Gandhi and the heritage of enlightenment: non-violence, secularism and conflict resolution

Gandhi and the Heritage of Enlightenment: Non-violence, Secularism and Conflict Resolution. Tadd Fernée. 1. Situating the legacy of Gandhi’s political contribution within the tradition of Enlightenment. Values, epistemic issue, practice. There are three levels to the question of Gandhi’s political contribution to the legacy of Enlightenment: the question of values, the epistemic problem, and finally the issue of practice. The practical aspect points to the problem of violence and the heritage of the French Revolution as a paradigm of political action within the Enlightenment tradition. The point of discussing Gandhi in the context of Enlightenment is not so much to claim him for Enlightenment – as if Enlightenment were some massive block defined by a single identity or essence, and we fall squarely inside or outside of it. One purpose of the discussion should be to reappraise the Enlightenment as a multi-centred, heterogeneous, and non-Eurocentric heritage – a departure from the views of both its conventional admirers and detractors. Even within a limited discussion of Enlightenment in the north Atlantic world of America and Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were not one but numerous Enlightenments, each with a distinctive national, cultural or regional basis. There is no single doctrine of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is a tradition, yet one where ongoing appropriations and interpretations are invariably selective and function in a pluralistic context. Therefore in discussion of the heritage of Enlightenment on the broad scale of the Indian national movement it is really difference to be explored rather than sameness. Above all, the influence is not restricted to the various threads of the European and American Enlightenments, but also includes the complex heritage of Indian historical Enlightenment. See, for example, Amartya Sen The Argumentative Indian. A tradition with Enlightenment tendencies is described going back as far as the Emperors Ashoka and Akbar, among multiple other threads. It is the contention of this essay that Gandhi was not merely an heir to the tradition of Enlightenment, but also that he radically challenged, expanded and transformed the received Enlightenment heritage as a living tradition. It is necessary to at once make this case based on the evidence of Gandhi’s speech and actions, and to reply to prevailing arguments which claim he was an enemy of Enlightenment. We will begin with the second task. Such arguments are advanced from two points of view. The first celebrates Gandhi as a force of resistance for Indian ‘authenticity’ against Enlightenment as a colonizing power at the mental level, and the second condemns Gandhi for having caused the failure of Enlightenment to take root in India through the deployment of a religious mass politics. These are from opposite perspectives, the first being advanced by the foes of Enlightenment as a dominant “alien structure” from Europe, the second being advanced by the champions of Enlightenment who lament its weak hold over contemporary Indian political life. The first we see especially in Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee, a romantic discourse of post structuralism that has been highly influential since the breakdown of the Nehruvian consensus. The second we see in Meera Nanda’s Prophets Looking Backward, a courageous and important book which never the less tends to speak too readily of a “failure” of Indian secularism, to speak vaguely of Enlightenment in terms of an idealised and uniform notion of reason, and which above all fails to distinguish between Gandhi’s secular political intervention and politically dangerous uses of religion such as those of Aurobindo Ghose and others in that line. This essay presents an alternative interpretation to both of these views, arguing that Gandhi in fact embodied the best qualities of Enlightenment tradition while also being a significant critic of some of its aspects. Here is a summary of these arguments. In the first, Gandhi is represented as an enemy of Enlightenment and a dreamer of romantic past utopias whose popular charisma was co-opted by the Indian National Movement for different ends. They argue that in the final moment Gandhi was left a bitter and disappointed old man as his mission to restore India to pre-colonial authenticity was brushed aside by the National Congress in its relatively trivial project of transforming the nation into a secular democracy. This first argument must be met at the level of political values, where Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment divide. The counter-Enlightenment tradition typically features a condemnation of the epistemological and political heresies of critical enquiry and democratic equality, emphasising the need to preserve hierarchic order based on received authority and revelation while judging human beings incapable of self government. The argument that Gandhi represents such an ideal is entirely inconsistent with his lifelong affirmation of democratic and secular values and his strong rejection of any political line making claims to identity on the basis of religious authenticity - as we certainly do see with the communalist band which was responsible for the conspiracy leading to his violent death. Never once did Gandhi entertain the notion that political life might be ameliorated by being brought under public religious authority, the hallmark of reactionary modernist thought in its revolt against the ‘disenchanted’ limits of secularism. On the contrary – he insisted that “I cannot impose my personal faith on others, (so) never on a national organization”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Publications Division, 1992. Page 167. Nearly everything Gandhi said and did pointed to the conviction of religion as a choice in the secular tradition of modern political philosophy going back to Locke, rather than political theology in the de Maistre tradition claiming a basis for legitimacy in authenticity or a single fixed and ‘true’ identity. Joseph de Maistre, in Considerations on France (1797), defended the particularity of historical traditions against the universalising claims of Enlightenment humanism, identified the sacred as the defining feature of human existence, and condemned critical reflection and political action as a form of violence against this sacred hierarchic order that should remain sacrosanct. Gandhi argued that “the state would look after your secular welfare, health, communication, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your, or my, religion”, which is “everybody’s personal concern”. Gandhi. CW.85:328. He enthusiastically described a “spirit of democracy which is fast spreading throughout India and the rest of the world”. Quoted in Denis Dalton. Gandhi’s Power. Nonviolence in Action. