Gandhi—SatyƗgraha and Holding Fast to Truth
Lecture 30
The narrative for Gandhi of Indian spirituality is both philosophical and religious. It’s aimed at the future, but it’s aimed at grounding the future in an Indian past that reaches back to the GƯtƗ. Gandhi’s critique of modernity and of British rule is not just a political critique; it’s a very deep cultural critique.
Like Nietzsche, Mohandas Gandhi was a critic of modernity, believing that modernity itself makes a meaningful life impossible. During his life, Gandhi lived in India, Britain, and South Africa and, as a philosopher, wove together ideas from many sources into an extraordinarily complex, multicultural vision of what human life is and ought to be.
One idea that animates Gandhi’s thought is a deep sense of justice, a sense of the importance of human rights and the obligation of a nation to respect the rights of its citizens. As a young lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi’s political sensibility was galvanized by an act of personal injustice he experienced: He was deposited at a remote station in the middle of the night when a white South African demanded his berth on a train. In response, Gandhi mobilized a massive civil disobedience movement to liberalize race laws in South Africa. Later, he was invited to return to India to help lead the ¿ ght against colonial rule.
Many of Gandhi’s ideas derived from reading the GƯtƗ and from Jainism, a religion with a strong emphasis on nonviolence embodied in the principle of ahimsa, meaning “non-harming.” Jainism also encompasses the idea that no single individual has a complete grasp of the truth; we must always act on our own conception of the truth but hold ourselves open to the fact that others may understand some things better than we do. From Tolstoy, Gandhi inherited an emphasis on personal spiritual development as essential to human life and a powerful critique of industrialism and modernity. He derived a sense of justice from his studies in Britain and an emphasis on civil disobedience from Henry David Thoreau. From the Indian leader Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi developed a sense of the importance of national identity and the need for a revolution in Indian culture, which he thought could be achieved through a union of svadharma and ahimsa.
Recall that svadharma is the idea that we each have a particular duty in society and a meaningful life involves our discharge of that duty. For Gandhi, our svadharma derives from our political circumstances, which Government could not be an institution that allows some to bene¿ t and others to suffer. entail public political duties. Gandhi diagnosed the primary disease of modernity as inconsistency with ahimsa; that is, modernity itself is harmful to individuals and causes us to lead our lives in ways that harm others. The only way to confront modernity is to do so publicly and representationally through civil disobedience. Our svadharma in the face of an unjust law is to defy it publicly.
Gandhi endorsed the liberal democratic ideals and fundamental freedoms of Mill, but he believed that they had become the foundation of industrial capitalism, which he saw as intrinsically harmful. The idea of liberal democracy should be reinterpreted to be consistent with ahimsa. Government could not be an institution that allows some to bene¿ t and others to suffer.
Another central construct for Gandhi is the idea of satyƗgraha, meaning a commitment to determining the truth and an insistence that truth prevails. This is a realization of the ideals of the GƯtƗ, speci¿ cally, the role of jñƗna yoga in understanding the nature of reality and karma yoga in acting so as to realize that understanding. Gandhi thought that satyƗgraha must be performed publicly, actively, and nonviolently and should be aimed at enabling others to see and act on the truth. Gandhi follows Thoreau in suggesting that such action always invites resistance and punishment, which one should accept publicly, again, because doing so educates others about injustice.
The second important construct in Gandhi’s political thought is swaraj, literally meaning “self-rule,” a term that can be applied to both politics and the individual. Gandhi believed that political swaraj was impossible without personal swaraj, self-mastery. For Gandhi, swaraj and satyƗgraha are tightly connected. SatyƗgraha is the vehicle for obtaining political swaraj, but personal swaraj is the necessary condition of genuine satyƗgraha. We can’t grasp the truth without ¿ rst ruling ourselves.
In Gandhi’s view, the individualism of Hume, Kant, and Mill was the foundation of capitalism, which inevitably resulted in industrialism and, in turn, the exploitation of workers, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and eventually, colonial expropriation of wealth from other countries. Gandhi also thought that secularism—the abandonment of religion in public life—had the effect of eliminating moral critique, which generally arises from religious roots. Gandhi urged a kind of swaraj that resisted modern ideas of liberality, individualism, and so on, replacing large-scale government and industry with a commitment to local production. He acknowledged that this commitment would involve the sacri¿ ce of many of the bene¿ ts of modernity—technology, medical advances, and so on—but he argued that it’s better to do without those bene¿ ts than to lose the human soul. Ŷ
Name to Know
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1869–1948): Gandhi was born in Porbandar, then a small princely state, in the modern state of Gujarat. His father was diwan of that state. Gandhi’s parents were both devout Hindus, but much of the surrounding community was Jain; hence, he grew up in a context of great piety and commitment to nonviolence.
Important Terms
ahimsa: Nonviolence, or refraining from harming others.
