by Stella Xia
Prompt: Gandhi offers a sustained critique of “modern civilization.” Apply Gandhi’s criticisms of modern civilization to the representation of civilization in another text on our reading list and assess your findings.
“We are the innately philosophical animal, moral and political theoreticians by trade, forced to an unending concern with what we are and who we can and should be.” (Chapman, 313)
That our conceptions of the moral self build our conceptions of moral civilization is not an especially assertive claim. Still, it is nonetheless remarkable the cultural ubiquity of such a phenomenon, and the subjects of this essay are a prime example: upon a closer reading, it becomes apparent that Gandhi’s view of society is not so different from that of Nietzsche or Freud. All three see civilization as an extension of the self and a manifestation of human nature, acknowledging that humans have equal capacity based on their internal states to create an environment of love and community as well as greed and exploitation. However, the moral assignations attributed to each scholar’s unique view of civilization depend on the culture and politics in which they are situated: in particular, Nietzsche and Freud attempt to rationally analyze the source of virtue, while Gandhi’s traditional religious ideals come prepackaged with its own morality system and associated practice, one that delineates between a “natural” or “true” state of self and a corrupt one mapped respectively onto a “true” and “false” civilization. Notably, Nietzsche and Freud do not make such moral distinctions. Although the Western scholars agree with the existence of these dichotomous world states as following from the individual, they contradict him by arguing for their inevitable coexistence, positing that both conventionally virtuous and sinful aspects of civilization find their origin in one unchangeable human nature, not two, and therefore, immorality as popularly conceived cannot be banished in the way Gandhi envisions while still preserving morality. For Nietzsche, the piety Gandhi necessitates in his ideal image of India is merely a manifestation of slave morality; for Freud, it is a coping mechanism for inescapable suffering. Similarly, Gandhi’s godless and developed modern India is analogous to Nietzsche’s powerful master morality, as well as the social productivity arising from Freud’s sublimation of libido. This essay will position Gandhi, the East, and religion across from Nietzsche, Freud, the West, and reason in the analysis of how traditional and modern civilizations are moralized based on the interpretation of individual human nature, ultimately concluding with a broader speculation about the influence of political environment on how we decide we ought to live.
Gandhi’s argument is parallel to Freud and Nietzsche in one key respect: he attributes the social condition to the sum of its parts, that is, its people. The book begins with the rejection of English occupation, proclaiming it a self-imposed oppressive force rather than an external one and asserting famously that “We alone keep [the British]” (Gandhi 40) and India is wholly responsible for its own subjugation. Gandhi cites godlessness and overzealous materialism as the source of the problem, criticizing Indians for chasing “worldly pursuits” over holy ones and losing sight of their sense of duty and moral compass (41). This is further developed by his indictment on railways and doctors, which is similarly founded on the premise of straying from what God intended: railways are man’s abuse of intellect to override the “limit to a man’s locomotive ambition” (49), leading to cultural overstimulation and the unnatural spreading of evil, and the burgeoning medical profession is an “institution for propagating sin” that “violate[s] our religious instinct” (61-62) by using the availability of cures to encourage vice and indulgence. It follows, then, that “true civilisation” is closely related to individual observance of religious duty, a framework of happiness based in acknowledgement of finitude and appreciation of tradition (66). Therefore, the home rule that he advocates must arise from the individual, and “has to be experienced by each one for himself” (71) in the training of passive resistance, which involves a strengthening of one’s body and mind to face the self-sacrifice necessary to stay true to the values of swaraj. On a collective scale, such an endeavour is crucial to shrugging off English influence and enhancing the resilient spirit of the country.