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1993. Page 50. Most significantly, he placed morality before any religious dogma or revelation in Kantian fashion, arguing that he is no Hindu “who is bigoted, and who considers evil to be good if it has the sanction of antiquity”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 230. In response to orthodox criticism, he proclaimed himself ready to declare the shastras false if they sanction untouchability. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 236. Gandhi’s secular outlook certainly corresponded to the worldview of European thinkers in the Locke-Kant tradition, and sometimes nearly term for term regarding epistemological stance (Nicolas of Cusa’s “learned ignorance”), the primacy of ethics over religion, and the political autonomy of the human agent. Yet although Gandhi was very widely read, and we do not know the precise limits of his reading, it is almost certain that his concepts of secularism were derived in large part from Indian sources such as the Jain thinker, Rajchandra Ravjibhai Mehta, who wrote him an influential letter in 1894 arguing for the “many sidedness” of religious truth and against the “presumption” of any “human group” in claiming “to have possession of absolute truth”, as well as condemning rote learning of sacred texts and insisting that a common human truth may be found in all world traditions. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and other writings. Page xiviii. His secularism also has its basis in an interpretation of the theory of the purusharthas. Anthony Parel. Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Page 61. Gandhi’s worldview was an evolving compound of multiple sources from various world traditions. In this spirit he claimed to prefer to retain his ancestral religion “so long as it does not cramp my growth and does not debar me from assimilating all that is good anywhere else”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 230. This is, if nothing else, a highly cosmopolitan view in the tradition of Enlightenment while also affirming the value of local tradition. The second argument charges Gandhi with fostering a tendency to religious mass mobilization in the Indian public sphere which has since cumulatively compromised the nation’s secularism, i.e.; that he failed to undertake a translation of the facts of science into a public worldview. This charge concerns not the political values of Enlightenment but the epistemic realm, in terms of failure to promote the growth of a secular liberal public culture in India. While this epistemic aspect raises the more serious charge, the most obvious objection is that Gandhi’s politics were far more democratic and indeed secular (in terms of an independent public sphere) than most nation-making movements claiming an explicit basis in allegedly ‘modern scientific worldviews’ in the twentieth century. The strongly Comtean inspired nation making process of the Kemalian Revolution under Ataturk, which similarly inspired the Shah of Iran, sought an ‘epistemic revolution’ by imposing ‘modern ideals’ upon the population by force while seeking to destroy traditional religious modes of public life including dress, music and mystic Sufi orders. Ataturk quite simply announced that “the objective of the reforms is the transformation of the people (…) into a modern society, both in appearance as well as inside (and) the mentalities which do not accept this reality will be destroyed”. Quoted in Alexandre Jevakhoff. Kemal Ataturk. Talendier, Paris, 1989. Page 354. The Marxist experiments in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere similarly claimed a basis for authoritarian politics in allegedly scientific principles while deriding tradition as an inherent obstacle to modern progress. It may be true that Gandhi did not seek to ideologically privilege scientific rationality as the supreme medium of public communication following the intellectual tradition of the Scientific Revolution – but he did consistently champion rational and critical public discourse as the only legitimate mode of deciding matters of public policy. Gandhi was deeply convinced that democracy must be the product of the efforts and struggles of the masses themselves, and argued that “even the most ideal government plays among a self-governing people the least important part in national growth”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 144. Elsewhere he argued that “the spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by the abolition of forms”. Quoted in Dalton. Page 50. Conversely, the examples of Turkey and the Soviet Union directly stifled free public debate in the process of nation-making precisely in the name of the alleged higher truth of a universal scientific and modern worldview that was far more ideological than scientific, and legitimized an authoritarian politics of destroying the public sphere. Despite their identification with secularism, the destruction of the public sphere by such movements rendered void the practical historical achievements of secularism in terms of freedom. It was Gandhi’s constant commitment to open public debate and non-violence as the only means to truth that must explain, in considerable part, India’s long term success as a secular democracy where these other new states experienced varying forms of violent authoritarianism during the nation making process. This view of Gandhi’s was articulated clearly on a number of occasions in terms of secular Enlightenment political principles. He insisted that non-cooperation requires “respect for the opposite views” and urged that the Congress “provide a platform for all shades of opinions” where a “minority may (…) translate itself into a majority, in the course of time, if its opinion commended itself ”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 12. Gandhi described this in terms of “reason appealing to reason”, a process without final closure or fear of conflicting opinion because “no two men agree exactly on all points”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Pages 214, 169. The experiments in nation making that we see in Turkey, the Soviet Union and India are all three, in distinctive ways, heirs to the political and intellectual heritage of Enlightenment. These differing tendencies within the tradition of Enlightenment may be explained by viewing the European Enlightenment not in terms of such vague categories as “scientific rationality” or the “world of Enlightenment reason”, but concretely in terms of a double heritage between the initial Hobbes-ian stream and the second Rousseau-Kantian stream. The Hobbes-ian stream made a case for the twin social pathologies of ignorance and fear as the unique sources of religion, and argued that the progressive advance of positive scientific knowledge would eventually uproot religious belief by eliminating its source in existential uncertainty. This is the ideal of the “epistemic revolution”, most notoriously used to argue that mass democracy must be preceded by a period of ‘enlightened’ authoritarian rule from above to lead the ‘mass mind’ out of the ‘darkness’. The assumption