From his youth until the very day of his assassination Gandhi’s life is marked by his sincere, honest, dynamic and open-ended experiments with truth and nonviolence. He experiences a great diversity of situations that express values, relations and structures of oppression, exploitation, alienation, humanly caused suffering, violence and untruth. He always emphasizes the primacy of practice, and his analysis arises out of the particular, contextual, experiential world within which he is living. His experimental ideas are confirmed or falsified by testing them in terms of new practice. Gandhi is primarily a moralist, who focuses on the practical concerns of how we can be actively engaged in education, socialization, satyagraha, constructive work and a life of transformative practices so that we can live as virtuous individuals who are integral parts of virtuous societies.1
In this practical moral orientation Gandhi is not concerned with being a critical, systematic thinker who can offer abstract philo sophical formulations. He is not overly concerned with theoretical consistency. When others point to his inconsistencies, he replies that he is not aware of being inconsistent, but if others find inconsistencies they should take his most recent formulations as most adequate. Gandhi, as he himself confesses, is certainly not a ‘philosopher’ in any critical, academic or scholarly sense.2 However, his basic existential orientation or way of being in the world, his fundamental assumptions and values and commitments, and his theoretical formulations and diverse practices are philosophically challenging and insightful. Indeed, one could maintain that Gandhi is more philosophically interesting, significant and relevant than 90 per cent of what is done in contemporary ‘professional’ philosophy.
Many of Gandhi’s admirers, during his lifetime and today, approach the Mahatma simply as a revered, awesome, idiosyncratic, mystical, larger-than-life, too-good-for-this world, moral and spiritual being. In addition, even most Gandhi admirers, citing such famous quotations as ‘my life is my message’, feel that following in the path of this remarkable individual M. K. Gandhi consists entirely in the practical task of simplifying one’s needs, being peaceful and nonviolent and living a Gandhi-inspired life.
What is often overlooked is that in a dynamic, flexible, con textually sensitive, inclusive manner, Gandhi actually embraces a profound underlying theory or philosophy. Only by appreciating this moral and spiritual philosophy of truth and nonviolence can one understand why Gandhi engages in particular practices, what motivates and sustains him, why he assesses experimental practices as successes or failures and how a reformulated Gandhian philo sophy may have great significance and relevance today.
Gandhi’s two major philosophical concepts are satya (truth, which he uses interchangeably with God, self, soul) and ahimsa (nonviolence, avoiding harm, noninjury, which he uses interchangeably with love). Although Gandhi is best known for his nonviolence, one cannot understand his views and practices of nonviolence without understanding his analysis of truth and the integral relation of truth and nonviolence.
In his view of reality, Gandhi emphasizes the metaphysical or ontological concept of truth that focuses on sat, that which really exists (what is real, being, the true essence). It is revealing that Gandhi entitles his autobiography ‘the story of my experiments with truth’. His life of challenging varied experiences reveals his determination to pursue truth no matter where it takes him. This unending pursuit of truth necessitates an incredibly strong will, self-reflection and self-purification, courage, fearlessness, sacrifice and voluntary suffering. This pursuit often involves taking positions that are unpopular and disturbing, challenge those with privilege and power and place Gandhi’s life at great risk.
One major difficulty in formulating Gandhi’s view of truth or reality is that he is so inclusive, flexible and eclectic. As Gandhi states: ‘For me the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.’3 His own spiritual positions on truth and reality range from very personal devotional affirmations to Rama and other deities to very impersonal Vedantic affirmations of some impersonal, all-pervading, absolute spiritual force or power. He usually presents positions in which truth or God is interchangeable with morality, and a nonreligious person can identify with his approach to reality. In other passages his approach to truth or God is greatly dependent on personal faith and divine grace. At times Gandhi submits that he prefers a monistic, Advaita (pure nondualistic) view of reality, but then says that he also believes in a non-Advaita view of reality of oneness with differences, or that he upholds a supernatural view of God or deities that is rejected by pure nondualism. Scholars and other commentators debate to what extent Gandhi’s formulations of truth, as well as of nonviolence and other key concepts, are muddle-headed, inconsistent and incoherent and to what extent they are eclectic, pluralistic, insightful and open-ended in a helpful innovative way for dealing with issues of violence, war, suffering, domination and civilizational disharmony.
