Sir Richard Sorabji- Gandhi on killing Dogs

Cornelia Sorabji, the first female Indian lawyer, was a harsh critic of Gandhi. The Brits funded her tour of America where she said nasty things about the Indian freedom struggle. Her nephew, Sir Richard Sorabji, a vaunted scholar of Stoic philosophy, has chosen to go very far in the other direction- at least with respect to Gandhi. Or has he merely appeared to do so? He has written an article for Aeon in which, quite gratuitously, and mischievously, in view of the great contemporary philosophical and ethical interest in animal rights, he has drawn attention to an occasion when Mahatma Gandhi called for the killing of all stray dogs. What is Sorabji up to? Let us assume he is sincere when he writes- 'Gandhi was a surprising, subtle philosopher in the Stoic tradition'. This begs the question, were Stoics really into canine genocide? Is that what got their rocks off?

A central Stoic principle is that our nature inclines us to cleave to each other and to develop a sense of belonging. But it also inclines us to value the companionship of dogs. The dog, proverbially, is man's best friend. Few in Greece had not wept on hearing in Homer of how Odysseus's hound, Argos recognized his master. Did the Stoics really think every abandoned Argos, sick and old as it may be, should be slaughtered by the minions of the State? If not, in what sense is Gandhi a 'philosopher in the Stoic tradition'?

Let us find out. 

Sorabji writes

In 1926, Gandhi wrote a series of eight newspaper articles, including an English version, under the title ‘Is This Humanity?’, in which he refined his conception of non-violence. In particular, he addressed the question: when is killing non-violent? This question was triggered by his support of the head of a municipality, who had authorized the killing of 60 stray dogs for fear that they might spread rabies. Outraged letters came to Gandhi from all over India, saying: ‘We thought you were a man of non-violence.’

Sorabji is lying. Ambalal Sarabhai, a financier of Gandhi's, ordered some 60 stray dogs in the vicinity of his ultra-modern new mill in Ahmedabad to be killed. He was not 'the head of a municipality'. He was a tycoon who had returned from England thinking, perhaps, that he had himself become English and could push through the construction of his costly new Mill in any manner he pleased. He didn't have to bother with the religious sensibilities or cultural taboos of beggarly brown natives.

What is odd about Sorabji's highlighting the dog killing episode is that Sorabji himself is of Parsi (Zoroastrian) descent. The dog holds a very high place in Zoroastrian religion and culture. Indeed, at the time of death- where the orthodox Hindu may grasp the tail of a cow, the Zoroastriand introduce a dog (preferably 'four eyed' as in the Ashvamedha ceremony) into the room of the dying man. This scares away evil forces. It is the dog which guards the narrow bridge to Heaven and it is a dog which, like the dog Dhruva who follows Yuddhishtra in the Mahabharata, accompanies the virtuous man into Paradise. So strongly do Parsis feel about dogs that they rioted against the British in 1832 in Bombay because of the cull the Administration had ordered of all stray dogs on the island. However, in subsequent decades, violent resistance to such measures receded. But, Ahmedabad was more religiously orthodox than Bombay. The municipal authority considered destruction of animals and birds causing a nuisance to be a discretionary, not mandatory, duty of the Administration.  

One reason that discretion may have been called for is because it is forbidden in Hinduism and Islam to kill innocent dogs. Indians, famously, are a religious people. They literally have 'sacred cows'. A Government which adopts a heartlessly instrumental approach to the lives of animals will soon find itself facing a rebellion. 

Ambalal Sarabhai knew what he had done in a moment of hubris was something his own countrymen considered despicable and impious. It is true, at that time, what he did may have been legal. But he could still have been sued in a Civil Court. He could have been 'out-casted' by his Jat Panchayat. Nowadays, that may not matter- but back then it could harm the prosperity and marriageability of your sept.

Sarabhai's atrocious action wouldn't be legal now. Independent India has progressed at least that much. None dare slaughter dogs for fear that Maneka Gandhi will come and bite them. 

Consider- were the dogs really strays? It may be some of the dogs were in fact attached to the family of one or other of the Mill hands or construction workers. A child may have lost her play-mate because a tycoon pays some money to a bunch of guys who need cash so badly they end up killing canines. It is unlikely that such a child could sue the Mill owner for damages because lawyers, as Gandhi well knew, cost a lot of money. 

What should Gandhi have said to his financier who, it seems, came to him to assuage his feeling of guilt? The Hindu answer is- 'you must do prayaschitham- ritual expiation- offer a sum of money for a philanthropic purpose with a prayer for the souls of the beings you slaughtered so that they may have a good re-incarnation'. 

Suppose this 'sin-offering' is used to set up a school. We can think of those playful puppies being reborn as little children who go to that school and, it may be, later qualify as veterinary surgeons or something of that sort. 

The lawyer's answer might be quite different. That would involve checking that the Mill owner had a right to do what he did and that nobody else's rights were infringed in the process. It may be there was no crime, according to existing legislation or customary usage, in what the Mill-owner did. But there probably was a 'tort'. Did the Mill-owner really exercise a high standard of care such that the only dogs that were killed were those at demonstrable risk of rabies and who were genuinely entirely unloved and unattached to any human? Perhaps. If so, that fact should have been publicized. 

Gandhi may well have felt irritation at being dragged into this debate. But, a prudent man- a barrister forsooth!- would give both a lawyerly and, in view of Gandhi's claim to religious authority, a religious answer to the question. He did neither.

He wrote- 'Imperfect, erring mortals as we are, there is no course open to us but the destruction of rabid dogs.'

This is bizarre. Would a perfect, inerrant, mortal have to destroy rabid dogs to save the lives of his family and his neighbors? To our current understanding, yes. Of course, Gandhi may have meant that a 'perfect' man would have supernatural powers. With one glance, he could cure the dog. But then he could also feed and defend the country merely by snapping his fingers. 

On the other hand, an imperfect, erring, mortal might well run away or climb a tree and then watch, with great merriment, the rabid dog bite his enemies till one of them manages to club it to death. Being a bad person means you have more options than a good person in a situation like this. What Gandhi has written is nonsense. Sorabji may think that the Hindu religion says 'if you wish to be perfect, you must never kill'. This is not the case. A perfected person may kill and then perform 'prayaschitham'- ritual penance- thus being restored to a pure and perfect state. 

Gandhi goes on to write- 

At times we may be faced with the unavoidable duty of killing a man who is found in the act of killing people. If we persist in keeping stray dogs undisturbed, we shall soon be faced with the duty of either castrating them or killing them.

Most people think castration a better outcome than being killed. 

A third alternative is that of having a special pinjrapole for dogs. But it is out of the question. When we cannot cope with all the stray cattle in the city, the very proposal of having a pinjrapole for dogs seems to me to be chimerical.

About a week later Gandhi returns to this topic. This time he has decided that no stray cattle exist in India! 

A roving dog without an owner is a danger to society and a swarm of them is a menace to its very existence. If we want to keep dogs in towns or villages in a decent manner, no dog should be suffered to wander. There should be no stray dogs even as we have no stray cattle. Humanitarian societies should find a religious solution of such questions.

