When it comes to philosophy and religion, M. K. Gandhi is primarily a moral thinker and practitioner who is always concerned with how human beings actually live their lives. He is more focused on practical living, conduct, character and actually practised human values and relations than on philosophical formulations of one’s beliefs. In this regard Gandhi is more influenced by an Indian orientation that views philosophy and religion in terms of total ways of being in the world, ways of life, in which less priority is placed on intellectually or cognitively knowing the truth and more emphasis is placed on the experiential transformative realization of the truth. This may be contrasted with a dominant Western philosophical and religious orientation in which one focuses on the essential theory, belief or dogma that allows us to classify a follower as, say, a Cartesian, Kantian, Jew or Muslim. For Gandhi, as for Socrates and for dominant Indian and Asian approaches, one cannot know the good, in the fullest experiential sense of realizing the good, and do evil. For Gandhi the key to comprehending his philosophy is to focus on how he lives his life; how his values and philosophical and religious formulations are lived or embodied in his relational way of being in the world.
Even for such a remarkable human being as Gandhi, living his philosophy is not a simple task. His entire life is full of uncer tainties, doubts and struggles, as he views life as a continual experiment with truth and nonviolence. As noted in the Introduction, Gandhi did not leave his followers a legacy of some philosophical, ethical, economic, political, cultural and religious blueprint. There is no Gandhi recipe for truth and nonviolence that can simply be applied to any complex contextualized situation in order to grasp a Gandhi solution. Gandhi certainly has absolute ethical and spiritual ideals and experiential claims about the nature of reality but he repeatedly formulates and reformulates his philosophical approach as he learns from his experimental successes and failures with truth and nonviolence.
In this regard Gandhi is strongly committed to his constructive work, but, just to cite the first formulation in his Constructive Programme, entitled Communal (Religious) Unity, he struggles for decades to achieve Hindu–Muslim communal harmony.1 And during the last decade of his life, with increasing Hindu–Muslim disharmony, distrust and violence and with the Partition into India and Pakistan on religious grounds, Gandhi evaluates this constructive work as an abysmal failure. Indeed, a Hindu nationalist, who feels that Gandhi favours Muslims and betrays Hindus, assassinates him. Similarly, nothing is more emphasized in Gandhi’s life than his commitment to the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. And yet late in his life, as he feels over whelmed by the religious and political communal violence all around him, he sadly concludes that he had repeatedly miscalculated the degree to which even most of his satyagrahis and other nonviolent followers had ever embraced a commitment to nonviolence as a philosophy and way of life.
One of the major ways for understanding Gandhi’s struggles, experiments and developing formulations and practices of truth and nonviolence can be seen in his central focus on what he calls ‘Modern Civilization’. When asked by a British journalist what he thought of ‘Western civilization’, Gandhi famously and humorously responded: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ As with most of Gandhi’s humour, many layers of meaning are concealed and revealed underlying simplistic and even childlike humorous expressions. In his response about Western civilization Gandhi is engaged in dialogue and complex relations of conflicted intimacy with British colonialism. He is challenging the British hegemonic, arrogant, racist imperial claims that they are in India taking on the noble burden of bringing civilization to Indians. He is challenging colonized Indians to overcome their sense of inferiority, to stop worshipping everything British, Western and ‘modern’, and to be proud of what is great and morally, culturally and spiritually superior in their own civilization.
It is not always clear what Gandhi means by his frequent significant references to ‘Modern Civilization’ or ‘Western Civilization’ and to ‘Ancient Civilization’ or ‘Indian Civilization’. Many of his perplexing and even bizarre formulations, if taken at face value, seem completely nonhistorical, unscientific, nonfactual and easily refuted. They often seem completely irrelevant to contemporary India and the world. However, if interpreted, reinterpreted and reformulated in creative ways, Gandhi’s insights and expressions about civilization have profound symbolic, mythic, allegorical and even historical and scientific meaning, value and relevance.
