Imagination in Gandhi's Philosophy

By Sonal Singh (St. Stephen's College)

Hannah Arendt writing in the aftermath of the Jewish holocaust argued in the ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ that true totalitarianism begins with the death of the imagination. In retrospect, her theorization came resoundingly true not just in Hitler’s Germany but also in the colonized regions where the narrative of shame and the imposition of western vocabulary was maintained by the rulers to create a sphere of discourse where any uprising for freedom becomes an impossibility. After all, how can one express discontent when the possible avenues of articulation are distorted or closed? The colonists asserted the incompetence of the colonial subjects to govern themselves pointing to the fact that the natives repeatedly used European terms while talking of emancipation. 

Most movements across the world work on the principle of an ‘ideology’ where individuals group themselves under a certain set of principles. Ideologically led struggles relegate the individual to a background –their creativity is suppressed and imagination is stifled. Ideology projects the idea of a grand direction, meaning and moral path of human ‘development’. Take for instance, the teleology of Marxism, the certainty of Science and the morality of religions. Ideology insists that truth is not something to be created but something which we will be led to within a continuous process. Thus, most ideologies while they may free the people of one evil, inevitably lead them to another.     

Gandhi did not accept this destructive bias which vitiates most public movements. Rather, he transmuted it to respectful contingency of each view which leads us to the narrative of Gandhian philosophy which intertwines and underlies all of his narratives- that of non-violence and truthfulness.

For Arendt, ideologies preclude the possibility of engagement by individuals as they emphasize their internal consistency rather than their subject matter. Most often ideological movements spring from some factual historic occurrence which is elevated to the position of an axiomatic premise for the ideology to hold. However, Reality always occurs fortuitously-“facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise”.  That is why ideologies notoriously stifle individual expression.

Ideology perverts common sense by denying the contingent nature of reality and instead subsuming all objects in experience to fit the ideological explanation. To bolster their credibility and coherence, ideologies provide retrospective explanations for facts- these explanations themselves do not determine why events occurred; rather they reconcile factuality with human comprehension. Ideology assumes and seeks to prove that its explanations for human events are determinate. Thus, the dialectical movement in ideological argumentation explains past setbacks in terms of future success so that the distinction between past and present is erased, foreclosing the possibility that the present ideological explanation can be contradicted.

Gandhi redeemed ‘dissent’ from being a merely disruptive force and gave it a creative shape while still allowing it to remain flexible, locating the individual in a space both personal and social at the same time. Though Gandhi was for most the face of the Indian Independence Movement, the dissent was in no way ideologically driven. In fact, we have come to use the term ‘Gandhian’ only in retrospect.

Contrary to that, Gandhi assumed that the individual is the creator or formulator of social values and social norms. He himself said: “If the individual ceases to count, what is left of society? Individual freedom alone can make man voluntarily surrender himself completely to the service of society. If it is wrested from him, he becomes an automaton and society is ruined. No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.”

Actually, Gandhi’s autonomous individual who governs himself resists any source of domination, whether it is a controlled/limited ancient society or the modern liberal world order. Gandhi holds that no text and no economic process can claim to possess a truth that displaces the autonomy of individuals. He said: “Man is the maker of his own destiny in the sense that he has freedom of choice as to the manner in which he uses that freedom. But he is no controller of the results. The moment he thinks he is, he comes to grief.” Thus, Gandhi’s subject is not only the maker of his own destiny, but also a choice-maker. He can hear his own inner voice and takes decisions accordingly. Gandhi enlists his theory of conscience in his arguments on behalf of Satyagraha or civil disobedience. He expects the Satyagrahi to be honest to her/his deepest convictions and ready to suffer on behalf of her/his commitments. 

Gandhi was critical of any fixed definition of truth. According to Gandhi, one of the greatest evils of modern political and other human relations has been our tendency to absolutize what is necessarily relative. Gandhi’s insistence on the relativity of all political, religious and other human perspectives is a justification for toleration and respect for others’ relative perspectives to truth and reality. However, it may seem at this juncture that Gandhi’s insistence on truthfulness tilts towards egotism and is untenable in practice.

However, besides truth, non-violence is another interlinked narrative in Gandhian philosophy. Ahimsa (non-violence) means avoiding injury to anybody on earth in thought, word, or deed. Moreover, this is possible only if we are ready to remove our ego. In order to understand non-violence, as preferred by Gandhi and others, it is imperative to understand how selfless action is compatible with complete self-realization of the individual person. Gandhi says to make oneself a zero is to realize oneself completely. When the egotism/ego vanishes, something else grows—that ingredient of the person that tends to identify itself with God, with humanity, all that lives, the Universal Self. Thus, for Gandhi complete truthfulness goes hand in hand with elimination of egocentricity.

This reduction of egocentricity in no way limits the freedom of the individual. For Gandhi, (political) judgments involve imagining “how I would feel and think if I were in…” the position of another but not as if one were the Other; the distinction being the difference between representing the Other’s possible standpoint in imagination and blindly adopting the Other’s actual perspective or trying to adopt their private mental states.

  To even have a standpoint implies having an intimately private basis to stand from – the facts and experiences informing opinion and action are all our own. Gandhi’s account of ‘judging’ describes how representing another’s possible standpoints informed by their physical characteristics, desires, or experiences could generate within the spectator a new experience of thinking because a different set of particulars are the object of thought. 

To think in terms of the other liberates us from both the absorption of ego-centric individualism, which makes objective judgment impossible as there is no one to hear them and no one to validate them, and totalitarianism which perverts the use of imagination by disallowing the development of a standpoint and the recognition of another’s standpoint. 

Imagination is also the first step for the possibility of impartial and reflective judgment. For Gandhi, the more positions represented in imagination, the more impartial the judgment. Without the spectators to constitute a space for appearances, no action or speech could appear meaningful because it could never survive its ephemeral existence. 

Thus, Gandhi realized that imagination provides the bulwark against blind ideological indoctrination and the state of un-freedom. Truthfulness and non-violence are the necessary conditions for imagination to thrive and vice versa….