Abstract
While Heidegger and Gandhi share the conviction that conflict is an inevitable feature of the human condition, they differ on what that conflict entails and what it may accomplish. For Gandhi, human finitude means that any individual and any culture will have only a partial perspective on the truth, whether in religious matters or in questions of justice, and therefore conflict is the necessary result of these differences. Although Heidegger also argues that we are finite beings, he would disagree with Gandhi’s view that we may critique ourselves and our institutions in the light of a truth that, if only partially glimpsed, transcends our particularity. For Heidegger, there is no transcendence to a world of timeless principles and ideals, only the immanence of historical belonging. This means that while Heidegger believes that conflict plays a role in refining a community’s sense of its own historical destiny, he would condemn as nihilism Gandhi’s view that conflict can invite us to transcend ourselves. For Heidegger, genuine conflict reveals the opponents as incommensurable enemies; for Gandhi, the goal of conflict must always be the possibility of reconciliation, and conflict must unfold in a way to promote this. The essay argues that Gandhi’s position on what I call soft enmity offers a more promising understanding of the dialectic between our rootedness in historical traditions and our need to judge those traditions by standards that go beyond them.
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Notes
- 1.
Hannah Arendt called Heidegger “the hidden king” of German philosophy in the 1920s; see Arendt (1978).
- 2.
In 1946, Gandhi wrote about the “cataclysmic changes in the world” brought about by the atom bomb and that “without the recognition of this truth [namely, truth of satyagraha as a moral force in each of us], and due effort to realize it, there is no escape from self-destruction.” The truth he means is the realization that every human being bears within, even if only dormant, the twin spiritual force of truth and non-violence. See Gandhi (2003, 279–80).
- 3.
See Martin Heidegger (1962, 1).
- 4.
See the entry for es- in Watkins (1985, 17).
- 5.
We will render satya as capitalized Truth to emphasize its distinctive importance in Gandhi’s thought; this is consistent with conventions for translating key Hindu terminology.
- 6.
Quoted in Bondurant (1965, 19).
- 7.
Gandhi (1957, xiv).
- 8.
I would argue, though I do not have space to do so here in full, that Gandhi’s notion of being a seeker after Truth has a great deal in common with Plato’s understanding of the nature of the philosophical life. See Fried (2006), where I argue that Plato distinguishes between zetetic and echonic philosophy, where the former understands truth as a goal to strive for, the latter as a possession to be owned. In my reading, Plato comes down decisively in favor of philosophy as zetetic: as guided by heuristic ideals, as constructively skeptical and non-dogmatic, and yet still able to make claims about justice.
- 9.
Gandhi (1982, 67), quoted from Young India, April 27, 1927.
- 10.
Heidegger (2010, 118), translation amended.
- 11.
For a discussion of this connection, see Parkes (1987).
- 12.
Gandhi (2003, 273).
- 13.
For example, in speaking of his experiments with Truth and how far he still has to go: “I must reduce myself to zero.” And: “Not until we have reduced ourselves to nothingness can we conquer the evil in us.” And: “The first step towards moksha is freedom from attachment. Can we ever listen with pleasure to anyone talking about moksha so long as our mind is attached to a single object in this world?” See Gandhi (1982, 35, 62) and Gandhi (2003, 81, 28–29, 170).
- 14.
Heidegger (1989, 171). For a discussion of this passage, see Polt (2006, 174). Heidegger is obviously referring to Buddhism’s goal of release in nirvana from life’s cycle of suffering, rather than Hinduism’s deliverance through moksha, but I believe it is fair to say that he would see both notions as closely related and nihilistic, because they seek to nullify the tragic nature of existence through an escape to something beyond it.
- 15.
Heidegger (2010, 127).
- 16.
See Fried (2000, 19, 233).
- 17.
See Gandhi (1982, 54 and passim).
- 18.
Gandhi (1982, 56).
- 19.
- 20.
I take responsibility for this rendering of Heraclitus’ fragment 53, although I gratefully acknowledge advice from Martin Black. The Greek, transliterated, is: pólemos pántôn men patêr esti, pántôn de basileús, kai tous men theoùs édeixe tous de anthrôpous, tous men doúlous epoíêse tous de eleuthérous.
- 21.
Heidegger (2010, 90–91); translation amended.
- 22.
- 23.
Huntington (1993). See also Huntington (1996), which removes the question mark and expands upon the thesis. It is worth noting, given the argument later in this essay, that Huntington’s final sentence in the original articles was this: “For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.” On this point, Huntington and I agree that we cannot address reality by simply imposing ideal theory upon it. The question remains, of course, what the ideal should be, and to what extent we can realize it in the messy present of the real and not allow that reality to overwhelm what improvements might be possible. Once again, Gandhi’s pragmatic idealism seems to me to strike the right balance, even if one might not agree with his particular policies or his method of nonviolence.
- 24.
See Heidegger (1991).
- 25.
Gandhi (2003, 29).
- 26.
For example, see Gandhi (1962, 60–85). “I would no more think of asking a Christian or a Musalman or a Parsi or a Jew to change his faith than I would of changing my own” (1962, 66). Gandhi allows that true conversions may occur, but he is suspicious of missionaries of any faith, particularly those who prey on the poor, depriving them of their indigenous faith and thereby “destroying their social superstructure, which notwithstanding its many defects has stood now from time immemorial the onslaughts upon it from within and from without” (1962, 67).
- 27.
It is worth comparing Gandhi on this point with a contemporary political theorist such as David Miller, who argues in Miller (1997) that liberal-minded people should not be afraid to embrace the idea of nationality, which can subsist in the context of respect for other national identities without leading to crude nationalism.
- 28.
Schneeberger (1962, 148–149); my translation.
- 29.
Quoted in Fried (2000, 180); translation amended.
- 30.
- 31.
I am grateful to Richard Polt for suggesting this point.
- 32.
Another fruitful topic for comparison between Heidegger and Gandhi would be the question of technology and globalization, but there is no space for that here. Both are deeply suspicious of the modernist project for the conquest of nature, and both believe that technology uproots human beings from their attachments to tradition and to nature.
- 33.
See also Eisikovits (2010), where he has argued that openness understood as sympathy may be the royal road to forms of peace-making that are all the more successful because they don’t presume to settle all the sources of a given conflict at once.
- 34.
See Fried (2006).
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Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the comments and critiques of Richard Polt and Joseph Prabhu, who read early drafts of this essay.
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Fried, G. (2013). Heidegger and Gandhi: A Dialogue on Conflict and Enmity. In: MacLachlan, A., Speight, A. (eds) Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5201-6_4
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