the post-enlightenment German philosophical tradition. And I want to just make a couple of points here which I think are really what is of great interest in this direction that was taken. See, this brings me to the heart of the idea of the link between truth and freedom. If you see that Kant himself and Hegel, Marx, and Rousseau give you the link between how truth and freedom are linked, how autonomy is not just the exercise of choice but making the right choice, and you understand that you can't make the right choice except by appealing to resources that are part of your social conditioning, then there are ways to go wrong when you make your choices. So, for instance, suppose I'm raising a question about some aspect of my social conditioning, and in answering it, I appeal to resources that are from some other aspect of my social conditioning, but those aspects of my social conditioning are just a bunch of prejudices of my social conditioning. So, let's say caste is prejudice. I have some casteist prejudices and I deploy them in answering the autonomy question. Well, then I get it wrong. So, the idea is that reason is just a capacity to ask the question. It doesn't mean you get it right. Reason can be exercised wrongly, especially if it's part of your social conditioning, and the part of your social conditioning which you appeal to answer the question is just a prejudice which you have acquiesced in. So, you can have illusions of exercise of reason. That's the important thing. You can really be under the impression that you have exercised your reason, and in fact it's an illusion of having exercised reason. That comes with the idea that truth and freedom are linked.

Click on the image to view at full size and to read the mentioned argument.

So, the question arises, how can you tell? Is there a criterion? Is there a rule which tells you, here you've authorized it, and here you're under the illusion of authorizing it? Here your reason has been correctly applied, here it is an illusion of an exercise of reason. Is there a criterion? And the answer is no. There is no criterion. All you can do is to ask of the place you've gone to, to answer the question and ask the autonomy-inducing question about that place too. There's no rulebook. Outside of a very narrow range of thinking, there is no rulebook. Reason is an extremely loose and broad notion. It's a very, very small part of reason which has rules to tell you how to reason. So, there's no answer to the question, when are you correctly exercising reason and when are you under the illusion of exercising reason. All you can do is to try and get over your illusions by asking the autonomy-inducing question all over again of that part of where you appeal to. And that is what Ashok Vajpeyi was saying about Gandhi's claim that getting to the truth and avoiding illusion is not an easy thing. You've got to go through layers of reason which reflect your autonomy. So, there's a kind of vigilance that comes with the possession of autonomy that you have to exercise. And Sartre understood this in a way, except that Sartre was not willing to call it reason, partly because he thought all social conditioning was a kind of bad faith. But the fact is Sartre did understand that there isn't any getting away from the exercise of autonomy. And I think it's very important, therefore, to understand that what Hegel and Marx bring in for all their insightful enrichment of Kant is not an abandoning of Kant. It's not an abandoning of the idea of the vigilance that reflective reason requires.

So, I want to raise a couple of other things which are close to my heart because these are, for me, the really interesting aspects of the role that reason plays in social understanding. What I want to first point to is there's a deep asymmetry between the cases, when the capacity for reason gets it wrong and when it gets it right. The asymmetry is that when it gets it wrong, (when the reason you appeal to, to make an authorization of a norm is, say, an expression of a prejudice) it's an illusion of exercising reason. When you get it wrong, you need to explain it. Why did this person merely express a prejudice? Why did this person authorize something which is merely an expression of a prejudice? Why did he not see the truth? So, the injunction is always to explain the error. There should be no unexplained error. So, we begin to be very interested in why people go wrong in the exercise of this reason in making this choice. Why did they go wrong? What are the prejudices of society they succumb to, etc.? But the asymmetry is when they get it right, no such explanation is called for. Now I find an extremely fascinating thing about the human, social mind, and social consciousness. You don't need to explain the cases of truth. The truth just transparently gets you to social reality and there's nothing to explain. It's only when you get it wrong that you then ask, why did the person get it wrong? Now, of course, you can take an interest in how people get it right and why they got it right and so on, but that's sort of ancillary further interest you might have, but it's not called for in the way that error is called for. I think this is extremely interesting; for a philosopher it's extremely interesting, you see, because there's something to be done in our cognitive practice if there's an error. But if you got it right, there's nothing to be done. So, there isn't any importance in our cognitive practice for this other thing. It becomes a sort of ancillary interest, which of course historians have. Historians make their living in this sort of thing and you can have an anthropological interest in why things get true, when things are true, but it's not called for when you've got the truth. If you have an explanation, it's a bonus and I'm not even sure it is a bonus because sometimes it can actually be a rather bad thing to be obsessive about explaining everything in that sociological way about choices and getting it right. I don't think you should be rushed to historical explanations all the time. Why? Why should you do that? I mean Foucault is so interesting because he did that sort of thing for pathologies, for regimes of incarceration, for the stigmatization through normalization of mental illness and so on. But he wasn't keen on just doing it for every case, even when there's no pathology and when you've got it right. And I think that's an extremely interesting asymmetry.

Click on the image to view at full size and to read the mentioned argument.

