For over a hundred years, M.K. Gandhi’s life and work have attracted critical scrutiny and inspired socio-political movements across the globe. His political and social visions have been the subject of much controversy, provoking both admiration and criticism. Even though he saw himself as an ordinary political worker, his expansive writings on various subjects have become rich resources for scholarly reflections on a number of political, social, economic and environmental issues.
Despite his importance to political, religious and social transformations in the past century, scholars have rarely taken him seriously as a philosopher whose teachings transcend both his time, nationalist political struggles, and his religious doctrines. Read as a slow philosopher, Gandhi has much to offer to illuminate contemporary questions of human existence and struggles for meaning in our time. What kind of a philosophic figure does Gandhi make?
The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot, in his landmark book Philosophy as a Way of Life, divides the history of Western philosophy into two traditions – philosophy as a discourse and philosophy as a way of life. The first – philosophy as production of discourse – is the dominant tradition with its interest in producing novel concepts and theories more like a domain of science. This is the tradition that came to define what is taken to be philosophy in the contemporary world.
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The second tradition, however, has its concern both in the production of philosophical wisdom and exemplary philosophical life through what Hadot called ‘spiritual exercises’. Philosophy as a way of life is primarily focused on training the student of philosophy in the arts of dialogue, self-examination, self-transformation, attention, inquiry, slow and reflective meditation, reading, writing, relating to others and otherness in the world, ethical orientation, searching after truth, arts of public confession, and striving for human excellence.
In this tradition, philosophical texts become training grounds, not sources of new knowledge. They are formative, not informative. The discourses of the past philosophers act more like reminders of something the reader already knew but for some reason has forgotten. The object is the production of philosophical life and a figure of a philosopher exemplifying an image of possibilities of human excellence. The aim is to transform oneself through slow, laborious and even painful spiritual exercises involving both the body and mind so as to acquire a new orientation and reformation of unhelpful habits.
Hadot’s framework helps recast Gandhi’s life and work in a new light. Throughout his life, Gandhi insisted on experimenting on himself much like philosophers in the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. He believed that one should first change oneself if one aspires to change others. It is this impulse and principle that finds its best expression in the title of his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. Gandhi’s writings exemplify the spirit of dialogue both in form and content. A dialogical form of communication and engagement demands as its primary condition that the speaker is trustworthy and is able to establish quick trust with his interlocutors. Gandhi’s engagement with others was not always successful; his best-known failure was his exchanges with Dr B.R. Ambedkar. That does not detract from his legacy of writing in a manner that opens minds rather than shuts them close.
Gandhi’s writings are carefully crafted to bring about a change of mind rather than win an argument. In other words, he is adept at a philosophical style that draws the reader to the completion of his texts rather than logical exposition. Gandhi insisted that he was searching for the truth without having found one. He wrote often that given the limitations of human understanding, any claim to infallibility would be dangerous and dogmatic. Even though he was a man of faith, he never was dogmatic, much like Dutch philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who insisted that faith rests on one’s willingness to take a leap into the unknown. As German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote, one can be truthful without knowing the Truth.
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Gandhi’s writings, much like the Socratic dialogues, are intended to bring about a change of attitude in the reader. They are meant to be read slowly so as to bring about a change in the orientation of the reader. Gandhi wrote not only to inform but to transform the reader. In the journals he published in South Africa, Gandhi would insist that the readers take time, collect the articles they read, and re-read them often until they not only have absorbed the contents but the spirit underlying the mode of communication. Much like St. Augustine, Gandhi took seriously the idea that a genuine reformer should become a skillful public confessor – philosophy as a public confession. This is very demanding for there is nothing more difficult than to be truthful to oneself. Public confessions run the risk of being seen as inauthentic and hypocritical. Gandhi showed great mastery in this art. My Experiments with Truth is an exhaustive demonstration both of the necessity of this art and a skillful way to do it in practice.
As has been noted by many scholars, reading widely, slowly and equally selectively has been crucial to the formation of Gandhi’s worldview and life orientation. He took inspiration from religious texts such as the Gita, Bible, Koran, and other religious and philosophical texts, often retranslating them to serve his ethical project. His acts of translation are more in the nature of rewriting, and appropriating rather than fidelity to the literal. Arguably, his translation of the Gita, for example, takes its cues from Tolstoy’s reworking of the Gospels in Brief – inventive, accessible, and creative appropriation, yet true to the underlying original message. This is a kind of originality and ingenuity few thinkers in history could claim.
Gandhi, like the philosophers in the tradition, placed great significance on the idea that the searcher after truth should be willing to die for his idea. The willingness to die for one’s belief marks Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, and others. The true mark of a genius seeking to transform the world is not their cleverness but their commitment, a commitment that might call upon them one day to make the ultimate sacrifice. Gandhi lived and ultimately died for his truth much like Socrates, making his life both memorable and tragic. The manner of his death, as much as his life, committed to the search for truth in the darkest corners of humanity, in itself, marks him as an untimely figure who will continue to shape human expectations and the quest for human excellence far longer like the figure of Socrates that he admired as a soldier of truth. Gandhi’s arts of slow thinking and slow living will continue to instruct and inform us in our search for a counter-tradition and corrective force in an age marked by speed and haste.
V. Krishnappa is Professor and Executive Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Contemporary Ethics at RV University, Bengaluru. Views expressed are solely those of the author.