The Story of the Short Tempered SageFootnote ⁷

The (Epistemic) Moral of the Story

On the surface, this is an ethical tale – a story about a brahmin sage, Kauśika, learning to control his rage and overcome his pride. According to a historically contextualised reading,Footnote ⁸ the episode records adjustments made in Brahmanical theory in order to withstand criticisms being brought against the Vedic practice of animal sacrifice. Such critiques could have come from the renunciate precursors of Buddhism and Jainism who espoused absolute non-violence. The butcher's speech at the end of the episode is a skillful mediation between unavoidable violence and non-violence: it drives home for Kauśika the ‘true meaning’ of non-aggression or ahimsā. This is an ethical message.

However, through a different lens, the story can be seen as plotted around the drama of epistemic displacement and epistemic transformations.Footnote ⁹ It is about someone who, in spite of having the social capital of a high caste ‘scholar’, did not possess the intellectual virtues necessary for effective inquiry. It shows the re-tooling of an erudite but irate sage into a ‘good knower’ through engagement with individuals at the social margins. The ethical, here, seems to serve a deeper epistemic purpose.

But how can a narrative about pride and aggression speak to the problem of knowledge – not just moral knowledge – but of knowledge pertaining to garden-variety plain truths about sticks and stones? In fact, the didactic portions of the Mahābhārata often render the very notion of the ‘epistemic’ nebulous because of the manner in which they speak of truth (satya) - the designated goal of cognitive activity. The Mahābhārata routinely embeds truth in a list of ethical virtues and sometimes openly dismisses truth-speaking in favor of moral virtues like non-cruelty. Let us look more carefully at the worry that a notion of alethic truth might be absent in the Mahābhārata. This is important because without an independent notion of ‘truth’, endeavors and concepts that define themselves in terms of ‘cognitive contact with reality’ become shaky.

In response to the direct questions: What is truth? How is it obtained?, the Śānti Parvan in chapter 162.1–26 lists and defines thirteen moral virtues, calling them the thirteen ‘Ways of truth’ or satya-ā cāraFootnote ¹⁰ (satya meaning ‘truth’ and ācāra meaning ‘ways of conduct’ or ‘practice’.) The list comprises of standard ethical qualities like impartiality, freedom from envy, self-control, patience, and the like. Now, this can easily be made sense of in a virtue-theoretic framework. Cognitive success depends on possessing thirteen character traits which are the ways/means to truth. We are often biased, lazy, hasty. We are also prone to fantasy, wishful thinking, and deceit. Such proclivities routinely scramble ‘cognitive contact with reality.’ Moral virtues (like the thirteen listed) become ‘virtues of truth’ since they help overcome common psychological impediments to accessing reality. They are, as Bernard Williams says, ‘qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people’.Footnote ¹¹

However, the text quickly muddies such an easy interpretation by going on to call these thirteen ‘Ways’ the ‘Forms’ of truth or satya-ākāra Footnote ¹² (ākāra meaning ‘form.’) With this reformulation, moral virtues are no longer simple means or ways to a cognitive end, but rather truth becomes incarnated or embodied in thirteen ‘forms’ as the moral virtues themselves. A similar blurring of the ethical and the epistemic occurs in crucial verses in the Bhagavad Gītā also. Chapter 13: 7–11, in a bid to tell us what knowledge is (etadjňānam iti proktam) ends up listing a set of moral qualities! The cognitive here thus seems to be articulated in terms of the ethical.

The problem is that such moves loosen our grip on the notion of an intellectual virtue. Note that Zagzebski distinguishes epistemic from moral motivation (and hence the two types of virtues, intellectual and moral) in terms of the difference in their goals – the former aiming at truth and the latter at the good life. However, if truth becomes an embodiment of moral good, as when moral properties designated as ‘ācāra’– the means to/practice of truth – turn into its ‘ākāra’ or its forms, then a hunt for the epistemic in the epic becomes futile. Or so goes the objection.