Jainism: An Indian religion in which nonviolence is the central value. satyƗgraha: A Gandhian term: holding on to, or insisting on, the truth. swaraj: Self-rule.
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Suggested ReadingGandhi, Hind Swaraj.
———, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Study Questions
1. What are the roots of Gandhi’s account of satyƗgraha and swaraj? Are they consistent with one another?
2. How do the personal and political dimensions of swaraj ¿ t together? What aspects of the political program are plausible? Can they be disentangled from the less plausible aspects?
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Gandhi—The Call to a Supernormal Life
Lecture 31
Liberalism claims to be the way to make sense of human dignity, the way to encourage freedom, the way to encourage the development of knowledge and progress, but Gandhi argues, in fact, it subverts all of that.
Gandhi insisted that a meaningful life is a supernormal life, and his own was supernormal in a number of respects: his extreme asceticism, his practice of chastity, and his devotion to religion. His concept of satyƗgraha involved a willingness to sustain injury and deprivation at the hands of his adversaries, and he was imprisoned many times. He was also committed to the idea that every aspect of his life was representational, a potential lesson to others in the possibilities for human life. Of course, his life was also nonviolent in the extreme, and we might say that it was successful in the extreme. This one man mobilized a disuni¿ ed and largely impoverished subcontinent in rebellion against the most powerful military force in the world.
For Gandhi, a normal, ordinary life involves a rejection of autonomy. He believes that we all too often unreÀ ectively accept social norms, political structures, economic values, and so on. He argues that this abdication of responsibility for our lives is always an acquiescence to and a complicity in violence and oppression, because industrial capitalism and the existence of militaries are themselves inherently violent and oppressive. These entities always involve the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of many. Because so much of our lives is structured by capitalism and industrialism, we accept these outcomes as legitimate. For this reason, we live lives of bad faith, lives in which we are alienated from our own values and cannot take responsibility for our actions.
One possible justi¿ cation for living such an inauthentic life might be liberalism of the kind advanced by Mill or Kant, but Gandhi thinks that’s insuf¿ cient because it ignores the harms of capitalism and industrialism. According to Gandhi, Mill’s harm principle is violated by liberalism itself because liberalism is set up to make harm possible. It argues for freedom, but the freedom it makes possible for the few is bought at the cost of enslavement of the many.
For Gandhi, normality gives others authority over our actions and ideology, allows us to relinquish responsibility for the way we live, and involves a rejection of truth because it requires us to accept ideologies that we know to be false. Further, normality violates the Jain idea of ahimsa, because leading a normal life in the context of a system that is built on the legitimation of harm involves leading a life that itself causes harm, even if we don’t intend to harm directly. Thus, a normal life is a meaningless one.
Gandhi believes that the principles of liberalism— freedom of speech and of ideas—enable capitalism. People become free to sell their labor, accumulate wealth, and spend their Swaraj, a mastery of ourselves, calls upon us to be deeply self-reÀ ective, to be aware of our motivations and our values.
wealth freely. This smallscale capitalism quickly becomes large-scale industrialism; the resulting concentration of wealth and power among the few subverts democracy and encourages consumerism. Further, capitalism and political oppression are built on advertising and propaganda, the purpose of which is to convince us that values we don’t actually endorse are acceptable. The result is the replacement of knowledge with confusion and a reduction in autonomy. This critique of liberalism is based on the idea of svadharma in the BhagavadGƯtƗ. Gandhi argued that our membership in society gives us a collective svadharma of service, the duty to bring our societies in line with the values we endorse on reÀ ection.
Gandhi’s articulation of satyƗgraha, an insistence on truth, and of swaraj, self-mastery, place supernormal demands on us: the duty to engage in constant social and political activity and struggle and the obligation to live a life of relentless nonviolence, consistency of values, and austerity. Such a supernormal life is active in alleviating the suffering of others and in achieving political liberation for the oppressed. Any recognition of harm is an obligation to organize our lives in such a way as to avoid it or eliminate it. Finally, the supernormal life is one of local production and consumption, one in which we attempt to minimize our participation in global economic structures.
For Gandhi, anything less than the supernormal life is utterly meaningless. The kind of self-discipline involved in this life is what gives us freedom from unreÀ ective submission to mass values. Such a life is meaningful because it is the only one that reÀ ects the truth as we know it. Finally, a life led through discipline and service to others connects us to something broader than ourselves: our fellow human beings and genuine sources of values. It’s a life that actually serves the values we endorse: genuine freedom, not the arti¿ cial freedom of liberalism; genuine equity, not equality of opportunity to suppress others; and complete nonviolence. This is the kind of life that serves the highest good. Ŷ
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Suggested Reading
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj.
———, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Study Questions
1. What aspects of the life Gandhi recommends seem reasonable? Which are unreasonable and why?
2. Do the principles that Gandhi uses to justify the life he recommends in fact entail that life? If so and if that life seems unreasonable, which of these principles might we reject?
