Abstract
The personality of Gandhi possesses a unique character in modern times: It is all at once the emblem of the most of the important colonial liberation—of an entire subcontinent—and the figure of radical spiritual exigency for asceticism and freedom from the world’s enslavements. No other guide towards emancipation or enfranchisement has united these two dimensions, the political and the spiritual, in this way—even if the desire to join the rejection of domination with the opening of a new dimension of meaning has more or less manifested itself among all the others.
Gandhi left a vast body of writings. This book under review outlines the system that gathers Gandhi’s writings and practices into a corpus within which his precise conception of nature, truth, violence, resistance and the end is clarified. But, Gandhi’s writings and practice remain in a critical relation to technology in modern society.
The book consists of ten chapters excluding an introduction. These are as follows: 1. Hypo-physics, 2. Scalology: Speed, 3.The Faculties I: Body, 4.The faculties II: Mind and Soul, 5. Dynamics: Active and Passive, 6. The Law of the Maker, 7. Truth and Will, 8. Violence and Resistance, 9. Critical Nation, 10. Conclusion: Anastasis.
When we explore about Gandhi we find that there were many things that Gandhi was. He was the last of a kind. He was the first of his kind. Which one is it better to be? He was the first one to ask this question. Gandhi founded a new materialism, which was the theory of nature as the reification of spirit. Gandhi opposed the separation of religion as a business of the spirit and politics as the field of material relations.
To Gandhi, nature is value, the moral is the natural. Deviations from nature are measured by the scalology of speed—the quick is the evil and slow is the good. In Gandhi’s world, earthquakes, thunderstorms and famines carry out judgments upon the deviations from the natural and bring about corrections. Gandhi conceives a new system of limits that cures the ills of deviations from nature’s moral course, that is, the syndrome of civilisation, the perils of speed and the desire for progenies. His sexual experiments, his theoretical apparatus to determine truth, his resistance to democracy and women’s liberation movements, his racism towards the Africans and untouchables of the subcontinent and his startling political positions with respect to great events of early twentieth century such as the Nazi camps and atomic bombs are understandable only by thus recovering the systematic unity and uniqueness of his thought. This new system to delineate pro-genesis (commonly understood as sex, desire, pleasure) from other virus (those of material, moral and the sense of finality) such that it could be rendered ‘Zero’. The book aims to bring to light the technology of Gandhi’s system and examine the fate of certain programmes that today follow his steps. It does so by developing the counter-system, which hovers over his own corpus and evading its capture.
Gandhi was not a philosopher—the history of philosophy was ‘Satanic’ for him. Yet, Philosophers (Martin Buber, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Ardent in the last century, and Etienne Balibar and Slavoj Zizek recently found) found it necessary to engage him. Hence, recently, European Philosophers have initiated dialogues between Gandhi’s concept of non-violence and other western political projects; for example, Slavoj Zizek (Gandhi and Hitler) and Etienne Balibar (Gandhi and Lenin).
Gandhi wanted to be a philosopher, but he was not the well-trained sort, so he left these fragments of thought that are to be systematised comfortably by the scholar today. In his communication with Radhakrishnan, Gandhi himself wrote about the philosophical task left to be undertaken. Indeed, clarification of the concept of violence has become an urgent philosophical task today. In this context, Gandhi’s major contribution to political thought was to question the primacy of the concept of violence in political theory: politics as the artifice regulating the ever-present threat of the natural, or violence, while he rejected the conception of non-violence as the mere absence of violence. Gandhi was a great politician whose singular ambition was to get independence for India and he did whatever he could to get to do that. He used the method of non-violence for this mission.
However, Gandhi never claimed to be a philosopher, he was either Indian or occidental. He never acknowledged any thought-system as perfect and hence worth following, not evens the religious kind. Gandhi’s system has been allowed its maximum articulation such that it approaches its limit and its telos. Methodology had always been a problem regarding Gandhi. In this matter Gandhi himself added several complications by suggesting that one must follow his most recent writing if one encounters a conflict in the corpus and at the same time asserting that all he ever wrote since the Hind Swaraj were corollaries of it.
In the current atmosphere of theoretical discourse and political posture that gags the Master in whose ‘native name’ there should be speech, although the Master himself shall not speak, the speech of Master is still some other Master’s words, that ‘of western thought’—one, the Master of authority and the other, the Master of words. Hence, Gandhi often speaks of gargoyle of the fashionable theory though Gandhi’s writings and transcripts of speeches run into more than a hundred volumes.
In brief, what Gandhi’s liberating thought questions is all that the West has wanted to put into the word ‘humanism’. Yet what moved Gandhi was indeed the concern for a human life freed from its frenetic Western pace, attuned to a just rhythm. Above all, it is exactly this frenetic pace (this ‘speed’, as Gandhi put it) that is increasingly questioned from within the heart of the West today. And what Contemporary thinkers, especially in Europe, have been concerned with for quite some time exactly is what the words ‘man’ or ‘human’ and ‘humanist’ ideas encompass, after having worried about the ‘preterhuman’ perspectives of vision designated as totalitarian—since Gandhi’s time, and to say nothing about ‘transhumanist’ oracles spreading today as viewed in the forward of the book by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Finally, in conclusion, Mohan and Dwivedi call attention that we are in the Gandhian era of criticalisation. Critique is also the work that develops and trains within the system the powers for future encounters. Gandhi adopted the style of a critique, particularly that of Thomas Taylor, when it came to his analysis of the effects of modern technologies in the villages of the subcontinent.
Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi seem to have thought seriously of doing on Gandhi and Philosophy though many scholars exclaim about this. A figure of spiritual resistance to modernity, today Gandhi draws the limits of geopolitics as we can test them in the planetary regression characteristics of the beginning of this century. The authors of the book reveal the main lines of Gandhi’s thought circumscribing the limits of the East–West division as well as the ambiguities of a politics of resistance whose projects have been, ultimately, to create a Hindu nation invested with a global eschatological mission.
This book presents a hitherto unexplored, critical dimension to contemporary debates on truth and fidelity. Gandhi’s remarkably different uses of these two terms have not received sufficient attention. He re-interpreted the concept of passive resistance or non-violent protest in the neologism Satyagraha, literally, holding fast to the truth. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi’s Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theoretical Anti-politics is an intellectual penetration to examine Gandhian thought. It is a sophisticated reflection on modernity in its own right. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical resources, Gandhi and Philosophy succeeds in expanding new vistas of thought, which gives us a radically new Gandhi. The book is a most valuable contribution to orient us towards the Gandhian thought.