Now this worry misconstrues the Mahābhārata's deeply virtue-theoretic endeavor of turning away from belief-based accounts to agent-based ones. A shift from truth-practices to truth-forms (from satya ācāra to satya ākāra) does not necessarily lose the good old alethic target of inquiry. Rather it signifies a change in how we understand what truth is in a virtue-theoretic context. Definitions of truth in terms of propositional fit with reality are basically consistent with belief-based accounts. An agent-based perspective, however, suggests looking at how truth is operationalized in conduct. A life of (moral) virtue is an embodiment of a life free from obstacles to attaining truth. Thus pointing to such a life, becomes a way of alluding to what is attained in such a life and hence to showing us what truth is. Just as what ‘direction’ is can be indicated by pointing to what parallel lines have in common, a successful epistemic life can become an indicator of what that life aims at. Truth, in other words, can be contextually defined through ‘characterizations’ of the knower. Because of this, describing the Buddha himself as pamāna bhûta Footnote ¹³– as someone who had himself become knowledge – is a strategic way of conveying what knowledge is. The grasp of the nature of knowledge is now mediated through an encounter with a paradigmatically knowledgeable person. Theory of knowledge, it seems, must assume the form of a normative theory of knowers.

The Ethical and the Epistemic

The Kauśika story models a couple of different ways of connecting ethical excellence with cognitive excellence without reducing one to the other.

(1) First, by single-mindedly focusing on knowledge in a solitary meditative trance under a tree, Kauśika failed. He burned with an exaggerated ‘love of truth’ which led him to unravel at the slightest, un-intended interruption by the bird. We confront something like the paradox of intention here. The story shows how a direct and intense pursuit of truth can be counter-productive, how Kauśika's excessive eagerness to attain knowledge reduced his chances of getting it. The general point is that knowledge is power and power can be corrupting. Epistemic success – especially when self-celebrated, easily slips into hubris that ruins the momentum of initial success. The pursuit of epistemic goals is always on the brink of collapsing unto itself: the more we achieve truth, the greater the probability that we will fail in maintaining the fidelity of inquiry. Successful knowing comes with the risk of generating pride and related ethical vices, which in turn, stymie cognitive progress.

The epic solves the conundrum by making Kauśika de-center or even forget about the cognitive and focus on cultivating the ethical instead. This is not giving up love of truth. In fact, Kauśika's moral fervor and his realization that he needed to embark on an anger management program is motivated by this very desire (for truth.) Just as the desperate insomniac does not try to sleep but starts reading a boring novel in order to fall asleep, an effective, albeit indirect route to ‘cognitive contact with reality’ is to immerse oneself in things non-epistemic: ordinary, interactive life requiring cultivation of self-control, equanimity, patience and the other virtues of sociality. Such self-cultivation brings the very epistemic success that eludes us when pursued directly.

Of course, this strategy of resorting to an ethical response in the face of an epistemic failure presumes a particular ends-means relation between the two. A necessary condition of moral conduct is cognitive excellence. One cannot alleviate the needs of others, create conditions for their flourishing, not interfere with their interests and the like, without knowing what they are. In order to better perform one's roles in society one needs to know oneself and the requirements of those roles. Thus ethical life brings cognitive success in its tow by the ‘relation of requirement’ as it were. Consequently, concentrating on the ethical can become a means of achieving the epistemic. Learning to be compassionate, in some forms of Buddhism, for example, sets us on the path to cognitive success because a clear mind is a prerequisite for being compassionate. But importantly, the practice of compassion is not as easily wrought with ethical pitfalls that come from pursuing ‘clear and distinct ideas’ directly - after all, successful pursuit of an ethical life means consciously attempting to stay away from ethical vices. In this way, moral life is an epistemically successful life, but one that avoids the dangers of a direct pursuit of cognitive goals.

(2) Second, could Kauśika's killing the bird be construed as an epistemic defect itself? Note that ‘brahmin’ comes from ‘brāhmaņa’ which is etymologically a cognitive epithet signifying someone who knows the nature of ultimate reality.Footnote ¹⁴ Note also that in the narrative, the housewife berates Kauśika by saying that as a brahmin/brāhmaņa he was expected to study and to teach, (yo' dhyāpayedadhīyīta. Vana Parvan, 206:36). Yet, it was clear to her that he did not know the truth (about Dharma) (na tu tattvena ...dharmam vesti, na jānîṣe dharmam Vana Parvan, 206.43) What could this scathing epistemic indictment mean when coming in wake of unethical behavior? The embarrassing incident with the bird could well signify that whatever truths Kauśika might have learned, these were not aligned with other culturally accepted intrinsic values, like for example, non-violence. Now this mis-alignment becomes an epistemic shortcoming once the goal of inquiry is designated to be not truth simpliciter or bare truth, but truth as related to other correlative values. But why should we thicken the epistemic purpose in this way?