here is that the positive knowledge of physics or astronomy is readily and in equal measure applicable to the social realm for the purpose of political transformation by knowledge experts, an elitist ideal articulated particularly by Comte. This Hobbes-ian stream sought to minimise the role of conscience and curiosity, hope and despair, as aspects of human moral agency, seeking instead a perfected social/political order based on scientific claims to objective knowledge that would solve the problems of history once and for all via an all powerful central authority. In sum, the first stream conceived the project of modern nation making as a ‘purely’ scientific endeavour, and excluded the uneducated ‘rabble’. The stream is articulated in Peter Gay’s The Rise of Modern Paganism and The Science of Freedom, in which there is only one Enlightenment involving a programme essentially hostile to religion – a reproduction of the narrow if predominant paradigm of Enlightenment as based on the French philosophes and the French Revolution. The second Rousseau-Kantian stream embraced a scientific principle while never the less acknowledging the moral core of the Enlightenment and hence recognised the practical likelihood in some form of religious belief for pursuing rational moral ends at the individual and collective level. Above all, this vision insisted upon the autonomy of individuals as ends in themselves, not means to any higher end, in the process of nation making, and insisted upon the participation of the popular masses in their own emancipation process. This second stream, remaining committed to a secular principle of political organisation while acknowledging a potentially positive role for religious values and beliefs, sought to reform and transform religious belief/practice within the context of this ongoing struggle both against ‘cosmically’ sanctioned hierarchy and for democratic modernity. This is the tradition that Gandhi not only belonged to but considerably advanced in a manner that practically paved the way for the later freedom struggles of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama – all religious figures with a commitment to secular Enlightenment values and visions. It is also the stream of Enlightenment that culminated in the thought of John Dewey within the Western tradition, whose outlook shared important points in common with Gandhi. Now, we may undertake the task of showing how Gandhi was both an heir to the Enlightenment political tradition and a radical innovator within that tradition. We shall begin with the question of values. Gandhi, despite being famously ambiguous in his voluminous speeches and writings, never the less consistently and unfailingly embraced the core values of Enlightenment throughout his political career: those of political liberty, social equality and reason - the lattermost in the sense of a reformist attitude to tradition which seeks to dismantle inherited hierarchic systems of social injustice and exploitation. Gandhi, speaking of untouchability, urged Indians to “remove the unnecessary barriers that strangle Hinduism rather than strengthen it”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 191. He claimed to have “again and again appealed to reason” against “intolerance, ignorance, inertia”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 62. He called for “absolute equality in theory and practice”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 18. Throughout his entire political life, Gandhi repeatedly urged that “civil liberty” is the “foundation of freedom” and that there is “no room there for dilution or compromise”. Quoted by Bipan Chandra. Gandhi, Secularism and Communalism. In Gandhi Reconsidered. Page 50. In his consistent advocacy of these values he was clearly an heir to the political tradition of Enlightenment. Thus, what Gandhi shares in common with the Enlightenment – values of political liberty, equality (including gender equality), and reason (a reformist attitude to tradition based on secular criteria) – reflect the desire for and a belief in progress. Gandhi accordingly rejected fatalism, prejudice and superstition while championing the autonomy of the individual or the principle of agency. He declared that “Swaraj of a people means the sum total of the swaraj (self rule) of individuals”. Quoted in Dalton. Page 6. He partook of the Enlightenment tradition of speech over coercion, by extension seeing political legitimacy in reason or conscience rather than received authority. He claimed to have “arrived at (his) own views independently of any authority, although originally they may have been drawn from various sources”. Quoted in Bhiku Parekh. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform. An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse. Sage, New Delhi, 1989. Page 123. All of these were elements of his strong belief in democracy. Following a democratic line of nationalist thought, he believed that legitimate power resided in the people within the context of a secular political system of checks and balances with emphasis on “correct procedure, evidence, and rights”. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Loyd I. Rudolph. Gandhi. The Traditional Roots of Charisma. Orient Longman, India, 1987. Page 25. As a believer in democracy, he saw struggle and resistance as the means to democracy under any political/social regime of hierarchy, indignity and violence. He insisted on the “right of a subject to refuse to assist a ruler who misrules”, and to “compel justice” from that ruler. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 1. Pages 297-300. So in true Enlightenment fashion he was an activist who sought to transform the world motivated by specific essentially egalitarian-humanist values. As a deeply religious man he sought to bring out the humanist and activist side of his religion, while acknowledging the autonomy of a secular public space to make possible a peaceable coexistence with multiple other religions making their own theological claims to a transcendent truth. He urged that the very precondition of Swaraj was that “men and women, young and old, Hindus and Muslims, Christians, the Government servants and all alike can take part”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 23. And he claimed, notably, that all of these religious traditions were received through human agency and were thus fallible and subject to reform. All religions were, within a historicist framework, “ever evolving”. It follows, he argued, that “all religions are more or less true”, but are “imperfect because they have come down to us through imperfect human instrumentality”. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 132. It would be difficult to find a stronger affirmation of the secular Enlightenment view of ‘disenchantment’ than this basically Kantian outlook on religion as a human historical experience with no direct or unmediated access to the noumenal or divine. Gandhi was also in important ways a critic of Enlightenment. What are typically taken to be his points of opposition to Enlightenment are more often expressions of solidarity with certain tendencies in Enlightenment, and rejections of others, reflecting the pluralistic and divided inner nature of historical Enlightenment itself. (1) Gandhi rejected a concept of autonomy that separates people from their traditions. The dominant French Revolutionary ideology envisioned its task in purging all vestiges of the old order in a declared war on hypocrisy and to the end of creating a “new people”. Francois Furet /Mona Ozouf. Dictionnaire Critique de la Revolution Francaise. Idees. Flammarion. Paris. 2007. Page 373. Comte, who saw his intellectual system as the final completion of the destructive work of the French Revolution, viewed religious tradition as merely a subjective “fiction” while promoting his system as the “objective”, “immutable” and “external” basis for sociability in a “final harmony”. Auguste Comte. Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme. Flammarion. Paris. 2008. Pages 41-48. Marx, too, expressed this pathos of novelty, in saying that just as men seem engaged in “creating something that has never yet existed”, they “anxiously conjure up the spirit of the past”. Social revolution cannot “draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future” in having “stripped off all superstition in regard to the past”. Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford, 2000. Pages 329-331. It is true that Gandhi did not conceive such a trans-historical or trans-cultural subject beginning afresh on purely rational foundations while jettisoning the accumulated heritage of ‘irrational’ cultural and religious meanings. But he did argue, in a Kantian vein, that “the individual is the supreme consideration” within the political realm and never a mere means to any ‘higher’ end. Quoted in D.G. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume 2. Page 162. He also urged reform of religious traditional practice on secular ethical grounds, i.e., those traditions identified with hierarchy, oppression and violence. His rejection of a metaphysical Reason (with a capital “R”) as the supreme end of all human endeavours was a view which differed from the stronger strains in the French Enlightenment and Revolutionary tradition but certainly concurred with the outlook of John Locke, the eighteenth century British Enlightenment, the middle course of the Kantian tradition and above all the critical interventions of Dewey who rejected the “call to create a world of ‘reality’ de novo”. John Dewey. The Philosophy of John Dewey. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Page 355. Dewey did not like the term “Reason” and preferred to speak in more specific terms of “the application of intelligence to problems”. Hilary Putnam. Ethics Without Ontology. Harvard, 1994. Page 97. Gandhi was similarly context specific, insisting that civil disobedience “can never be directed toward a general cause” because the “issue must be definite and capable of being understood and within the power of the opponent to yield”. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and other Writings. Cambridge, 1997. Page 179. It is clear that Gandhi advanced a critique of certain views of the modern subject in Enlightenment tradition while according with others, and none of the views he expressed entailed a rejection of the Enlightenment principle of individual autonomy as such. There is a difference of opinion over what constitutes the individual, but no denial of the value of the individual as an autonomous agent of political action or change – as counter-Enlightenment, following Joseph de Maistre and others, explicitly does in the name of submission to a fixed hierarchic and transcendental order of common and absolute meaning with obvious danger for the secular democratic or multi-cultural principle. If one wants to argue that mobilizing mass politics based on religious values or ideals should be ruled out of modern politics in favour of purely ‘secular’ axes of mobilisation, Gandhi might be called to account. But Gandhi cannot be charged with political mobilization based on a particular religious identity as privileged over others and – above all - identified with state power at the institutional level. On this point he consistently upheld the secular character of the state, breaking significantly with the outright religious politics of Aurobindo and the ambiguous stance of Tilak, and paving the way to India’s secular democratic experiment. (2) Gandhi also argued that autonomy or freedom extend beyond the political to encompass the social. This is another way of saying he sought a broader degree of inclusion and expanded the political definition of the public beyond the limits conventionally conceived within the liberal tradition in terms of education, property ownership and so forth. He attributed equal value to social freedoms and political freedoms, or what Amartya Sen has called “substantive freedoms”. See Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom. All of this is contained in his critique of “speed”. This outlook is encapsulated in Gandhi’s remark on Bolshevism. He admired their motives in terms of a socially egalitarian and just political order, but did not “believe in short-violent cuts to success”. Quoted in Dalton. Page 12. This view belongs to a broader critique of theories of development which put primary emphasis on increased national productivity at the expense of human political freedom and social well being. It is a critique of certain strains in traditional Enlightenment thought, i.e.; of mechanical notion of means/ends, but it is far from counter-Enlightenment as the rejection of the very notion that human wellbeing might be ameliorated through direct political action. Gandhi simply acknowledges, in pragmatic fashion, the amount of time and investment necessary on the ground among national leaders for democracy to take deep root at a wide popular level. Thus, he wrote that “civil disobedience in terms of independence without the co-operation of the millions by way of the constructive effort is mere bravado and worse than useless”. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and other writings. Page 180. Gandhi’s critique, moreover, seeks to extend the promise of Enlightenment to a broader section of humanity than the ruling class claiming to be universally representative. This was also the critique made by Karl Marx, inspired by the experience of the French Revolution, and the entire socialist tradition of Enlightenment in a variety of versions. Marx sought to empower and include the mass at the broadest possible level, beginning from the most oppressed among the illiterate and exploited, in the political process of modern nation making through a materialist interpretation of history. By materialist I do not mean anti-religious, which may characterise any idealist philosophy, but in terms of viewing the challenge of modern politics as the immanent and this-worldly problem of providing a level of economic wellbeing and political organisation suited to human dignity and freedom. Gandhi followed in this tradition, and his highly practical intervention culminated in the unprecedented construction of a democratic system of universal adult franchise in the founding moment of nation making following the achievement of Indian national independence in 1947. This represents a radical expansion of the democratic and egalitarian promise of Enlightenment, but hardly its negation. (3) A more serious charge regularly made concerning Gandhi’s opposition to Enlightenment concerns an alleged hostility to science and universalism. This is hard to square, at the outset, with Gandhi’s choice of the highly socialist and scientific minded Nehru as a successor among so many possible candidates on the grounds that he was “truthful beyond suspicion”. Quoted in B.R. Nanda. Jawaharlal Nehru. Rebel and Statesmen. Oxford India Paperbacks. 