The Global Gandhi

Essays in Comparative Political Philosophy

Ramin Jahanbegloo

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429957550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Ideologías políticas

This book is a comparative study of Gandhi's philosophy and analyzes his relevance to modern political thought. It traces the intellectual origins of Gandhi's nonviolence as well as his engagement with Western thinkers – ancient as well as his contemporaries. The author discusses Gandhi's exchanges with eminent thinkers like Tolstoy and Thoreau, and looks at his vision of pluralism, democracy, and violence through the lens of philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Further, it explores Gandhi's association with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khilafat Movement. Finally, the book examines Gandhian thought in the light of his global followers like Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela.

An invaluable resource for the contemporary mind, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, political thought, Gandhi studies, and philosophy.

1
Gandhi and Thoreau

The duty to disobey

In July 1846, Henry David Thoreau was taken to the local jail in a small town in Massachusetts on a charge of not having paid his taxes. Thoreau’s imprisonment led him to write his famous essay published in 1849 under the title of Resistance to Civil Government, later known as On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Sixty years later after this publication, during his second prison term in October–December 1908, Mohandas K. Gandhi read and paraphrased Thoreau’s famous essay. As Anthony Parel underlines in his illuminating introduction to Hind Swaraj, Gandhi

was heartened to read that conscience, not majorities, should have the ultimate say in judging what is politically right and wrong, that while it is not one’s duty to eradicate evil, it is certainly one’s first duty not to give support to it, that even one person’s action counts although the multitude may be opposed to it, that in an unjust political regime the prison is the right place for the just person, that only the state is worthy of obedience which recognizes the just individual as a higher and independent power from which the state’s own power is ultimately derived.¹

Actually, Thoreau’s argument was that every individual should follow higher laws and principles against all unjust laws. As such, Thoreau invites all individuals to govern their own actions by referring to the principle of justice rather than by justifying them through the principle of legality. However, Thoreau’s rebellious individualism and dissenting disobedience should be differentiated from any form of revolutionary anarchism of a Bakunin or Kropotkin. The essence of Thoreau’s “disobedience”, which he distinguishes from mere lawlessness:

is contained in the word civil – a word of many and varied connotations. First of all, civil is an adjective relating to the responsibilities of the citizen, and the whole justification for Civil Disobedience lies in the idea that the man who practices it fulfills his responsibilities by demonstrating in action his disapproval of an evil law or social situation which ordinary democratic procedures will not eliminate.²

In other words, from Thoreau’s point of view the inner sense of the moral law invokes the idea of responsibility against the idea of obedience. This simply means that the individual should stand alone against the State. Thoreau argues the following in his essay:

When I converse with the freest of my neighbours, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquility, the long and short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences of disobedience to it to their property and families. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, I will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects.³

So what Thoreau is suggesting is that the only way to transform a society is to transform oneself.

Underpinning both aspects, making them one structure, was Thoreau’s bedrock radicalism. It was this that gave his essay on “Civil Disobedience” its spirit. It is not strategies, after all, that keep his words alive, it is the Prometheus in them, Shelly’s Prometheus, who will never make peace with an overlord.⁴

We must remember that Thoreau went to jail to protest against the institution of slavery, but also as a way to reaffirm his defiant individualism in face of social wrong. That is why,

he calls upon all honest men to do what he has done and to refuse active or even symbolical support to the state which countenances the nefarious institution of slavery. He excoriates those who think that they have done their duty when they have merely voted right and who then take refuge in that kind of good citizenship which consists in bowing to the will of the majority.⁵

Thoreau, thus, asserts the right of conscience as a form of nonviolent civil resistance against the State. As a transcendentalist, Thoreau was convinced that living simple and fighting against economic royalism was a badge of honor.

Rebelling against acquisition, he was happy in the gift to him by the gods of years without an encumbrance. He was willing to live so Spartan-like as to put to flight all that was not life. He journeyed to Walden Pond not, as some may think, to flee from life but in the midst of this apparent privation to find it.⁶

Perhaps Gandhi’s condemnation of modern civilization and his acceptance of simplicity as a life principle were partly influenced by Henry David Thoreau. But Gandhi positioned himself on the higher grounds of moral and political leadership by suggesting crucial means such as swaraj (self-government), Satyagraha (truth force) and Sarvodaya (Welfare of All) to get there. Gandhi’s disobedience, like that of Thoreau, was civil and active, but it entailed the spiritual search for truth and the art of suffering. Where Thoreau acted more as an eco-philosopher, Gandhi appeared as a moral leader of Indians and a political strategist. Recognizing the theoretical significance of Henry David Thoreau for his Satyagraha, Gandhi named Thoreau as one of the five thinkers who had an impact on his life and suggested the reading of “The Duty of Civil Disobedience” to his companions. As Parel points out,