The need for a ‘reflective understanding’ might lead us in this direction. Drawing on some discussions of the nature of intrinsic value, it is clear that though the value of truth is not understood instrumentally as leading to something desirable, it still needs to be ‘made sense of’ in terms of its relation to other intrinsic values.Footnote ¹⁵ The ‘fit’ of truth in this larger normative matrix results in understanding of it. Kauśika's instances of unseemly behavior indicate that though he might have truly believed, yet for him truth itself remained isolated from the broad spread of other non-instrumental values which helps us grasp it as having worth at all. Kauśika failed to reflectively understand whatever truth he was pursuing – which is an epistemic failing.

The general distinction made in the tradition between dharma ‘with a little-d’ and Dharma ‘with a big-D’,Footnote ¹⁶ throws more light on the pursuit of truth as related to a plurality of intrinsic values. Speaking the truth (and thereby investigating it) in isolation, is a small-d dharma or a narrow epistemic duty. But this is embedded in a big-D Dharma defined as flourishing in harmony with all virtues – including harmony with cosmic Law. Now, when the epic extols that truth can be given up if it causes harm, (Droņa Parvan, 164.99) it speaks on the level of ‘small-d’ dharma and narrow epistemic goals. But when it says that ‘Truth is the Highest Dharma’ (Śānti Parvan, 199.63–71), it references ‘big-D Dharma’ and truth as a necessary element in that Ultimate eudaemonic state. The latter is flourishing or well being constituted by a harmonization of a plurality of intrinsic goods, including Truth - which harmony has to be affected each time, in a new way, given the particularities of the situation.

What this suggests is that according to the Mahābhārata, a small-d pursuit of truth-speaking should not become a fetish. This is because the ultimate cognitive aim is such truth that can be reconciled with the other values in a big-D Dhārmic life. Thus the epistemic agent needs to be open to sometimes giving up a small-d truth for a big-D coherence: Highest excellence comes from understanding the inner structural relations between ‘cognitive contact with reality’ and other intrinsically valuable goals in a ‘living well’. Truth is ultimately good when it is incorporated into and becomes a constituent of a good life even as its place in and value for flourishing must be contextually negotiated.

Jonardon Ganeri speaks of a new intellectual virtue called ‘Receptivity’ introduced by the Mahābhārata over and above the standard epistemic virtues of Accuracy and Sincerity. As the ‘disposition to resist the insulation of belief’,Footnote ¹⁷ Receptivity is more complex than simple Accuracy and enables truth to affect our lives and ‘run riot in the soul’.Footnote ¹⁸ This means that the only truth worth having is one that leads to good agency. When bare truth conflicts with other intrinsically important values, the virtue of Receptivity pushes for harmonizing them – a contextual synthesis and re-arrangement of priorities that affect behavior.

If not anything else, this indicates the depth of difference between the modern ‘purely scientific’ inquiry and the classical Indian concept of truth, the knowledge of which, liberates us from existential suffering. The latter always embeds ordinary, epistemic truth in a larger normative framework. But what is important for our purposes is that such embedding is not its denial but rather its expansion. Hence, it would be overreaching to claim that the Mahābhārata did not work with epistemic truth as ‘we’ know it. Truth is not made more nebulous in the epic. Rather it is brought closer to our lives. In different ways then, a good knower in the Mahābhārata, has to be both ‘good’ and a ‘knower’ in the traditional senses – unlike say a ‘good executioner’ or a ‘good thief’. Kauśika's character thus becomes epistemically exemplary at the end of the story because he engages with the ethical. And he must do so in order to be epistemically good.

Ethico-Epistemic Exemplary Agents

A virtue theoretic framework requires us to model epistemically virtuous agents in order to attain cognitive excellence. From this perspective, the Kausika story throws up the following two questions:

1. (a) What is the character of the housewife and the butcher who displace Kauśika as an epistemic paradigm within the story. What traits ground their cognitive superiority and make them exemplary for Kauśika?

