We are nothing but dust in a universe of nothing but dust. Consciousness arises as an emergent property from that dust, behaving according to the everlasting laws of Truth.
by Panduka Karunanayake
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…"
David Hume,
In: Treatise of Human Nature.
Carlo Fonseka was passionate about reason. That passion and Hume’s assertion formed the dilemma that embodied his intellectual life – like a problem and its solution in a thick mist, seeking each other for an elusive embrace.
Carlo – as we endearingly called him – must have acquired his passion for reason early in life, from his teachers at Maris Stella College, Negombo and St. Joseph’s College Colombo, and also through the influence of the rationalist Abraham Kovoor, one of his mentors. Whereas human beings relentlessly pursue their passions (or perhaps passions pursue them, like demons secretly pursue their victims), Carlo turned tables around and passionately pursued reason. The young, eloquent rationalist, freshly returned from the UK with a PhD, was an instant hit in our nation in the 1970s.
For many of us, being a schoolboy then was blissful indeed. Carlo, E.W. Adikaram, Arthur C. Clark and Carl Sagan enthralled us with their crisp arguments, nourished our growing minds with infallible facts, and broadened our horizons with illuminating scientific findings – giving us different strokes of reason from their respective vantage points and through their diverse, often incompatible styles. There were periodicals to read too, such as the Vidya magazine and the Navayugaya newspaper. It was the golden era of rationalism, and one wonders how unscientific hocus pocus like astrology, survived the day.
It was also probably the last decade or so of exactitude in language usage. Here too, Carlo was a role model to us. Listening to him explaining something complex was alone enough to tutor us on how to select the right word or put it in the right place in the sentence.
In the 1980s, Carlo was one of the last quintessential medical academics. Back then, he taught Physiology, but there was much more in his teaching. He injected a little bit of rationalism and added a pinch of history and philosophy into it. But, most importantly and consequentially, he reconceptualized his subject to make it the truly foundational basis of the medical knowledge that a doctor needed. To give an example, the basic conceptualization of body fluid compartments that he taught us in the first term (which hardly occupied a paragraph or two in textbooks then) is still used by generations of doctors to successfully treat their patients with dengue and sepsis – although he himself knew very little of these and dengue wasn’t even in textbooks then. That was how foundational the Physiology he taught was.
But as Carlo grew old and more interesting, a down-and-out rationalism was no longer enough for him. He must have suffered from a nagging feeling that seeing the world through reason alone was like walking with just one leg. This unease too must have had its roots in early life, perhaps at school when his mind was so completely captivated by the Arts. He could recite from memory extensive passages of Shakespeare’s Hamlet right down to his final illness. He reminded us that if the last remaining library on earth was burning, it was more important to save Shakespeare’s works than Newton’s: Newton’s, being facts of nature, can always be rediscovered while Shakespeare’s, once lost would be lost forever.
A man so restlessly curious and so widely read – whose mind was trained to categorize all that we know and encounter in the universe into the three transcendentals of Truth, Beauty and Goodness – is inevitably bound to perceive the existence of the other leg.
These are tough dilemmas. To lesser minds, the only way to deal with them would be to choose one of the transcendentals and ignore the value of other two – to spend the career exalting one at the expense of the others. It is the beauty of Carlo Fonseka that he chose not to do that – and instead accepted, even celebrated, this dilemma as part of the human condition that beautifies and emboldens us rather than stupefying and paralyzing us. His compendium of essays, articles, lectures and orations published in 2016, Essays of a Lifetime, amply corroborated this.
Of course, the full story doesn’t hang so briefly or easily. It was a story that evolved over a lifetime. If Kovoor mentored him at the start, Martin Wickramasinghe may have inspired him in later years. It was also a case of incessant hard work – reading, thinking, debating, writing and rewriting, rethinking. In the 1990s, as my first (and so far the best) boss, he summed up practical wisdom for me in just four words: "Nothing worthwhile comes easy."
Be that as it may, in a story we often remember only the beginning and the end. For instance, when we celebrate civilizations, we do so by marvelling at aqueducts and colosseums by comparing them to untouched jungles and rocks, rather than exalting the hard work of more primitive, tentative masonry that went in the intervening centuries. Besides, the beginning and the end come together to reveal the moral of the story quite nicely.
The story of his life thus progressed from unbriddled Marxism to an accommodation of the practicalities of stark economic truths; from being a stickler to the meaning of letters to being a wise man who reads the spirit of the writing; from being a dispassionate rationalist who attacks religious orthodoxy and myth to being a compassionate human being who could live and let live, even inside a small, tolerable puddle of myth if it has to be that; from being an abrasive, uncompromising political animal to being a pragmatist who sees opposing factions as complementary parts of one society.
As a result, Carlo in his later life would not speak so abhorently about private medical schools, only about substandard private medical schools; would not ask for the pound of flesh, only seek to make new friends; would not walk on fire, only tend to the burnt souls that mythwalking might leave in its wake. Naturally, in his earlier, more rigid years he made enemies as much as he attracted fans, and in later years he soothed many hearts as much as he disappointed some of his earlier followers. That is what must necessarily come to a man who refuses to stay in one place, who realizes the existence of the other leg too and starts walking with both.
Thus, he began as an iconoclast destined to be a maverick, and thankfully, ended up as the icon of his own style: a combination of indelible reason and ungovernable passion, made immeasurably valuable by a lifetime of voracious reading and incessant questioning, made enormously useful to all by his cogent argument and generous engagement, and made irresistably attractive by his impeccable enunciation and colorful delivery.
But as Carlo changed, so did the times – in the opposite direction. Today, reason has fled and unscientific hocus pocus engulfs society. Exactitude in language is a curse, not a sign of erudition, and those who possess it are condemned to a life of unceasing mental torture – whether in public life or the academia. The value of education has been detached from societal goals and is realigned with economic goals, its lofty purposes replaced by new managerialism, and great teachers displaced by prolific researchers. Today, for foundational knowledge we browse Wikipedia; for 3-dimensional role models we click on the 2-dimensional YouTube. Has he left us, then, when we need him more?
There may be only a few – or perhaps not even one – who agreed with him at all times and on all matters. But there are many who admired him, whether openly or grudgingly, for his signature personality. The minds of each one of those admirers have both benefitted from his and acquired some of its traits.
That – as his hero Bertrand Russell implied in his essay "The Free Man’s Worship" – is how we overcome the transience of our physical state and its vulnerability to nature’s laws, how we overcome the limits of the human condition, and how we transcend the impermanence of existence.
We are nothing but dust in a universe of nothing but dust. Consciousness arises as an emergent property from that dust, behaving according to the everlasting laws of Truth. But consciousness makes its own laws, the ephemeral laws of Beauty. And conscious beings come together to make their own laws, the tentative laws of Goodness.
With some minds like Carlo’s, that consciousness has not only understood this nature and its laws – the laws that it can free itself from, as well as those that it cannot – but has also strived to live beyond its own physical existence – and has succeeded. While the body has succumbed to nature’s laws and perished, the mind has defied them and will live on.
Carlo lives on in what he has left behind in – and for – us.
The writer first met Professor Carlo Fonseka as a candidate in the Physiology viva, where he obtained a Distinction. After graduating as a doctor from the North Colombo Medical College, he then worked as a demonstrator in Professor Fonseka’s department. He currently teaches Medicine in the University of Colombo. They kept in touch throughout, until the Professor’s final illness.
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