Gandhi must have been aware that many Humanitarians then in India were agnostics or rejected organized religion. Religious societies should find religious solutions. Humanitarian societies must find solutions which are not predicated on the authority of scripture or religion.  

But can we take individual charge of these roving dogs? And if we cannot, can we have a pinjarapoles for them? If both these things are impossible, there seems to me to be no alternative except to kill them.

There may be orphaned or abandoned or run-away children roaming the streets. We could take 'individual charge' of them. We could open a asylum for them.  But it is repugnant to think, if neither course is available, that no alternative remains but to kill them. 

Connivance or putting up with the status quo is no ahimsa; there is no thought or discrimination in it. Dogs will be killed whenever they are a menace to society.

According to Gandhi's logic, stray cattle too should be killed because they too could be a menace to society! Fortunately, no stray cattle exist in India. Why? Gandhi explains 

 The buffalo is a domestic only in India. It is a sin to domesticate wild animals inasmuch as man does so for his selfish purposes. That he has domesticated the cow and the buffalo is not out of mercy for them, it is for his own use. He, therefore, does not allow a cow or a buffalo to stray. The same duty is incumbent regarding dogs.

India has stray cows, but not buffaloes, because Hindus regard it as a sin to kill cows. Buffaloes can be sold for their meat and hide. Perhaps, Gandhi would favor dog meat becoming a commodity? Perhaps the thing could be exported as a delicacy. That would ensure any bow-wow, not vigilantly watched over, would disappear from the streets.

It occurs to me that the reason Madras had less of a problem in this regard was because the skin of a dog could be sold. In addition to the bounty paid by the Municipality, this made it profitable to keep the streets clear of strays unless the community was vigilant in protecting such animals.

 Every country at a low level of economic development has stray cats and dogs. Why? Such animals are predisposed to befriend humans and provide companionship and other useful services- e.g. catching mice, or barking at thieves or other intruders. This has been the case since time immemorial. In big, rich, cities, it makes sense to have a kennel for abandoned pets or those whose owners have died. Such 'rescues' have brought much joy into the hearts of families of every social class. Gandhi, however, won't admit this obvious fact. 

Instead he tells stupid lies-  

 There can be no two opinions on the fact that Hinduism regards killing a living being as sinful.

This is false. Plenty of Hindus are butchers. Animal sacrifice is required in many sects. The 'Vyadha Gita' is named for the wise butcher who has attained the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya. Hearing it dispels Yuddhishtra's Vishada just as hearing the Bhagvad Gita dispels Arjuna's Vishada.

I think all religions are agreed on the principle.

None are. I'm killing lots of microbes every time I wash my hands with soap.  

There is generally no difficulty in determining a principle.

No. Principles are determined with difficulty but are easily grasped by others.  

The difficult comes in when one proceeds to put it into practice.

Hinduism has developed a juristic procedure to make this is as easy as pie. Gandhi, sadly, chose to remain ignorant of the relevant literature.  

A principle is the expression of a perfection,

No. There is no 'expression of a perfection' whatsoever save by Divine Grace or theophany. A 'siddhantha' is a judgement made after hearing both sides of a debate but it has nothing to do with 'perfection'. 

What Gandhi is thinking of is 'vidhi'- injunction- which some contemporary Hindu jurists wrongly thought was a 'perfect' command- i.e. positive, indeed indefeasible, law. This is not in fact the case. The entire trend of subsequent Hindu jurisprudence is to regard what appeared to be 'apurva-vidhi' to be 'niyama' merely- i.e. a restrictive imperative without any instrumental epistemological dimension.  Metaphysically, Law is a 'samskar'. It is sublatable and defeasible. Still, let us be charitable and say 'Gandhi thinks vidhi is an expression of perfection- i.e. he is a primitive type of Purva Mimamsaka who holds no felicity higher than that of the man who has discharged all his ritual obligations and is enjoying wealth and health and the love of a beautiful woman and the caresses of an affectionate brood of children.'                                              

Granted all this, what is the utpatti-vidhi- i.e. the principal injunction binding with respect to the matter at hand? Presumably, the injunction which the Mill-owner was seeking to uphold was 'Protect human lives from rabies'. However there is a 'nishedha'- a prohibition against killing dogs which are after all the offspring of Sarama, as per the Rg Vedic hymn, and are man's best friend. In particular harming a dog, even during the performance of a Religious ceremony, is shown as an impious act in Scripture. The question is, was the wrong committed due to ragaprapti i.e. impulsively & in a state of anger or annoyance? Prima facie, yes. Sarabhai speaks of his frustration at not being able to get the Municipality to do anything. Thus he took the law into his own hands.

We can easily picture the tycoon, recently returned from a trip to England, impatient with India's ancient ways, shooting a bunch of dogs so as to send a message that his new Calico Mill will be a thoroughly modern establishment where waifs and strays and malingerers and beggars get short shrift.

Sarabhai needed to do 'prayaschitham' so as to clear himself of the taint of hubris and impiety. Gandhi, fool that he was, thought his job was to stick up for his financier right or wrong. But, in doing so, Gandhi showed he was merely a politician- that too of a mercenary sort. He was no sort of moral authority- at least for Hindus. 

The fact is, Gandhi tells us the Mill-owner felt guilty. He had also incurred odium within his own mercantile community- not to mention how the workers felt. The proper thing for Gandhi to do would be to get Sarabhai to acknowledge that he acted hastily and that he now feels genuine remorse. He can then go on to expiate his sin in an appropriate manner. This is how human societies have always handled what are felt to be impious actions.

There is a story by Saki- 'The penance'- about a man who kills a tabby cat, believing it to have killed his chickens. But the cat belonged to some children just returned home from India. They put his little baby daughter in jeopardy till he performs a proper Anglican prayaschitham. That's a good thing. He purges himself of guilt and has learned a valuable lesson. 

Gandhi, sadly, didn't read Saki. He said

and as imperfect beings like us cannot practice perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice;

This is nonsense. The fact that we can't practice levitation doesn't mean we devise limits on jumping. What Gandhi is speaking off is 'substitute performance'. The Mill-owner killed some dogs. He should make inquiries and satisfy any tort or other claim that could be made against him. If he is a Hindu, he should offer 'prayaschitham' of a type deemed acceptable by local religious preceptors. That's it. That's the whole story. There is no need for Gandhi to start displaying his ignorance of Hinduism and his inability to reason and to end up providing an argument for the killing of stray cows! 

So Hinduism has laid down that killing for sacrifice is no ahimsa (violence).

No it hasn't. Violence remains violence but the prohibition against it is removed for a particular sacrifice performed at a particular time by particular people. This is how all juristic systems work. English law doesn't say capital punishment isn't killing. It says it is lawful killing provided the thing is done in a particular way by particular people at a particular time. 

This is only a half-truth.

It is no truth at all. It is gibberish. 

Violence will be violence for all time, and all violence is sinful.

X is X for all time- okay, that may be the case. But X isn't Y. Violence may or may not be sinful. Hindu Mimamsakas, sometimes using Navya Nyaya reasoning, sometimes not, have elaborated a juristic doctrine in this respect. Gandhi did not know that doctrine. That is why he babbled like a moon-calf.  

