Mokṣa

What it asks

Indian thought generally shares a starting diagnosis and disagrees about everything after it. Existence is repeated, the repetition is driven by action and its residue, and the whole of it is unsatisfactory in a way that no improvement within it repairs.

Liberation is release from that. And because release depends on what binds, an account of mokṣa is an account of what a person is, which is why this is a philosophical field rather than a devotional one.

It sits here rather than under metaphysics or ethics because it does not divide that way. The Indian traditions treat the question of what we are, what we should do and what we may hope for as one enquiry, and mokṣa is where it is conducted.

The recurring problems

What bondage consists in. Almost every school answers: ignorance. They then disagree entirely about what is not known. That the self is identical with ultimate reality; that consciousness is distinct from the material principle it is entangled with; that there is no self at all.

Whether liberation is a state or a cessation. Some accounts describe it as unbounded consciousness or bliss. Nyāya, more austerely, holds it to be the final cessation of pain, with no experience remaining - a position critics called indistinguishable from annihilation and which its holders defended as honest.

Liberation while living. Whether a person can be liberated and still embodied. If yes, the liberated person is walking about and the state is observable; if no, liberation is only ever posthumous and no one can report on it.

Knowledge or action. Whether release comes through insight, through disciplined practice, through ritual obligation, or through devotion. Whole traditions divide on this and the answers are not compatible.

How it developed

The Upaniṣads pose the question and give the most influential answer: the self is not the body or the mind but something identical with the ground of everything, and knowing this is release.

The renouncer movements of the same period - including what became Buddhism and Jainism - accepted the diagnosis and rejected much of the framework. Buddhist thought denied a permanent self entirely, which forced a complete reworking of what could be liberated and from what.

The classical schools then each produced a systematic account. Sāṃkhya described release as the isolation of pure consciousness from the material principle it had been misidentified with. Advaita Vedānta held that the appearance of separateness is itself the ignorance, so nothing is achieved in liberation, only recognised. Nyāya took the deflationary route. Jain thought made it the shedding of accumulated karmic matter through austerity.

The devotional traditions from the medieval period offered a different route again, in which release comes through relationship with a personal deity rather than through knowledge - and generated centuries of argument with the knowledge-based schools.

The positions within it

Advaita Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Yoga, Jainism and the Buddhist traditions each give a different account, and the Bhakti movements give another. All are in the Schools section.

Cārvāka materialism denied the whole framework, holding that there is no rebirth and no liberation, and that the doctrines exist to serve those who profit by them.

Where it stands now

As a living concern it is unbroken. As a subject for philosophy it is read increasingly as a set of positions about personal identity, consciousness and value, which is what they are.

The comparative interest is considerable. Arguments about whether the self persists, whether there is anything it is like to be liberated, and whether the cessation of a person can be good for them are recognisably continuous with questions in current philosophy of mind and value theory, worked out over two millennia by people who took the answers to matter enormously.