Throughout Hind Swaraj and in other writings Gandhi formulates a sharp oppositional dichotomy between Modern (Western) Civilization and Ancient (Indian) Civilization. In this civilizational struggle Gandhi equates ‘Modern Civilization’ with the Kingdom of Satan and the God of War and ‘Ancient Civili zation’ with the Kingdom of God and the God of Love. Typical of oppositional normative categories found in traditional myths, Gandhi’s formulations attempt to abstract from particular contextual variables to reveal essential foundational truths and realities.2
In his Preface to the March 1910 English translation of his work Gandhi tells us that his purpose in writing Hind Swaraj is to show Indians that they should reject modern civilization with its violent methods and that if they would ‘but revert to their own glorious civilization’ they would achieve self-rule and true independence of swaraj. In this regard he makes many confusing assertions, such as the fact that India ‘has nothing to learn from anybody else’, even though Gandhi’s own life and his inclusive philosophical and religious approach contradict this, and the fact that in order ‘to restore India to its pristine condition, we have to return to it’.3
The major illustration of these latter assertions can be found in Gandhi’s idealized and romanticized descriptions and evaluations of India’s villages. He claims that villagers of Ancient Indian Civilization, as well as those in contemporary villages where the ‘cursed modern civilization has not reached’, recognize the dignity and value of manual labour. They know that cities are a ‘useless encumbrance’. They know that kings and weapons are inferior to ethics, and their lawyers and doctors recognize that they are people’s dependents. Common people in villages live independently and enjoy ‘true Home Rule’. Traditional Indian peasants use soul-force, not brute-force or body-force, and ‘have never been subdued by the sword, and never will be’. Courageous and virtuous, they know that nonviolent Satyagraha is the only Indian way to true swaraj.4
Similarly, Gandhi is often criticized and dismissed for his uncritical and irrelevant formulations in his chapter in Hind Swaraj on ‘Machinery’. Attacking ‘machinery’ as ‘the chief symbol of modern civilization’ and as representing ‘a great sin’, Gandhi concludes that he ‘cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery’. We must never forget ‘the main thing’: ‘It is necessary to realise that machinery is bad. We shall then be able gradually to do away with it.’5 It is true that Gandhi later modifies and softens this view, claiming that he is not against the use of machinery or technology if it can meet real human needs and improve human life. Indeed, Gandhi himself utilizes the printing press, railroads and the mass media in spreading and implementing his philosophy. What Gandhi claims to be against is the modern ‘machine craze’, the worship of technology, as part of an orientation and world view that displaces meaningful labour, is dehumanizing and marginalizes ethical and spiritual priorities.
Gandhi frequently uses and develops the disease metaphor to portray Modern Western Civilization. He also emphasizes that this is not a permanent fatal condition; it is a ‘curable disease’ if we just return to the essential ethical and spiritual truths of Ancient Indian Civilization that alone will allow twentieth-century India to achieve true swaraj.6
What is Gandhi doing in these frequent dramatic, sweeping, judgemental formulations that usually strike contemporary readers as uncritical, romantic, bewildering and probably irrelevant for the twenty-first century? Gandhi’s glorification of Indian villages, his negative attitude toward machinery and technology, and his simple disease and other negative metaphors to describe modernity seem largely irrelevant to our contemporary urban, industrial, technological, globalized world.
One can certainly understand and even identify with most of these formulations in a variety of ways using historical, anthropological, political, sociological, economic, religious and philosophical documentation and critical reflection and analysis. For example, Gandhi, despite continually professing his strong loyalty as a citizen of the British Empire, gradually becomes aware of the condescending, humiliating, judgemental attitude of the self-justifying ‘civilized’ British colonial rulers. Traditional Indians are viewed as inferior, backward, unethical, irrational and uncivilized. As seen in his response to the question of what he thinks about ‘Western Civilization’, Gandhi is intentionally providing a dramatic oppositional inversion in which he exhorts Indians to free themselves from their internalized fear, sense of inferiority, acquiescence and self-imposed enslavement and to be proud of their superior ‘Ancient Civilization’. Reversing the British colonial attitude, Gandhi even tells Indians that they should feel pity for the English who are victims of an inferior, unethical, materialistic, dehumanized and meaningless ‘Modern Civilization’.7
Even in some of Gandhi’s most controversial and bewildering writings, such as those on machinery as evil or hospitals as ‘institutions for propagating sin’, one can recognize profound truths that seem truer today than ever. More and more people now write about what Gandhi calls the disastrous ‘machine craze’ that is part of a modern context of dehumanization and alienation. It expresses itself through the displacement of labour, meaninglessness, false views of progress and development, unlimited egotistic consumption, violent economic and social relations, and unsustainable relations between human beings and with nature. Similarly, more and more people now critique and provide alternatives to dominant forms of modern medicine, driven by profits and not selfless service. Millions are denied decent health care, suffer and die from preventable diseases. Modern humans become dependent on technology and drugs and don’t come to terms with the underlying causes of illness or suffering, our mind–body interactions and how we perpetuate unhealthy causal conditions.8
Nevertheless, this critique does not minimize the fact that Gandhi’s key civilizational formulations, especially in Hind Swaraj, are simplistic, exaggerated, uncritical, hopelessly irrelevant and simply false or nonsensical. For example, using historical, anthropological, sociological and other evidence, it would seem impossible to justify Gandhi’s bold essentialized claims about Indian villages and peasants and other idealized virtues of some supposedly ethical nonviolent Ancient Indian Civilization.