Four ideas from this essay greatly impressed Gandhi. The first concerns the moral foundation of government and the state. To be strictly just, government must have the sanction of the governed. The second idea concerns the relationship of the individual to the state. In some respects, the individual is subject to the power of the state, but in some other respects, he or she is independent of it. Gandhi agreed with Thoreau that there would never be a truly free and enlightened state until the state recognized the individual as the higher and independent power from which all of its own power and authority are derived and treated him or her accordingly…. . The third idea concerned the need to limit government’s power over the citizen. “That government is best which governs least” is the famous motto of Thoreau that Gandhi adopted as his own…. The fourth idea was that the duty to disobey an unjust law requires prompt, concrete action…. Thoreau’s famous dictum that under a government that imprisons any person unjustly, “the true place for a just man is also a prison”, went straight to Gandhi’s heart.⁷

Moreover, Gandhi was already a serious practitioner of civil disobedience when he discovered Thoreau’s famous essay in a South African prison. Therefore, he readily endorsed the Thoreauvian idea that citizens come before the State and disobeying unjust laws is for the sake of justice and not power change. Also, Gandhi considered Thoreau, as in the case of Socrates and Tolstoy, as a true Satyagrahi who believed in a life of virtue and excellence rather than a life of leisure and material possession. He writes:

Thoreau in his immortal essay shows that civil disobedience, not violence is the true remedy. In civil disobedience, the resister suffers the consequences of disobedience. This was what Daniel did when he disobeyed the law of the Medes and the Persians. That is what John Bunyan did and that what raiyats [peasants] have done in India from time immemorial. It is the law of our being. Violence is the law of the beast in us. Self-suffering, i.e. civil resistance, is the law of man in us. It is rarely that the occasion for civil resistance arises in a well-ordered State.”⁸

As such, unlike Thoreau, Gandhi’s underlying commitments to truth and nonviolence are found in his spiritual idea of self-suffering. For Gandhi, the secret of self-suffering lies in maintaining the right balance between self-discipline and ethical demands. Hence, Gandhi is a thinker and practitioner who is in search of the guidance of the voice of Truth speaking from within. That is why his concept of civil disobedience is deeply spiritual. As for Thoreau, there is a constant reference in his writings to the idea of a “higher light within”. According to Thoreau: “It is by obeying the suggestions of a higher light within you that you escape from yourself and … travel totally new paths.”⁹ It is this mystical approach that can lead us to find some significant ethical similarities between Thoreau and Gandhi. However, there is a limit to the need for virtue in Thoreau’s philosophy. Though Gandhi is impressed by Thoreau’s earnestness, he does not consider him as a model of chastity. Gandhi himself sought to bring clarity to the idea of “chastity” through his discussion of purushartha. “Our only right is to purushartha,” writes Gandhi:

We can only strive and work. All human beings, animals too, struggle. The only difference is that we believe that behind our struggle there is an intelligent purpose. That purpose seeks much more than bodily material well-being; it seeks moral and spiritual well-being as well. We seek to transcend our mere bodily condition; we strive even to surpass ourselves. We can achieve all this if we pursue our purushartha.¹⁰

As in the case of Gandhi, Thoreau may also be considered as a spiritual thinker in quest of self-reform and reform of the society. Yet, Thoreau was very different from his transcendentalist fellows. As Joel Porte explains, “For both Whitman and Thoreau, Transcendentalism was a Saturnalia of sense experience. Unlike Emerson, who stood in awe before the ‘mighty and transcendent Soul’, Thoreau trembled before the mystery of matter, of sheer physical existence.”¹¹ Surprisingly, Thoreau did not believe in humankind’s divine destiny and espousing higher moral principles did not necessarily mean for him to follow divine laws. He writes the following passage in his Journal for 1840:

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer. To see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a fixture, that old Jewish scheme! What right have you to hold up this obstacle to my understanding you, to your understanding me! You did not invent it; it was imposed on you. Examine your authority … Your scheme must be the framework of the universe, all other schemes will soon be ruins.¹²

It goes, therefore, without saying that for Thoreau the search for the spiritual is a lonely occupation. His poetic perception of reality goes hand in hand with his motivation to experience beauty. According to Walter Harding, “As he strove for simplicity and economy in his life, he strove for simplicity and economy in his art…. He was able to appreciate the beauty of the functional approach.”¹³

Thoreau, therefore, was a bundle of diverse, different and contradictory things. As a result, aside from the resemblances between Gandhi and Thoreau, there are many differences. For example, there are serious gaps in Thoreau’s actions as a social reformer. Unlike Gandhi, Thoreau had no talent for mass leadership. He was more of a lonely thinker and writer. According to Norman Foerster:

Channing thought that Thoreau’s taste in English literature was “very exquisite”. With some exceptions it assuredly was…. What he absorbed unconsciously from his Transcendental environment, he supplemented through the books that chance – and Emerson – brought to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gandhi and the otherness of the other
• 1 Gandhi and Thoreau: the duty to disobey
• 2 Gandhi and Tolstoy: desperate old men wandering like Oedipus at Colonus
• 3 Beyond violence: a comparative analysis of Hannah Arendt and Mahatma Gandhi
• 4 Two concepts of pluralism: a comparative study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin
• 5 Gandhi and Castoriadis: self-government and autonomy
• 6 Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan: critique of religious fanaticism
• 7 Gandhi and the Khilafat
• 8 The Gandhian vision of democracy
• Conclusion: Gandhi and the Global Satyagraha
• Bibliography