John W. Chapman, in his 1977 essay “Toward a Theory of Human Nature and Dynamics”, classifies both Nietzsche and Freud as instinctivists in their conception of the self, one of three psychological theories in Western politics alongside plasticity (the belief that we are infinitely malleable by culture or habit, epitomized by behaviourists like Skinner) and developmentalism (the Rousseauian idea that we are a host of unrealized potentialities that may or may not manifest based on our institutions and belief systems). Instinctivists join Plato in the recognition of “subterranean drives … decisive for thought and motive” (Chapman 296). At its extreme, they believe that there is a singular, unchanging internal force that drives all action: for Nietzsche, this force presents itself as a will to power, which controls the morality of society as a whole; he understands history as a continuous chain of power struggles, a lens he uses to explain the authority of value systems thus far taken for granted. In questioning the origin of constructs, he reliably arrives at deeper, inalienable truths about the human condition: the innate pleasure of cruelty gave rise to punishment (Nietzsche 41), the pleasure of protection (“the basic relationship of the creditor to his debtor”, 46) to community, and the “consciousness of power” (47), or the awareness of the superiority necessary for withholding punishment, to mercy. Although Nietzsche’s analysis is more chronological than cross-sectional, he nonetheless relates the conception of society to the cumulative expression of life acting “in its basic functions–in an injuring, violating, pillaging, destroying manner”, or else as “partial restrictions of the true will … as means for creating greater units of power” (50), analogous to Gandhi’s relating natural godly duty to the Indian spirit.
However, instinctivism in its more moderate form sees its subscribing members advocating for a “multiplicity of propensities or dispositions, more or less independent and autonomous, and yet sufficiently compatible to render us ambivalent rather than incongruent creatures” (Chapman 296). Freud exemplifies this variation of the school of thought, proposing multiple ideas for the root of human activity. For one, he cites all conduct as motivated by either the pursuit of pleasure (“the pleasure principle”, Freud 43) or the avoidance of displeasure. His idea that there lies a subconscious of which we lack awareness holds remarkable explanatory power for the components of civilization, even seemingly contradictory ones. This subconscious suffering-avoidance becomes both “voluntary isolation”, a turning-away from a painful world, as well as a joining of hands against it – becoming part of the “human community … working with all for the good of all” (45). Community, however, is explained in parallel with a force he dubs Eros, or libido, which for reasons to which he admits ignorance endeavours to “combine single human individuals … into one great unity, the unity of mankind”. Friendship and communal love, then, are merely inhibited sexual desire channelled into an avenue with less disappointment (82). Additionally, the titular discontents plaguing civilization are attributable to none other than the death instinct, which turns into aggression that grapples with our libido on an individual level in a manner directly reflective of civilizational development. Freud asserts that “[t]his struggle of civilization may … be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species” (111); every human phenomenon is also by extension a social one, and thus the tensions of our internal instincts predict the tensions in our interactions – the standard of cleanliness, for instance, is merely a manifestation of human “anal erotism”, or our supposed infantile obsession with excretory function (74). As per the instinctivist worldview, these human phenomena are all manifestations of drives that make up fundamental humanity.
Where Gandhi fundamentally differs, though, is the moral perspective ingrained in his approach to civilization. The impetus behind his work is political antagonism, meaning that he must necessarily start with a “bad” in mind that can be cleaved from the “good”. Thus “modern civilization” is mobilized and villainized, a force acting on human nature instead of being a product of it: he calls the modern mode of governance a “disease”, but also specifies on multiple counts its partition from the English people, who are only “at present afflicted by it” (Gandhi 37) and have the potential to turn themselves around if they so choose. In contrast, the “true” civilization he seeks is the core of human nature, a truth without which “the universe would disappear” (87); that soul-force has prevailed in spite of turmoil over centuries is “the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force” (88). The characterization of modernity as transient and moral spirit as permanent, aside from an Englishman’s “Indianisation” being synonymous with his uncovering of humanity (72), is not self-servingly arbitrary, but rather rooted in religious principle. Gandhi calls modern civilization “irreligion” and contrary to dharma (36), the law that governs the universe of which the core is pity (86); his faith, his belief that some truths are higher than others, is Hind‘s foundation.