Gandhi is well aware of how the actual history of India and historical institutionalized Hinduism and other religions are often extremely violent and lacking in truth, nonviolence and morality. He is aware of past violent conquests and oppressive domination, and how villages reflect considerable caste, class and patriarchal violence. He writes in later decades about how Indian villages are often dirty and unhygienic places and impose violent exploitative and oppressive relations of domination on untouchables, women, lepers and others. He clarifies that his Indian village is the village ‘of my dreams’. However, key passages in Hind Swaraj and other writings are not so qualified and seem to be offered as actual historical accounts of what life in pre-industrial, pre-colonial India is like. Indeed, Gandhi insists that he is not presenting a ‘utopian’ dream but as a pragmatic idealist he is presenting views of an India that once existed and that is now practically achievable.9
If one does not simply dismiss Gandhi’s controversial assertions and judgements about Modern Western Civilization and Ancient Indian Civilization, there are two related ways of rendering such formulations insightful, significant and relevant for the contemporary world. First, one could approach such oppositional civilizational accounts not on the level of literal, historical and scientific descriptions and judgements, but rather as highly symbolic, mythic, allegorical, literary and aesthetic formulations consistent with Gandhi’s interpretive insights. Second, one could approach such oppositional accounts as essentialized formulations of two ways of being in the world, two civilizational narratives, two paradigms that attempt to uncover the essential values, priorities and modes of being abstracted from the complex, particular, historical and cultural variables that appear in any ancient or modern context.
Instructive for approaching the ancient and modern civilizational formulations is Gandhi’s famous and controversial approach to the Bhagavad-Gita. This is especially significant since the Gita is Gandhi’s favourite ethical and spiritual text and his guide for how to live a most developed, exemplary human life. The Gita provides Gandhi with his favourite path of karma yoga of renunciation in action: act, based on self-knowledge and fulfilling your dharma or duty, with an attitude of nonattachment to the results of your action. What astonishes others is Gandhi’s startling claim that the Gita should be read, interpreted and applied as a ‘Gospel of Nonviolence’.10
After all, the dramatic setting of the Gita is the battlefield, with the two sides about to engage in unavoidable warfare. Krishna instructs the great warrior Arjuna, leader of the Pandavas, that he should engage in the war, acting on knowledge of his personal karma and karmic situation and fulfilling his duty as a leader of the Khastriya or warrior caste, but he should renounce any ego-attachment to the results of his action. As the best-known Hindu scripture the Gita has been the source for numerous influential interpretations and commentaries. These include those by Shankara and other ancient philosophers, up through the major nationalist interpretations during the anti-colonial independence struggles, and continuing to the present day with many diverse interpretations. In addition, hundreds of millions of Indians have embraced versions and interpretations of the Gita through rituals, art, literature and other cultural creations, and the Gita’s influence continues through contemporary expressions of popular culture. It does not seem to have occurred to the great philosophers and other interpreters or to the masses of devotees that the essential message of the Gita is nonviolence. In fact some scholars describe Gandhi’s seemingly bizarre interpretation as a hermeneutic disaster. They claim that his approach may have fictional value or it may be how he subjectively reframes the text to fit in with his own philosophy of nonviolence, but this has nothing to do with a serious, rigorous interpretation of the actual text.
Gandhi’s well-known response is that the Gita should not be read in a literal or historical way, as if it is describing an actual historical battle or is literally instructing Arjuna to fight. It should be read as a highly symbolic allegory. The battlefield is an effective allegorical device for portraying the battle that goes on within each of us, the battle between darkness and light, our lower and higher nature, untruth and truth, violence and nonviolence.
Even more instructive and relevant to Gandhi’s civilizational formulations are his insightful hermeneutic reflections on how he interprets the Gita or any other significant text. Every reading is always a rereading, every interpretation a reinterpretation, every formulation a reformulation. We are always engaged in a complex, dynamic process of the interpretation of meaning. The ancient Indians who first formulate the Gita over 2,000 years ago exist within their own horizons of meaning shaped by their historical, social, economic, cultural, political, religious and linguistic variables. Human beings today live in very different horizons of meaning shaped by all kinds of developments, including past interpretations of the Gita and major contemporary variables. In this sense, how we relate to the text, what messages or voices are heard and which are marginalized or silenced, what is significant or insignificant, relevant or irrelevant, and what the Gita means to us is part of a dynamic creative process of reconstitution and reinterpretation. In this sense there are multiple Gitas or, expressed differently, the text is not fixed and closed but it is always a part of an open-ended process of multiple rereadings, reinterpretations and reformulations.
