Acting Morally: Bhukti Yoga and Kant Beyond Duty

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, a Hindu religious artist whose Hindu name is Srimati Syamarani, spoke on the art of spiritual life. A person is like the hand of Krishna. The hand puts food in Krishna’s body, so the entire body is nourished. The hand serving the body is a duty. So too is following the type of bhukti that is following rules and regulations out of duty. At some point, it will no longer be felt as a duty. In Kantian terms, this means not acting ethically by being compelled by reason—the necessity of the moral law that reason presents to us; rather, going beyond moral duty is to approximate the holy will, but not because it is the nature of finite rational beings to be good; rather, it is out of love of the moral law, including its necessitating us to act ethically. In bhukti devotion, however, it is not love of the form of moral law (i.e., it being an imperative, or command, of reason) that obviates the sense of duty to serve Krishna and other people, as in being a hand of Krishna serves Krishna’s body; rather, it is love directed to Krishna (and ensuing compassion to people) that transcends ethical obligation per se. This is not to say that bhukti practice can go beyond feeling obligated due to a feeling, whereas it is by the use of reason that Kantian gets beyond duty, for it is the feeling of respect that empirically motivates a person to treat people as not only means to one’s own goals, but also as ends in themselves. As rational beings, we partake in reasoning, albeit in a finite way, and reason itself has absolute value because it is by reason that value is assigned to things. Even so, it cannot be said that a devotee of Krishna in Hinduism can go beyond acting out of duty due to an emotion (i.e.., love or compassion) whereas for Kant it is just by reasoning that a person can go beyond acting because one is duty-bound.

To Kant, acting out of a maxim, which is simply a reason for doing something, that includes a desire for an empirical object is lower than having as a reason, acting out of the moral law. Material principles presuppose an object of desire. Getting that object is a condition of having the subjective, material principle. Kant didn’t want a material maxim, such as the desire for one’s own happiness, not to mention wealth, to have anything to do with the moral law. A material maxim cannot furnish the content of a moral law. “All practical principles that presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are, without exception, empirical and can furnish no practical laws.”[1] A moral law, which is practical in that it relates to actions rather than, say, metaphysics, cannot be oriented to getting something that is desired. Not even the desire to be happy can be admitted to a moral law. “All material practical principles as such are, without exception, of one and the same kind and come under the general principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.”[2] Even though self-love, unlike self-conceit, is constrained by moral law, self-love is sordid in that it can be the basis of a reason for doing something (i.e., a maxim) that is connected with a desire for something. Additionally, Kant maintains that “(t)he maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises,” whereas “the law of morality commands. . . . there is a great difference between which we are advised to do and that to which we are obliged.”[3] In short, being motivated by self-love is not strong enough to get us to act morally. It is the form of a moral law, specifically as a command by reason, that turns out to be crucial in us, who have other inclinations, to be moral agents.  

Even enjoying doing your duty is a material practical principle because such a motive is empirical in nature, whereas being motivated to act because of the form of the moral law is not a material principle. The holy will of an infinite being can only be approximated by finite rational beings by trying to extirpate material desires (i.e., trying to rid oneself of all inclinations). But we can’t do that completely. Even so, we can be morally good agents because we can feel obligated to do something out of duty; we know we can be ethical because we are obligated. That is to say, we can be moved to do something just because it is our duty. Moral goodness is only possible for finite rational beings; if we were infinite, we wouldn’t be morally good—we would be good because that would be our nature. A fully rational agent would just do as a matter of its nature what it ought to do, so doing so would not even be thought of or felt as a duty. In bhukti, Krishna does not feel obliged to act ethically; rather, the deity does so out of compassion, which is the deity’s nature.

To Kant, Love and benevolence are a matter of duty to for finite beings such as us. In contrast, pathological love is from an inclination and thus cannot be a duty.  Practical love is the duty to make the following maxim: acting for others’ state rather than one’s own as a reason for doing something. Even though for Kant self-love is subject to the moral law (whereas self-conceit is not), it seems to me that the maxim of love and benevolence is difficult to reconcile with the idea that self-love is confined by the moral law. I think Kant’s desire to distinguish self-love from self-conceit is responsible for his over-estimation of self-love normatively (i.e., as a good thing).

Also, whereas love and benevolence are salient in bhukti devotion and the devotee’s interpersonal relations, for Kant, practical love can’t be the sole motive in acting on a moral duty because but there cannot be a duty to have a feeling. “If a rational being is to think of his maxims as practical universal laws, he can think of them only as principles that contain the determining ground of the will not by their matter but only by their form.”[4] The moral law has the form of an imperative by the nature of law itself, as necessitated by reason. Necessitation is the process by which a finite rational being brings oneself to do what one ought to do by what one takes as a command of reason to do. Necessitation is a psyche process in the phenomenal realm (i.e., of appearances) that is empirically motivated by means of the feeling of respect. But this is only empirically so; a priori (i.e., apart from experience), it is the duty itself that motivates us. Think of reason as commanding you. A person follows the command by being motivated by a feeling of respect for the moral law itself. It is precisely that feeling that can obviate the sense of duty itself; even though our nature, unlike Krishna’s or God’s, is not goodness itself (omnibenevolence), we can get beyond feeling obligated to act according to the duty required by reason and motivated by respect for other people as ends in themselves (because they too are rational beings). With sufficient respect for the form (i.e., imperative) of moral law itself, a person can act morally not out of a sense of duty.

