Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17. The details of the conference may be read here. A pdf file of the address is downloadable here - DS
Satyagraha - An answer to modern
nihilism
Dilip
Simeon
Keynote
address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference
Ramjas
College, March 17-18 2016
Zilu stopped for the night at
Stone Gate.
The gatekeeper said, Where are
you from?
Zilu said, From the household of
Confucius.
The gatekeeper said, The one who
knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying? - from the
Analects of Confucius (14:40)
What is truth? asked jesting
Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon
In fact it is more correct to say
Truth is God than to say God is Truth
– Mohandas Gandhi
Introduction:
The
human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This
feature of humanity is noticed across cultures and across time. The Bhagwad
Gita notes that:
Hunger, sleep, fear and sex are common to men and
animals //
What distinguishes men from animals is the knowledge
of right and wrong.[1]
In
his Introduction to the lectures on the philosophy of
world history, Hegel remarks:
This is the hallmark of the sublime and absolute
destiny of man - that he knows what good and evil are, and that it is his will
which chooses either the one or the other. In short, he can be
held responsible, for good as well as for evil, and not just this or that
particular circumstance and for everything around him and within him, but also
for the good and evil which are inherent in his individual freedom. Only the
animal can be described as totally innocent.’ [2]
Socrates,
executed in 399 BCE for corrupting the young with atheism, epitomised the
philosopher’s quest for the answer as to what constituted the good and just
life. So at the heart of the perennial human search for wisdom, lies the belief
that the polis is a community of beings
that perceive good and evil, who are aware that a difference exists between justice
and injustice, even if they can’t seem to act upon that knowledge. If we accept
Leo Strauss’ observation that the struggle between belief and unbelief - in
other words the question of the source of our moral obligations - is the
deepest theme of human history, then clearly this is not just a bridge between
east and west, but a marker of our common humanity.
Equally
significant is the distinction between scientific truth and human experience. Science
is a product of the human spirit, but human nature is not fully explicable by
science. Truth is larger than science. Scientific methods can help explorations
of human behavior, but there are matters - including ethical ones – which science
cannot adjudicate. If this is true, the matter has philosophical implications.
Our nihilist time
The
indications of nihilism lie in everyday life. They include the sense that all
opinions are equally valid, that there are no standards of truth, that life is meaningless
and ethical judgements pointless. It appears in the replacement of dialogue by
cynicism; the evaporating distinctions between Right and Left, and the
religious character of ideologies. All these indicate an erosion of meaning and
the decline of language.
Some
outstanding features of this reality are as follows – the concept of truth is
seen as irrelevant, powerless, or rendered subject to interest groups or
historical context (relativism and historicism). In each case truth is replaced
by, or subordinated to utility, ie its efficacy in the quest for power. This
results in alethiological nihilism, or the denial that truth
possesses reality.
The impulse
to overcome the tension between subject and object undermines our
sense of objectivity.
When only the Subject remains all theories become
interpretations. In their dogmatic form such interpretations do not permit
dialogical truth-searching. Furthermore, we are left with no means of
distinguishing between historical events and accounts of those events. This
reinforces the effects of historicism. These tendencies result in epistemological
nihilism, the denial of the possibility of knowledge.
The
ancient debate between reason and revelation acquired a nihilist dimension in
the quest for a civic religion. Must political life be governed by divine or human
guidance? For centuries the civic religion thesis has been concerned with the
utility of religion rather than its truth. This may be called utilitarian
nihilism, or the belief that goodness and knowledge are fully discharged in
usefulness.
The
reduction of truth to scientific certitude undermines the conversation on
justice and the good life. We cannot measure goodness. Since mathematics is
ethically neutral, we are left with the conclusion that human behavior cannot
have any reasonable standards of conduct. This is a version of ethical nihilism.