In his approach Gandhi claims that the ancient Indian rishis or seers, mystics and other enlightened beings were extraordinary human beings who had intuitions and insights into ethical and spiritual truths that speak to us in the most profound ways today. However, ancient Indians who formulated and interpreted the Gita were also limited human beings who used limited linguistic formulations consistent with their limited historical and cultural horizons. Therefore Gandhi is not claiming that ancient Indians expressed a Gandhian commitment to nonviolence. Similarly, Gandhi realizes that the Indian nationalists, who offer interpretations of the Gita as an invaluable text in the struggle for national independence, often emphasize how it justifies the use of violence for their worthy cause.
For Gandhi the Bhagavad-Gita is a gospel of nonviolence because that is how we can read it as its most developed, ethical, spiritual and urgently needed message today. Parts of the text, as with all scriptures and other significant writings, may strike us as irrational, immoral, untruthful and violent, and we should revise or simply reject such passages. Although not read as a gospel of nonviolence by earlier Indians, that is the text’s purest and most developed message for us today. This does not mean that anything goes, and we can subjectively read, interpret and apply the Gita any way that pleases us. The text is not infinitely malleable; it has basic structures, symbolic expressions, key principles and teachings. Some readings are misreadings or are of limited explanatory value and limited ethical and spiritual significance. However, reading and interpreting the essential meaning of the Gita as a gospel of nonviolence is an interpretation that is consistent with the essential textual values and teachings and is the most developed, creative, significant and relevant rendering of the open-ended text for us today.
If one applies this hermeneutic approach to Gandhi’s seem ingly uncritical, unhistorical, idyllic formulations of ‘Ancient Civili zation’, then he is not claiming that he is offering factual or accurate descriptions of how premodern Indians actually live. They often support human relations that express economic, political, military, gendered, caste-based and other forms of violence and untruth. They often violate the true social and ethical sense of dharma or moral obligation and do not experi ence deeper senses of reality. What Gandhi is claiming is that there are basic intuitions, values, principles and experiential realizations that define ‘Ancient Civilization’ at its highest ethical and spiritual levels. We can develop those essential Indian contributions to higher levels of ethical and spiritual realization that relate significantly to our contemporary world.11
Consistent with this approach, one can interpret the meaning of Gandhi’s formulations on ‘Ancient Civilization’ and improve on them. This involves rejecting what is hopelessly uncritical and irrelevant and reinterpreting and reformulating what is essential in new creative ways that are significant today.
Similarly, many of Gandhi’s formulations of ‘Modern Civilization’, with their absolute, unqualified negative descriptions and judgemental dismissals, should not be read and interpreted simply as accurate factual claims. Gandhi himself is influenced by many modern writings in their critiques of premodern orientations, and in their contributions to his thinking about individual autonomy, freedom, equality, democracy and other values. What Gandhi claims is that there are basic intuitions, values, principles and experiential realizations that define dominant formulations of ‘Modern Civilization’ and that most shape our views of success, progress, development and civilization. These dominant essential human relations trap us in illusory causal cycles of untruth and multidimensional violence that define how we relate to our self, to other humans and other sentient beings, and to nature. They are obstacles to developing our ethical and spiritual potential for dealing with our crises today.
At the same time, in a dynamic, open-ended approach, Gandhi and we today can develop essential contributions found in modern writings to higher levels of realization. We can reinterpret and reformulate more adequate meanings of self-rule and self-realization, true individual autonomy, real freedom and equality, deeper democ racy and independence and interdependence, and the proper relations of humans to technology and to nature in ways that relate most significantly to our contemporary world.
Such an approach to Gandhi’s civilizational account reveals the value, but also the limitations, of a frequent interpretation of Gandhi and his philosophy as premodern, or modern or post-modern. In his positive valuation of ‘Ancient Civilization’ and his usual critique of and hostility toward modernity, it is tempting simply to classify Gandhi as an engaged premodern thinker and practitioner. This is what many devotees and most critics do. However, this ignores Gandhi’s radical critique of traditional hierarchical India, with its fixed relational violent structures of domination, and how Gandhi’s complex philosophy, religion and cultural practices are not simply traditional or premodern.
A smaller number of interpreters have claimed that, on a deeper level, getting beyond Gandhi’s external appearance, idiosyncratic practices and premodern expressions, he is essentially modern. However, this ignores how even when Gandhi is using such seemingly modern Western concepts as individual autonomy, self-reliance, individual rights and freedoms, democracy, and independence, he is reinterpreting, reformulating and reapplying them in ways that critique dominant features of ‘Modern Civilization’.