In her talk, Srimati Syamarani spoke of following the rules and regulations first as her duty, but then out of love for Krishna. In contrast, Kant claims that love cannot be the sole motive for acting morally, whether out of duty or not. Respect for the imperative of reason itself in its capacity as a moral law-giver is very different than the love that a devotee directs to a deity, and yet these two ways can get finite moral agents acting morally and yet not out of a sense of duty.

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1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 5:36.
4. Ibid., 5:27.

The Russian Orthodox Church as a Political-Moral Force: A Case of Religion Overextended?

While visiting the Pskovo-Pechersky Monastery in northwestern Russia in 2000, Vladimir Putin wrote in the guest book, “The revival of Russia and growth of its might are unthinkable without the strengthening of society’s moral foundations. The role and significance of the Russian Orthodox Church are huge. May God protect you.” This statement is revealing concerning what has perhaps fueled the Russian president’s vision, at least ideally.

First, Putin may have a historical perspective, meaning that he did not come into office merely to gain power by enriching his connections (i.e., the oligarchs) and make use of Soviet authoritarian tools he had learned while working at the KGB. Rather, I suspect he looked back at the Czars who had made Russia into an empire well before the Soviets came on the scene.  

Second, Putin’s habit of being a road-block on the UN Security Council may extend beyond his embrace of the absolute or unfettered national sovereignty doctrine to exercising (or announcing) Russia’s might as one empire alongside the E.U., U.S. and China. That is to say, using the veto can effectively demonstrate might without the cost of a military show of force.

Third, Putin wanted to send a signal of his support for the Russian Orthodox Church. Not unexpectedly, the New York Times reported in 2012 on the continuance of the ascent of the Church as a political force in Russia. At the time Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov stood “at the center of a swirling argument about the church’s power and its possible influence on [Putin].” Shevkunov’s claim that Putin had saved Russia from “vulgar liberals” who nearly destroyed Russia in the 1990s  must have been music to the sitting president’s ears. Interestingly, however, when the cleric is said to have referred to modern Russian women to “a drunk girl standing by the bus stop,” Putin reportedly replied, “Father, you have gone too far.” Nevertheless, to have such a traditionalist Church on such a sort of power trip in the earthly realm can be dangerous to society in terms of what I would call moral dogmatism.

 Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, head of the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow    NYT

Putin’s identification of the Church with the “strengthening of society’s moral foundations” could lead to those foundations being narrower than simply that which is moral. In other words, a particular view of what counts as moral could delimit the contours of the moral foundation of the society. Such an approach would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary because equally valid moral standpoints differing from the Church’s position would be excluded even though they are moral.

Moreover, to conflate religion and morals as being one and the same ignores the fact that there are many immoral acts lauded in the Bible. More abstractly still, human moral systems, unlike theological claims, are not transcendent in that moral theories are based in our domain. To be sure, religions such as the Abrahamic faiths include moral strictures among the divine commands, but even here the moral commandments are second to the theological ones (or are derived from them and stated very broadly, as in “love your neighbor”). Put another way, were specific moral claims or principles on the same level as the theological, the Book of Job would not make sense. Job was morally not at all blameworthy and yet the theological point of God’s omnipotence (all-powerful) means that the theological cannot (by definition) be limited by what we think is moral. For us to say that Job does not deserve to suffer cannot trump God’s power, as if God were limited by our moral judgments. Do Russian Orthodox lay persons really believe that God likens Russian women to drunk sluts at a bus stop just because Shevkunov happens to hold that opinion?  I doubt it. Moreover, I doubt that God would have “vulgar liberals” inserted into the Bible. For one thing, some of the more sexually “immoral” (by modern standards!) acts by some of the heroes in the text would have to be expunged. 
Sanctioning particular moral views by theological claims and then using political influence such that those views become the cement walls of society’s moral foundations unfairly excludes other moral views from being part of the moral foundation. This is particularly relevant in the case of an empire because it is by definition heterogeneous (i.e., diverse). Different cultures had been brought into Russia at least by the death of Peter the Great. Unless there are moral universals that extend to particular applications, one can expect (as fully legitimate) there to be a bricollage of moral values interlaid in the foundation.  To identify the foundation itself with a particular institution—and one that is not primarily oriented to the moral dimension—is to ask for trouble, as the moral perspectives that are dogmatically excluded must surely in their very legitimacy press their case, either formally or as mounting pressure politically.

Source:

Sophia Kishkovsky, “Russians See Church and State Come Closer,” The New York Times, November 1, 2012.

On religion as distinctly religious and yet applicable to leadership in business organizations, see Spiritual Leadership in Business, available at Amazon.