2. (b) What is the nature of Kauśika himself who begins as deficient but undergoes an ‘improvement of the understanding’? What is the basis of his redemption and why is he, at the end of the story, worthy of emulation by us?

Our primary concern is with the struggling Kauśika and hence, with the second question. Yet, let us briefly look at his teachers – the housewife and the butcher first. The characters of these two protagonists are repeatedly marked in the text by ‘ordinariness.’ And this is parsed as their leading conventional moral lives. Disconcertingly, for the feminist, they both seem content with the status quo: the housewife is happy being a pativratā (a woman who considers her husband to be God) and the butcher is content to follow his hereditary caste-duties and familial obligations to his parents. Moreover, both characters emphasize their caring activities. The housewife openly ignores the Brahmin so that she can attend to her husband; the butcher makes much of his ‘taking care’ of his parents. Both hark back to their care giving when explaining to a surprised Kauśika, why and how they know as much as they do.

The narrative movement is also a gradual progression inwards – from a description of the city, to the public marketplace where the butcher practices his trade, to a seeming digression into a detailed description of the serenity of his home space and its inner chambers. It is here that the butcher finally imparts his message to Kauśika. What is highlighted both literally and metaphorically, then, is the domestic, even while the housewife and butcher function as cognitive exemplars. This suggests fascinating connections between domesticity, the labor of care and knowing and is a startling reversal of the public and the private domains in epistemology. Putting that, and its feminist potential aside,Footnote ¹⁹ let us move to the character of Kauśika.

Now, even though within the story, the housewife and the butcher are cognitive exemplars for Kauśika, for us readers, Kauśika himself, works as a role model for ‘improvement of the understanding’. What does the fallible yet teachable, Kauśika model for us? We find him struggling with vanity, arrogance, and a sense of privilege. We find him coming to recognize his own epistemological inadequacies. And we find him conceding that surprisingly, peripheral figures do know what he, the professional savant, does not. In order to be like Kauśika, therefore, we need to inculcate traits that enabled his interaction across entrenched social and epistemic hierarchies. What are these characteristics? Leaving aside the general involvement of the epistemic with the ethical, let us now pan in on the analysis of two specific qualities in Kauśika's character. Why should we, qua epistemic agents, be interested in inculcating dispositions of humility and shame which, according to the narrative, are central in Kauśika's character?

Ignorance and Epistemic Virtuosity

As the scales of the three vices – of māna, dambha, and ahamkāra – fall away from Kauśika's eyes, he begins to recognize the limits of his excellence. This suggests, contra Driver, that a humble person can well be aware of her accomplishments, as long as she does not exaggerate or over-estimate her worth.Footnote ²⁵ However, knowing the limits of what one knows is a gesture to the reality of something beyond the limit: it implies some sort of awareness of that which is not known. Humility thus does involve ignorance, but not in the sense of false belief.

The contours of a patch lit up by a searchlight always signals the co-related shape of a dark patch too. As the convex lighted space comes into sharp relief, an awareness of the concave area in the darkness beyond is also deepened. Thus, if knowing is a searchlight, then when we know what we do, we also become aware of the darkness/ignorance that lies beyond what we know. Now such ignorance/darkness conveys an awareness of a something which we do not know – even though this awareness is not a knowing of it. To put it dramatically, we come in ‘cognitive contact with reality’ through ignorance states (inchoately grasp the reality lurking in the dark patch) though of course, this awareness is not the kind of making contact involved in knowing states. On this construal then, ignorance is not a mere lack of knowledge. Rather, it is a positive entity with an intentional content i.e., the object/reality as unknown.Footnote ²⁶

To illustrate with an example: to the extent that I am aware that my knowledge of the table is limited to its top (is only of its top), I am aware of the table beyond its top. My knowing a cloth-covered table is not, after all, a knowledge of the cloth floating in air. In the same way, grasping something as masked is not grasping a mere mask. ‘In the empirical cognitive situation’, J.N. Mohanty says, we are in a state ‘of light and darkness mingled together... Just as there is awareness of light manifesting whatever is manifested, so there is awareness of darkness concealing whatever is concealed’.Footnote ²⁷ Ignorance as ‘darkness’ is an awareness of objects as concealed. Humility, in involving ignorance, therefore, involves such a grasp of reality ‘known as unknown’.Footnote ²⁸

Now, the concept of an object ‘known as unknown’ or an awareness of reality as beyond my knowledge, grants the object known a knowledge-transcending ‘excess’ which makes room for genuine surprises and ensures a robust realism. However, to the extent the object appears to me as unknown, it can appear to others as known. Thus acknowledging my ignorance makes room for the possibility of their knowledge: de-authorizing myself by recognizing where my knowledge ends, amounts to epistemically authorizing others. This last point makes Kauśika's humility deeply ‘relational’. As a disposition, relational humility is a double move – of de-privileging myself epistemically by realizing our ignorance while privileging others. The heart of relational humility consists in such ‘other-regard’ in spite of and because of a realistic self-regard. The more sharply we realize what we know in the lighted patch, the more we are aware of how much we do not know; and along with this comes an awareness that there are others who can/do what we do not.

Acknowledging the limits of knowledge does not always make space for other knowers. Classical scepticism is a case in point.Footnote ²⁹ Also, Lorraine CodeFootnote ³⁰ shows how James Mill in writing The History of British India was ignorant of Indian languages and culture and was aware of his ignorance. But this ‘conscious, self-congratulatory ignorance’,Footnote ³¹ he believed, gave him the objectivity to understand India. In this instance, self-ascription of ignorance was augmenting of Mill's own epistemic agency rather than making room for the authority of others. In Mill's political space, colonial subjects did not even exist as viable Others whose archives, records and ways of knowing could be empowered through his self-ascription of ignorance. By contrast, Kauśika's acknowledgement of his lacks led him on a hunt for teachers who, he presumably believed, knew what he did not.

Kauśika's ignorance-infused relational humility therefore, introduces epistemic community. Self-ascription of ignorance becomes the heart of continued cognitive growth not simply by signaling the vast beyond yet to be known, but by introducing necessary interactions with others in order to know it. But what kind of a sociality is sustained by relational humility? Does it involve an awareness of the workings of epistemic power? Note that the marginal status of the housewife and butcher has done no conceptual work in our reading so far. Can humility help foreground an understanding and reworking of structural exclusions within a knowledge-community? Could one argue that Kauśika's epistemic ‘other regard’ involves a commitment to justice? These questions arise when feminists – whether virtue epistemologists or not – encounter Kauśika.

‘Historicizing’ Relational Humility

Kauśika's story clearly overturns entrenched epistemic hierarchies. Now typically knowledge tracks social power. Thus the re-distribution of cognitive power when the housewife and butcher are made superior to a brāhmaņa, could in principle, trickle down to rectifying socio-economic imbalances. But interestingly, the Mahābhārata curbs any such radical potential. Its protagonists speak of very conventional moral and social norms – the subservience to husbands, the adulation of brāhmaņas, unwavering filial piety and a satisfaction with the social roles accorded to them. Kauśika's surprise at finding a knowledgeable person like the butcher at the fringes of society, is explained in the story, not through narratives of oppression and resistance, but through the transcendental theories of karma and rebirth (Vana Parvan, 215.21–31). But in spite of this, could the disposition of relational humility be deployed to ‘socialize’ knowledge in a thicker sense? Could it articulate an epistemic agency cognizant of power, even if it did not do so in the Mahābhārata?

The notion of a ‘realistic assessment’ at the core of relational humility affords a cue. Kauśika encountered where his knowledge ended. This was not a negation or under-estimation of his cognitive excellence, but rather a realistic ‘non-overestimation’ of it. This is a move of keeping our successes in perspective. Now, a realistic assessment of success signifies a context-sensitive evaluation that invariably has ‘a deflationary effect on one's accomplishments’.Footnote ³² Social factors always contribute to success and are not all our own doings for which we can personally claim credit. Subjects are embedded in history. Their successes, therefore, are determined at least in part, by the privileges and limitations of their location, by their group membership and by the social positioning of these groups.

When a particular fifth-generation brāhmaņa educator's son outshines a group of fifth generation sons and daughters of low cast butchers, how should the upper caste boy view his epistemic success? The advantages and disadvantages of the lad's location feeds his epistemic excellence. But to the extent such contingencies are contributing factors, they do not seem to be all his doings. Moreover, besides a sense of ‘equity’, this awareness introduces a sense of the co-implication of privilege and disadvantage. What privileges the upper caste boy is implicated in the failures of others. Thus understanding of his social luck is also an understanding of the exclusions required to maintain it. In this way, ‘realistic’ self-assessment understood in structural terms, can bring in the relationality of domination and oppression - the larger relational matrix within which individuals like Kauśika and the butcher are situated.

Interestingly, even when humility is materially grounded in this way, the play of ignorance and knowledge remains formally similar to what we found in Kauśika. A relationally humble person now is one who realizes that he could have been ignorant had he not had the social advantages that he does. The brāhmaņa boy might not have succeeded had he had only the opportunities available to the lower caste children. But to the extent that he grasps this fact, he also realizes that those others, who are now not accomplished, could have easily been so had they not been excluded from certain opportunities. Thus, the failure of the children at the social margins could well be due to their lack of access to epistemic resources. A subjunctive ascription of ignorance to ourselves now goes hand in hand with a subjunctive ascription of knowledge to others.

Ignorance here is not just a defect on the part of the knower but is ‘a structural condition’,Footnote ³³ just as epistemic success is not ‘individual’ success but structurally enabled.

A ‘realistic’ assessment includes the imagination of a different distribution of socio-intellectual advantages and disadvantages, along with the unremarkableness of one's own achievements.

Note that such analysis of humility is not an ‘unconcern’ or ‘inattention’ to our own successes as Roberts and Wood would like to have it. Rather, in being a nuanced engagement with what success presupposes, it unearths inequalities in socio-epistemic space. Humility therefore, is not also motivated by the simple egalitarian evaluation of the equal worth of all humans (as suggested by Ben-Ze'ev).Footnote ³⁴ Rather, it is based on realizing how much our achievements are a product of unearned social luck which makes us very unequal. This leads to a humble person behaving and relating to others in a specific manner – a way that de-emphasizes the importance of ones own accomplishments and foregrounds the possible achievements of others. Thus, in the contemporary taxonomy of theories of humility, the Mahābhārata seems to be espousing what is called a ‘presentation view’Footnote ³⁵ of the virtue.

There is a difference even here. On Scott Woodcock's version of the presentation theory, the humble behavior of de-emphasizing one's accomplishments while recognizing the epistemic agency of others, is partly due to ‘caring that people not overestimate the magnitude or the importance of (their) natural talents’Footnote ³⁶ and partly due to ‘caring more about not jeopardizing the welfare of others’.Footnote ³⁷ Woodcock locates the former condition as arising out of commitments to justice and the latter in a commitment to beneficence. Now relational humility, in not claiming credit for unjust privilege, is a sensitivity to ensuring justice through equity. But unlike Woodcock, the ‘relationality’ of humility is not simply abstaining from harming others or ‘not jeopardizing’ their welfare. It is, as we saw, positively empowering them as knowers. This move is not a matter of mere beneficence. A structural reading of relational humility makes clear that ensuring the knowerhood of those who have been hitherto disenfranchised by social luck is also a matter of justice. Receding oneself in order to foreground the epistemic status of others is not charity or benevolence but a rectificatory response to historically entrenched structural inequalities.

However, the awareness of power-knowledge in a relationally humble agent is not the political will to change an unjust system. There still remains a gap between relational humility (even when parsed in historicized terms) and the actual motivation for social reform. Are there resources in the virtue perspective of the Mahābhārata to make this transition? This is where shame may become helpful as an action propeller.

Shame as an Intellectual Virtue

A Sanskrit cognate for ‘shame’ in the Mahābhārata is hrī. Hrī occurs in the list of the thirteen ‘Ways of Truth’ discussed earlier, and hence comes clearly marked as an intellectual virtue. Elsewhere in the epic, commentators explain it with the more familiar word, lajjā. Footnote ⁴⁶ We come across a fascinatingly odd explication of lajjā/hrī/shame. Hrī is ‘doing good/ensuring welfare’ (kalyāņam kurute) but ‘without gloom’ (na glāyate) (Śānti Parvan 162.15) But given that shame is squarely an intellectual virtue, there must also be a connection between seeking truth and doing good/ensuring welfare. Unearthing these links explains how a ‘virtue of truth’ transitions into a ‘virtue of justice’.

