SPIRITS OF NON-VIOLENCE

Abstract

In the first few decades of the twentieth century there came into view two competing yet collaborative discourses of non-violence, one non-western and the other western. Where the former found its condition of possibility in the particular forms of anticolonial politics popularized by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, the latter emerged in more muted form out of the curious interchanges between English guild socialism and continental phenomenology. Did these culturally dissonant traditions ever converge or enter into productive dialogue? Do they designate a coherent form of postcolonial ethics, one we might draw upon to counter the epidemic of harmfulness in the present world? The answer to these questions requires that we carefully reconsider the cosmopolitan dimensions of what Jacques Derrida has described as an imaginary colloquium around the thematics of ‘spirit’ which also emerged in the period under consideration: ‘And this is indeed what they are all wondering, in this imaginary symposium, in this invisible university where, for more than twenty years, the greatest European minds met. They echo each other, discuss or translate the same admiring anguish: “So, what is happening to us? So, what is happening to Spirit? Where is it coming to us from: Is it still from spirit?”’(Derrida 1987: 124). This essay hopes to bear witness to M. K. Gandhi's role as a crucial interlocutor in this almost, but not entirely, imaginary discussion. It will, first, sketch the historical setting for the cosmopolitan crisis of spirit under review, looking for points of convergence between European and non-European variations on the theme. A second, concluding, section accounts more theoretically for the philosophical contrapuntality between the refrains of non-violence and of spiritual crisis, respectively. My purpose is to enlist Gandhi's voice in the design for a ‘modern’ metaphysics of morals founded upon the valorization of the principles of non-violence.