Ethical
nihilism also arises out of the cynicism and despair caused by undeserved
suffering. Religion attempts to justify such suffering by reference to God’s
plan to render good out of evil (theodicy). Secular versions of theodicy may be
seen in ideologies that replace God with History. The arguments of these ideologies
are basically prophetic: History will redeem our pain in a reconciled future.
Theodicy is religious, and nihilism despairs of God - but the contradiction is
illusory. What has taken place is not
the end of transcendental thinking but its displacement. It is the
future that has now acquired a religious dimension – this is true for market
fundamentalism as well as other forms of utopian thought.
The
use of religion by the state (civic religion), the use of the state by the
priesthood (theocracy), and the elevation of the mathematical sciences to an
object of belief (‘scientism’) – lead to ethical nihilism.
This is exemplified by the advent of propaganda, which makes the idea of goodness
a slave to the requirements of the state. Propaganda is not a particularly modern
phenomenon, but has acquired fresh complexity in the era of total war that
began with 1789.
All these forms of nihilism have a terrible impact
upon public morality. The evil we do in the present is transformed into virtue by God
or by History. Our gaze is turned backwards, to control the uncontrollable
past, and forwards to an ever-retreating horizon. Before we reach it, all
crimes are forgiven; after we cross it, there will be no crime. Therefore our
actions in the present may only be judged by future generations. The end
justifies the means, and since we are always in transit we can do what we want.
History places us beyond good and evil.
If transcendental thinking has not disappeared, but
remains with us in the form of orthodox religious beliefs, civic religions, political
ideologies and mixtures of all of these, the distinguishing feature of nihilism
may not be the all-too-human aspiration for transcendence. The distinction
might lie in what activities appear as justified to the doer, rather
than the need for faith-based justification. In brief, the matter of nihilism
and its antidote rests with our understanding of human action, and its relation
to time.
Here
are some questions that arise out of this situation:
1/ Are
there philosophical truths that transcend time and place? If so, how do they
relate to the present?
2/ Are
there permanent limits to scientific knowledge? If so, is there a place for
metaphysical speculation?
3/ Does
the ancient debate over divine guidance throw light upon contemporary politics?
4/ Is
there a way out of nihilism?
These
questions have pre-occupied philosophers for centuries. If we think about them
too, we might achieve a better understanding of our present.
Divine versus human guidance
Leo Strauss
believed the most basic question of political philosophy to be the question of reason
versus revelation: “No alternative is more fundamental than this: human
guidance or divine guidance.” [3]
He also learned from Ibn Sina (Avicenna) that the question had been posed by
Plato, in his dialogues on law. [4]
He believed that the dispute between religion and science had not been settled decisively in favour of
one or the other. If there were indeed basic questions about life and existence
that could not be answered scientifically, then philosophy would have to
address such questions insofar as they affected social life – in brief, it
would need to make room for political philosophy. These include matters of the
origins of law, the determination of a just social order, the legitimation of
rulership, and the quality of goodness.
Regardless
of the content of this conversation (between philosophy and belief), the theorists
of civic religion argued in favour of using religious authority to buttress the
status of man-made law. Thus Rousseau opined: ‘The legislator therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or
reason, must have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of
constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.’ This was why
the legislator’s decisions had to be placed ‘into
the mouth of immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom
human prudence could not move.’ The difficulty, as Rousseau himself noted,
was that ‘it is not everybody who can
make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their
interpreter.’ [5]
The
highest possible ground of law is God, but the word of God is always
transmitted through a human medium. This immediately opens the door to faith
and it’s opposite. Given the plurality of claims to revelation, we are always
left with the moment of judgment, which has to be philosophic, hence human, and
hence potentially blasphemous. Moreover, is it enough to say sovereignty is a
human not a divine matter? Once it is based upon the theory of the perpetuity
of power, does it not become an ‘artificial version of eternity... a
re-appropriation of eternity’? [6] And
who or what is the guarantor of eternal power?
