My Station and Its Duties, and What Comes Next?

For some time, I have been dissatisfied with a certain feature manifested by both ethical philosophies and the great religions, at least in their textbook form.  Ethical theories usually advance a single principle, such as the Principle of Utility or the Categorical Imperative, to account for all moral judgments.  This is not a mistake on their part; for them, it is a statement of their goal.  It defines their enterprise.

Analogously, each religion tends to identify a single human predicament it takes as defining the human condition, which presupposes that everyone has the same fundamental predicament.  Speaking broadly, for Christianity, it is sin; for Hinduism, it is ignorance; for Buddhism, it is suffering.  And each identifies a single solution:  salvation from sin, or the realization of our identity with the all-encompassing Brahman, or understanding that the things to which we are attached are ephemeral and not self-subsisting.  Like the search for a single ethical principle, this is not an error.  It is regarded as the definition and very purpose of a religion.  The religions, of course, contend with each other about the predicament and solution, never considering the possibility that different people have different predicaments and hence need different solutions.  The Buddhist seems to assume, for example, that everyone suffers in the same way and from the same causes and that all suffering is, therefore, alleviated by what one might call “the same medicine.”

Why I find all this troubling is that my own intuitions point me in a quite different direction – toward the possibility that, from an ethical point of view, there are different values, human goods, norms, and judgments that may well vary from one person and one situation to another, without, however, being merely subjective.  One sees materials for such a view in Aristotle’s Golden Mean.  And my own intuition on the religious front is that the diversity of persons, cultures, and situations – outlined so beautifully in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience — suggests that there may be numerous human predicaments and spiritual goals, and that the task for each of us is to identify correctly our own proper spiritual quest and to determine which religious or non-religious venue best answers to it.  Religious do not completely ignore this insight since they often, in spite of textbook simplifications, contain an impressive array of precisely such diversities.

In spite of this off-on-my-own thinking, I always remember Edmund Burke’s warning that each individual’s private stock of wisdom is meager compared to “the bank and capital of the ages.”  So I try to find some pedigreed source that might help me to clarify and ground my personal intuition or idea, and to trace its implications.  By the serendipity of life, a friend’s offhand remark led me to a rather neglected section of the Bhagavad-Gita, a work which, if we ever compile a world canon of the truest and deepest spiritual texts, will surely be included.  That dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna explores the Hindu concept of dharma – a structure of duty that is  ontologically grounded, divinely ordained, and socially effective.  In the Indian tradition, dharma is structured around occupation or caste – with different duties for priests, warriors, merchants-farmers, and workers – and also for such stages of life as student, householder, elder, and renunciant.

Thinking about dharma outside the restrictive context of Indian social structure, I recalled an essay by the great British idealist, F. H. Bradley, from his volume, Ethical Studies.[1] Its title, “My Station and Its Duties,” sounds very much like the British version of dharma, and yet, since different people have a diversity of stations, it offers the possibility of a flexible and personal understanding.  Bradley’s essay offers both material for developing my intuition and potential difficulties for it.

The contending ethical theories of his day were John Stuart Mill’s principle of utility and Kant’s Categorical Imperative.  In the chapter entitled, “Pleasure for Pleasure’s Sake,” Bradley faults John Stuart Mill’s hedonism for taking one part of the person, and not the highest part, and in fact a fleeting part, as the sole measure of value.  When the momentary sensation is gone, Bradley writes, “We are not satisfied.” (96)  Properly understood, he writes, happiness involves the satisfaction of oneself “as a whole,” in “the realization of [one’s] concrete ideal of life.”  (96)

Hedonism prizes a string of particular feelings.  The problem in Kant’s theory is, Bradley says, “the opposite, since for mere particular it substitutes mere universal; we have not to do with feelings, as this and that, but with a form which is thought of as not this or that.  …  In a word, we find in both a one-sided view, and their common vice may be called abstractness.” (142).  In his essay, “Duty for Duty’s Sake,” Bradley objects to Kant’s way of turning human nature against itself, by setting the heteronomous will, which is the only will of which we are directly aware, in opposition to the autonomous will, which, in its supreme form, “the good will,” is impossible to detect.  Bradley agrees that the good will is a very excellent thing, but he wants to know, beyond the traits of autonomy and formal universalizability, just what it is, and searches in vain for an answer. (145)

Still, Bradley agrees with Kant about one thing:  an ethical standard is one that “realizes an end which is above this or that man, superior to them, and capable of confronting them in the shape of a law or an ought.” (162)  It needs to stand over and against us, as something to measure up to, but without setting us at war with ourselves.

