Introduction

Gandhi is exceptional on many counts. Not only does he provide a strong justification for civil disobedience, he is also an ardent opponent of colonialism and the architect of modern Indian self-identity. At the same time, he seeks to eliminate untouchability and faults the capitalism of the West and the Marxism of the Soviet Union. Moreover, he offers one of the strongest critiques of modernity and modernization in the twentieth century.

In the discussion of Gandhi that follows, Gandhi will be presented as a problematizer, and it is helpful to consider what I mean by the term. Things are not always what they seem. What often is understood as good sometimes turns out to carry unexpected, unwelcome consequences. Freedom, for example, frees men and women from arbitrary power and enables them to make their own choices. They are free to worship as they please, but also free to break God's law; they are free to marry and raise their own families or neglect or abandon them; they are free to develop morally or succumb to seduction and temptation; they are free to flourish or fail; they are free to cooperate with others or to cause them pain. To notice the problematic nature of freedom is hardly a reason to abandon freedom but it provides a reason to see its many possible consequences, both the bright and dark ones.

Gandhi wants to problematize some the principles we take as good and facts or theories we take as true. In taking up this exercise, he tries to show that modernity and modernization as well as power and violence carry mixed moral consequences and that we will never be able to address, much less challenge, their dangerous sides if we unreflectively take them as good and true.

Both friends and critics find Gandhi is most troubling when he writes about modernity and modernization. He continually attacks instrumental rationality; finds science is often dangerous; castigates industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucracy; and celebrates the simple economies of India's villages. A surface reading of these texts makes Gandhi anachronistic and, to avoid embarrassment, many ignore these topics today. We will take up his arguments not because Gandhi offers us valuable practical policies for the late-modern world but because his broad arguments give us one of the strongest twentieth century critiques about modernity and modernization. For Gandhi, they privilege efficiency and productivity over autonomy and substitute instrumentalism over morality. His critique supplies us with reminders of what is a stake in such moves.

At the heart of Gandhi's project is autonomy. For him, men and women must govern themselves. To do this they need a guide or compass, and Gandhi located that guide in our tradition or religious heritage. For him, there is a plurality of traditions, and each one embodies the story of how people are more than their egos, physical attributes, or individual possessions. Gandhi sees tradition asking us to reach beyond the force of gravity and toward a transcendence and thereby allowing us to ascend beyond our biological and physical selves. In inviting us to move beyond our biological needs and the weight of our immediate attachments, Gandhi holds that each tradition grasps no more than a portion of the truth. Because the truth of any tradition is fragmentary, according to Gandhi, we should recognize our own fallibility and the need for tolerance.

What is the truth? Gandhi tells us truth is God. This means several things to him. One is that the truth cannot be something that remains tied to the forces of gravity but transcends the earth. Gandhi believes when we are guided by a principled stand, we approached the truth. It is a truth that is found among Hindus, Christian, Jews, Moslems, and atheists. Secondly, it exists beyond any one person, any single lifetime, any particular people but it is expressed in concrete times and places by corporal people. Thirdly, the truth speaks to the autonomy of all persons: each deserves dignity and respect. Claims to the truth which give permission to some to control others are, on his account, misunderstandings of the truth. Fourthly, it speaks to the unity and interdependence of humanity and denies the morality of highly individualist solutions. This unity recognizes the debts we owe others: our parents, teachers, neighbors, fellow citizens, the many people who contribute to the vitality of our institutions, and the countless people whose work enables us to meet our daily needs. It also recognizes our debts to our tradition and the ordinary and extraordinary contributions earlier generations have made over time to the best we have today. These are enormous debts, and we cannot repay them all and we should not be expected to. But in repaying what we can, Gandhi holds we show we are part of an interdependent world that is better because others have made the effort and because we will make our own contributions.

For Gandhi, Hinduism captures this sense with its view of the universe as a cosmos. On this reading, there is a unity and interrelatedness of the many parts. The whole is not complete without the parts and needs the parts. By the same token, the parts gain their own identity and purposefulness by their relationship to the other parts.

For all of his traditionalism, Gandhi is no reactionary thinker. He holds that every tradition is subject to decay and that it needs to be scrutinized and challenged by its members. Gandhi seeks to reconstruct Hinduism in several important ways. He reinterprets the Gita to emphasize commonalities and he takes its violent passages to signal the necessity of (nonviolent) conflict to resist injustice. With this in mind, he seeks to abolish untouchability and challenge the contemporary status of women in India as an affront to the autonomy of persons and as a deficient reading of Hindu scripture.

We should notice that Gandhi never develops a theory of justice. One reason he rejects a comprehensive theory of justice is that it makes its own pretensions to the truth. Gandhi, for one, rejects the idea that any theory of justice can achieve what tradition and religion can not, that is escape its own partiality. But a comprehensive theory of justice is not necessary for Gandhi. If we are animated by a sense of injustice, he thinks we able to judge and confront the enumerable and continuing instances of injustice that are housed in our world.