1995. Page 292. A careful reading suggests that Gandhi’s critiques of “science” are more critiques of capitalist development geared purely toward profit at the cost of human freedom and dignity, or ideologies seeking to claim legitimacy in science while affirming either race superiority/colonial domination or providing totalizing modern ideological alternatives to traditional religion for uniting the public sphere (i.e.; Comtean positivism). Certainly Gandhi critiques liberal rationalist universalism in terms of a double standard in relation to colonial modernity, and the tacit essentialist limits that accompany this situation of political domination. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj. Pages xviii-xix. Gandhi also opposed the idea of an ‘epistemic revolution’ as we find in the Comtean inspired ‘revolutions from above’ as an affirmation of “modern ideals”, “scientific reason”, extended to public sphere with banning of traditional clothes, music, etc. in the name of ‘progress’. These express a political problem of totalizing claims to the public sphere in the process of nation making rather than any problem with the practice of science as such. Gandhi opposed such a coercive notion of progress as a result of his commitment to political liberty, and thus we see again a problem of disagreement within the tradition of Enlightenment rather than any opposition to it in the name of counter-Enlightenment principles. For Gandhi, knowledge is certainly relative – but this perspective falls term for term within the modern Locke-Kant secular tradition which argues that, as a practical matter, faith cannot be forced, and there is no democratic alternative to respecting the existing diversity of belief within the limits of ethical conduct befitting a multi-religious secular society. At the centre of Gandhi’s entire worldview was the persistent conviction that “all knowledge is partial and corrigible”, that people “saw the world differently”, and that “violence denied these fundamental facts”. Parekh. Page 156. It is because of the inherent limits/dangers of human knowledge that political structures such as federalism, secularism, etc., are required to keep intractable metaphysical or theological arguments from playing a dominant role in the public sphere, or to guarantee an equitable distribution of power among regional units within a national framework. This is in opposition to the Hobbes-French-Hegelian stream of Enlightenment which envisioned an eventual universal solution to humanity’s problems through the full and final realisation of absolute knowledge. To be fair to Hobbes, he did not envision a Hegelian End of History, but simply imagined that political authoritarianism promoting a single civil religion would suffice to realise his Enlightenment ends. What we do not find in Gandhi’s works, however, are arguments against the epistemological value of science as such of the kind we find in certain post-structuralist discourses. He simply describes science as a “limited thing” in being confined to time and space, while asserting in highly secular fashion that religious knowledge is “beyond the power of man to grasp”. Quoted in Anthony J. Parel. Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony. Cambridge, 2006. Page 203. This is a view far from uncommon among thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition (i.e.; Dewey, in A Common Faith and elsewhere) and indeed scientists (i.e.; Karl Polanyi, Alexandre Koyre) who criticise non-scientific intellectuals for seeking a key to universal utopia in ideologies derived from an imaginary omnipotent science. These arguments are advanced from a liberal perspective and typically fall, with some justification, upon certain followers of Marx, and sometimes with less justification upon Marx himself. They point at any rate to the deeper political problem of totalizing ideological claims made on behalf of science or religion or any other worldview as a hazard to liberty. These are the issues that Gandhi addresses when he states, for example, that it is “impertinence for any man or any body of men to begin or to contemplate reform of the whole world”. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume one. Page 107. This is a condemnation of any totalising perspective, but certainly not an on attack scientific method in itself. Gandhi certainly criticised Bolshevism for its obsession with “materialistic advancement as a goal” at the expense of “liberty”. Tendulkar. Mahatma. Volume one. Page 248. His famous attacks on the ill effects of modern civilisation, particularly in Hind Swaraj, are often not substantially different from similar ones by Rousseau, but by and large Gandhi’s outlook reflected pragmatism and democratic priority, and he argued that “opposition to machines is not the point” but rather “what machines are meant for”. Apart from cases harmful to human welfare he had “nothing to say against the development of any industry by means of machinery”. Gandhi. Hind Swaraj. Page 165. Gandhi was by his own admission a believer in reason and universalism – he urged that every religion “submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice” - which he never took to mean a single claim to absolute truth to be imposed by force everywhere at all costs and by any means necessary. Quoted by Bipan Chandra. Gandhi, Secularism and Communalism. In Gandhi Reconsidered. Page 60. Foreseeing the political dangers of such totalising misuses of reason, he argued that “Rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence”. Young India. June 27, 1939. (4) What does it mean to embrace universalism in a manner that does not entail killing, immobilising or marginalising anyone who does not agree with your definition of the term? Gandhi’s very real difference from the Enlightenment tradition as an ethical project was in his rejection of the use of violence as a means to emancipation. This is a problem of the relation between ‘means’ and ‘ends’: on this level Gandhi really did mount a radical and unprecedented critique of the dominant tradition of Enlightenment and modern political revolution at a level that had remained unthought. Gandhi praised Enlightenment traditions in “English and French histories” for their “pursuit of right irrespective of the amount of suffering” yet lamented the violence of these traditions and implored that India “avoid, if we can, violence from our side”. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 1. Page 293. What Gandhi thereby brought into clarity was non-violent conflict resolution as having been tacitly at the historical essence of the democratic political tradition from the very outset, in the seventeenth century European natural rights discourses or in the sixteenth century Indian Court of Akbar, a crucial link that had been subsequently obscured by successive waves of political experience and particularly that of the French Revolution and its aftermath. We may understand Gandhi’s political and intellectual contribution within the context of the problem of practical reason, or Kant’s revival of the ancient contrast between theoretical and practical knowledge. Gandhi had practical reason in mind when he described himself as a “humble explorer of the science of non-violence”. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 2. Page 166. This problem was grounded in the broader Enlightenment revolt against political theology that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which attempted to create a new way of treating political questions free from disputes over divine revelation following centuries of religious and political violence. Kant struggled throughout his life with the ethical issue of practice, or the question of action, and never fully renounced his belief in the positive value of the French Revolutionary experiment even in the wake of its worst excesses. Against the French Enlightenment current of the subject seeking absolute knowledge, or the final end, Kant raised the issue of the agent in stressing the limits of scientific knowledge for practice. As consistent with the secular principle, practical reason must make no claim to absolute knowledge. Like Kant, Gandhi identified practical reason with the limits of conscience and ethical choice rather than impersonal and final ‘scientific’ blueprints, arguing that a “moral act must be our own act” and that we “must have the liberty to do evil before we can learn to do good”. Quoted Ronald J. Terchek. Gandhi. Struggling for Autonomy. Vistaar, New Delhi, 2000. Page 24-25. This outlook places secular value on growth over final ends and leaves democracy an always unfinished project in which the proper relation of means to ends becomes paramount. Kant conceived it in terms of a non-doctrinal abstract moral principle capable of accommodating all shades of conflicting religious belief, or the “categorical imperative”. The universal constraint on freedom must be that we respect the freedom of all – and must therefore never use another with disregard for his autonomy as a person: “man (…) exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will”. Immanuel Kant. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Basic Writings of Kant. Modern Library, New York, 2001. Page 185. This normative idea is the foundation of modern human rights theory as an institutional mechanism for protecting freedom. Gandhi similarly recognized that practical reason as a democratic enterprise must make no final claims to truth. He shared the Kantian ethical principle of a constraint on our freedom as being the need to respect the freedom of all, of individuals as ends in themselves who may never be used by another in violation of their autonomy. Gandhi gave expression to this principle in saying “I am a lover of my own liberty and so would do nothing to restrict yours”. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 2. Page 239. It is strikingly embodied in Gandhi’s technique of Satyagraha as substituting an “end serving with an end creating function” in a shift from the cause/effect paradigm of nation making centred on ‘higher ends’ to the means/consequences paradigm of ongoing growth and voluntary mass participation. Joan Bondurant. Conquest of Violence. The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. University of California Press. 1965. Page 15. Gandhi therefore took this Kantian idea further by transforming it from merely a principle into a workable political technique of resistance and long term transformation in the face of violations of human freedom, and did so based on the conceptual resource of traditional Indian philosophy in Ahimsa. He was concerned less with the subject as the centre of objective knowledge than as an active agent – with the question of action as creating principles to guide practice and not merely to describe action causally. He was less interested in the metaphysical paradox of human freedom as a theoretical problem. Gandhi was closer to the Marxian notion of “praxis” in which truth is decided by action, almost certainly agreeing that any “dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”. Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach. In Selected Writings. Page 171. For Gandhi, however, practical reason (means) would play an important role in such action as “the real definition (of Swaraj ) will be determined by our action, by the means we adopt to achieve the goal”. Thus he argued that practice should not aim at determining “the definition of an undefinable term like Swaraj but in discovering the ways and means”, rejecting a single and closed epistemic claim or definition upon the nation making process while promoting an open and evolving movement grounded in practical reason. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 2. Page 240. Gandhi may have departed from both Kant’s theoretical obscurity and Marx’s general acceptance of the violent moment of insurrection as the defining moment of modernity, but certainly he shared a common aim with both of these thinkers in the vision of a new society liberated from old hierarchies of domination and extending political participation to the population at the broadest possible level. Ultimately, Gandhi’s outlook comes closest to Dewey’s criticism of the dominant paradigm of modernity in arguing against “final achievement” in favour of “growth (as) a higher value and ideal than is sheer attainment”. Dewey. The Philosophy of John Dewey. Page 241. Like Dewey, he argued that “human society is a ceaseless growth” and that “there is no such thing as rest or repose in this visible universe of ours”. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 2. Page 225. In accordance with the most basic insight of Enlightenment, Gandhi sought to effect the “transformation of relationships” based on the belief in “the capacity of man to change”. Quoted in Dalton. Page 42. 