The proper goal is, Bradley concludes, a “concrete universal.” (162)  “It is the self-realization of each member [of society], because each member can not find the function, which makes him himself, apart from the whole to which he belongs; to be himself he must go beyond himself, to live his life he must live a life which is not merely his own but which, none the less, but on the contrary all the more, is intensely and emphatically his own individuality.” (163)  In this way, “I affirm myself, for I am but as a ‘heart-beat in its system.’” (163)

Dharma sets a very large framework, since it sustains the universe and all existence.  It also provides social definition in a way that meets Bradley’s requirements.  Historically, dharma has usually been interpreted through a fixed structure of social roles.  An ancient Hindu saying, however, is that “dharma is subtle.”  And one place the subtlety appears is a somewhat neglected section of the Bhagavad-Gita, sec. 35.  It discusses svadharma (or swadharma) — one’s personal dharma.

Translations vary, but here is one by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwoood:

“It is better to do your own duty, however imperfectly, than to assume the duties of another person, however successfully.  Prefer to die doing your own duty: the duty of another will bring you into great spiritual danger.”[2] 

J. J. Johnson adds “inherent” duty. [3] Franklin Edgerton adds “to which it has pleased God to call him.”[4]

When the preflix sva, one’s own, is added to bhava, nature, the result is svabhava, one’s own nature, originally identified with the proper traits of one’s caste but with the possibility of being understood in more personal terms.  When the prefix sva is added to dharma, the result is svadharma, one’s own or personal duty, which is the duty proper to svabhava, one’s own nature.

According to the Twentieth-Century Hindu philosopher Sri Autobindo,[5]  “… there are four distinct orders of the active nature, or four fundamental types of the soul in nature, swabhava, and the work and proper function of each human being corresponds to his type of nature.” (509)  This, he explains, is not the same as the traditional caste system:  “There all is rigid custom … with no reference to the need of the individual nature” and “without regard to [a person’s] own individual call and qualities …” (511)  Aurobindo ridicules this view as insisting that “the son of a milkman be a milkman, the son of a doctor be a doctor, the descendants of shoemakers remain shoemakers to the end of measurable time ….” (511)

Aurobindo explains that an act not one’s own, regardless of its superior features, “is still inferior as a means of subjective growth precisely because it has an external motive and a mechanical impulsion.”  “Action should be rightly regulated action … but intrinsically one’s own, evolved from within, in harmony with the truth of one’s being, regulated by the Swabhava …” (510)

A striking example from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic of which the Bhagavad-Gita is a section, the good king Yudhishthira is almost too good.  He converses with holy men, when he should to attending to his royal duties.

For my intuition, svadharma is still too impersonal.  It can be taken to mean just doing all our work, whatever it happens to be, in a worshipful manner.  Agency itself can be denied or minimized:  whatever we do is Spirit expressing itself through us.  To arrive at the highest, says Aurobindo, “if we turn the action of the Swadharma into a worship of the inner Godhead, the universal Spirit … and surrender the whole action into his hands ….  The Spirit takes up the individual into the universal Swabhava, perfects and unifies the fourfold soul of nature in us and does its self-determined works according to the divine will and the accomplished power of the godhead in the creature.”  (Aurobindo 525)

At other times, svadharma is presented with too much resemblance to finding one’s proper vocation, as if one needed a career counselor.  It could be determined by starting with an inventory of one’s personal assets, temperament, and what they call one’s “skill-set,” combined with what management consultants call an environmental scan, a survey of obstacles and opportunities present in one’s situation.  Aurobindo sometimes speaks this way, as when he writes:  “… each man fulfills different functions or follows a different bent according to the rule of his own circumstances, capacities, turn, character, powers.” (508)

Winston Churchill provides an interesting case.  He was a person whose personal nature or svabhava well matched the duty to which he was called.  When he was finally called to the prime ministership after his warnings about Nazi Germany had been proved true, he reports feeling “a profound sense of relief.” He felt he knew what needed to be done and “that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trail.”  In fact, he felt he was “walking with Destiny.”[6] This goes a step beyond just the circumstances – the dire straits of Europe in 1939 – but carries the sense of a life that has a meaning or purpose.  It was for this task, he is almost saying, that he was born and for which all his life experience had prepared him.  This is very close to svadharma – one’s own nature matched to one’s own duty – but it adds a distinct sense of personal calling.