When it comes to Gandhi’s attitude toward others, the difficulty in formulating his philosophy of reality is even greater. He will often share his view of truth but then advise others that they must do their own experiments and pursue truth no matter where it takes them. What is true for Gandhi may not be true for them. And yet Gandhi is determined to avoid a pluralism that results in the acceptance of unlimited subjective and relativistic positions. He can accept a certain kind of descriptive relativism in the sense that different religions and cultures express different approaches to and formulations of reality, even if he maintains that these are different relative paths to and formulations of the same Ultimate Reality or Absolute Truth. However, he never endorses a normative relativism that to assert that x is true can mean nothing more than x is true for y within society or culture z. Hatred, torture, terrorism, exploitation, involuntary poverty and suffering may seem to some to be justified, moral and socially and religiously sanctioned, but they are always immoral, evil and are based on untruths and false views of reality.4
In various writings Gandhi reports that at an earlier stage in his life he defined reality in terms of ‘God’ and accepted the traditional, theistic view of ‘God is truth’, in which truth is one of the many essential attributes of God. He later emphasizes the significance of his reformulated view of reality in terms of the key concept of truth, reversing his previous formulation to a more inclusive ‘Truth is God’. Such a broader philosophical approach could then encompass Jains, Buddhists, atheists, secular humanists and others who strive for truth but do not adopt God-formulations.5
While acknowledging and even celebrating the diversity of his and other formulations of truth and reality Gandhi sometimes shares his personal preference for the impersonal, nondualistic, spiritual view of Brahman that is expressed in key Hindu Upanish adic passages. Reminiscent of such Vedic expressions of a view of reality in terms of an all-encompassing, permanent, spiritual Self, Gandhi often writes of truth or God as an impersonal Absolute, an unseen power or unifying force pervading all things, pure consciousness, the changeless essence of life beyond name and form.
There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel It, though I do not see It. It is this unseen Power which makes Itself felt and yet defies all proof, because It is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses . . . I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is.6
Consistent with the Vedic Upanishadic and Advaitin monistic identification of Brahman (Reality, Being) with Atman (the Self), Gandhi often uses the terms Truth, God and Self interchangeably.
Gandhi’s inclusive and pluralistic approach to reality includes different formulations of self, soul and self-other relations. First, Gandhi often affirms the true moral and spiritual self in terms of an inner individual essence, sometimes expressed as ‘an inner voice’, conscience or the God within each of us. Second, Gandhi most commonly affirms the true self as social and relational. His understanding of the Hindu concept of dharma or ethical and social obligation shapes this view and it can be related to Confucian and other Asian relational formulations: I am self only in relation to the other; the relational other is an essential part of my self-identity. Third, Gandhi affirms his preference for the impersonal, universal unifying, pure Absolute self or soul that can be identified with the Hindu Atman. These self and self–other formulations are often complementary, but they also express ambiguities, tensions, contradictions and unresolved philosophical problems and issues.7
As Bhikhu Parekh has analysed, Gandhi’s view of self focuses on his emphasis on swabhava or our individual, unique, physical, mental and social nature and contextual situatedness.8 This is a dynamic approach in which we are born into this world with our own nature and then develop and realize our individual self-nature through our social interactions and relations with others. Although Gandhi has many general or universal values he rejects a rigid absolute view of human nature. He repeatedly advises others to be true to their own, unique, changing nature by understanding and acting in ways reflecting their individual self. This focus on the individual self with its unique nature should not be confused with the atomistic, modern, Western ego-oriented individual and ideology of individualism.
Although Gandhi sometimes expresses his personal preference for an Advaita Vedanta monistic interpretation of the pure, undifferentiated, impersonal, nondualistic, spiritual Absolute Self, he is not consistent in his formulations of Truth, God and Self. The above passage about his experience of the unseen permanent Power or Spirit need not commit one to nondualism, and his identification of such a spiritual Truth or Reality with ‘God’ and ‘He’ is not a formulation consistent with the pure nondualistic monism. One can certainly provide a Hindu neo-Vedantic interpretation of some of Gandhi’s philosophy, but he is not a traditional Advaitin or traditional Vedantist of any variety. This is because Gandhi is a philosophical realist, and he tries to integrate his realism with a specific kind of pragmatic idealism. As will be seen, this means that Gandhi resists devaluing and dismissing this world as maya or illusion and places primary emphasis on relative truth and relative nonviolence. He claims, in a nontraditional way, that no one knows Truth, God or Self, and even he has only fleeting, imperfect ‘glimpses’ of Absolute Truth and Absolute Nonviolence.
At this point, we need only emphasize the ontological claim in Gandhi’s approach to truth: there exists some deeper, permanent spiritual power or force that allows us to experience the meaning ful interrelatedness and unity of all reality. Gandhi presents an inclusive, organic, holistic philosophical approach with presuppositions and principles that affirm the essential unity and interrelatedness of all existence, the indivisibility of truth that is manifested in diverse ways and the integral relation of truth and nonviolence.