This predicament
points to three further problems: one, the dispute between reason and
revelation is intractable; two, religion cannot legislate among its followers
because of internal dogmatic fragmentation; and three, the perfect and
conflict-free polity is a feature of messianic thinking, or prophetism. We may justifiably
ask all believers whether and why their love for God automatically subtracts
from their love for humanity; and notwithstanding their answer, carry on with
humanity’s long-standing efforts to establish self-correcting political institutions
based on dialogue.
Nation-worship as right-wing atheism
Civic
religion puts religion to work for purposes of civic order and stable rule. (We
must remember the distinction with theocracy, which uses state power to
implement God’s will, as interpreted by clerics).[7]
It is concerned not with the truth but the manipulation of belief. But a God
who is simultaneously the creator of the universe and the flag-bearer of a
chosen people is a herald of conflict. The image of German and Allied soldiers
coming out of their trenches on Christmas eve to sing carols during the Great
War of 1914-19 should be enough to remind us of this terrible irony. [8]
The
problem became endemic in the world order that emerged after the First World
War. The recently overthrown empires had been grounded in Divine Right, but their
successor polities were not accustomed to democratic governance. The matter was
further complicated by the multi-cultural nature of the societies in which anti-colonial
movements began in mid 20th century. Let us keep in mind that the
perception of being beset with external and internal enemies
is essential to the language of nationalism - the Versailles model of the nation-state is by very
definition the home of a natural majority and problematic minorities.
If majoritarianism is a way of saying that might is
right, and further, the ‘nation’ is conceived of as a homogenous entity with a
unifying civic religion, the enactment of this
kind of nationalist idea in a multi-religious
society like India was always fraught with violent potential. The ideal of a
homogenous nation-state cannot sustain itself except at a terrible cost in
human life. The Bolshevik exhortations to ‘oppressed nationalities’ were a
political challenge to the British empire but their theoretical core was not
markedly different from the Wilsonian idea of self-determination, which was itself
indebted to the Russian socialist movement. This doctrine is incapable of
resolving the problem of who defines the self. Both versions of national
self-determination were sought to be applied in pre-1947 India. Gandhi’s idea of
anti-imperial resistance was founded on a different approach altogether.
The
battles being fought today lie within the tradition of political theology.
Whereas Carl Schmitt’s avowed philosophical mentor Hobbes sidestepped the issue
of truth and justice by recourse to a realism of power, authority, pain and
pleasure, Schmitt himself correctly insisted on the metaphysical core of all
politics that lay embedded in the concept of sovereignty. His authoritarian deceit
lay in his nationalism and decisionism. By making the friend-enemy distinction
the very definition of politics, absorbing Nazi anti-Semitic paranoia into his
legal theories, and making emergent situations (the famous ‘he who decides on
the exception’) into the first norm of sovereignty, Schmitt incorporated
political thought into warfare, a move which transformed wisdom into ideology. The
warrior-mentality was imported wholesale into democratic politics, and utilized
to justify Nazi tyranny as an expression of the people’s will. As the world has
seen, a claim to wisdom hinged on ethnic affiliation undermines itself and
overthrows the ‘strong affinity between philosophy and peace.’ [9]
The nihilist
pathways of political theology led to the nationalisation of religious belief
on the one hand, and the deification of the Nation on the other. (Robespierre
and the Jacobins failed in their experiment with the Goddess of Supreme Reason,
but inaugurated the era of Nation-worship). Over time, these ideological
processes have merged into new versions of atheism. No matter how often
‘religion’ appears in these doctrines, they are sustained not by God’s will,
but by patriarchy, martyrdom and eternal warfare. As Orwell warned us in 1984, war is not meant to be won, it is
meant to be continuous. The self-inflicted wounds of human consciousness have turned
it away from the pursuit of wisdom to the pursuit of power.