But what is inevitable is not regarded as a sin,

Yes it is. If you drink too much and drive your car, it is pretty much inevitable that you will injure others. That is a sinful and criminal thing to do.  

so much so that the science of daily practice has not only declared the inevitable violence involved in killing for sacrifice as permissible, but even regarded it as meritorious.

Farting is inevitable. Why regard it as meritorious? Gandhi won't tell us.  

But unavoidable violence cannot be defined for it changes with time, place and person.

Unavoidable violence is defined under all circumstances as violence which is ...urm... unavoidable. It is a different matter that we can't prevision all possible concatenations of circumstances. But we do have an easy means of finding out whether violence was or wasn't unavoidable under any given set of circumstances described to us. The Mimamsakas have a technical language to analyze this- but then every system of Law has 'terms of art' in this respect.

What is regarded as excusable at one time may be inexcusable at another.

Gandhi is conflating 'excusable' with 'avoidable'. But he is wrong. What is true is that what some found excusable then, they may not find excusable now. This just means that opinions- or eudoxa- change as times change. 

The violence involved in burning fuel or coal in the depth of winter

is no violence at all. How fucking ignorant was Gandhi?  

to keep the body warm may be unavoidable and, therefore, a duty for weak-bodied man, but fire unnecessarily lit in midsummer is clearly violence.

No it isn't. Nobody thinks so. Hindu ascetics perform the five fire austerity (panchagni tapasya) during the noon day heat. Of course, doing 'unnecessary' stuff with scarce resources is foolish. But folly is not itself sinful. 

We recognize the duty of killing microbes by the use of disinfectants.

Only if we actually have such a duty and the means to discharge it. 

It is violence and yet a duty.

Because violence is not per se a sin.  

But why go even as far as that? The air in a dark, closed room is full of little microbes, and the introduction of light and air into it by opening it is destruction indeed. But it is ever a duty to use that finest of disinfectants pure air.

No it isn't. Nobody has the duty to open the window of someone else's room unless specifically employed by that person and instructed to do so. Suppose I am hired as a cleaner in your office. I've been reading Gandhi and so I think I have a duty to open the window to let in pure air. However, a violent gust of wind enters your office and throws all your papers into disarray. You may sack me for doing something which I was not authorized to do. Clearly, Gandhi was wrong. There is no duty to use that ineffective disinfectant, pure air.

I mention this because Gandhi was always misapplying a word- 'duty' in this case- and then drawing a mischievous conclusion with respect to public policy. 

These instances can be multiplied. The principle that applies in the instances cited applies in the matter of killing rabid dogs. To destroy a rabid dog is to commit the minimum amount of violence. A recluse, who is living in a forest and is compassion incarnate, may not destroy a rabid dog. For in his compassion he has the virtue of making it whole.

So, Gandhi's philosophy is predicated on the notion that perfected people, with supernatural powers, exist.  

But a city-dweller who is responsible for the protection of lives under his care and who does not possess the virtues of the recluse, but is capable of destroying a rabid dog, is faced with a conflict of duties. If he kills the dog, he commits a sin.

Not if the dog was genuinely rabid. Violence is not itself a sin. There is a prohibition on killing dogs but it ceases to apply if the dog is rabid. I suppose one might stretch things and say this is an example of  parisankhaya- vidhi (exclusive specification). But it is not germane to the case at hand. There is a wide difference between a rabid dog and a dog you think is a stray and which you think might get rabies. Why might a non-stray dog not be equally liable to contract that terrible disease?

If he does not kill it, he commits a graver sin.

No he does not. This is a purely 'laukik' or secular matter. Even if weren't it is a case where 'vikalpa' applies- the man can make his own decision in his own way. One could say parisankhaya vidhi applies. Only if it is his duty to kill rabid dogs- i.e. he is paid or otherwise legally obliged to do so-  does failure to fulfill that duty constitute a sin. 

So he prefers to commit the lesser one and save himself from the graver.

A psychopath may say- 'I roofied that girl so as not to beat her over the head to render her unconscious. I also chopped her tits off so as save from myself from the graver sin of skinning her alive so as to make a flesh-suit for myself. The fact is, I've large man-boobs and so, had I not lopped off the girl's breasts I'd have been unavoidably driven to a greater crime. ' Does such a statement really convince anyone that the poor fellow committed a lesser sin so as to save himself from a graver offense? Is that what is happening here?

I believe myself to be saturated with ahimsa non-violence.

Gandhi was saturated with stupidity, ignorance, and conceit. 

Ahimsa and Truth are as my two lungs. I cannot live without them.

People can live with one lung. Did Gandhi not know that? As for his 'perfected' anchorites meditating in the forests, they don't need to breathe at all. 

But I see every moment, with more and more clearness, the immense power of ahimsa and the littleness of man.

But Gandhi had not been able to show that ahimsa had any power whatsoever. He did however show he was a little man with little brain but lots of money coz Mill-owners were 'sweet' to him- provided he came to their rescue anytime they started slaughtering bow-wows. 

Even the forest-dweller cannot be entirely free from violence, in spite of his limitless compassion. With every breath he commits a certain amount of violence.

Nonsense! The sort of anchorite Gandhi is talking about does not need to breathe or eat or fart.  

The body itself is a house of slaughter,

In the same sense that it is a house of prostitution where millions of microbes are fucking each other or, worse yet, reproducing onanistically.  

and therefore moksha and Eternal Bliss consist in perfect deliverance from the body and, therefore, all pleasure, save the joy of moksha, is evanescent, imperfect.

So just fucking die already. 

That being the case, we have to drink, in daily life, many a bitter draught of violence.

And put up with millions of microbes using our body like a brothel. 

It is therefore a thousand pities that the question of stray dogs, etc., assumes such a monstrous proportion in this sacred land of ahimsa.

Monstrous? A guy gets 60 dogs killed. His neighbors aint happy because human beings like dogs. Gandhi has a 'sweet' relationship with the dog killer. He says 'this guy did a wonderful thing. What? Why are you saying I'm a fucking disgrace to the Hindu religion? I'm super smart, I tell you. Also one of my lungs is Truth. So fuck off you lying bastards!'  

It is my firm conviction that we are propagating himsa in the name of ahimsa owing to our deep ignorance of the great principle.

& it may be someone else's firmer conviction that Nathuram Godse was propagating ahimsa by shooting a rabid cunt.  

It may be a sin to destroy rabid dogs and such others as are liable to catch rabies. But we are responsible; the Mahajan is responsible, for this state of things. The Mahajan may not allow the dogs to stray. It is a sin, it should be a sin, to feed stray dogs,

others may feel it was a sin, or should have been a sin, to give money to Mahatmas who talk incessant bollocks.  

and we should save numerous dogs if we had legislation making every stray dog liable to be shot.

Let's get Brigadier Dyer to do it. What's that? British people don't like killing innocent dogs? Then, fuck them. Quit India you insufficiently murderous bastards! 

Even if those who feed stray dogs consented to pay a penalty for their misdirected compassion we should be free from the curse of stray dogs.