For Gandhi, religion is more than just a belief system – it is a way of life, and thus “every activity of a man of religion must be derived from his religion, because religion means being bound to God, that is to say God rules your every breath” (Karuvelil 55). When he advocates for true civilization, he advocates not just for the eradication of innovation, but a collective embracing of faith, regardless of what form it may take. In the essay “Gandhi on Religion in Public Life”, George Karuvelil highlights how the tension between Gandhi’s belief in all-encompassing religiosity and his secularist political stance is reconciled by the fact that, unlike Western secularism in which faith and reason are mutually exclusive, the nonconformity of the government to any particular faith enables the harmony of India’s pluralistic religious setting so that “[o]n the strength of merit … a Christian could be the Chief Minister without exhibiting greater merit than a Hindu or Muslim” (56). Morality, then, is not dictated by the specific strand of faith, but the general presence and practice in an individual, a “solitary spiritual journey of ‘self-realization or knowledge of self'” in pursuit of the great Truth (59), which is subjectively interpreted and adapted for the optimization of the pursuer’s life. By identifying commonalities among every faith, this ethos grants the state a moral compass, an Eternal Law that transcends discrete belief systems, revolving around ahimsa, or care for all living beings. This may be further broken down self-suffering, or discipline imposed only upon oneself to “vindicate his particular view of truth” (64), and suffering-love, in which one suffers in service of his fellow living beings. These tenets combined make up the satyagraha philosophy, Gandhi’s brand of nonviolent resistance against British occupation. Religion to Gandhi is understood as morality and thus intimately related to public life, informing his political activism against the divine deprivation of the English.
In absence of a God to substantiate moral claims, the atheistic Nietzsche and Freud adopt a much more passive, rational stance in their discussion of civilization, exhuming the fruits of their analytic approach for notions of good and bad. The phenomena they observe about society are not different than Gandhi’s – both point out selflessness, religion, and a sense of moral duty as well as human progress and self-interest as features of the community living experience – but instead of an ultimatum between faithful and faithless, they are positioned as coexisting. Nietzsche agrees with the setup of Gandhi’s conflict in that there are two moralities at war with each other, but in Nietzsche’s conception there is no valorization of asceticism; a victor is not self-evident. Gandhi’s “true civilization”, for Nietzsche, is simply the slave morality, which “always needs an opposite and external world” (Nietzsche 19), and is ideologically bound to an ascetic ideal that follows from the ressentiment of powerlessness. Therefore, “modern civilization” – what Gandhi calls sacrilege – Nietzsche calls flourishing, master morality, “spirits strengthened by wars and victories” (66). And instead of one necessarily vanquishing the other by way of godly sanction, Nietzsche contends for the never-ending battle of “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome” (31), fueled by collectivized wills against the backdrop of imbalanced power dynamics, not religion as motivator but humanity.
Freud goes even further, abandoning Gandhi and even Nietzsche’s temporal analysis and placing both moral and immoral civilization on the same timeline, implying that the societal condition can simultaneously display virtue and vice. For him, religion is also a human construction, attributable to a number of causes: a misinterpretation of the “oceanic feeling” (Freud 25), the need for a paternal figure in the face of “infantile helplessness” (36), a “lullaby about Heaven” to alleviate the strife of the death-instinct and Eros (111), or a preset path to happiness to avoid dealing with one’s own neuroses (56). The morality accompanying it serves only to “defen[d] against human aggressiveness” (146), a custom of loving thine neighbour to guard against acting on the repressed urge to attack or have sex with them.
However, he does not see belief in a higher power as antithetical to human flourishing like Nietzsche, but as branches of the same tree, equally symptoms of repressed desire. Freud fancied himself a rationalist, and, aside from adamantly avoiding any association with Nietzsche in his early career, heavily criticized the German philosopher for his moralizing of Christianity and “transform[ing of] ‘is’ into ‘ought’, which is alien to science”, deeming him unable to “free himself of the theologian” (Roazen 37). This is somewhat hypocritical of him, however, given that his later argument against the Christian edict to “love thy neighbour as thyself”, echoes Nietzsche (“The means employed by the ascetic priest with which we have thus far become acquainted – … ‘love of one’s neighbor’ … are, measured according to a modern standard, his innocent means in the battle with listlessness,” Nietzsche 99), only thinly veiled in an appeal to the rationality of his overarching instinctivist sentiment – he reasons that “I should be wrong to [love a stranger], for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on par with them” (Freud 92). Thus, Freud argues, such an edict is merely a compensatory measure against aggression or libido enacted upon such neighbours, and the super-ego’s conception of morality is civilization forcing the instincts inward, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “internalizing of man”, in which “the entire inner world … has taken on depth, breadth, height to the same extent that man’s outward discharging has been obstructed” (Nietzsche 57).