Socrates taught philosophy could give us wisdom, that is knowledge about who we are and how we should conduct ourselves. Today, we do not talk much about wisdom or even knowledge but information. In fact, we call this period in history the "information age." For someone such as Gandhi, this term epitomizes much that is wrong today. We eagerly acquire fragments of information, as kings once collected conscripts, and in each case the purpose is much the same: to master new territory. But how can we master the world if we do not know what the world is or even where it is? For Gandhi, the world can never be described only by its observable attributes but must always include a place for the interrelatedness of its parts and give a place of pride to the worth and integrity of autonomous men and women.

Socrates may have been wiser than we are, but we have something Socrates did not have: modern science and its companions technology and modernization. With them, we have come to lead longer lives, eat a healthier diet, liberate many from debasing labor, communicate faster with more people, and generally lead lives we would not want to trade with earlier generations. Gandhi was not as confident about modern science and technology as we are.

In a sense, modern science can be seen as fending off (at least for a time) the demon death, freeing us from biological necessity and enabling us partake of numerous choices previously unknown. When he surveys the consequences of modern technology and economic modernization, Gandhi despairs rather than celebrates. He finds millions of Indians unable to meet their biological necessities in their traditional occupations in their customary villages. Fleeing to the cities, most remain unemployed or underemployed. And he finds the newly industrialized, urbanized workers are tied to demeaning, alienating tasks which offer them no sense of identity or purpose. In other words, Gandhi sees modernization depleting people of meaning at the same time it offers a longer life and promises more goods to more people and he found the cost too high.

The fact remains that modernization has made life better in many ways for many people. But Gandhi thinks we have not considered what he takes to be the heavy costs we pay for the new bounties. We assume that modern technology enables us to control nature in ways that if not defeating death at least delays it; that challenges nature's blind furies of famine, draught, and pestilence; and that enables us to harness energy to do the arduous work that previously described the human condition. But in the process, modern technology also discovered how to kill more people, and not just soldiers. Primitive weapons give way to sophisticated ones; solitary means of destruction make way for weapons of mass destruction, and the prospects of destroying humanity mushrooms with nuclear arms and its henchmen bacteriological and chemical warfare. The promises of modern technology to improve and secure life, Gandhi fears, have given way to a dark uncertainty that can destroy us.

Gandhi rejects optimistic readings of modern reason, technology and modernization. He finds that modern reason and science prompt us to think that we must find general, law-like claims that fit all similar cases. However, Gandhi argues, the human condition is best described by its diversity and connectedness. People are not abstractions but real individuals who have multiple needs to meet in order to fulfill themselves. Gandhi argues that to assume that one solution fits our most troubling problems, to pour everything into one mold, or to discover a universal standard to judge ourselves and others is to deprive individuals of their distinctiveness and deny them their authenticity.

Many consider the justification and protection of equal rights to be the crowning achievement of Western theory and practice. On this account, people deserve equal respect and regard regardless of their background and should be free to make their own choices and not have them made by others. From this perspective, rights are due to each of us independent of other considerations, including the demands of the state or the expectations of convention. Gandhi has trouble with this construction of rights, not because he opposes freedom but because he finds the accepted reading of rights is incomplete. In talking about freedom, Gandhi turns to the concept of autonomy. Autonomy rests on the assumptions that people are capable of making fundamental choices for themselves, their choices give them an identity, their choices should be referenced to a moral standard, and people are ultimately responsible for their choices, the consequences of their choices, and the moral character that grows out of their choices. Many of these considerations are lost in theories of rights which make individuals superior to every other consideration, including their community, tradition, or other goods, such as justice. With others, Gandhi finds that this disassociation leaves men and women without attachments and commitments. He claims individuals know themselves and are known by others by their everyday projects--as spouses, parents, children, workers, neighbors, citizens, and the like, and we need concrete attachments and coherent standards to situate ourselves when we make choices. On Gandhi's account, people have dignity not because they are free to make expansive choices but because they have moral purposes which they freely choose.

Gandhi's commitment to autonomy undergirds his theories of nonviolence. Because everyone is worthy or respect and because we participate in the unity of life, Gandhi holds that when we deliberately harm others, and particularly take the lives of others, we assault on their autonomy. None of us, he insists, has warrant to assume we can place our own particular idea of the good, however noble, over the autonomy of others, no matter how much we think the other person is wrong or unjust. In developing his theory of civil disobedience, Gandhi means to show that resistance to injustice does not have to be unjust itself and can escape violence.

In presenting Gandhi as a problematizer, I want to introduce a thinker who asks who and where we are and argues that some of the tools we borrow from modernity and modernization to answer these questions can take us only so far. At the same time, we will explore similarities between Gandhi and modernity and try to locate his theories in the late modern world.