Where there is a shifting population- e.g. mill workers in the Twenties- there will be 'semi-attached' dogs who turn up to play with the kids and generally make themselves useful. As a species, we like having dogs around. The proverbial 'dhobi ka kuttha'- the laundry-man's dog- doesn't belong to him exclusively. But it serves a function. It will raise the alarm if a kid falls into the river. It scares off thieves who can't be sure it isn't a guard-dog. There's a good reason Gandhi's people were outraged when one of their own behaved like a fucking Laat Sahib and had a bunch of dogs exterminated without any shadow of legal, or customary, authority. The guy knew he had done wrong. That's why he felt guilty.  

Humanity is a noble attribute of the soul. It is not exhausted with saving a few fish or a few dogs.

Nor is it expressed by heeding the ravings of a cretin. 

Such saving may even be sinful. If I have a swarm of ants in my house, the man who proceeds to feed them will be guilty of a sin.

No he won't. For the action to be sinful, there must be a malicious intent. 

For God has provided their grain for the ants, but the man who feeds them might destroy me and my family.

Or he might not. But the same thing could be said of Gandhi. Those who fed him and provided him with money for his crackpot schemes may be considered to have helped destroy India.  

The Mahajan may feel itself safe and believe that it has saved their lives by dumping dogs near my field, but it will have committed the greater sin of putting my life in danger.

After reading this, the sane course would have been for everybody to dump any animal they thought needed killing on the Mahatma's doorstep. Breathing through his two lungs of Truth & Ahimsa, he could have been kept busy slaughtering puppies rather than fucking up the Indian polity.  

Humaneness is impossible without thought, discrimination, charity, fearlessness, humility and clear vision.

Only to the extent that inhumaneness too is impossible without being a human fucking being.  

It is no easy thing to walk on the sharp sword-edge of ahimsa in this world which is so full of himsa.

Clearly. That's why this stupid man is babbling about killing all dogs not on a leash and then, no doubt, extending this kindness to abandoned cows.  

Wealth does not help; anger is the enemy of ahimsa; and pride is a monster that swallows it up.

Pride in his own intellect is what did for the Maha-cretin.  

In this straight and narrow observance of this religion of ahimsa one has often to know so-called himsa as the truest form of ahimsa.

No. The fact that himsa is enjoined by what someone might choose to term parisankhaya vidhi does not make it ahimsa. Arthaikatva applies. The injunction, 'don't harm dogs' can't be interpreted to mean 'harm stray dogs' just because the word dog was not qualified. Indian Mimamsakas who had become lawyers considered this parallel to the maxim  expressio unius est exclusio alterius.

Such things mattered a lot back then. A rich man might suddenly find himself deprived of his ancestral wealth because his cousin's lawyer claimed that his parent's marriage had been invalidated by failure to respect a certain supposed vidhi of the type which Gandhi pretends exists. One reason Hindu India had to chose Democracy was so as to have a uniform Civil Code to get rid of this nuisance. 

It is sufficient to say that in pursuing 'ahimsa', there are times when 'apadh dharma' applies and an exception has to be made. But there is a prayaschitham penance to restore purity or effect 'metanoia'. 

Things in this world are not what they see and do not seem as they really are. Or if they are seen as they are, they so appear only to a few who have perfected themselves after ages of penance. But none has yet been able to describe the reality, and no one, can.

So we needn't worry about these 'perfected' beings. They are irrelevant. But this means that a 'Principle' can't be what Gandhi said it was- viz. A principle is the expression of a perfection. Rather, for Hindus, it is what Mimamsa or Nyaya says is a principle- i.e. a maxim of some type. For Anglo Indian Jurisprudence, there are 'equitable maxims' which translate into equitable principles. Philosophy, in ancient Greece, or Kant's Germany, took its model from Jurisprudence as much as the Mathematical and other Sciences. 

Sorabji won't admit this. He thinks Gandhi's specious reasoning, quoted above, is 'philosophical reaction'. For Heaven's sake- why?

Gandhi offered a model of philosophical reaction. He published a number of the letters in his newspapers, not concealing, nor misrepresenting, the criticisms, although he allowed himself a witticism: that one of the letters demanding non-violence was violent.

That wasn't a witticism. It was a lie.  

Nonetheless, Gandhi sought to rethink his position, in order to provide an answer, and by the end of the third article offered a new criterion. Killing was always violent, unless it was done for the sake of the killed.

Is Sorabji making fun of Gandhi? It is obvious that killing is violence. On the other hand helping a person who is paralyzed and in great pain to commit suicide isn't really killing and isn't really violence- though, of course, the law may take a different view. However, saying 'I kill this dog, which appears to have no owner, for the sake of the non-stray dog population' is killing, it is violence, because you are not putting a stray out of its misery because you love it but rather chasing and beating to death an animal which values its life as much as you value your own life.

Was that not an admission that he was in the wrong, since killing the stray dogs was not for their sake, although it might have been for the sake of other dogs, and people? But he had already, in the first article, made an important philosophical point:

What is that philosophical point? Sorabji thinks it has to do with the infirmity of universal, 'exceptionless', rules. But that infirmity only exists for philosophy itself because philosophy is not 'buck-stopped'. Actual juristic, protocol bound, decision processes are 'buck stopped' in the sense that at some point an authoritative decision is made though, no doubt, its consequences may be softened depending on the circumstances. Furthermore, there can be a stipulation that the 'tie-breaking' action shall not be used as a precedent. In other words, there can be a rule to which everything is the exception, provided it is known to be a rule! This is the 'halachah vein morin kein' which arose when Pinchas broke the 'teiku' created when both Moses and Zimri were on an equal footing by reason of their foreign consorts. It is said that Pinchas is as Elijah for breaking the tie. But no one can follow this precedent unless they don't know it is Halachah!

In Hinduism, something similar happens under the rubric of 'Apad dharma'- conduct in calamitous times- a rule is created to which everything is the exception. 

A city-dweller who is responsible for the protection of lives under his care …

is not referred to as a city-dweller. He is referred to as the Governor or the Mayor of the City or the Chairman of the Municipality 

is faced with a conflict of duties. If he kills the dog, he commits a sin.

Not if that is his duty. He is welcome to resign if he has religious or other scruples in this matter. If he doesn't, parisankhaya vidhi applies. Still, he may offer prayaschitham penance out of a feeling of remorse. This 'metanoia' can usefully take a public, communal, form. 

If he does not kill it, he commits a graver sin.

Only if it is genuinely his parisankhaya vidhi duty to do the killing. But that duty only arises out of legitimate holding of a particular office of a legal and administrative type. What Gandhi is talking about is people taking the law into their own hands.  

So he prefers to commit the lesser one and save himself from the greater.

Like the rapist who lopped the tits off the victim he roofied.  

In other words, it was wrong to kill the dogs, because one is sometimes, through no fault of one’s own, in a moral double-bind: wrong if one does and wrong if one doesn’t.

But Gandhi is saying his financier was right to kill the dogs. Killing dogs is Ahimsa- just like forcing Kasturba to cook lamb chops for Maulana Azad is Ahimsa! This was a convenient doctrine. Gandhi told his great niece that if she didn't sleep naked with him she was committing Himsa- Violence! Get nekkid rite now otherwise u iz wurse than Hitler! That's what Gandhi is saying. He doesn't mention any fucking double-bind- which wasn't a thing back then. Sorabji puts it in himself. Why? The guy is very old. He doesn't know that any protocol bound deontic system can use type theory so as to remove all such situations so that Ethics can always have 'univocal foundations'. Double-binds arise out of impredicativity. But we have known from the time of Russel that type theory can tame impredicativity something fierce. Category theory, using Directed Graphs, gets rid of any such shit. It can use any method it likes to break concurrency deadlocks or other types of 'teiku'.  But then the Athenian Legal system- which is where the word kategoros comes from- could do so just as every other ancient Legal system did so. The thing is subtle, but it is practical and common sensical. It isn't rocket science.

