Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values by Richard Sorabji (review)

Perhaps inadvertently, since he gives no indication that he is aware of this field of knowledge, Richard Sorabji has made an important contribution to comparative political theory—a subject pioneered by Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, and others—by interpreting Gandhi’s thought in the context of Stoic and other ancient Greek philosophers. But there are shortcomings to his way of treating Gandhi. Sorabji portrays him as a philosopher whose ideas and arguments parallel or complement those of Stoic and other Greek thinkers, notably Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But Gandhi did not think of himself as a philosopher. He thought of himself as a karma yogi, a person who seeks truth in action—the sort of action exemplified by satyagraha, the militant but nonviolent collective practice that Gandhi invented and pursued.

Moreover, whatever similarities might be found between his approach and the Stoics’, ancient Greek thought played at most a limited role in the shaping of Gandhi’s thinking. In the preface and foreword of his most seminal work, Hind Swaraj, he turned for the most part not to the mainstream of Western philosophy but to “the other West,” made up of dissenters from imperialism and industrialism, such as Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, and Emerson. They imagined another way to live, quite different from that of the Stoics. Gandhi’s co-conspirators from the other West said no to modernity’s siren call of progressivism and maximalism and to empire’s awesome violence and splendor. Gandhi says explicitly what he learned from and shared with writers of the other West:

Whilst the views expressed in Hind Swaraj are held by me, I have but endeavoured humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers besides the masters of Indian philosophy. Tolstoy has been one of my teachers for a number of years. Those who want to see a corroboration of the views submitted in the following chapters, will find it in the works of the above-named masters. For ready reference some of the books are mentioned in the Appendices.

These include, in addition to books by two Indians (Dadabhai Naorji and Romesh Dutt), four by Tolstoy, two by Thoreau, and one each by Ruskin, Robert H. Sherard, Edward Carpenter, Thomas F. Taylor, Godfrey Blount, Giuseppe Mazzini, Max Nordau, and Henry Sumner Maine. The “Defence and Death of Socrates—From Plato” is also on the list, but no other Greek works. “These views are mine, and yet not mine,” Gandhi writes in the foreword to Hind Swaraj. “They are mine because I hope to act according to them. They are also part of my being. But yet, they are not mine, because I lay no claim to originality. They have been formed after reading several books. That which I dimly felt received support from these books.” It was “these books”—a countercultural and culturally hybrid list—that shaped Gandhi’s mentality. And it was this canon to which, in time, he made major contributions of his own.