A distinction drawn by the columnist David Brooks may be helpful here.  He distinguishes between the Planned Life and the Summoned Life.  For the former:  “life comes to appear as a well-designed project …”  By contrast, when asked,  ‘What should I do?, The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, ‘What are my circumstances asking me to do?’”  “The person leading the Summoned Life starts with a very concrete situation: I’m living in a specific year in a specific place facing specific problems and needs.  …  The important questions are: What are these circumstances summoning me to do?  What is needed in this place?  What is the most useful social role before me?  These are questions answered primarily by sensitive observation and situational awareness, not calculation and long-range planning.”[7]

Speaking of the “summoned life” is surely a step in the right direction, at least in the direction of my intuition, though it dwindles down to responding to the “problems and needs.”  There is something bloodless in Brooks’ account:  it is generic.  To which need I should respond would depend on an inventory of my talents, training, and situation.   It would presumably apply to anyone with the same traits and circumstances.

A more personal question would be:  Of all the problems, needs, and opportunities in my situation, which one — or which ones — summon me in particular, not the generic “me” but the actual person I am.  A friend of mine always asks, “Does this particular task ‘have my name on it’?”

Perhaps the relevant concept is that of having a calling, which is among the horizon of meanings suggested by “summons.” Having a calling is most familiar perhaps in religious contexts but not exclusively there.  As I understand it, a calling is quite personal.  It applies to this particular person in this particular situation, and it may be quite idiosyncratic, in the sense that, even in the same circumstances, two people with similar character, experience, and talents – similar personal profiles one might say – might have two quite different callings.

There is a hazard here, of course.  Bradley warns against taking one’s “conscience,” one’s private moral preferences as authoritative.   “It wants you to have no law but yourself, and to be better than the world.  … if you could be as good as your world, you would be better than most likely you are ….”  (199)  He urges us to  “… take the best that there is, and to live up to the best.”  (200)

Bradley continues, “But it is another thing, starting from oneself, from ideals in one’s head, to set oneself and them against the moral world.  The moral world with its social institutions, etc., is a fact; it is real; our ‘ideals’ are not real.  …  our private ‘ideal’ being anything more than an abstraction, which, because an abstraction, is all the better fitted for our heads, and all the worse fitted for actual existence.”

Although Bradley’s point is worth bearing in mind, it is overstated.  To be legitimate, I will argue, a calling does not need to conform to a previously existing social role.  Charles Taylor has focused on the more likely danger in our times – taking one’s own subjectivity, one’s own authentic self, to be authoritative, in the absence of, or even over against, any objective pole.  The claimant declares, says Taylor, “There is a certain way of being human that is my way.  I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s.  But this gives a new importance to being true to myself.  If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.”[8]

This statement sounds almost like a definition of svabhava, and its corresponding personal duty, svadharma, but it is not.  At least, it is not a definition that answers to the intuition I have been pursuing, which is personal, but not merely subjective.  I am not the measure of all things.  I am not even the measure of myself.  There can be an objective dimension to one’s calling, however unique to oneself it may be.  However, to be objective, a value or a calling need not be defined by any social role or by any socially instantiated fact.

Mark Berkson identifies three critical questions that arise pertaining to “being called”[9] : What are we being called to do?  Who/What is doing the calling?  Who is the being who is called?  The “who” or “what” that is the source of the call is crucial, since it determines the authority of the call.

The classic case would be God’s call to Abraham to leave Ur and to go to a place God will designate later (Genesis 12):  “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”  Abraham’s response is the premier answer to a call:  “Here I am,” the language of a soldier reporting for duty, something like, “Aye, aye, sir.”  That the call comes from God is crucial.  But the call is personal.  It is not a call to everyone to leave Ur.  It is a call to one and only one man and his family.