The fact is, Gandhi, in his third letter, finally did hit on the right legal argument- viz. exigent circumstances- I have suggested the killing of some dogs as a “duty in distress”- which translates as 'apad dharma' but under ascertainable parisankhaya-vidhi. 

Sadly, Gandhi didn't take the next step which was to prescribe the correct religious prayaschitham and process of communal inquiry such that the case could be closed. Instead the cretin started whining about his inferior caste status.

But I know that it is not ahimsa that is wrong, it is its votaries that are wrong. Ahimsa is the religion of a Kshatriya. Mahavir was a Kshatriya, Buddha was a Kshatriya, Rama and Krishna were Kshatriyas and all of them were votaries of ahimsa. We want to propagate ahimsa in their name. But today ahimsa has become the monopoly of timid Vaishyas and that is why it has been besmirched

This type of self-abasement got Gandhi off the hook with the Pundits and Thakurs. After all, he was just a lowly Bania trying to turn a profit on things only comprehensible to Priests and Princes.  

Did the fact that Sorabji had spent a lot of time reading the Stoics set him up to fail with respect to Gandhi's 'psilosophy'?

NO. Stoicism should have enabled him to see Gandhi was a fuckwit who got money from financiers whose actions he defended and whose interests he advanced. In other words, Gandhi was a politician of a non-violent, i.e. money backed, type.

Sorabji signally fails to apply to this situation the key Stoic concept of 'oikeiosis'- which corresponds to 'purushartha' in Hinduism- as something natural and as arising from birth, belonging and 'appropriation'. As the etymology of the words quoted indicate, this is ultimately an economic matter. All ancient religious traditions stress the need for 'economia'- discretionary management and mutual accommodation- over and against 'akreibia'- rigid 'exceptionless' rules. Jewish theism explains halachah vein morin kein- a duty such that, if it is known, it forbids its own performance- as arising out of God's special relationship with his chosen people.

Hindu Nyaya, which is not necessarily Theistic, stresses the conventional nature of the Law.  The maxim 'Aprapta parpako Vidhi' indicates that superior foresight or dexterity in thought can prevent the need for applying an injunction . Where understanding independently adjusts to a situation in which an obligation would otherwise arise, there is no obligation because it has been extinguished by a superior proffer.  But this is just plain common sense. There are no need for rules if people are exercising superior foresight and judgment and are arriving at mutually beneficial solutions in an amicable atmosphere. 

More generally, any protocol bound decision process of a 'buck stopped' nature has no difficulty dealing with equitable exceptions to 'too general' rules. But rules don't matter if none are injured. No principle has been violated where none complain. 

 Lawyers learn about such things at College. Gandhi studied the law. He was by no means brilliant but had audited lectures where Cicero was mentioned. Briefly, in Cicero, or in the law re. culpa levis, the distinction is clearly made between the highest duty of care or highest benevolence and that of the ordinary variety. It could be argued that Ambalal Sarabhai was acting like a 'bonus paterfamilias' and that the killing of dogs was required to avoid 'culpa levis in abstracto'- i.e. a type of negligence excusable in ordinary people but not in a man of superior endowments and attainments who is expected to live up to a higher standard. This is an argument Gandhi could have made. But he didn't. Instead he started babbling about killing dogs being Ahimsa! 

Gandhi did not have a philosophy. He couldn't afford to. It would have interfered with his conviction that he was super-smart. 

Gandhi believed in reincarnation and considered this belief essential for all Hindus- though in fact we consider karma to be Maya- illusory. For Jainism, violence causes 'aashrav' of negative karma binding particles. Doing Satyagraha may have no positive effect on the world, but it may cause you to be reborn in the Golden age when there was no conflict, no scarcity, and everybody is born with a twin to whom they are mated for a very very long life. Still, in the end, all beings are reborn as Jain monks at a time when a Tirthankar is preaching. After that they gain kevalya omniscience for ever and ever.

 Vaishnavas, by contrast, say they want to be reborn in some humble capacity to serve the Lord. So what Gandhi was saying was mere orthodox fustian to Indian ears. That is why no one found him 'subtle' or 'surprising'. They did marvel at his capacity to raise funds and to turn those funds into mass movements which, however, failed quite quickly and increased British power to direct the pace and shape of reform. In this way, the Brits were denied an excuse to cut and run till the US pulled the financial plug.

 
It is true that Europe had various purely Pacifist sects- e.g the Quakers who were very influential in publishing at that time. Tolstoy was attracted to a Slavic versions of this type of Creed. However, one sect he admired and for whom he got permission to emigrate to Canada was so crazy that the Canadians turned upon them with loathing. Some came back to Russia. Oddly, they did well on Collective Farms!

 
Would Sorabji ascribe a stoic philosophy to Tolstoy? Of course not! Sorabji would be laughed at. Tolstoy was an educated man. Russian philologists know their onions. But, in the Aeon essay I am  commenting on, he is linking Gandhi to both Tolstoy and the Stoics. Why not add Nietzsche and throw in Moh Tzu for good measure? 

The fact is anyone can write any nonsense about Gandhi. The assumption is that Indians who know the truth won't ridicule and rubbish such bizarre claims. Indeed, if sufficiently deracinated, they will jump on the bandwagon. But there is no point telling such stupid lies. Stoicism does not demand it of you. This is not a debt you owe to Philosophy as an academic discipline. It simply testifies to the parlous state of non-STEM subject instruction at the University level.

Sorabji begins his article thus-

Was Mahatma Gandhi a philosopher?

No. He claimed to be a karmayogi, not a gyanayogi.  Lala Hardayal & Radhakrishnan were philosophers- i.e. lectured in Philosophy. Gandhi had no similar ambition.

He would not have thought so himself. But I want to show that he was a model for philosophy in the philosophical subtlety of his accounts of non-violence and in his thinking on a vital kind of freedom.

There was philosophical subtlety in Bill Clinton's assertion that there is some meaning of the word 'is' such that he wasn't a fucking liar. But if Clinton is a model for philosophy, why not Trump? Why stop there? How about Hitler and Pol Pot? 

There was a time when Philosophy looked to Maths or Jurisprudence for its model. That's why it was once respected.

Gandhi was full of surprises: in his defence of concrete particularity in ethics when exceptionless rules cannot guide conduct;

But both British and Hindu law provided these sorts of 'equitable' remedies. Gandhi was a Hindu lawyer. Nobody found what he said 'surprising' though many thought it stupid. But this is true of all politicians engaged in a hysterical type of mass agitation which is backed by a class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs.  

in his openness to views from other cultures; and in his exemplary response to criticism, which was welcomed, promulgated without being distorted, treated with disconcerting wit, and used to lead to a radical re-thinking of his own views.