The attempt
to enforce civic religion in India led to a legitimation crisis of colossal
proportions. It is not possible to establish a stable polity in South Asia
based on a ‘national’ religion. The issue here is not the separation of
religion from politics, but from nationalism. What we call communalism – ideologies
that ground the concept of the nation on the presumption of an endangered
community – is a mode of politics that legitimizes the emergent situation, the
‘state of the exception’, to the point of rendering it permanent.
The gods of Athens [10]
Let
us turn to another time. Socrates utterances at his trial were a refutation of
the charge of impiety, but if he was pious, he was so in his own way. Plato’s Apology of Socrates demonstrates fleetingly
that Socrates must have believed in the gods of the city for the sheer fact
that he had accepted the Delphic oracle’s utterance that ‘no one is wiser than
Socrates.’ This utterance had set him off on his philosophical journey to
square the oracle’s view with his own knowledge that he was ignorant. Further,
he was able to trap his young accuser Meletos into a contradiction: he accused Socrates
of being a complete atheist yet acknowledged he was a believer in certain
daimonic things.
Again,
by comparing his own decision to philosophize with Achille’s decision to court
death in the Trojan war, Socrates stressed the nobility of individual
steadfastness. He did not acknowledge the gods of the poets, for, he said, no
god could wish evil to men. The Homeric gods were not gods at all. His own daimon, he said, had commanded him to
exhort Athenians to cultivate reasonableness, truth and the goodness of their
souls rather than wealth, fame and honour. He remarked that he had been given
to the city by ‘the god’ as a gadfly is given to a great but sluggish horse
that needs to be awakened.
Thus Plato’s
Apology was intended to show that
what Socrates meant by piety was not identical to ordinary piety. He was
convicted for atheism, but was he an atheist? It was on his own terms that he
was innocent. The god to whom he remained loyal till death was his daimon, which we can compare to
divinely-inspired conscience, and reminds us of Gandhi’s oft-mentioned ‘inner
voice’. He was both pious and impious - he could be held to be dismissive of
the gods of Athens, and his teachings could be judged to be undermining the
gods of the city. But Socrates held fast to his commitment - his was not a
localized faith but philosophia, the
love of wisdom, the divine madness.
Satya
Gandhi’s
discourses in prison in 1930 were significant for his philosophical
meditations. Thus:
The word Satya
(Truth) is derived from Sat which means being. And nothing is or exists in
reality except Truth. That is why Satya or Truth is the most important name of
God. In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth…
Where there is no Truth there can be no true knowledge. That is why the word
chit is associated with the name of God. And where there is true knowledge
there is always bliss (Ananda). Sorrow has no place there. And even as Truth is
eternal, so is the bliss derived from it. Hence we know God as
Sat-chit-ananda..[11]
His
approach to the question of divine versus human guidance is contained in a
response he made in 1936 to the query ‘where do you find the seat of authority?’
Pointing to his breast, Gandhi said:
It lies here. I
exercise my judgment about every scripture, including the Gita. I cannot let a scriptural text
supersede my reason. Whilst I believe that the principal books are inspired,
they suffer from a process of double distillation. Firstly, they come through a
human prophet, and then through the commentaries of interpreters. Nothing in
them comes from God directly. Mathew may give one version of one text and John
may give another. I cannot surrender my reason whilst I subscribe to Divine
revelation. And above all, ‘the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life.’ But
you must not misunderstand my position. I believe in Faith also, in things
where Reason has no place e.g., the existence of God. [12]
Coupled
with his oft-expressed belief that all religions were essentially paths to the
same God, this response opens up an approach that departs from the polarity of
human versus divine. His 1930 jail observations differentiate between religion
and faith, and religion and irreligion (his term for communalism). Truth was
God. All faiths were a revelation of Truth, but all were subject to error,
because the human apprehension of Truth was bound to be fragmentary. Just as
the human soul was one, yet animated a multiplicity of bodies, so also the
Truth was akin to the trunk of a tree, and the faiths akin to its many
branches. Separate doctrines were not divisive, but different approaches to
Truth. [13]
Indeed,
Gandhi made it a point to study the religious texts of the major religions of
the world, and asked his fellow Indians to do the same. Such was the practice
in his ashrams and it continued till
his last days, when he would insist on reading passages from all the holy books
to teach his grieving countrymen and women the lesson that it was not religion,
but human folly that was to blame for political tragedy. He dwelt on the need
to discern and correct errors in all faiths, especially our own, and suggested
that acceptable features of other faiths be blended into our own. It was
precisely the inevitability of imperfections that required humans to practice
tolerance.