Gandhi’s second major philosophical concept is ahimsa or non-violence. As the best known and most significant modern theorist and practitioner of nonviolence, nothing is more important for analysing and responding to contemporary conflict, war, suffering and civilizational disharmony than understanding Gandhi’s insightful approach to violence. Gandhi deepens and broadens our use of the terms ‘violence’ and ‘nonviolence’. He challenges us to rethink how our ordinary uses of ‘nonviolence’ are very ‘violent’ and our ordinary uses of ‘peace’ usually express states of conflict, disharmony and war.
In standard dictionaries ‘violence’ has two kinds of meanings. First, it is defined as a force that is intense, immoderate, fierce and rough. Second, there are definitions with a clear negative meaning: ‘violence’ is a fierce and rough force that involves aggression, assault, infringement and violation. For Gandhi nonviolence, like violence, is a force, but without being a rough force that involves aggression and violation. Unlike most other approaches that view nonviolence as simply being against something (not violent) and as passive (refraining from exercising violent force), Gandhi’s ahimsa is an active, positive, moral, truthful, transformative force.
Most people claim to be against violence and war and for nonviolence and peace, but they use these terms in a very narrow sense. We restrict ‘violence’ and ‘war’ to overt physical forces and conflicts. ‘Violence’ refers to killing, assaults, rape, torture, domestic physical abuse, bullying and terrorist attacks. ‘War’ involves military attacks, shooting, bombing and threatening with military force. In this sense conflict resolution and peace-building involve the challenge of how to transform or prevent these overt, physical, violent conflicts.
In his profound philosophy of ahimsa and throughout his life Gandhi is very concerned with illustrations of brute overt violent force and overt armed conflicts of war. His approach is insightful for providing transformative methods for conflict resolution with regard to physical assaults, shootings, bombings, torture, rape, bullying and other clear examples of the violent infliction of suffering on others. However, such serious, overt, physical acts are only a relatively small part of overall violence, and Gandhi broadens and deepens our understanding of violence in two main ways.
First, Gandhi frequently addresses the multidimensionality of violence. In addition to overt physical violence Gandhi often points to inner or psychological, linguistic, economic, social, political, cultural, religious and educational violence. Numerous manifestations of such multidimensional violence are not overt but express themselves in concealed and camouflaged ways. Such violence is often expressed in states of multidimensional war and war-making, such as economic, psychological, cultural and religious war. We are socialized and educated in such ways that all of these dimensions of violence interact, mutually reinforce each other and lead to a violent, disharmonious, ‘normal’ world view in which we relate violently to ourselves, to others and to nature.
To examine very briefly only one dimension of violence, Gandhi, unlike most philosophers and others who adopt ethical and spiritual approaches, places a primary emphasis on basic material needs and the ‘normal’ state of economic violence. You do not preach the higher virtues of nonviolence, peace, freedom, true swaraj or self-rule and independence to those who are impoverished and starving. To do so would be not only unrealistic and irrelevant but also immoral. Instead it is your duty to engage in selfless service working with others to provide meaningful work that results in food, water, shelter, health care and other basic material necessities without which a more developed ethical and spiritual life of truth and nonviolence is impossible.9
Repeatedly and in very contemporary ways Gandhi uses ‘violence’ as synonymous with economic exploitation. Gandhi is attentive to unequal, asymmetrical, violent power relations. A minority who possess and control wealth, capital, land and natural resources, technology and media are able to exploit and dominate those lacking such economic power. Gandhi identifies with starving and impoverished human beings and with the plight of peasants, workers and others disempowered, exploited and dominated.
Gandhi is very attentive to the growing concentration of wealth and power and the growing inequality between the haves and the have-nots in India and throughout the world. He emphasizes that such economic violence – including poverty, which he often describes as the worst form of violence – is not the result of supernatural design or immutable law of nature. It involves humanly caused oppression, exploitation, domination, injustice and suffering and, hence, we as human beings are responsible. If I could change conditions and alleviate suffering but I choose either to profit from such economic violence or not to get involved, I perpetuate, am complicit with and am responsible for the economic violence of the status quo. Obviously, incorporating such concerns of economic violence broadens and radically changes the causal analysis and understanding of the nature of true nonviolence, peace and civilizational and environmental harmony.
Mention of the economic violence of the status quo points to Gandhi’s second innovative way for broadening and deepening the perspective on violence: his emphasis on the structural violence of the status quo. This is ‘business as usual’ or simply the way things are, which we usually don’t even recognize as violent. For Gandhi the normal dominant economic, political, cultural, religious and educational systems are inherently violent. They assume views of human nature, rationality, success, happiness and progress that express multidimensional violent relations toward one’s self, others and nature. The fact that the dominant system seems to be functioning efficiently, without examples of overt physical violence and disruption, creates an illusion of nonviolence.