Fuck does this mean? Gandhi's various mass movements failed. He surrendered and was a good sport about it. But, after Independence, he was ruthlessly killed when he tried to start up his stupidity once again.  

Of course, Gandhi (1869-1948) is known for his belief in non-violence,

He is also known for being very weak and for continually surrendering and going meekly off to jail 

which included, but was by no means confined to, non-violent resistance to the British rulers of India. But it is less well-known that he rejected the non-violence he had heard of in India.

Nonsense! He paid lip-service to it though, being a stupid cunt, he would do odd things like force his wife to cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad.  

Although the most important influence in his life was

Hinduism. He was a Hindu.  

the Jain faith, on non-violence, he preferred the second most important influence – Leo Tolstoy.

How? The guy was a recruiting sergeant for the Brits in the First War. He wasn't a pacifist.  

He thought, rightly or wrongly, that the Indian view he knew did not sufficiently mind someone else treading on a beetle, so long as one kept oneself pure by not treading on it oneself.

Substitute 'turd' for 'beetle' and you have the right of it. Not otherwise. Killing beetles is necessary in some contexts. It is foolish in others.  

Gandhi saw his early self as a votary of violence. It was the Russian Christian writer, Tolstoy, who converted Gandhi to non-violence, a fact that shows his openness to views from other cultures.

This is nonsense. Gandhi converted to celibacy after a visit from, Arya Samaji missionary, Bhai Parmanand who, though a householder himself, seems to have had a similar influence on Lala Hardayal. Aurobindo decided not to consummate his marriage and to remain celibate at around this time. A little later, women- like Kripalani or J.P's wives- too took such oaths. Kamala Nehru, on joining the Ramakrishna Order, denied sex to Jawaharlal- which he was man enough to be unhappy about.  

For this openness to views from elsewhere, Gandhi acknowledged the value of another Jain view – that ordinary humans have only partial knowledge, from which he concluded that truth must be sought in diverse quarters.

Sorabji may be surprised to learn that everybody thinks in this way. That's how come you consult a Doctor if your dick don't work and a Lawyer if it worked very well but in the wrong place.  

He described non-violence as being, on Tolstoy’s view, an ocean of compassion – one would not want anyone to tread on a beetle.

Yes one would. One might spend a lot of money on hiring an exterminator if there were an economic reason to control the beetle population.  

But more than that, you should never hate your opponent.

Why have an opponent in the first place? The fact that you don't hate the guy whose life you are making a misery is no consolation to him. 

With his permission, Gandhi published Tolstoy’s A Letter to a Hindoo (1909), which argued that millions of Indians were enslaved to a few thousand British only because, instead of internalising the law of love, they cooperated with the British in carrying out the violence on which their enslavement depended.

Tolstoy had been influenced by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and so forth. But he was a deeply silly man. He was saying Kings invented a false Religion. With the firm establishment of true Religion there would be no need for any type of organized Government. He might as well have said 'Everybody should be nice. Then nastiness would not exist.' 

Gandhi combined the attitude of compassion to all, opponents included, with a readiness for self-sacrifice so that, in resisting the British, he was ready to suffer a violent response without ever hating.

Sadly, his disciples hanged the man who killed him and attacked thousands of his caste-fellows. 

But he did not think that all should join his non-violent confrontations, because everyone has a different character and hence a different duty (svadharma), since only some can retain the non-violent attitude in the face of violence. For those who could not, he set up a ‘constructive programme’, to carry out a different type of work.

That work was silly, not constructive at all. 

Sorabji next says something which makes one wonder how good his Greek really is.

This was known to the ancient Greeks, but resisted for a long time by Christianity.

Utterly mad! Both the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews, who had been so thoroughly Hellenized by the time of Second Maccabees that they were writing in Koine, and the Christians had a protocol bound method of judging and purging sin by widely accepted forms of expiation.  

In the Greek story, Orestes was in a moral double-bind: wrong if he did not avenge his father by killing the assassin, but wrong if he killed his mother, who was the assassin.

The story of Orestes explains why a particular place and a particular ritual was efficacious for the expiation of a particular sin. Aeschylus is basically advertising a particular service offered by a shrine in his own City while burnishing the reputation of the Goddess of that City. 

The truth is, there was no 'double bind'. The guy did take an axe to mommy. He didn't curl up into a catatonic ball. But he was tortured by the Erinyes who, when the proper prayaschitham was performed turned into beneficent Euminides helpful to the Commonweal. 

Gandhi could have done what people expected- viz. tell the Mill-owner to contribute to local charities or set up a School with a nice statue of Sarama- mother of the dogs- for the kiddies to climb upon. That kind of 'expiation' has a 'metanoiac' property for the entire community. Gandhi gassing on about how he knows more about Jainism than the Jains and more about Hinduism than the Hindus was what infuriated his own people.

Sorabji, whose ancestors spoke Gujarati, appears as stupid as Gandhi. He does not seem to understand that for Christianity, Athena wasn't divine. She might be a witch or a demon or something of that sort. Pagan rites of expiation don't work. They further jeopardize your soul. The unforgiveable sin is to attribute the works of the Holy Spirit to some lower or malign agency. 

Christianity at first found this hard to accept, because eternal punishment was expected for serious wrongdoing

Has this guy not read the Gospels? Christ saves even the worst of sinners. The last shall be first.  

and, since God was just, the wrongdoing needed to be one’s fault.

Nonsense! Some are predestined to damnation. Some to Grace and Life everlasting. Under which rock has Sorabji been living? Why does he not know this? 

As a result, in the 6th century CE, elaborate attempts were made to locate a fault.

Why? Because the schism in the church had to do with whether Christ had two natures. Obviously, impeccability is problematic if there is a human nature subsisting alongside one that is wholly divine. However a preoccupation with casuistry, as such, only took off a thousand years later. 

But Gandhi saw that sometimes choosing violence is not one’s fault.

Either a fault arises or it does not in a given choice situation. Choosing violence may be meritorious or it may be a fault. There is a protocol bound, juristic way in which this matter can be resolved- provided the thing is 'buck stopped'.  

He nonetheless continued to hold that all violence was wrong, and was not even tempted by the implausibly lenient idea that, if something is not one’s fault, it can only be apparently wrong, prima facie.

A court may decide in this manner. We are not obliged to. Defending my life I cause your son to lose an eye. I may be under no obligation to pay for your maniacal son's retina transplant but it is a good thing to do. If I say 'I feel guilty. I've had so many opportunities in my life. That poor maniac had the cards stacked against him from the get-go. God alone preserved my life. I would be showing myself niggard in the face of the Lord's boundless mercy upon me if I did not use a portion of my wealth to restore that poor lunatic's sight.' This may sound a little unctuous but what great harm does it do to the commonweal?  

This in turn meant that although Gandhi admits a few exceptionless moral principles (in this case, all chosen violence is wrong),

but does he really? That is the question his interlocutors asked him. Hindu religion was clear enough. It is wrong to kill the sons and daughters of Sarama even if you fear they may interfere with a Religious Ceremony or that they may at some future point develop rabies or take to pissing on your leg. It would be an easy matter for the Mill owner to expiate his sin and win back the respect of his neighbors by providing money for some charitable purpose.  

he does not think that exceptionless principles can on their own guide us on conduct

though, very clearly, they can. Don't harm the sons and daughters of Sarama unless you have a clear obligation to do so under Hindu law.  