Conjoined
with his insistence that he would use his judgment when it came to religious
texts, that the scriptures were not to be taken literally but allegorically, we
can see that Gandhi’s approach to religion was metaphysical, not doctrinal or
dogmatic. (This resonates with Socrates’ refusal to take the Homeric gods as
true representations of the divine). It combined an insistence on individual
reasoning with a profound commitment to his tradition – which was a melting pot
of Vaishnavism, Jainism and the teachings of Vivekananda, especially his
latterly-evolved concept of daridra-narayan
- the poor as god incarnate. All this helps us understand why the separation of
religion and politics was incomprehensible to Gandhi. Answering a query on this
issue in 1940, he remarked:
Indeed religion
should pervade every one of our actions. Here religion does not mean
sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe. It
is not less real because it is unseen. This religion transcends Hinduism,
Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and
gives them reality.[14]
Aside
from his ontological sense of truth, Gandhi also employed it in an empirical
sense, as in careful collation of the facts of the case, whether this related
to peasant distress, disputes between communities or negotiations with the
colonial government. Truth also evoked the meaning of individual authenticity. This
was evident in his repeated appeal for mindfulness, and the great significance
he attached to the individual conscience as an essential component of
nation-wide civic awakening. The many usages to which Gandhi put the concept of
truth convey the sense of an over-arching first principle. Truth is Being,
knowledge, wisdom and the good. Attaining it requires public service, and indeed
bringing truth to light requires the effort of all of humanity. Any claim to
exclusive possession of truth - as seen in evangelical religious impulses - implies
absolutism and the desire to dominate others, which he rejected.
Gandhi’s
commentary on the Gita, the Anasaktiyoga,
demonstrated his capacity for theological innovation. He contradicted those who
used the text as a justification for holy war. He insisted rather, that the
ancient sages had used war as a metaphor for the struggle within the human
soul. The meaning of words changed over time, and he was entitled to add his
own interpretation to them, which was that selfless action called for non-violence.
Thus satyagraha, or ‘holding fast to truth’
is not a political doctrine but a philosophical premise for right action at the
level both of the polity and in society at large. This action can have a
positive effect only if it is performed without selfish motives. Gandhi often
invoked the ideal of nishkaam karma-yoga
from the Bhagwad Gita – the doctrine of action without attachment to its fruit,
which has also been reformulated as ‘disinterested interest’. Since satya is both the premise and the quest
of the satyagrahi, his or her
activity is (or may be) political in the larger sense, but can remain non-ideological.
It can also be the basis for challenging unjust laws – and this is a
philosophical question, for it pits natural justice against the formal laws. Moreover,
swaraj, or the quest for self-recognition
had to be pursued by pure, that is, non-violent means - to indulge the impulse
to violence was to undermine the self. The satyagrahi
secure in her or his commitment to truth acquires serenity, and becomes a sthith-pragna, one who is imperturbable
in the face of all provocation.
Truth amidst annihilation
Socrates fought as a common soldier in Athen’s land
army during the Peloponnesian war that ended in 404 BCE. His execution in 399 BCE took place during a wave
of fundamentalism that saw a number of impiety cases in Athenian courts. It was a
time described by Thucydides thus: ‘Civil
war broke out in city after city and in places where the violence occurred
late, the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused
still new extravagances of fanatical zeal..’ He spoke of unheard-of
and revengeful atrocities and tells us how ‘words, too, had to change their
usual meanings… to think of the future and wait was merely another way of
saying one was a coward; any act of moderation was just an attempt to disguise
one's unmanly character... Neither side had any use for conscientious motives;
society had become divided into two ideologically
hostile camps…’[15]
Against this background, we
can understand that the piety of Socrates
was not an ordinary piety.