For thousands of years and continuing today human beings have suffered and died without responding with active noncooperation, protests and resistance. They typically accept and adjust to their oppressive relations because they accept their unfortunate conditions as ‘that’s life’ and the way things have always been and will be; they feel fearful, hopeless and powerless to change their situation; they blame themselves for their suffering and often accept some religious or other ideological explanation and justification for their situation. But such typical understandable responses must not disguise or minimize the structural violence of the status quo. As Gandhi repeatedly emphasizes, if people are dominated, exploited and oppressed, but suffer passively and without overt violent reaction, that is a very violent situation that creates a false sense of peace and nonviolence.
In Gandhi’s approach to the structural violence of the status quo, constructive nonviolent disruption, sometimes involving seemingly ‘unpeaceful’ conflict, plays a crucial role. In Gandhi’s satyagraha and other nonviolent methods of resistance, active intervention, creative tension and transformative disruption are often necessary for exposing, raising consciousness and transforming the structural violence of the status quo. Gandhi uses a medical image for analysing and transforming the ‘normal’ relational system of multidimensional violence. It’s as if the patient is unaware of a deep serious illness, such as cancer. Pointing to the cancer will often produce discomfort, self-denial and anger, and will certainly disrupt one’s normal life, but this is necessary to cure the disease and regain health. For Gandhi our status quo or dominant economic, technological, social, cultural, psychological, political, state, military, media, religious, environmental, educational, civili zational structures and relations are unhealthy, alienating, violent and unsustainable. These dominant structural relations are increasingly deadly, like a cancer, threatening human existence and life on planet earth. But Gandhi is both an optimist and a philosophical realist and he maintains that this unhealthy state of our present existence in the world is ‘curable’ if we adopt the transformative means and ends of nonviolence and truth.
In Gandhi’s philosophy of truth and nonviolence, central to any relevant Gandhian perspective, satya and ahimsa must be brought into an integral, dialectical, mutually interacting and reinforcing relation.10 Most often Gandhi presents satya as the end and ahimsa the means. We cannot use violent means to achieve truthful ends. In the means–ends ethical analysis, immoral violent means lead to immoral, violent, untruthful ends. Gandhi also states that the ideals of ahimsa and satya are convertible or interchangeable as means and ends. As we have seen, nonviolence is the means for realizing the truth. As we are educated and socialized to become more nonviolent, we become more truthful. However, truth is also a means for becoming more loving and nonviolent. Living more truthfully is an essential part of the developmental process for living more nonviolently. As we become more educated and socialized as to the true nature of reality we resist living under false illusions of violence and hatred.
However, with his major ethical focus, readers and even most followers usually overlook the key point that Gandhi is also making a major ontological claim in relating truth and nonviolence. Nonviolence is a powerful bonding and unifying force that brings us together in caring, loving, cooperative relations, that allows us to realize and act consistently with the interconnectedness and unity of all of life. Violence, by way of contrast, maximizes ontological separateness and divisiveness, and is based on the fundamental belief that the other – whether individual, class, caste, gendered, racial, ethnic, religious or national target of my hatred and violence – is essentially different from me or us. In other words, in the Gandhian perspective, violence and hatred are not only unethical but are also inconsistent with truth and reality, whereas nonviolence and love are the ethical means for realizing truth and reality.
Only by understanding the nature of truth and nonviolence and their integral, mutually reinforcing relations can we understand how we are socialized and educated in ways that prevent us from realizing the reality or truth of the unity and interrelatedness of life, and from realizing and living consistently with the reality of nonviolence and love. Gandhi’s philosophy and practices offer ways for resisting pervasive forms of violence and untruth and for proposing positive alternatives that are grounded in satya (truth), ahimsa (nonviolence), satyagraha (‘firmness for the truth’, truth-force, love-force, soul-force), swadharma (one’s own duty), swadeshi (self-sufficient economy based on one’s local or national products), sarvodaya (the well-being of all) and real swaraj (self-rule, self-government). An expanded consciousness of a more complex, nuanced, overt and hidden, holistic, relational approach to violence and war radically changes how we understand and respond to our contemporary crises and how we transform violent structures and relations into ones of truth, nonviolence, love, compassion and self-rule.
In his philosophy Gandhi introduces several key concepts for analysing and bringing about this transformation toward greater nonviolence and truth. These include his significant analysis of the integral relations of means and ends; his key short-term and especially long-term preventative approach to violence; and his brilliant analysis of the relative–absolute distinction in which he affirms absolute regulative ideals, but emphasizes that we at most have ‘glimpses’ of the Absolute and are always at best moving from one, imperfect, relative state of violence and nonviolence to greater, imperfect realizations of relative truth and nonviolence.