– they do not tell us what to do, since we might have personal duties, a svadharma such as responsibility for municipal welfare, that would make the non-violent course the worse one for us.

Svadharma arises by oikeiosis. It is economic in nature and thus does tell us what to do- viz. minimize opportunity cost or, if global opportunity cost is incomputable by reason of Knightian Uncertainty, then adopt the Muth rational regret minimizing strategy. 

The fact is juristic reasoning uses sequent calculi or directed graphs. In other words, there is always- for some set of protocols- a way of finding a 'covering set' of 'exceptionless principles' ex poste. This can't be done in Quantum Mechanics where a radical type of identity obtains between the particles in question. But it poses no problem for 'Law & Econ'. Uncorelated asymmetries aren't a scandal- they are the reason that superior correlated equilibria are available on the basis of public signals.

Gandhi might think that certain attitudes, such as non-violence as compassion, are universally desirable.

Or he might just have blathered any shite that he had overheard and mangled in his head. 

But even so, he does not aim to alter the attitude, or the conduct, of those Muslims who believed instead in retaliation.

Why not? A good man would try to alter the attitude and conduct of a Muslim guy who believes in retaliation but whose entire family or community will be pitilessly slaughtered the moment he runs amok. But in doing this good office, there is no reason to bring Religion into the matter. We have all seen plenty of films where the hero is held back from retaliation by good folk in the vicinity. The hero then gets  to learn Shao Lin kung fu and kill the bad guy in the final reel. 

Incidentally, Sharia prohibits the killing of stray dogs. Only a 'biting dog' may be killed under certain circumstances. Islam is  at one with Hinduism on this point. To be clear, a Muslim may not kill a dog because it bit him. Retaliation against even a dumb animal is un-Islamic. The only justification for harming animals in Religion is such as the most enlightened current jurisprudence on this topic can only strive to approach.

I sympathise with Gandhi’s denial that exceptionless universal principles can tell us what to do.

Why? Sorabji won't tell us. The fact is we use heuristics all the time which are 'exceptionless universal principles'- at least, some set of them could be proved to be so ex poste if Humanity has a finite life span. In other words, the thing may not be computable but we can be sure it exists. 

In ancient Greece, the later Stoics too after Panaetius (late 2nd century BCE) were particularists in ethics, but went further in avoiding exceptionless moral principles.

Arguably, Panaetius's student, Hecato of Rhodes, considered that such principles did arise in those virtues which were based on nomothetic 'scientific intellectual principles'- things we may treat under the rubric of Epistemology or Game Theory- as opposed to those of a wholly idiographic sort. 

A text based on Panaetius

Plutarch? 

tells us that when Julius Caesar marched his army on the city of Utica in his bid for supreme power in Rome, it was right for the Stoic Cato, who was there, to commit suicide, but not right for anyone else in the same circumstances, and this was because of Cato’s uniquely uncompromising character in standing up for the Roman republic. To explain why this was right only for Cato, one would have to depend on people knowing Cato’s history, or else illustrate that history. In either case, one would not have the kind of universal principle that was being looked for, but a rationale that depended on reference to an individual or to his particular history – that is, to his unique Stoic persona, or his Gandhian svabhava, and to the resulting personal duty (svadharma).

This is quite mad. What fucking 'exceptionless principle' involves rich dudes killing themselves rather than fighting the guy they don't want ruling over them? It is obvious, that when one guy does a stupid thing he may still be acclaimed. If everybody does it, Society collapses. There can only be one Rohit Vemula at a time. 

It has been said that the ancient Confucians in China avoided universal ethical principles, and an unfavourable contrast has been drawn with Western followers of Immanuel Kant and of utilitarianism. Why then does Gandhi nonetheless keep the universal principle that all violence is wrong?

Because he was stupid. The correct 'vidhi' in this case is 'don't harm the sons and daughters of Sarama unless such and such circumstances obtain and you have such and such obligations not otherwise dischargeable.' Even then, you have to do prayaschitham.

He has an answer to this too. One reason is that the principle is a counsel of perfection for the imperfect,

But he says that 'counsel of perfection' can't be expressed even if it is known to some guy living in a forest. Thus there is no fucking counsel at all.  

which helps us to raise our sights, even though we cannot altogether avoid choosing violence.

This is not reason, it is madness. The rapist can raise his sights towards the highest asceticism and celibacy while sodomizing and strangling his victim as is his unavoidable habit or propensity. Why the fuck should we care about how high he has set his sights? String the filthy fellow up already! 

It is not surprising that, looking at Gandhi as simply a politician, many, and especially the British then, could have thought that he was a political twister, saying whatever suited him as and when. But if he says at one time: ‘Don’t use violence,’ and at another time: ‘Do use it,’ this is actually the product, to my mind, of perceptive philosophical thought.

But everybody already communicates things of this sort. The cat sometimes purrs and rubs against my leg to command me to feed it, but, at other times, it is disdainful of my rattling her bowl. Why? Sometimes the cat is hungry. At other times not. Sometimes the dog wants to go walkies. At other time he wants to sleep. To Sorabji, no doubt, all this suggests 'perceptive philosophical thought'. 

My second illustration is Gandhi’s treatment of freedom. There was a long tradition behind his unusual views on freedom,

There is a long tradition of kids saying 'I know it looks as though I'm a little kid who has to go to School. But I am actually a big tall secret agent working for Her Majesty's Secret Service. Everybody thinks I'm sitting quietly in Maths class. Actually I'm assassinating Putin in between having sex with Russian Super Models.'

It may be possible to 'manage the news' such that you can think of yourself, every moment, as this James Bond character though you are actually a janitor. Maybe you could trick yourself into thinking that when you get a coke from the machine in the basement, you are actually being served a Martini, shaken not stirred, by a scantily clad hostess on a beach in Barbados. You may even invent a philosophy such that you were the true James Bond while the actual 007 is a mere janitor. This may be a Gandhian philosophy. But it isn't a Stoic philosophy. Why? What is missing is the notion of oikeiosis. The thing ignores your reciprocal ties of belonging to your family and colleagues and community. It is a wank, that's all. 

and Gandhi certainly had access to some of it, but he might have worked it out for himself, only sometimes making use of the antecedents. The fullest account was in the ancient Stoics, starting with Epictetus in the 1st century CE. Gandhi read a book about three major Stoics, including Epictetus, which he called inspiring, but only in 1922-24, after many of his views were already formed. And in 1926 his learned secretary Mahadev Desai commented that Gandhi’s ideals were sometimes remarkably similar to Stoic ideals, citing two examples of the different topic of personal duty.

In Discourse, the Stoic Epictetus presents personal freedom as a kind of invulnerability gained by setting your heart, or rather your will (prohairesis), only on what it is in your power to have.

Who want a freedom conditional upon the enslavement of heart and will and prohairywhatsits? I want a freedom where my heart can do what it likes and my will can get jiggy with my soul and my soul can shit on the face of the pleroma. 

That sort of freedom is worth having. 

Then the tyrant cannot do anything to you.

