Mahatma Gandhi`s Philosophy of Modern Civiliciation Essay

Highlight and assess Gandhi’s critique of â€Å"modern civilization† and relate it to the debate about the nature and practice of development that surfaced with Gandhi’s 1945 exchange with Nehru [in Sudhir Chandra’s essay] and continue into the post-independence era is with us today. â€Å"Through the ‘successor’ †¦ Gandhi was pitted against a whole discourse which the ‘successor’ and virtually the whole country considered as the only rational mode of ordering life, be it individual or collective† (Chandra 44). In every argument at least two people are involved. However, in many significant controversies or, even more so, in contestations of well accepted norms, the real debate rages not simply between two rational†¦show more content†¦While Gandhi never precisely defines ‘modern civilization’, such a thing may indeed be impossible as the discourse already, to some extent, defines us, he does offer an analogy to understand its nature. As this kind of civilization exists in idealized forms in its literature and theories and realized forms throughout Europe, America, and their colonies, he considers these its identity. From this, one can infer its nature as one learns of a tiger. While, in theory, a tiger could change its character, this question completely misses the point that the very nature of the tiger is at fault (Swaraj 27-28). The preaching of modern civilization, as rhetoric, plus the real patterns of this kind of living comprise the object of h is criticism. This marks one of his first important differences from the discourse he opposes. Where Gandhi considers the tiger in terms of its nature and as a pattern of behavior, the technical rationality of the discourse he is arguing against considers a tiger as a particular collection of biological specificities that may sometimes act in predictable ways, but is entirely mutable. While this summary of Gandhi makes him sound more like Plato than is fair, his arguments tend to look for deeper meanings where possible and permanent truths as opposed to the myopia of the discourse he is criticizing. Similarly, Gandhi claims that â€Å"only men with mature thoughts are capable of ruling themselves† (Swaraj 16), whereas modern civilization boasts