As Gandhi repeatedly maintains, Hobbesian and most other modern perspectives involve versions of the doctrine that the ends justify the means. Violence is necessarily used in the name of non-violence. War and war-making are used in the name of peace and peacebuilding. Gandhi claims that such modern approaches are foundationally and structurally unethical. They express means–ends systems of violent values and relations that can only produce violent versions of ‘freedom’, ‘independence’, ‘security’ and ‘peace’ that perpetuate violent states of unfreedom, dependence, insecurity and war.
A key to Gandhi’s alternative preventative approach to violence and war is his famous analysis of means and ends. He analyses the integral, moral, means–ends relations, allowing us to decondition the multidimensional violent causes and structures and interject compassionate, loving, truthful, nonviolent causal factors and structures to break the vicious endless cycles of violence and war.
Gandhi rejects contemporary positions that maintain that economic, political and other ends justify the means. He rejects utilitarianism’s principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ and other modern formulations of ‘national independence’, ‘security’, ‘democracy’ and other seemingly noble ends used to justify violent unethical means and sacrifice millions of human beings. Instead, Gandhi embraces a philosophy of sarvodaya (‘the welfare of all’).11 With his emphasis on the pure moral will and ethical intentions, it is tempting to consider Gandhi an anti-consequentialist Kantian or deontologist, but this also is an inadequate classification. As seen throughout his life, Gandhi often has the best of intentions, but if his experiments with truth lead to undesirable results, he assesses them as failures.
Here we see that Gandhi emphasizes both means and ends and their integral, mutually reinforcing relations. Although Gandhi describes himself as a pragmatic idealist who is concerned with ethical and spiritual results, he places even greater emphasis on nonviolent moral means. This is because we often have much greater control over the means we use, whereas noble ends, such as ending war and violence, may be unattainable because they express ideals beyond our power of realization.
Although we may be tempted to use violent means for short-term benefits, Gandhi repeatedly emphasizes that we cannot use violence to overcome violence and achieve nonviolence. Violent impure means will shape violent impure ends regardless of our moralistic, self-justifying slogans and ideology.
In language similar to formulations of the law of karma, Gandhi warns us that economic, psychological and other forms of violence lead to more violence, and we become entrapped in endless vicious cycles of escalating violence and war. For Gandhi, as for the Buddha, most violence has a moral character and involves intention and choice. It is this moral character of volitional intention and choice that binds us to the vicious cycles of violence, war and suffering. This can also be related to Gandhi’s identification with the Gita’s action path of karma yoga in which one’s intentional attitude of nonattachment to the results of one’s action is key to breaking the karmic attachment to results. The only way to move toward more nonviolent ends is to assume a nonviolent attitude and to introduce nonviolent causal factors through the adoption of nonviolent means. Such nonviolent factors will begin to weaken the causal factors that produce violent chain reactions that keep us trapped in destructive cycles of violence.
In many respects Gandhi’s perspective of means–ends preventative analysis is similar to the Buddha’s formulation of the Doctrine of Dependent Origination (pratitya-samutpada or Pali paticca-samuppada). Violence, terror, exploitation, greed, hatred and war are not independent, eternal, absolute or inevitable. They exist within a violent phenomenal world of impermanent, interdependent relativity. Historical, psychological, economic, social, religious and other forms of violence are caused and conditioned, and themselves become causes and condition other violent consequences that then become new violent causal factors that fuel our state of violence and war. The path of ahimsa involves focusing on the means that allow you to decondition such violent causal factors and conditions and to introduce nonviolent causes and conditions that will lead to more nonviolent results, of greater peace and security, that will then become new causal factors. This means–ends relation involves mutual interaction, since the adoption of nonviolent ideals, as ends, will also have a causal influence on shaping appropriate nonviolent means. This very process of means–ends causal transformation, by which one transforms relations with others in order to serve their real needs, unmet in the violent relations of domination, exploitation and war, is the very process by which one transforms one’s own self toward greater freedom, real peace, real security and self-realization.
In his analysis of means–ends relations Gandhi offers his greatest strength for dealing with violence, war, injustice, exploit ation and alienation: nonviolent preventative measures for long-term changes necessary for identifying and trans forming root causes and causal determinants that keep us trapped in escalating cycles of violence. However, it is important to emphasize that a Gandhian perspective also has profound short-term nonviolent and peace-building benefits.
Gandhi offers many possibilities for short-term conflict resolution when contradictions become exacerbated, and individuals, groups or nations are on the brink of overt violence and war. Gandhi’s own life is replete with illustrations of how he is able to intervene through listening, sympathizing, engaged dialogue, fasting, willingness to suffer and other forms of nonviolent intervention and resistance in order to defuse very tense, violent situations.
