One would assume that last weekend’s flip-flop regarding GN Saibaba – in which the Bombay High Court‘s acquittal of the 52-year-old former Delhi University professor and four others sentenced in 2017 for life imprisonment for having Maoist links was overturned by the Supreme Court – was solely about GN Saibaba. It wasn’t really. The centrality of the stay order was about granting Descartes’ mind-body duality legal sanction, the first in the world.
According to Descartes – the chap famous for his ‘I think, therefore I am’ bumper sticker – the mind is a ‘thinking thing’ and an immaterial substance. The body, on the other hand, is a ‘existing thing,’ a material substance. The two of them, according to ‘Cartes, coexist and interact but are separate – like software and hardware in a computer, with the mind being superior.
So the zombie, for instance, is a (not too healthy) body bereft of a mind. Which for Descartes, not acquainted with the de-Cartesian 20th century philosopher George A Romero and his films like the 1968 classic, The Night of the Living Dead, is an impossibility. The mind bereft of the body, on the other hand, has found its existence in artificial intelligence, something Descartes was aware of in its more primitive form of automatons – relatively self-operating mechanical devices – that were quite the rage in 17th century Paris.
Justice MR Shah, who along with Justice Bela M Trivedi heard the Maharashtra government’s appeal against the acquittal of Sai Baba and others last Saturday, observed, ‘So far as terrorist or Maoist activities are concerned, the brain is more dangerous. Direct involvement is not necessary.’ He added he was making ‘a general observation, and not with respect to this specific case’, underlining the broader Cartesian underpinning to the case.
In the Cartesian hierarchy of mind (modernspeak: brain) and body, the mastermind is given supremacy over the masterbody. The ideologue – whether Leon Trotsky, Dale Carnegie, MS Golwalkar or Pep Guardiola – has more power than those acting upon his or her ideas. Descartes, of course, did not believe the mind to be capable of existing in isolation – ‘brain in a jar’. ‘I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship.. I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken,’ he wrote in Meditations.
Accordingly, Saibaba – who is 90% physically handicapped and wheelchair-bound since a child because of polio – doesn’t have much of a ship to pilot. And it’s this ship that has been docked for his perceived offence. But then, if Professor Charles Francis Xavier, the brain behind the bunch of mutants who go under the sobriquet of ‘X Men’ (Xaoists?), can wreak havoc with his powerful telepathy from the confines of a wheelchair, so can the professor and author of the doctoral thesis, ‘Indian Writing in English and Nation Making: Reading the Discipline’.
Stephen Hawking – paralysed and wheelchair-bound for most of his life – must have also come to mind when the Supreme Court overturned the High Court judgment. His body-as-prison didn’t stop the physicist from using his brain to work on gravitational singularity theorems and predicting that black holes emit radiation. The brain can, indeed, be ‘far more dangerous’ (and ‘far more beneficial’) than the body politic.
Which makes one wonder about the effectiveness of jailing a bright spark. Wouldn’t it be smarter to just pick his brain and defuse the real danger? Wishing both your mind and body a very happy Diwality.