It has become fashionable among some interpreters in recent decades to classify Gandhi as postmodern, especially in his critique of Western hegemonic universalizing of modern violent philosophies and practices. These postmodernist interpreters focus on Gandhi’s insistence on pluralism, diversity, respect for differences, multiple perspectives and narratives, and the need to situate and contextualize each approach as expressing relative limited truths.12 Although this classification seems to make Gandhi relevant in bringing him in line with key European postmodernist thinkers and some other recent Western philosophical developments, it ignores essential premodern and also modern influences on Gandhi’s philosophy and practices. Such an interpretation of Gandhi as postmodernist ignores or devalues his significant claims about the truth of our fundamental oneness or unity, with a respect for differences, his endorsement of absolute regulative ideals and his powerful critique of and resistance to perspectives not based on truth and nonviolence.
Although the premodern–modern–postmodern categorizations have some interpretive and explanatory value, this classification is inadequate for grasping Gandhi’s philosophy and practices and how they can be reinterpreted and reformulated as relevant and significant for our contemporary world. When Gandhi brings his experiences, readings and diverse expressions of what he sometimes labels as ‘Ancient Civilization’ and ‘Modern Civilization’ into a dynamic relation, what emerges is a new civilizational model of how to conduct ourselves meaningfully. When Gandhi, through his experiments with truth, brings into dynamic relation the premodern, the modern and the postmodern world outlooks and orientations, key positive and negative relational values in each approach interact with the other approaches. What emerges in Gandhi’s innovative philosophy and practices is something radically new that cannot be subsumed under the inadequate tripartite classification.
Most significant for our contemporary world, Gandhi’s broad, essentialized, judgemental and often seemingly uncritical formulations of ‘Ancient Civilization’ and ‘Modern Civilization’ are his attempt at uncovering two radically different human ways of being in the world. Abstracting from the diverse historical and cultural variables that appear in all ancient and modern contexts and shape all ancient and modern texts, Gandhi formulates two essential civilizational narratives revealing two oppositional paradigms. These two accounts of our human mode of being in the world reveal contrasting approaches to the nature of reality with radically different values and priorities. Gandhi is especially concerned with critiquing and resisting ‘Modern Civilization’, an orientation that defines modern Western industrialized, technological, globalized relations today. This dominant modern philosophy and its practices are untruthful, violent and leading humankind and the planet earth towards disaster.
Very briefly formulated, Gandhi submits that dominant characteristics of ‘Modern Civilization’ express economic, political, cultural, psychological and other forms of violence, and ‘moderns’ are socialized and rewarded in ways that perpetuate the systemic structural violence of the status quo. ‘Modern Civilization’ privileges the illusory modern, separate, ‘independent’ self, with its aggressive, ego-defined, endless desires, needs and attachments. It privileges individual, social, national and other differences. ‘Modern Civilization’ thus contributes to modern experiments with untruth. In its basic assumptions, approaches and world view, it violates the fundamental ethical and ontological nature of nonviolent interconnected unifying truth and reality and results in diverse dangerous forms of violent civilizational disharmony.
According to Gandhi, human beings have a duty to provide the means to satisfy the material needs of impoverished and suffering human beings, but ‘Modern Civilization’ is violently and untruthfully materialistic in that it emphasizes the material in a radically reductionistic manner. Modern approaches organize life around endless insatiable material production and consumption. They conceptualize models of development, progress, success, happiness and standard of living in terms of maximizing levels of material production and consumption. In this way they emphasize bodily desires, with the proliferation of endless needs and wants. According to Gandhi they even do a poor job of fulfilling such bodily desires, since they lack the necessary qualities and virtues of self-discipline and self-rule over desires. Indeed, when egocentric bodily desires are so emphasized and detached from the total, body–mind–spirit, integral human being, they represent our lowest base ‘animalistic’ nature and provide the least adequate criteria for human conduct and civilization.
Here one finds Gandhi’s critique of the modern ‘machine craze’ as a major part of materialist, consumerist, violent and untruthful ways of being in the world. Such a machine-centric and money-centric orientation privileges and worships the idols of technology and does not express the moral and social relations of limited appropriate technology. It produces and expresses the alienation of labour and dehumanizing and violent human relations of growing inequality. It marginalizes any deep sense of morality and duty that is at the heart of a human-centric approach to our real ethical and spiritual development.
Gandhi’s critique of ‘Modern Civilization’ raises insightful contributions that can be related to earlier Western writings critical of the modern, post-Enlightenment dominant tradition. Some of these dissenters, such as Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau, deeply influence Gandhi. Gandhi’s critique can also be related to some modern ethical thinkers, as evidenced in Kant’s formulation of the Categorical Imperative to treat others as ends and never merely as means, and even more so in Marx’s analysis of alienated labour in his ‘Manuscripts of 1844’ and formulations in his later writings. Gandhi’s critique can also be related to approaches of theologians such as Paul Tillich, existential dialogic philosophers such as Martin Buber in his ethical and spiritual I–Thou relational analysis, much of twentieth-century existentialist philosophy and literature, and recent approaches to our ecological crisis and the unsustainability of dominant economic and environmental models of development.