If someone intent on inflicting violence confronts me, Gandhi offers many responses that may prove effective in preventing violence. If I manage to limit my ego, achieve a larger perspective, do not define the other as ‘enemy’ and empathize with the other’s feelings, this may allow for dialogue and for creating nonthreatening relations. In addition Gandhi repeatedly emphasizes that intellectual approaches with rational analysis often have no transformative effect on the other, but approaches of the heart, involving deep personal emotions and feelings, frequently have profound, relational, transformative effects. If I refuse to strike back and am willing to embrace sacrifice and suffering, this can disrupt the expectations of the violent other, lead to a decentring and reorienting of an extremely violent situation and touch the other’s heart. Throughout his writings on satyagraha and other methods for resisting and transforming violence, Gandhi proposes numerous ways for relating to short-term violence and moving toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding grounded in truth and nonviolence.
The much greater strength of Gandhi’s approach to violence involves long-term preventative education, socialization, relations and interventions so that we do not reach the stage of explosive overt violence and war. For Gandhi, over 90 per cent of violence is humanly caused, contingent and hence preventable. The greatest challenge is to identify root causes and basic causal determinants of violence and war and to propose alternative nonviolent determinants. This allows us to break escalating causal cycles of violence and war.
Gandhi places a high priority on education as essential to preventative approaches. Through education he deepens and broadens the analysis of violence, including educational violence, and the analysis of means–ends relations for getting at root causes and conditions underlying multidimensional violence. He devotes much time and effort to a radically different model of education with emphasis on character-building and moral and spiritual development. Education must focus on psychological awareness and analysis of how we constitute and must decondition ego-driven selfishness and greed, defence mechanisms responding to fear and insecurity, hatred, aggression and other violent intentions and inner states of consciousness that trap us in violent relations toward other classes, castes, genders, religions and nations. Education must focus on political, cultural, social, economic, linguistic, religious and other aspects of overall socialization that contribute to, tolerate and justify violence, oppression, exploitation and war.
The value of a long-term preventative Gandhian perspective can be illustrated by the very example frequently cited to refute Gandhi’s approach to violence and war: how would Gandhi have dealt with Hitler? In this case we are not just dealing with some hypothetical question. We know of the letter that Gandhi wrote to Hitler on 23 March 1939, and we know what advice he gave to European Jews as they faced the immediate threat of genocide.12 As was noted in chapter Five, although there is room for interpretation, disagreement and debate, Gandhi’s short-term advice is uninformed, naive, ineffective and, at times, even unethical and suicidal. As will be seen, contemporary Gandhian perspectives are capable of providing radically different responses in such violent situations, even occasionally upholding the need for short-term violence in the name of peace and nonviolence.
It is not as if a Gandhian approach to Hitler has no short-term options. For example, even after Hitler and the Nazis came to power, if a majority of ‘good Germans’ had been morally, politically and spiritually concerned and had used a variety of nonviolent acts of noncooperation, the Nazis would have been greatly disempowered and the regime would have found it difficult to carry out its violent intentions and actions. Even if a significant minority of concerned, dedicated, nonviolently disciplined Germans had engaged in noncooperation, acts of resistance, with a willingness to suffer, this might have awakened the consciousness and conscience of many other citizens, touched their hearts and motivated them not to benefit from or become complicit with the violence being perpetuated in their name. Nevertheless, it must be conceded that at a certain point in history, especially after Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Gandhi’s short-term efforts, as well as non-Gandhian approaches, had little chance of stopping the Nazi rise to power and violent devastation.
What is most instructive in this difficult Hitler and Nazi counter-example is the tremendous potential of Gandhi’s long-term prevent ative approach. As is evident from the means–ends analysis, the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis is not inevitable, but is causally determined by explicit and implicit, overt and hidden, multidimensional and structural violent relations. If Germans in the 1920s had had a more Gandhian sense of nonviolent education, socialization, sensitivity to anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and persecution, less egoism and more concern for serving the needs of oppressed others and more motivation to intervene actively to expose and resist violent intentions, words and actions, one could prepare a long list of numerous things they could have done that would have prevented the relatively small number of Nazis from later rising to power. Similarly, one can think of numerous things the victorious Allies could have done differently, after the incredible death and suffering of the First World War, to arrive at a long-term preventative peace treaty, informed by a sense of restorative justice and peacebuilding reconciliation. Such an approach would have lessened the punishment and humiliation of Germany and would have gone a long way toward defusing or eliminating the subsequent causal factors that Hitler and the Nazis exploited in rising to power and justifying their violence and war-making at home and abroad.
In short, Gandhi’s long-term preventative approach could have been very effective in preventing Hitler and the Nazis from coming to power and confronting the world with the difficult challenges of extreme short-term violence and war-making. It is such long-term preventative approaches that have the greatest potential for more permanent nonviolence and peacebuilding.