And one of the things that I think is a way to think about why this asymmetry is important is that in a way the truth and the transparency of getting to reality when your reason is exercised without illusion is that it is transparent, as I said, you get to the reality, it is the conceptual default. When I say you have to explain the error, it's a conceptual default that there's truth and transparency and then you have to explain the cases where it doesn't exist. That's something that's called for. And I'm very keen to say it's a conceptual default because it's got nothing to do with statistical frequency or anything like that. It's purely conceptual. You can in fact be pervasively erroneous, illusory and so on. I'm not insisting that this is more common to get it right. Not at all. It's only a conceptual default.

And in fact, I think to bring in the third figure in this audit intellectualist term giving, Marx is precisely wanted to say, that in certain economic formations you get it wholesale wrong. And that's what he meant by ideology, that you get it massively wrong. I mean you can't get it entirely wrong but you get it pretty massively wrong and that's what he meant by ideology. And the overcoming of ideology is to gain transparency. The ideology is the opaque middle intermediary, epistemological intermediary that gets you from the transparent reach to truth. And so, it can be very pervasive. It can be a feature of a whole economic society around an economic formation like capital. And that brings me to one more point, which is that what Hegel and Marx were very keen to get us beyond Kant in was to overcome what they called the subject-object divide. And the subject-object divide for them was – I'm not going to try and spell out the exact epistemological issues of Hegel's critique of Kant, which turns on the idea of a thing in itself, or Ding an sich (it is a German word which means 'thing in itself'), which made Kant, according to Hegel, completely unable to overcome the subject-object divide because he had this notion of Ding an sich, a thing in itself. So, reality is sort of unknowable in that sense. The object is unknowable, the subject is just separated from it, unredeemably. And Hegel criticized him for that. But the idea here in Hegel and Marx and the overcoming of ideology and so on is that you overcome the subject-object divide when you're free of ideology and you get things right and you see through to the transparent reality, the social reality. It's very easy to make this point on the non-social canvas. Take ordinary perception. I see an object in my vicinity and there's nothing to explain. The object is transparently present here when I see it. Now, I sometimes suffer from an illusion. When I suffer from an illusion, you need to posit intermediaries that make things opaque if it's not transparent. You talk about appearances of a bottle, seeming as if there is a bottle there and so on. You only introduce seemings, appearances etc. if you've gone wrong, if there's an illusion. But when there's a veridical perception, you just reach through to it. That's really the same idea. So, the subject-object is not divided; they are integrated in the episode of consciousness and on the social canvas that is what Hegel and Marx sought.

I am giving a little bit of structure to the idea of how the social allows us to grasp transparently the norms of our society, and for that I just want to appeal to a rather beautiful point made in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules, and I'll just put up something on the board which I'd like you to keep in mind. Wittgenstein asks the question, and it's really a very wonderful example because it generates, I think, the right way to think of the relationship between the social and the individual. Wittgenstein asks, what is the nature of our grasping or perceiving rules and norms? And though his eventual interest is in the rules of language or meaning, he starts with an example of a traffic sign (a signpost) which we see, and he says, when all of us see a traffic sign, we immediately see it as turning left, as telling us to turn left. So, you're walking off, and you see the sign, or driving, and he says, how come all of us here, let's say, as soon as we see this, we see it as telling us to turn left? He says, we don't stop and scratch our heads and say, how shall I interpret the sign? We don't do that. We just turn left. He says, how come? How come we're not puzzled? How come we just see meaning? What is this rich phenomenology that you see meaning in the sign? You don't see a wooden board with some mark on it or some paint on it. You don't see that. You just see 'turn left.' You see meaning. It's a direct, rich, phenomenological perception of meaning. 'So how come? How is this possible?' And he says, it's only possible, and he introduces a notion of forms of life, because in our social backgrounds, not in the foreground, we've been brought up in a culture of martial weaponry, of seeing illustrations of arrows being shot, which move in a certain direction. Many of us have read books, comic books of the middle class, families, seen pictures and so on. So, there's a whole rich social background of forms of life, which has nothing to do with signs and rules or anything. It's just part of our culture. It's part of our practices. It's just part of our social history, our social memory, and so on and so forth. And all that background, you know, gives us the rich phenomenology of perceiving meaning, seeing it as 'turn left.' With somebody from another culture, let's say where arrows are used for decorative purposes, and not for martial weaponry. They're not going to go there. And they are going to say, what does this sign, you know? So, you need a certain background of social memories, culture, etc., to be able to so much as perceive what, correctly, what the rules are. And then the question arises, how do illusions arise? How should we deal with those illusions? And there, the real hard issues of the relationship between social and individual will come up. Thank you very much.

Works Cited:

Arrow, K. J. (1951). Social Choice and Individual Values. John Wiley & Sons.

Berlin, I. (1969). Two Concepts of Liberty. In Four essays on liberty. Oxford University Press.

Condorcet, M. J. A. N. C. de. (1795). Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.

Gandhi, M. K. (1938). Hind Swaraj and other writings. Navajivan Publishing House. (Original work published 1909)

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). The Social Contract (Various editions and translations).

Akeel Bilgrami is a renowned Indian-born philosopher and the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, with a focus on philosophy of language, mind, and political/moral philosophy. A former Rhodes Scholar, he has authored significant works on secularism, identity, and Mahatma Gandhi's thought, often addressing deep socio-political concerns. 

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.