So
too was Gandhi killed at a moment when the world had barely emerged from the
worst war in history, and when India was torn apart by civil war and
blood-letting. So also, in his time was moderation seen to be an act of
betrayal, so too had many of his fellow-countrymen consigned all conscientious motives into the flames of
ideological hatred. As was Socrates, so indeed was Gandhi pious in his
own way, and yet seen by his enemies as betraying the god of the Nation, for
his god was Truth itself, and not a national god at all. Service to his people
was a means of serving humanity. From the standpoint of those for whom
nation-worship was the supreme piety, Gandhi was the supreme betrayer, an
atheist. If nation-worship is the atheism of modernity, the truly pious man was
‘executed’ for impiety by the atheists –India’s fanatic nation-worshippers
refer to his assassination as Gandhi-vadh
(execution) even today.
Across
the world today, we may see signs of the overrunning of truth by Schmitt’s friend-enemy
distinction. This signifies nothing less than the loss of the capacity to
think, a reversion to animal existence via an assault on the mind. The quest
for the good is the quest for the standard of right action. And that quest must
be conducted simultaneously in speech and in action. In the absence of truth,
speech is rendered meaningless. When speech is equivalent to silence, we are in
a nihilist condition. That we still continue to speak indicates that an answer
to nihilism exists, the first essential for which is satyagraha, holding fast to truth. We may philosophize about truth
being relative to identity, class location, or being an illusion inside a word
game or time-horizon, but such speculation is itself impossible without truth.
How can one make a crime out of truth? Socrates’ defence was a critique of
Athens and its laws, an exposure of its sophistries. It was made in a friendly
spirit, the last piece of wisdom he gave his city. If his piety and love for
goodness remained unintelligible to his peers, it was a function of their bad
faith. Or was it, as some of the Platonic dialogues suggest, a terrible mistake?
In that case the argument that evil has its roots in thoughtlessness is
strengthened. At the
time of his death a servant attached to his companions bade Socrates farewell
by calling him ‘the noblest, the gentlest, and the best.’ After the poison had
done its work, Phaedo, the former slave, composed an epithet for him: ‘the
best, the wisest and the most upright.’ [16]
Speaking
of Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, C. Rajagopalachari, India’s Governor-General
remembered Socrates and Christ. Fazlul Huq, ex-Premier of Bengal, compared
it to the tragedy of Karbala, and Louis Fischer said that all humanity
wept for this old man in a loin cloth. George
Bernard Shaw said, ‘It shows how dangerous it is to be good’. In India today,
Mohandas Gandhi is both an icon and a forlorn figure, even though his stature
in world history is assured. Ideological extremism has eroded our capacity to discern
goodness, as it did for the jury in Athens in 399 BCE. That twenty-five
centuries separate that event from our time shows that some things do not
change. There are indeed eternal verities and nihilism is an ever present
danger. But ordinary people still recognize such friends of humanity - on
India’s larger railway stations you can get a cheap Hindi paperback entitled Sukraat.
Napoleon’s
victory at the battle of Jena in 1806 coincided with Hegel’s completion of his
manuscript of The Phenomenology of Mind.
Hegel then lived in Jena, and famously commented that he had seen the World
Spirit on horseback ride out to survey his reign. In the midst of the first
total war, the philosopher of reconciliation could not foresee that two
centuries later, mindfulness itself would be in mortal danger, and the horse
would run away with the spirit. We may however, take courage in the tenacity
with which humanity clings to the memory of ‘the noblest, the gentlest, and the
best.’