This brings us to Gandhi’s usually overlooked analysis of dynamic relations between the absolute and the relative that is essential for providing a more nuanced, complex and adequate nonviolent approach. The key absolute–relative distinction and analysis challenges contemporary antithetical responses to violence and nonviolence, war-making and peacebuilding, that emphasize either unlimited cultural contextual relativism of values or narrow intolerant absolutism that imposes a supposedly universal model of human rights and peace on diverse others. A Gandhian perspective, by way of contrast, submits that such common, dichotomous formulations of absolute or relative truth, violence and nonviolence are inadequate, and that a more adequate dialectical analysis of the relative and the absolute is needed.
Gandhi himself sometimes conveys the impression that he is a simple, rigid, uncompromising absolutist with respect to violence, nonviolence, war, peace, vows, principles and rules, and other ethical and spiritual concepts and values. Gandhian perspectives focusing exclusively on such passages lead to dogmatic absolutist claims and ways of being in the world that are not sensitive to changing historical and contextual developments and that are often irrelevant when confronting violent challenges.
One can simply assert, for example, that the Mahatma would have been against contemporary dominant globalization and that is certainly true. Nevertheless, we live in a globalized world that is not going away and that largely defines the nature of violence and war-making today. A more adequate and more relevant Gandhi-informed perspective, while incorporating a strong critique of contemporary globalization, would explore how a Gandhian approach would constructively engage our world of globalized relations and what a radically different Gandhian formulation of globalization might look like in terms of bottom-up, decentralized, egalitarian, nonviolent relational theory and practice.
A more comprehensive examination of Gandhi’s writings reveals a more subtle, nuanced and flexible Gandhi, who addresses the complexity of violence, struggles with linguistic, psychological and other forms of violence, and recognizes the difficulty of resolving violent conflicts and contradictions in human relations. This recognition of complexity in real situations of violent conflict and war-making must not minimize Gandhi’s commitment to such absolutes as nonviolence, love and truth. Gandhi’s philosophy, embracing such absolute ideals, resists certain fashionable modern approaches of unlimited facile relativism, complete subjectivism or postmodernist interpretations in which Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence is nothing more than the construction of a Gandhi narrative without any claims to truth and reality.
As we have seen, Gandhi frequently emphasizes the two major absolutes of truth and nonviolence and how they must be brought into integral, mutually interacting and reinforcing relations. With this foundation of absolute truth and nonviolence it is tempting to formulate Gandhi’s approach to violence in oversimplified and false ways by overlooking his emphasis on the following metho dological, epistemological and ontological claim: all of us exist in this world as relative, finite, imperfect beings of limited, situated, embodied consciousness. Ambiguity, contradiction, fallibility and existential tension are defining aspects of our human mode of being in the world. Our knowledge is always conditioned, imperfect and perspectival. As Gandhi repeatedly states, even he, at most, has limited temporary ‘glimpses’ of absolute truth and nonviolence. A Gandhian approach, with ethical and spiritual paths of human development and self-realization, expresses the attempt to move from one relative truth and nonviolence to greater relative truth and nonviolence closer to the absolute regulative ideals.13
Here one finds the central place of empathy, care, mutuality, cooperation, tolerance and respect in Gandhi’s nonviolent truthful approach. One of the most arrogant and dangerous moves – as seen in the ethnocentrism of many modern models and approaches to violence and war-making – is to make what is relative into an absolute. Recognizing the specificity and complexity of our contextualized situatedness, a Gandhian perspective allows us to grasp relative partial truths. Our approach should be tolerant and open to other points of view; others have different relative perspectives and different glimpses of truth that we do not have. With relative limited knowledge we often misjudge situations and even misjudge our motives and that is why we must learn from our errors and from others in the movement toward greater truth and nonviolence. At the same time, as has been seen, Gandhi’s nonviolent approach does not advocate uncritical absolute tolerance and passive acceptance of approaches based on multiple forms of violence and the violence of the status quo.
The absolute–relative distinction also allows one to address the most difficult challenges to Gandhi and any Gandhian approaches to violence. These frequently given anti-Gandhi refutations – such as how to respond when terrorists are slaughtering innocent people or napalm or bombs are being dropped, when madmen are killing people or rapes are taking place, when deadly animals or insects are threatening human life – usually consist of examples of extreme, erupting or immediate violence in which all of Gandhi’s short-term and long-term preventative measures seem completely ineffective and irrelevant.
Consider the example most frequently used to refute Gandhi after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 in the United States and the 26/11 terrorist attacks in 2008 in Mumbai. Using the Mumbai illustration, sceptical questioners ask: what would Gandhi have done about the 26/11 terrorists? Such questioners are not focusing on long-term Gandhian preventative measures, which are the most significant and relevant for getting at root causes and transforming causal determinants that trap us in escalating cycles of violence and terror. They focus on the situation of 26/11 terrorists at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST, or Victoria Terminus, VT, train station), the Trident hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, the Leopold Café and the Jewish Chabad Nariman House. Terrorists are slaughtering innocent human beings. What immediate response does Gandhi’s perspective advocate?
Most people who raise this difficult question assume that there is contemporary terrorism, on the one hand, and Gandhi’s philosophy and practices, on the other hand, and the two have nothing to do with each other. In this sense Gandhi is irrelevant when responding to terrorists. In even stronger terms of refutation, anti-Gandhi questioners often assume that, at best, Gandhi may be well intentioned, but he is naive, ineffective and hence irrelevant, or, at worst, his nonviolent approach is complicit with, contributes to and is part of the problem of terrorism, since it weakens us by insisting that we not use violent force, the only means that can stop terrorists. When questioners complete their terrorist example of refutation, they often have a pronounced smirk or puffed-up self-assurance and confidence that they have demolished Gandhi and the Gandhian perspective.
However, an open-ended, flexible, self-critical, innovative Gandhian response to the terrorist refutation, using the key absolute–relative distinction, usually meets with initial surprise and then with curiosity and interest. Even many sceptics are then willing to engage in dialogue and often grant the soundness and potential of Gandhi’s response. This is especially the case if one is modest in advocating Gandhi’s perspective to such an immediate eruption of violence and terrorism and the need to combine this approach with other, complementary, non-Gandhian perspectives.
Largely because of uninformed stereotypes and simple slogans, even among some Gandhians, people do not realize that there are many passages in which Gandhi, while upholding the absolute ideal of ahimsa, grants the necessity of relative violence. In numerous passages he claims that for those who are not at a sufficient moral and spiritual level of development, brave ethically motivated acts of violence are to be preferred to passive cowardly ‘nonviolence’, which is furthest from true ahimsa and allows for the perpetuation of violence. Clearly this is relevant to how people could have responded to ongoing 26/11 acts of terrorism.14
In other writings Gandhi grants that even morally and spiritually developed human beings, because of their relative existential situation in the world, inevitably, unavoidably and often unintentionally are involved in some violence and destruction of life. This even applies to Gandhi’s vegetarian diet and the application of disinfectants and other hygienic practices.15
More surprising, in terms of stereotypes of Gandhi’s phil osophy with his absolute commitment to ahimsa, is his view that there are unavoidable cases in which we may be required to use necessary relative violence in the cause of nonviolence. In contrast to a common stereotype Gandhi is not rendered passive and reduced to inaction when there is no effective nonviolent response. He would not simply allow the violent acts of Mumbai terrorists to take place. We act, using violent means if necessary, to prevent extreme violence because that is the least violent, most effective, contextualized response possible. Gandhi goes so far as to write about extreme cases under such titles as ‘when killing may be ahimsa’!16
In no way should Gandhi’s approach be confused with the usual justifications for ‘necessary’ military, economic and other forms of violence and terrorism as part of the dominant modern ideologies of globalization and other modern violent structural and institutional responses. For Gandhi almost all of our violence is humanly caused, either actively or through nonresistance and complicity, and hence contingent; does not reflect a last resort since there are usually many nonviolent options; and is potentially preventable through short-term and long-term measures. This is the case even when we struggle with difficult issues of applying ahimsa to our relative contextual situatedness. However, even in cases in which violence is taking places and there are no nonviolent options, we must not misinterpret Gandhi’s position.
Gandhi never rejects or deviates from the absolute of ahimsa, even when we have exhausted nonviolent options and he reluctantly grants the necessity of using violence to avoid much greater violence. One needs to intervene, perhaps even violently, to stop the Mumbai terrorists in the act of shooting innocent human beings, since no nonviolent intervention, including a willingness to die, has any possibility of stopping the killing. We use violent force to stop the terrorists, to disarm and capture them or, if necessary, to kill them. However, we must never glorify such relative violence that may be necessary, but is never moral and is always ‘sinful’. It is tragic since it represents human failure in realizing more ethical and spiritual relations closer to the absolutes of truth and nonviolence. That we live in a world of violence, terror, hatred, exploitation and injustice is an indication of human failure. That we are forced to use violence is also an indication of human failure. We have failed to create preventative nonviolent structures, relations and conditions and to take nonviolent actions that could have avoided the need for such violence.
Always attempting to express our intentions, means and goals as informed by our absolute ideals of truth and nonviolence, we must limit the need for such relative necessary violence. We must restrict to the minimum the intensity and duration of such violence, feel saddened by such violence and work toward reconciliation. Most importantly for future nonviolence and peace-building, we must do everything possible to change violent and untruthful conditions and human relations in order to avoid the repetition of such tragic violence.