2. Non-violence and the French Revolutionary tradition With the Satyagraha technique Gandhi focused on the creation of practical political technique of organization, contestation and conflict resolution rather than an ideology. Satyagraha, as a political technique lending itself to mass struggle, stands in line with the heritage of Enlightenment in terms of political aims and values and within the tradition of mass political movements/nation making processes stemming from the French Revolution. Yet Gandhi’s rejection of violence at the core of this experience indicates important points of departure from this tradition – though never a rejection of the fundamental premise of the right of people to transform their social and political world through direct action according to principles of democratic justice. What we see is a shift from an emphasis on essential foundations (of Reason, of national identity) leading to a final End and the prioritising of a principle based on growth, choice, experiment, and fallibility, or practical reason/means. This principle is Ahimsa, or non-violence, a code of anti-dogma by which the Indian National Movement remained open ended, broadly inclusive and in continuous ideological transformation through decades of hard struggle for independence. On the basis of the secular principle of Ahimsa we see a commitment to conflict resolution rather than destruction of the enemy, a view to particular situations rather than the uniform political line, dialogue rather than doctrinal dogma as the basis for social reconstruction, and an ethic of pardon rather than revenge. Gandhi did not seek to impose closure on modern experience, but to devise tactics for living harmoniously in the continual open-ness, diversity and uncertainty of a large multi-religious nation-state linked to the wider world of globalisation. The distinctive elements which are preserved from the French Revolutionary inheritance are: (1) a new concept of legitimacy based on the provisional nature of institutions, and rejecting the transcendental value linked to the sanction of antiquity; (2) the logical consequence of this is the recognition of the imminent values in political action. A population has the right to take a course of action to compel justice from and refuse to assist a ruler who misrules. (3) The third consequence is the legitimization of conscience as a force of political judgement and eventual action. Gandhi argued that “political emancipation means the rise of mass consciousness”. Quoted in Tendulkar. Volume 2. Page 227. These points of continuity mostly concern the traditional ends of Enlightenment thought. The distinctive points of transformation are in the lines of political action Satyagraha introduces, or the means. At the core of these lines is the doctrine of non-violence or Ahimsa. They are revealed in Gandhi’s work as a political organiser and builder of institutions. There are two principles of organisation we might point out: A. seeking institutional arrangements that lessen the burden to ordinary people, or inclusiveness; B. making tradition a resource actively incorporated into the everyday lives of ordinary men and women while confronting points of conflict in a context specific manner based on a principle of secular interests - thus attempting to secularise-democratise rather than ‘overcome’ tradition. These two modes of political organization in turn give a larger space to civil society, and are deployed in a manner intended to promote and expand a sense of modern public obligation in the nation making process. We may identify two aspects of Satyagraha in resistance and institution building, which generally function in coterminous and not sequential manner. As an extra-constitutional non-violent mode of resistance, the Non-Cooperation (1920-22) and Civil Disobedience (1930-32) movements paralysed the political order by pulling out of the system at every level – legal, tax, educational, industrial, and military – and by simultaneously reconstituting an alternative governing force to the state established as a complex and broadly accessible network throughout the nation. This institution building aspect involved promoting an increased commitment to secular public as against family or local obligation. This is discussed in detail in Rudolph/Rudolph. A. The movement did not require any particular political or ideological commitment from its activists, and nor did it try to limit its following to any social class or group provided the commitment to democratic secularism was present. It had no class essence, and included peasants, workers, artisans, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, intelligentsia and landlords. The adoption of non-violent struggle enabled the participation of the mass of people who could not have participated in a similar manner in a violent revolution – and therefore involved more women than the Russian and Chinese revolutionary movements combined. The struggle-truce-struggle tactic was employed to sustain a mass movement over a long time. These strategies helped to maintain democratic integrity within the mass movement that culminated in independence in 1947. All of these ideas are elaborated in depth in Bipan Chandra, et. al., India’s Struggle for Independence. Penguin, 1988. B. Gandhi used the traditional to promote the novel; he reinterpreted tradition in such a way that revolutionary ideas clothed in familiar expressions were readily adopted and employed toward revolutionary ends. Confronting points of conflict in a context specific manner, Gandhi conducted research on the ground to ascertain the veracity of opposing views. In the 1917 Champaran conflict between peasants and planters Gandhi toured the villages from dawn until dusk and recorded the statements of peasants, interrogating them to make sure they were giving correct information. Evidence was collected from 8,000 peasants. It ultimately convinced the government commission that the system was unjust and should be abolished. B.R. Nanda. Mahatma Gandhi. A Biography. Oxford, New Delhi, 1958. Pages 156-167. In this practice we see a respect for opposite views and a conviction that truth within the political sphere should reflect the outcome of free and undistorted public debate – and not some ultimate truth as based on a discursive universe contained within a given sacred text. These conflicts were accordingly defined in terms of modern categories of secular self interest. In 1942, Gandhi asked: “What conflict of interest can there be between Hindus and Muslims in the matter of revenue, sanitation, police, justice, or the use of public conveniences? The difference can only be in religious usage and observances with which a secular state has no concern”. Quoted by Bipan Chandra. Gandhi, Secularism and Communalism. In Gandhi Reconsidered. Page 49. In employing these techniques of organisation to shape the public sphere Gandhi modernised Indian politics by moving it in a professional and democratic direction and by providing the organisational base, procedures, and habits for national politics. From the pre-modern power network of relatives, ‘friends’, and dependents, Gandhi’s organisational techniques harboured the ideal aim of instituting a system of promotions, rulings and contracts based on civic virtue or public law. This heritage of Enlightenment examined in light of Gandhi as a