Opinion In an age of hate, Gandhi shows the power of shaping our lives with patience, awareness
Modern art tends to treat the artwork as a product of inspired imagination. Gandhi, and others like him, have lived lives that can be seen as products of an inspired ethical imagination
Confucius’s idea of the junzi, the superior person, or the person who has achieved an ideal of human moral perfection, is readily applicable to Gandhi. About 15 years ago, I stopped reading Michel Foucault, even though I continued to regard him as an exceptionally resourceful thinker. I did so not out of intellectual exhaustion, but because certain questions about the genealogy of modern knowledge began to trouble me. While reading The Order of Things, especially its opening discussion of the Renaissance episteme, I was reminded of the ninth-century Shia encyclopaedia Ikhwan al-Safa and of the often unacknowledged debts European thought owes to Islamic civilisation. This reflection gradually distanced me from Foucault, though not from the problems he posed. I return to him here for an unexpected reason: Mahatma Gandhi. Thinking about Gandhi forces me to reconsider ethics not as a doctrine or rule, but as a way of shaping a life whose meaning is visible.
It was this reflection that unexpectedly led me back to Foucault last month, not to his entire body of work, but specifically to The History of Sexuality, Volume II, The Use of Pleasure. The immediate occasion was Gandhi. A friend asked me to think about a paper for a convention he was planning on Gandhi, and suggested that I speak on Gandhian aesthetics. As I struggled with this theme, it became increasingly clear to me that Foucault, in this text, had already articulated a way of thinking about ethical life that was not centred on rules or doctrines, but on the shaping of one’s life as a whole. It was then that I realised how naturally Gandhi could be read through this lens — as a figure whose ethical life itself invites aesthetic judgment.
In an interview discussing the theme of The Use of Pleasure, Foucault says the following: “The reason is, I think, that the principal aim, the principal target of this kind of ethics [he was referring to Stoicism] was an aesthetic one. First, this kind of ethics was only a problem of personal choice. Second, it was reserved for a few people in the population; it was not a question of giving a pattern of behaviour for everybody. It was a personal choice for a small elite. The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence. I don’t think that we can say that this kind of ethics was an attempt to normalise the population.”
Gandhi can easily be brought under what Foucault calls “the will to live a beautiful life” as an ethico-aesthetic problematic. As Foucault shows in his historical study of Greek and Christian conceptions of sexuality, ethical life in ancient Greece can be evaluated in aesthetic terms. Something similar can be said of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, if one brackets its teleological orientation — namely, the claim that it is the natural disposition of human beings to fulfil eudaimonia, or human flourishing.
Gandhi, however, is closer to the Buddha and to Confucius. Confucius’s idea of the junzi, the superior person, or the person who has achieved an ideal of human moral perfection, is readily applicable to Gandhi. The idea of an ethics-led life, viewed purely in historical terms, was first articulated by the Buddha. One encounters the same theme later in the Analects, in Plato’s presentation of Socrates, in Aristotle, in the life of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, and again in Gandhi.
Modern art tends to treat the artwork as a product of inspired imagination. The figures I have mentioned, however, lived lives that can be seen as products of an inspired ethical imagination. Here, it is not an external object but the person himself who becomes the object of ethical work. Gandhi, like the figures mentioned above, trained himself to be a practitioner of an ethics-led life. For what purpose? Not to fulfil a human essence in the Aristotelian sense, nor to become closer to God, but to reduce his ego-centricity, to cultivate karuṇā, and to gravitate toward the other — to rescue them from insult, humiliation, and oppressive subjugation — much like his predecessors, the Buddha and Jesus of the Gospels. If the Buddha was the first to lead an ethics-led life and to theorise it, even without such theorisation, a life shaped by satya, ahimsa, aparigraha, and brahmacharya can also be seen in the Gospel portrayals of Jesus, if one reads them as an account of his life. The same can be said of Gandhi.
Only when one compares these figures with the much-discussed 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant are we able to see the conceptual shift that occurred in the history of ethical thought. For Kant, the moral law must be accessible to any rational being as such (though, for him, rational beings were effectively limited to European males), irrespective of upbringing, tradition, or habituation. Moral competence, on this view, is not something one grows into through practice, but something one can grasp immediately through reason. By contrast, for the Buddha, Confucius, Aristotle, Jesus, and Gandhi, ethical judgment is unintelligible apart from a long process of formation within a way of life. One cannot simply “apply” morality without already having been shaped by habituation, exemplars, and correction. The Kantian picture thus presupposes a freestanding moral subject, whereas, from the Buddha to Gandhi, the figures mentioned above presuppose that moral sensibility itself is socially cultivated and historically situated.
If one’s life is the product of shaping oneself ethically — where ethics is understood as that which orients one toward the well-being of the other — then such a life is the result of one’s own sustained effort. It is in this sense that Foucault’s idea of ethical life becomes open to aesthetic judgment by those who behold it in operation. This is unmistakably true of Gandhi’s life. Many who are familiar with the figure of the Buddha in the Nikāyas and the figure of Jesus as described in the Gospels recognise that, like Gandhi, they appear radically different from the rest of us. They attract our attention not merely because of what they taught, but because of the aesthetic appeal of the lives they lived.
In an age preoccupied with slogans and doctrines of hate, Gandhi reminds us that the deepest ethical force still lies in a life that has been patiently and visibly shaped.
The writer taught Philosophy at St Stephen’s College, Delhi University
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