References
[1] The Bhagwadgita; Tr S. Radhakrishnan, Bombay, George Allen
& Unwin, 1948, 1971, p 79
[2] G.W.F. Hegel; Introduction to the lectures
on the philosophy of world history, CUP, 1975; p 90
[3]
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and
History, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p 74
[4] Heinrich Meier, Leo
Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem; Cambridge University Press, 2006; p 12
[5] Jean-Jacques Rousseau; The Social
Contract and Discourses; Dent, London, 1983, pp 196-7
[6] Gerard Mairet, The Fable of the World: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freedom in Our Times; Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2010; p 54
[7] Ronald Beiner; Civil
Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy; CUP, New York, 2011, is an extensive and thought-provoking historical account of civil religion
theories
[8] See Steven Johns, The
Christmas Truce, 1914 here: https://libcom.org/history/christmas-truce-1914-steven-johns
[9] Robert Howse; Leo Strauss: Man of Peace; CUP; New
York, 2014; p 69. I owe a great deal to Howse’s careful explication of Strauss’
philosophy.
[10] This section and subsequent observations on Socrates’ trial and
its import for the question of piety and the law, relies on the following
articles in Timothy
W. Burns; Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political
Thought; Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2015: John C. Koritansky; Strauss on the Apology and Crito, pp 402-423; Wayne Ambler; An
Introduction to Strauss’ “An Untitled Lecture on Plato’s Euthyphron”
pp 361 – 378; Mark J. Lutz, The Argument and the
Action of Plato’s Laws, pp
424-442. Also see Debra Nails, The Trial
and Death of Socrates; in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds); A
Companion to Socrates, Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
Oxford, 2006, pp 5-20
[11] M.K. Gandhi, From Yeravada Mandir – Ashram Observances; Jivanji Desai, Ahmedabad, 1935 – p 1- 2
[12] CWMG, Vol 64 p 71; Discussion
with Basil Mathews and others (November
24, 1936)
[13] See Margaret Chatterjee,
Gandhi and the Challenge of Religious Diversity; Promilla & Co., New
Delhi, 2005, for a philosophically rich account of Gandhi’s ideas on religion.
[14] CWMG, Vol 71, p 177-178;
Harijan, February 10, 1940
[15] Thucydides, The
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III. I obtained this citation from Denis Dalton's moving essay on Gandhi during partition (click for pdf copy)
[16] See Debra Nails, The Trial
and Death of Socrates; referred
to above.
ALSO SEE:
Mohandas Gandhi: From Yeravada Mandir
Plato's Apology of Socrates, and Crito (the death scene), may be downloaded here
Plato's Apology of Socrates, and Crito (the death scene), may be downloaded here
The Other Side of Maoism
Communist Party of India's Homage to Gandhiji October 2, 1947 // Communist Party's Appeal to the People of Pakistan August 15, 1947
V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder
Madhu Limaye's (senior socialist leader) observations on the RSS (1979)
Communist Party of India's Homage to Gandhiji October 2, 1947 // Communist Party's Appeal to the People of Pakistan August 15, 1947
V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder
Madhu Limaye's (senior socialist leader) observations on the RSS (1979)
Jyoti Punwani - Let us not give our Islamic neighbour a run for its money
RSS Declared Unlawful: Text of GOI communique February 4, 1948
Smruti Koppikar - Maharashtra CM has no will to pursue my father’s murder
Petition in Supreme Court Accuses NIA of Soft-Pedaling Hindutva Terror Cases
After Malegaon, Ajmer Blast Case Faces Allegations of Sabotage // Witnesses turn hostile in Samjhauta case
The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism
RSS Declared Unlawful: Text of GOI communique February 4, 1948
Smruti Koppikar - Maharashtra CM has no will to pursue my father’s murder
Petition in Supreme Court Accuses NIA of Soft-Pedaling Hindutva Terror Cases
After Malegaon, Ajmer Blast Case Faces Allegations of Sabotage // Witnesses turn hostile in Samjhauta case
The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism
