How Labour Produced Philosophy, Not Books

early humans evolution

Historically there were two streams of philosophical discourses in the world, more particularly in India: The first one was the philosophy of people, who involved in production—agrarian, artisanal, animal economy and so on. The second one was the philosophy of saints, sadhus and sanyasis, who always remained outside production and lived for their own self- salvation. The idea of self -salvation was related to the post-life imagination of the well-being of a person in heaven. This heavenly life was/is totally imaginary. To continue to live here on this earth one has to eat on a daily basis. For that human beings have to labour. Both hunting and producing food from the earth involved labour. The saints, sadhus and sanyasis always remained away from labour, but continued to eat food that was a byproduct of labour. When both, while hunting and producing food, human beings had to create new ideas on a daily basis as well. The human philosophy of life took shape at this stage itself.

In India the idea of self- salvation has taken such a route that it moulded a self-salvational social group that has become a caste in itself. This is where the idea of Brahmin evolved. It also had an idea of re-birth in caste and family where they get good food without working on the land. They negated land and labour relationships as negative. This mode of thinking constructed a second mode of philosophical thinking. Unlike in the rest of the world anti-production and anti-labour philosophy took a deeper root in what they call the Vedic period.

The first type of philosophical idea of life remained mostly unwritten and carried through oral transmission from generation to generation. This we shall call the philosophy of production and reproduction. Unlike among animals among human beings production and reproduction of humans themselves were/are inter-related. The human factor of labour was/is an inherent process in production and reproduction. The first school always recognized how production is a source of life and how labour enhances human reproduction abilities so that life continues to exist.

Without the existence of the first school, there is no life in the second school. The people who lived in the realm of the second school of thought were/are parasites, totally dependent on the first school for improved food and housing. But unfortunately the second school had written and codified ideas and treated the philosophy of production as mean. Because of the life of leisure, anti-labour and anti-production the second school could construct a book based philosophy and started controlling the food producers. That thought was transferred through written texts, at least for a period of three thousand years or so, from one generation to another within their small community and treated the production force as unworthy of respect. This destroyed the country’s potential to advance by using its full potential of labour and knowledge. There is a total disconnect between the two schools now.

The food and goods producers were philosophically engaged with nature as a source of ideas, imagination and concepts. But the saints and sadhus were self-centered and their knowledge was purely perceptual without connecting itself to creative experiments. They never engaged with nature as a multiplier of resources. Nature constantly reproduces itself. As parts of it keep dying and its rebirth takes place at the same place. Those who are constantly engaged with nature understand birth, death and rebirth is a constant process in nature. They observed nature for millennia while living as part of it, without the ability to connect between nature and an unseen force, what later was called God. Abstraction of an idea from the material process was happening around human beings and this was a much later development.

The earliest philosophical imagination of God was formulated in the production fields only after domesticated plant and seed production—what was called agriculture- developed.

Understanding God and depending on the belief that God was with them here in this life and after life came into human belief in the process of struggle for food. After all, the basic human life sustains with food. A child needs food to survive and grow before the child thinks about the environment around it. The idea of God among children is a social construct but not an individual imagination. Child does not start its life praying to God but it starts life by drinking mother’s milk. Baby animals also start living in the same way that human babies start by drinking milk from their mother’s udder. A thinker who believes in an idea that God is first and the idea of food is later, would say that God created that early impulse among all babies to go to mother’s udder or breast and drink milk both among animals and humans. But the idea of God does not exist in the child’s mind in the same way that it does not exist in any animal, baby or adult. The idea of God came into human life when human consciousness had grown and became complicated.

Not only human beings, but animals also need food during their whole living period, which do not have the idea of God. The idea of God was/is a philosophical one, which also goes along with the idea of creation of the entire universe. Before any written text—Bible, Quran or Rig Veda about God —human beings who were engaged with nature encountered dangers, uncertainties, fear and anxiety. However, the fear of death, which was/is common to both humans and animals, was taking away many fellow beings living and working with others who were still alive. Such a complex idea of death forced them to believe that there was/is unknown and unseen power, which they thought, was responsible for the death. This search for an unknown power began a second major revolution in human existence after the first major revolution of producing food under their control from the land and seed relationship.

The living people talked about God as cause for all those things happening. The search for causation of happenings, when visible answer was not found, they concluded that there was an invisible force, operating to create all such conditions. Let us remember that the whole search for things started with their search for food in the beginning. Then they searched for causation of human death and sorrows as they began to grow more and more conscious about their being. They discovered the God who could not be seen and touched. All this happened before the Aryans arrived in this land, India.


They asked for God’s blessings much before the written books came into existence when they were ridden with fear, anxiety, disease and so on. They must have thought that support was needed for having a safe living, for living better and for continuing their labour as a source of life. If they cannot go to work with diseases because of fear or of hunger, not just one adult who fell sick, but the children around the working person—man or woman—would die. The strength to labour was far more important to procure or produce food. Fear of the future and the source of energy to labour in a powerful nature made them think and rethink for solace. To some extent such solace came from the idea of God.

That invisible support would give better results in the fields, at home (after humans built a house) and in the fields of production and food gathering. The idea of God is a civil societal idea, not an individual idea. Gradually that idea took the shape of religion. But religion was not the source of philosophy. Religion used philosophy for its hegemonic role in later years. In India the Vedic religion used the idea of God by those who never were willing to work in the fields of production for mobilization of food and life resources to constantly control and exploit people who worked and produced food. In other words it was labour that discovered God not the anti-labour saint or saadhu. Once the idea of God took root, philosophy grew around it in a much more complicated way. Religion is a by-product of this complication.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author.

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