Consider Socrates’ situation.  The oracle has declared him to be the wisest, yet he is aware that he knows nothing.  He takes it as a divine duty to test the oracle, not to refute it, but, assuming it is truthful, to determine what it can possibly mean, given its apparent contradiction with fact.  The case of Socrates is remarkable because, though his way of reasoning from the oracle has sometimes been questioned, his paradigmatic role in the history of thought makes it hard to doubt he did the right thing.             Svadharma, unless we interpret it in a more personal direction, does not seem adequate to the case.  It is not just Socrates’ “nature” that sets this duty for him, as if anyone with a similar nature should have done the same thing, the oracle names only him.  Whatever duty follows from the oracle, it is not a duty for everyone.  It is a duty that, quite literally, has his name on it.

A call from God or from a divine oracle has special authority, of course, but there are other calls as well.  They are not just the unfolding of the agent’s own nature and talents, but are felt as coming from the outside.  The call comes from someone or something.

There can be a felt duty to one’s people or to one’s ancestors or to one’s group – to the Sioux nation or to one’s grandparents who first came from the old country or to one’s fellow firefighters — a duty to keep their memory and their traditions alive.

There can be what a friend of mine calls, in a romantic context, “the summons of love.”  When one’s true love comes along, it is important to open one’s heart, not blindly but nevertheless unreservedly.

There is the summons of genius.  Vincent Van Gogh’s talent was uniquely his.  His art was compelling to him.  He would have failed his true calling had he led, arguably, a more sane life.  Perhaps Marie Curie felt this way, or Jonas Salk, or Cole Porter.

Exploring ways in which secular people experience a sense of calling Edward Langerak starts with gratitude.  It is possible to have a sense of thankfulness, even when there is no one in particular to thank.  We can have a sense of gratitude toward the sources of our lives, the beauties of nature, our cultural inheritance.  He quotes Ronald Aronson’s question, “Can one thank one’s lucky stars in such a way that it elicits a sense of calling?”[10]  Perhaps.

Calls come not only to people of talent and those who make history.  A young woman of my acquaintance saw deaf people signing.  She did not know what they were doing, but somehow it came to her, “Helping those people is my life’s work!”  She learned sign language and became an interpreter.  She sees this as her calling.

Anyone who has a certain calling is obligated to respond, but here thoughtful discernment is necessary.  Not every voice is God, not every oracle is authoritative, sometimes love is just a projection, and not every artist has the talent of a Van Gogh.  There is always a risk.  But there is perhaps a deeper risk in not responding to a summons, and a more profound possible gain, even a transformation, in taking up the challenge.

Dag Hammarskjold got it right.

“I don’t know who or what put the question.  I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender, had a goal.”[11]

Notes

[1] F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876, second ed., 1927, reprinted 1959).

[2] Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, The Song of God, tr. (N.Y.: Penguin-Mentor, 1954), p. 48.

[3] The Bhagavad Gita, tr. W. J. Johnson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 18.

[4] The Bhagavad Gita or Song of the Blessed One: India’s Favorite Bible, interpreted by Franklin Edgerton, (Chicago: Open Court, 1925), p. 61.

[5] Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 1995).

[6] Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. I:  The Gathering Storm, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

[7] David Brooks, “The Summoned Life,” New York Times, March 6, 2015, quoted by Edward Langerak, “Vocation without the Supernatural,” 202-223, in Kathleen A. Cahalan and Douglas J. Schuurman, eds., Calling in Today’s World: Voices from Eight Faith Perspectives, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s, 2016), p. 218.

[8] Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1991), pp. 28-29.

[9] Mark Berkson, “The Cultivation, Calling, and Loss of the Self,”: Confucian and Daoist Perspectives on Vocation,” 161-201, in Cahalan & Schurman, op. cit., p. 161.

[10] Edward Langerak, “Vocation Without the Supernatural: Calling in Secular Traditions,” 202-223, in Cahalan, p. 211, Quotes Ronald Aronson, Living Without God, p. 63 Berkeley, Counterpoint 2008.

[11] Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, tr. Leif Sjobeg and W. H. Auden, (NY: Knopf, 1966), p. 205, quoted on p. 1, Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation, ed. William C. Plachter (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2005).

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