participant invites a closer scrutiny of the received link between violence and change at the historical core of Enlightenment and nationalism. Almost every national experience faces near universal problems: of nation making with a religiously and ethnically diverse population, the struggle of new democratic political configurations against older hierarchic orders invested with ‘traditional’ sacred value, and the need to create new ‘imaginary’ foundations for legitimacy in the wake of radical and unprecedented change. There are the dangers of forced assimilation of minorities to create a unified national culture, the prospect of a war of modern ideas and values against the traditional past, and attempts to lay absolute intellectual claims corresponding to the new power of the modern state. These were indeed the experiences of the French Republic following the Revolution, and set a ‘universal’ prototype for nation making. See Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France. Stanford University Press, California, 1976. The Gandhean contribution offers serious attempts to reckon with these dangers within the democratic tradition of non-violent conflict resolution. A study of Gandhi within the heritage of Enlightenment invites reflection upon the limits of thinking within the framework of political violence on the path of nation making as introduced by the paradigmatic moment of the French Revolution. The Indian national experience both shares aspects with earlier moments in Enlightenment and nation making while also introducing an alternative epistemic and political paradigm of nation making, political struggle and social conflict resolution. The problem of transforming violent conflict into democratic forms of political interaction has been at the core of European Enlightenment from its beginnings in seventeenth century natural right theory through John Locke and Immanuel Kant, and the political work of Gandhi took up this mantle in a unique and original way and extended it on a practical level on the plane of mass political mobilisation. If there is some consensus concerning values in these differing Enlightenment ends, there is a thick historical layer of unthought shrouding the fundamental question of the means to attaining them – a problem engrained within the history of Enlightenment political movements/idea complexes themselves and pointing directly to the problem of political violence. Within this context we view a division in the road of nation making between moments of violent insurrection targeting the political apex of the state, on the French Revolutionary model, and prolonged non-violent campaigns of transformation aimed at the broader level of civil society and seeking to obtain popular hegemony as the precondition of any transfer of power. In Gramscian language, we might compare the classic war of movement to the war of position as two strategies of nation making within the struggle for national revolution and political independence. These differences have considerable ramifications in terms of the meaning of historical Enlightenment and the nation. The view sketched in this short essay provides the outlines of an alternative, I hope, to the all too frequent characterisations of Gandhi and his work in near cartoonish and one dimensional terms as an “anti-modern”. In such recently published works such as Anurandha Raghuramaraju’s Debates in Indian Philosophy, purportedly destined to introduce issues of Indian philosophy to Western readers, we find only a simplified and one-dimensional characterisation of Gandhi as an “anti-modern” delivered almost as a matter of course on the basis of the views expressed beforehand by Chatterjee. See Anuradha Raghuramaraju. Debates in Indian Philosophy. Classical, Colonial and Contemporary. Oxford, New Delhi, 2007. This almost trivial vision of Gandhi based on the outdated modern/anti-modern dichotomy that structured arguments of both Right and Left during the Cold War, to the extent that it is reproduced in scholarly literature, succeeds in burying an entire world of important theoretical and practical questions for our contemporary situation that might be gained from fresh research into the rich Gandhean legacy along new and more imaginative lines. This engagement with the Gandhean legacy in its real complexity and significance would also provide a welcome departure from the pre-packaged Gandhean fad that still thrives in Western countries, serving ultimately as a veil to perpetuate ignorance, in the form of venerating Gandhi as a symbol of all that is good and pure. A great deal of insight is to be gained from serious and concrete analysis, especially comparative analysis (of different types of regimes and movements), of the strengths and weaknesses, possibilities and limits, of Gandhi’s ideas and practices, and far less from continued adulation of the “man who became one with the universal being”. This is the title of the very nice book by Romain Rolland, which never the less portrays Gandhi as a kind of saint who is too high for the ordinary murkiness and corruption of modern politics. Yet Gandhi was precisely an actor in modern politics to be compared to Ho Chi Minh or Amir Cabral and not a saint, and by his own admission remained limited to a secular reality and made no contact with the “universal being”. From the great variety of contemporary democratic movements, including the violent political uprisings in Greece to the non-violent mass mobilisation to remove the government in Thailand, and recent non-violent uprising in Myanmar, to the long and violent U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq to purportedly spread Enlightenment ideals by force from above, invite the kind of complexity that a radical and new conception of the historical meaning of Enlightenment has to offer. Similarly, the violent attacks upon the secular Indian state – no less so the British, Turkish or American - by individuals inspired by the modern Islamist ideology also call for a more nuanced understanding of the problems and the stakes of the heritage of Enlightenment as a non-Eurocentric and multi-centred project of human emancipation. Neither post-structural iconoclasm deconstructing all and sundry with only the vaguest theoretical suggestion concerning its intended line of practice, nor staunch defences of a flagging ‘dominant narrative of modernity’ still grounded in the unreflecting assumptions of European world dominance, can offer new and creative lenses to transcend the paradigm crisis that occupies the political horizon at least since the end of the Cold War. A serious study of Gandhi offers, as a lens, a critical intervention into changing moral concepts within the historical field of Enlightenment, the shaping beliefs behind a hazardous opportunity for making progress toward human development as freedom, and a heightened sense of the responsibility of conserving and transmitting a humanist and democratic heritage that can be sustained exclusively by unremitting struggle but never taken for granted. PAGE 1