Gandhi is not claiming that modern individual human beings, social relations, cultures and civilizations begin the exploitation and destruction of other humans, other sentient beings and nature. Ancient and later premodern human beings certainly live unethical and untruthful lives that often express class, caste, misogynist and other forms of violence. Values, relations and structures expressing alienation, destructive conflict, ignorance and immorality are obstacles to ethical and spiritual development and limit these premodern human beings and cultures.
What Gandhi is claiming, as seen in his abstract essentialist formulations of ‘Modern Civilization’, is that dominant modernity introduces and promotes a modern paradigm that is qualitatively and quantitatively new, dehumanizing, alienating and destructive. It expresses relations that are self-destructive and destructive of other beings and of nature. The new models of human and civili zational progress and development dominate the modern world and entrap us in vicious causal cycles of untruth, violence, dis harmony, conflict, war and unsustainability.
In dominant forms of ‘Modern Civilization’, modern developed humans are separate, egoistic, ‘autonomous’ individuals who are able to use instrumental reason to calculate whatever means are necessary to further their economic, political and other self-interested ends. It is not as if modernity introduces the philo so phical and theological ideas that humans are special and superior and that nature exists in order to be subdued and exploited as a means to higher human or divine ends. However, modernity introduces new values, analyses and rationales for such exploitation and domination. Adopting the Baconian approach to scientific method and knowledge, nature is the objective valueless material means enabling humans to achieve control and domination. And when human beings later achieve the marriage of science and technology with the promotion of the ‘machine craze’, there is an unprecedented explosion in the capacity of modern humans and civilizations to maximize priorities of material production and consumption and to pursue objectives of maximizing power and domination over other humans and cultures, nature and all life on the planet.
Gandhi examines how the dominant forms that this modern paradigm of self, human relations, civilization, development and progress take are defined by the development of capitalism, industrialization, urbanization and globalization. Increasingly all of life becomes commodified and capitalized. Objectified nature and objectified human beings are conceived as commodities. Those who exploit their asymmetrical power relations treat commodified humans and nature as means for maximizing profit, control and domination. For Gandhi, this dominant model destroys the dignity of human labour, the moral and spiritual value of each human being and of nature and is economically and ecologically unsustainable. Such a dominant modern paradigm, with its philosophies and practices, poses the most dangerous obstacle to realizing basic nonviolent and truthful relations of integrity, harmony and real human and civilizational development, standard of living and progress.13
Rather than literal or historical descriptions, Gandhi’s formulations of superior ‘Ancient Civilization’ are primarily intended to challenge us to rethink civilizational assumptions, values and relations. Gandhi’s ‘Ancient Civilization’ emphasizes a paradigm and orientation that is human-centric rather than machine-centric and money-centric, is essentially nonviolent, emphasizes morality and spiritual realization, addresses our higher human capacities and focuses on human integrity and harmonious relations with other beings and with nature.
In his formulations of ‘Ancient Civilization’ Gandhi is selectively focusing on remarkable ethical and spiritual, nonviolent and truthful intuitions and experiential realizations, found in the ancient texts but also accessible to all human beings and cultures and constitutive of developed human realization in later premodern, modern and contemporary life. Gandhi, the philosophical and practical realist and pragmatist, is not recommending an unrealistic romantic utopian path of returning to some ancient Indian mode of being. His formulations are rendered most significant and relevant if we interpret them as emphasizing that we must return to the ancient texts as valuable resources for uncovering ethical and spiritual insights, in order to reappropriate and reformulate them, selectively and critically, in new contextual and civilizational ways that speak to the crises of the contemporary world.
Gandhi’s civilizational paradigms, with their contrasting philosophies and practices, provide the interpretative framework for analysing his insightful analysis of religion.14 As seen in previous chapters Gandhi frequently identifies himself and his approach as religious or spiritual and more specifically as Hindu, but his formulations often seem uncritical and inconsistent. Much of this confusion arises from the fact that Gandhi’s approach to religion is so dynamic, open-ended, critical and self-critical, tolerant and respectful in affirming the unity and equality of diverse religious paths. Gandhi may be viewed by some as deeply religious but not in any exclusive, traditional or institutionalized sense of religion. In some passages Gandhi prefers language with no ‘God’ references; in others he focuses on truth rather than God, as in his ‘Truth is God’ preferred formulations; and in others he emphasizes devotion to a personal God. In some of the latter passages, in which Gandhi tells us that he leaves everything to God and in which God speaks to him in unexpected ways, Gandhi’s approach seems baffling, irrational, immoral, superstitious and even dangerous. These confusing formulations seem at odds with Gandhi’s philosophy and his usual approach to religion.