First, the Mahābhārata is careful to regulate self-censure associated with shame as a mean between the hopelessness of ‘traumatic shame’Footnote ⁴⁷ on the one hand, and a smug shirking of responsibility to intervene, on the other. Confronting inequality can result in such extreme self-rebuke for failing the ideal of justice, that the very ideal one fell short of is itself jettisoned. This is the paralyzing glāni of hopelessness that makes action seem pointless. On the other hand, experience of inequality can lead to a ‘it's-not-my-fault’ sort of disengagement such that no action on my part is even called for. An intelligent response to injustice – the response of a dhīmān (thinking being) – acknowledges our share of responsibility for injustice but warns against a self-indulgent hopelessness (na glāyate). Shame, in the Mahābhārata, therefore, leads to a will to do better at living up to the ideal we have currently failed – a will to ‘do good for others’ (kalyāņam kurute). If a historicized humility makes us recognize our complicity in injustice, the consequent shame impels us to try and reverse the inequalities.

However, two questions come to the fore immediately. First, is not the disposition to ‘do good for others’ a motivation of beneficence after all, and not one of justice? Second, why is shame defined in terms of such a motivation a ‘way of truth’ ? Both questions can be answered together if we realize that (i) the disposition to feel shame is consciously intertwined with the desire to equalize (called samatā) and (ii) samatā is explicitly marked as an intellectual virtue occurring in the same list of Ways/Forms of truth that includes hrī or shame. Thus, shame in the epic targets both eliminating inequality and achieving epistemic excellence. How this can be possible becomes clear from the textual analysis of samatā itself.

Samatā, in the Mahābhārata, as the practice of equality is not re-iterating a metaphysical sameness. In fact, it is the normative constraint of treating as if equal those who are not naturally on a par. The four categories that one ought to ‘equalize’ are:

1. (1) myself (ātma),

2. (2) those who please me, in other words my friends and family (iṣta),

3. (3) those who do not please me (aniṣta), and

4. (4) those I hate, like my enemies (ripu)

Such a practice thus involves curbing our natural likes and dislikes and treating these four groups impartially. The epistemological potential of this is obvious for it can be a gesture towards controlling bias – both positive and negative. Accordingly, to ‘equalize’ would amount to withholding doxastic favors for the views of oneself and one's friends, while also extending sympathetic consideration to the views of one's opponents and strangers. Such impartiality is an attempt to position radical others and even those I actively do not like or agree with, as being as important as myself in a knowledge community. The seriousness with which we take ourselves and our own views, is thereby extended to many different groups in an attempt to move beyond the ‘we’ of same-sayers.

On a general level, this counters a shame-less-ness which is making exceptions for oneself, a smugness that feels superciliously unequal to (i.e., better than) others. A shame-less person has no sense of failing and no need to self-correct or reconsider. Would Socrates' elenchus, for example, work if his interlocutors did not have the virtue of being ready to be ashamed of their own inconsistency once it was pointed out to them? Shame then, becomes a corrective to self-exceptionalism and the practice of samatā operationalizes this in inquiry. As an epistemic virtue, shame is the quiet confidence to ‘make’ others equal to us so that our views can be tested against theirs. Thus, it is a way of avoiding dogmatism and a form of epistemic ‘doing good’.

It can now be objected that the ‘equality’ spoken of here is, after all, confined to equal representation in discursive space. Kalyāņam (welfare) associated with a shame emerging from a historicized relational humility should be the activity of trying to redress social injustice. But when intertwined with samatā it becomes parsed as the practice of addressing inequalities in epistemic space. Isn't this too narrow a response? Not necessarily. Once we realize that dialogue and debate are necessary conditions for justice, and any rectificatory move can be easily tinged with paternalistic beneficence if the equal right to think, reason and critique is not granted to those for whom we are attempting to secure equal opportunities. Equality in epistemic space is therefore, necessary for robust political change. Because of this, the three dispositions – humility, shame and equalizing – hang together in a startling echo of the feminist philosopher, Naomi Scheman's, slogan: ‘If you want truth, fight for justice’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Now we begin to see how the fight for justice brings truth in tow because it involves epistemic virtuosity. Ultimately then, good knowers cannot just be knowers. They must strive for a just community of knowers in order to be just knowers.