Interestingly, Nietzsche and Freud are not immune to the arbitering good and bad that comes out so clearly in Gandhi’s ideology; rather, they obscure their morals in an analytical framework rather than a faith-based one. Gandhi’s modern civilization – characterized by progress and innovation driven by power hierarchies – is analogous to Nietzsche’s master morality, both of which are then analogous to Freud’s sublimation, the “displacements of libido” into higher pursuits in an effort to evade base physical suffering (48). Gandhi and Nietzsche are actually aligned in that Gandhi is the manifestation of Nietzsche’s great fear, the realization of a shrewd and compassionate ascetic priest who “intuits this instinct [for herd organization] and fosters it” (Nietzsche 98); Gandhi, however, celebrates his Nietzschean priesthood as a quest towards Absolute Truth and would revolt at the “spirits strengthened by wars and victories” on which Nietzsche waits anxiously (66). Freud proves the least attached to either end, arguing for the most part with indifference that the technological flourishing that Gandhi so abhors is driven by the same mechanism of the abhorrence itself, “the non-satisfaction … of powerful instincts” (Freud 75) as a source of both innovation and the religious activism against it, and it would consequently be impossible to cauterize one consequence of these instincts without also affecting the others.
Chapman’s essay raises a fascinating debate on whether there is an innate, unchanging morality derived from some core truth about human nature (“A good man is, perhaps, one who is courageous, temperate, wise, prudent, liberal and just; and whatever the moral or ideological fashion of the times, such a picture … cannot change”, Chapman 298), or whether the often contradictory plurality of our natures, the fragment of truth to which each aforementioned psychological model lays claim, forces us to “choose among drastically different values and ways of life … that would account for the variety of human cultures” (Chapman 300). In other words, is Gandhi wrong about morality’s inherence to God? Are Freud and Nietzsche wrong about morality’s inherence to aggression? Or are all three valid anthropological samples of arbitrary value selection based on culture? He makes a distinction between the penchant towards rationality of the West, finding its roots in the “legalistic ethics of the Hebrews and the legal unity of the Greek polis”, and the “arbitral, ethical, and totalizing modes of thought” characteristic of the East (316), noting that Gandhi himself was opposed to legal order. This culturally-informed dichotomy offers a plausible explanation for the differing conceptions of morality between Western and Eastern thinkers as presented in this essay; Nietzsche and Freud as analytical and Gandhi as spiritual. Upon acknowledging the merits of each point of view, Chapman ultimately concludes that regardless of the true source of morality, it is self-evident across all culture that we have a drive to politicize our beliefs, regardless of what the beliefs are, that “what becomes of men depends on the kind of social and political unity they achieve” (316). For instance, religions like Gandhi’s Hinduism “offer ‘ … the genuinely reasonable way to live … , given the facts of life …'”; it coheres naturally from a certain perspective of the world how we should hope to inhabit it (298). The question of how civilization is conceived is closely relates to how we conceive our morals, which is in turn held flush against how we conceive ourselves.
Gandhi’s moral interpretation of civilization stems from his understanding of morality as rooted in God; for Nietzsche and Freud, morality and God are both rooted in the instincts, a conclusion informed by Western rationalist ideals. Yet, all three writers acknowledge, in a time of shifting political and by extension moral allegiances, that the influence of a people can amass staggering change. In Gandhi’s protest against the English, this manifests as his insistence upon the rediscovery of the Indian spirit, its goodness affirmed by the same ascetic ideal that Nietzsche warns will make us nihilistic sheep. Freud, meanwhile, plays mediator, demanding from the human condition both extremes at the same time without needing to compromise, though still agreeing with Nietzsche’s physiologically-founded conception of humanity. Despite the complexities in their dialogue, the three thinkers nonetheless all stumble into agreement on one point, perhaps our strongest case yet for a universal truth: how we ought to live is inextricably tied to who we ought to be.
Works Cited
Chapman, John W. “Toward a Theory of Human Nature and Dynamics.” Nomos, vol. XVII, 1977, pp. 292-319.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Co, 2010.
Gandhi, Mohandas. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Edited by Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Karuvelil, George. “Gandhi on Religion in Public Life.” Indian Philosophical Studies, vol. V, 2001, pp. 53-79.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, Hackett Pub. Co, 2009.
Roazen, Paul. Political theory and the psychology of the unconscious : Freud, J.S. Mill, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Fromm, Bettelheim and Erikson. Open Gate Press, 2000.