Much of this confusion can be removed by emphasizing a key distinction in Gandhi’s philosophy, consistent with his civilizational and other analysis, between ideal, absolute, universal, essential, true religion (‘Religion’) and actual, relative, historical, organized, institutionalized religion (‘religion’) and religions (‘religions’). Relative religion and religions include specific scriptures and other texts, authoritative leaders and structural hierarchies, rituals and other practices, and other limited contextualized expressions.
Gandhi refers to ideal Religion when he asserts that Hinduism and all other religions express nonviolence and that all religions are diverse paths to the one, spiritual, Absolute Truth and Ultimate Reality. He is offering a description of actual context ualized religion, religions and religious life when he repeatedly asserts that religion consists of nonviolence, love, compassion, selfless service, peace-making, tolerance and mutual respect. Gandhi is not providing a philosophy and approach to Religion based simply on his imaginary construction of absolute ideals. He claims to have experiences of the eternal and permanent Absolute Religion. That is why he is certain that it is real. But just as Gandhi asserts that no one knows nonviolence and no one knows truth, no one fully knows Religion. Gandhi has occasional, imperfect, temporary ‘glimpses’ of Religion. One of the greatest dangers, as evidenced throughout the history of religions, is to regard your imperfect religion as possessing the exclusive absolute reality, thus making into absolute truth what is relative. Other religions are then regarded as essentially false, sinful, evil and dangerous, thus providing a false justification for relating to others with intolerance, disrespect, hatred, violence and war.
As with economic, political, cultural and other civilizational relations as ways of being in the world, religious people are at best moving from one relative truth to greater relative truth; from one relative religious perspective to a greater relative religious perspective, more nonviolent, more truthful and closer to Religion as the essential ideal.
In Gandhi’s approach all religions contain significant ethical and spiritual insights and contributions but they also contain impurities, multidimensional and structural violence and untruths. They express human limitations reflecting the relative relational situatedness of past and present historical and cultural contexts. Believers should not be shamed or overwhelmed by aggressive proponents of other religions or of anti-religious ‘Modern Civilization’. Believers should be free to think critically and to act freely and with integrity consistent with their own deepest experiences. This includes being free to reject what is experienced in their own religion as immoral, untruthful or no longer relevant. They should be free to purify and develop their own religion. This includes being free to accept religious insights and contri butions from other religions as means for developing the ethical and spiritual depth, significance and relevance of one’s own religious life.
This approach to culture and religion, with the need for intercultural and interreligious dialogue, is expressed in Gandhi’s frequently cited formulation: ‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.’ As Gandhi concludes: ‘Mine is not a religion of the prison-house.’15
Here one finds Gandhi’s approach to religion and religions in terms of dynamic, open-ended, developmental, interreligious and intercultural dialogue with the need for empathy, tolerance, respect and mutual understanding. This approach is grounded in Gandhi’s philosophy with the key Absolute Religion–relative religion distinction providing the basis for his fundamental conviction upholding the interconnected, interrelated unity and equality of all religions as diverse paths to the same truth and reality. Gandhi goes beyond the usual political rationales in some secular forms of ‘Modern Civilization’ for pluralism, tolerance and the right of individuals to be free to practise their own religion. Based on his ethical and spiritual philosophy of satya and ahimsa, with formulations of Religion and religion, Gandhi provides a religious justification for tolerance, mutual respect and mutual understanding. These provide the means by which religious believers become more religious, religions become purified and develop ethically and spiritually, and religious believers move closer to ideal Religion, closer to realizing nonviolence, truth and reality.
This approach to religion is expressed in Gandhi’s challenging approach to religious scriptures, as seen in the earlier formulation of his interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gita as a gospel on nonviolence. Gandhi’s hermeneutic reflections arise from his engage ment with the troubling status and functioning of religious scriptures in his life, in history and in his world.16 He finds that Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and other organized and institutionalized religions often use scriptures as the basis for class and caste exploitation, oppression of women and others, justification of violence and war, and, in short, for what Gandhi analyses as ethical and spiritual untruths. Religions often assert that their scriptures are not to be questioned since they are the word of God. And such uncritical acceptance of scriptures is enforced, often with severe punishments for those raising questions of interpretation and justification. In this regard Gandhi is very critical of traditional religions, and he often makes orthodox religious authorities, including those with political and economic power, very uncomfortable.
How does Gandhi deal with orthodox religious claims that their scriptures justify and necessitate, say, the brutal violent punishment, even death, of women, nonbelievers and others who violate the divine norms and injunctions? Gandhi affirms his faith that scriptures do contain profound insights into ideal, absolute, universal, ethical and spiritual truths. However, religious truths expressed in religion, including those in scriptures, are always transmitted through and formulated by imperfect human beings. That is why scriptural formulations have to be situated in their specific, human, historical, social and cultural contexts in order to comprehend the expression and meaning of specific language, symbolism, mythic and ritual formulations, ethical teachings and social codes. Since those human transmitters and expressers are not perfect, their scriptural expressions are always imperfect, falling short of the ideals of nonviolence, truth and religion.
In some dramatic illustrations Gandhi is told that certain scriptural claims necessitate chopping off limbs of sinners, stoning to death and other cruel executions, sacrifice of animals, holy wars against infidels and other acts that he finds violate ideals of truth and nonviolence. Gandhi asserts that if the Bible, the Qur’an or any other scripture does in fact contradict human reason and authentic human experience, then you should reject what the scripture tells you to do.
Since all scriptures contain relative truths, with impurities and imperfections and untruths, they should be interpreted as limited attempts at realizing more perfect ideals. Each scripture represents a different relative orientation and path, or multiple paths, grounded in and reflecting particular linguistic, social, cultural and other contexts. That is why no scripture contains an absolute exclusive truth, why we should be tolerant and respect other scriptural paths and why we can learn from other scriptural revelations.17
What this means today for Gandhi’s hermeneutic project is that those believers who accept certain foundational scriptures should identify with and appropriate deep essential truths revealed in their scriptures, but they must also critically question and purify and develop their own scriptural relations and understandings. A scripture, in this sense, is not something static and closed. Rather it is a defining, often foundational, part of an ongoing process in which we provide new, more adequate ethical and spiritual interpretations and formulations in terms of our evolving, contextually related, developmental understanding.
Gandhi offers a valuable approach to religion today with his absolute–relative distinctions, oppositional civilizational formulations and call for a new paradigm that reappropriates what is of value from the past as integrated with other contributions in ways that are contextually sensitive and relevant. With so much destructive religious violence, war and untruth in the world, religion seems to be more of the problem than the solution when dealing with religious, cultural, economic, political, scientific, technological and environmental crises. Gandhi’s attempt at offering a new paradigm of religion, with its commitment to nonviolence and truth, to ethically and ontologically unifying harmonious relations, to intrareligious and interreligious dialogue and unity with a respect for differences, has great explanatory value and transformative potential.
Gandhi’s philosophical framework, including his approach to religion, is often difficult to apply and gives rise to many legitimate questions and concerns. There is no simple Gandhi blueprint that we can simply apply to overcome religious conflicts, multidimensional and structural violence and untruths. Gandhi repeatedly experiences questions and concerns in his own experiments with truth relating to religion, other religions and even Hinduism, experiments that he often assesses as failures.
How can Gandhi justify his foundational claim that he experiences, albeit imperfectly, the Absolute Truth of Religion? How can Gandhi justify his foundational descriptions and judgments about the integral, dynamic relations between the Absolute Religion and relative religion and religions? What about other religious believers who claim that they experience the Absolute Truth of Religion, and their God or Ultimate Reality contradicts Gandhi’s philosophical ideal? They reject Gandhi’s ethical and ontological framework and approach. Their true Religion does not include an essential Gandhi version of nonviolence and rejects Gandhi’s formulations of truth as expressions of untruth. They reject Gandhi’s powerful image of religions as expressing different legitimate paths for ascending and reaching the same top of the mountain. For them, other religions are taking false paths and will never reach the top of the mountain or, put differently, other religions are not even on the one true mountain. In addition, what about contemporary cultural relativists who reject the adoption of all universal essential absolutes, even Gandhi’s more inclusive and tolerant absolutes, as epistemologically inadequate, intersubjectively unverifiable, hegemonic and even multidimensionally violent?
What this means is that Gandhi’s remarkable ethical and spiritual approach, with his commitment to a new paradigm grounded in ideals of truth and nonviolence, his civilizational accounts and his analysis of religion has tremendous explanatory value and transformative potential for addressing crises in the contemporary world. But Gandhi does not have simple answers or all of the answers. His approach to civilization, including religion, emphasizes empathy, tolerance, mutual respect and mutual understanding, but it also involves active critical transformative engagement. As in other situations involving great violence and untruth, the appropriate Gandhi approach to much of civilizational and religious violence, war and untruth in the world includes satyagraha, determined nonviolent noncooperation and active resistance. It also includes economic, cultural, educational and religious constructive work that is essential for the morally and spiritually transformative process toward greater nonviolence and truth.