Only because you've already fucked yourself up. Why not simply kill yourself and leave a note saying 'Ha, ha! I cheated you out of the pleasure of torturing me by telling me how much you love me and respect me and just want me to stop biting my teachers so as to be able to get my PhD already. Fuck you Mummy! Fuck you very much!'  

What is in your power does not include your body, its parts, your faculties, your possessions, your reputation, offices, honours, children, brothers, friends, farm, slaves, clothes, house or horses. For thinkers, in case they felt safe, he added ‘your books’.

So you can't have a crafty wank when the tyrant is looking the other way. Shame.  

Epictetus describes the exercises by which he makes his students set aside any consideration that is not under the control of their wills. To a tyrant who threatens: ‘I will put you in chains,’ they are to imagine themselves replying: ‘What did you say, man? Put me in chains? My leg you will put in chains, but my will not even God can conquer.’

Which is cool if you really can withstand torture. It might be a little late to decide Epictetus was a lying toe-rag after a white hot poker is shoved way up your bum.  

The students are to learn to be free by reducing themselves to their wills – that is, to their rightly directed wills.

So their wills too are enslaved. But to what purpose? White hot pokers up the bum tend to make you wish your Will had told you to punch Epictetus in the fucking nut-sack.  

Already in 300 BCE, the founder of Stoicism, Zeno from Cyprus, had said that only the person who has become truly good is actually free; all who are not good are slaves.

Cool! Tell that to a bunch of really well-built African American gang bangers. Go on. I dare ya.  

Zeno also introduced the Stoic idea that only good character is really good, although other things have a certain limited value.

Whereas being really good has no value at all. Why? It does not represent 'transferable utility'. A rich man can give me money. You can't hand over a portion of your lovely character or your excellent health or your beautiful soul. Just let me fuck your wife and we'll call it quits. 

It is natural to pursue some things – food, pleasure, health and life itself – and it is right to follow nature.

It is not right to follow shitheads. - 

But the test comes if we fail to get them.

Which is when we say 'screw Nature. I'm gonna give Science a try'.  

Then what really matters is whether we exercise good character by pursuing them in the right way.

Good character doesn't gas on about good character. It gets busy finding ways to make life better. Nature made me very short-sighted. Science repaired Nature's defect. The good character shown by people who do useful stuff also involves their not harping continually on their moral excellence and freedom from some supposed tyrant.  

It is not securing the objectives that really matters. In Stoic terminology, the objectives are indifferent, but they are naturally preferred indifferents, which we must pursue for ourselves and others, if we are to be good people. Similarly, there are naturally dispreferred indifferents, and having your leg put in chains would doubtless be an example. But thinking that this is only a rightly dispreferred indifferent might reinforce Epictetus’ new point that you should think your leg is not you.

You should think sensibly and then tell Epictetus to eat your shit because you think it is actually chocolate cake and, what's more, you think he really wants to eat it but is just being shy. Now he wants you to keep punching him till he eats your chocolate cake. You think he is very very happy. He may think differently, but only because his rightly dispreferred indifferent is now choking on your chocolate cake. 

Epictetus finishes his Discourse on freedom by identifying only two people who were free, both from Athens in the 4th century BCE: Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in a wine vase, both of whom defied convention and influenced the Stoics.

Diogenes ran away from his home town after debasing its currency. The guy was a swindler. 

But there have been modern followers of Epictetus’ ideal of freedom. In 1993, I invited the US war hero Admiral James Stockdale to London to discuss with Greek scholars, a psychologist and the general public how a course on Epictetus he’d taken at university meant that, years later during the Vietnam War, he welcomed and withstood 19 occasions of physical torture (some exploiting, in Epictetan fashion, his broken leg) and four years of solitary confinement by his captors. As the resulting article and the book written with his wife describe, Stockdale was conducting what Gandhi would have called an experiment. The deliberate provoking of punishment by small infractions of the rules in captivity restored his self-esteem, and that of other captives, whom he similarly persuaded, which left them all free to refuse the captors’ limited objective of securing televised denunciations of the war.

The 'Stockdale paradox'- i.e. it is better not to subscribe to a falsifiable hope- is game-theoretic and can certainly be derived from oikeiosis. But that involves accepting that your leg is your actual leg. They keep breaking it but you can take the pain because, after all, it is your leg. That pain and those scars are medals of honor which nothing can take from you. 

The irony is that Stockdale and his ilk's valor represent the one victory the US were able to snatch from a corrupt shitshow of incompetence. With leaders like Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap, the Vietnamese completely outclassed the invaders every step of the way. But then, the Vietnamese are a remarkable people- who have done very well wherever they have settled. I need hardly add that Vietnam's per capita Income overtook India twenty years ago and has been soaring above it ever since.

Whether or not Gandhi knew the Stoic ideas, he knew their prototype from Plato’s Apology (4th century BCE), of which he wrote a paraphrase in 1908. There Socrates, is presented as defending himself before a jury against charges of corrupting the youth by philosophical discussion of conventional values and by introducing false gods. Plato presents Socrates as saying that exclusion from office, exile or execution would not be a harm to him; only his accusers would be harmed by trying to kill a man unjustly.

That makes sense. It is often the case that a regime dare not punish a particular intellectual. However, killing Socrates didn't really harm Athens. Plato and his chums had less power than they thought. Anyway, Socrates could simply have slipped away. He didn't coz he was a big fat Drama Queen. 

Like the Stoics later, Socrates here treats justice as a real good, and the usual objectives as indifferent. However, in treating unjust treatment as not harming him, he did not go as far as Epictetus’ admiring description of the true Cynic as someone who loves those who are beating him as if he were the father or brother of them all.

Actually, if a bunch of thugs are intent on kicking your head in, it is a good idea to pretend you are a masochist who would pay good money for that sort of treat- shame I left my wallet at home. Look, howabouts we do this Friday night? I'll bring plenty of cash and poppers.  

By bringing in love, Epictetus comes closer to Tolstoy’s Christian law of love, which so influenced Gandhi.

that he started recruiting for the British Army like crazy 

‘No power on Earth can make a person do a thing against his will’

And yet it happens all the time. Why? It's the Lizard People from Planet X. Fuck you Lizard People! Fuck you very much! 

Gandhi was more directly influenced on freedom, as on non-violence, by Tolstoy. We saw earlier, in A Letter to a Hindoo, the influence of Tolstoy’s view on non-violence, that Indians would be free from British rule, if they internalised the law of love and stopped cooperating on violent projects.

So being a recruiting sergeant for the British Army was a definite no no. 

Tolstoy saw freedom in recognition, when he said that Indians are enslaved by violence only because they do not recognise the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

Very true. Once guys in Gulags recognized the eternal law of love inherent in humanity they started kissing and cuddling all and sundry till the Soviet Union collapsed and Putin, thankfully, started cracking down on the great big Gay orgy his country had become.  

Similarly, in Gandhi’s other favourite work by Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Tolstoy writes that you will be free as soon as you recognise that the role you play in a violent society is not needed for the public good.

Still, the guy enabled some such to emigrate to Canada where their habit of dancing naked around the school houses they had burned down soured their welcome.  

The reference to love, we saw above, was brought into the Stoic Epictetus’ account of the Cynic’s response to injustice.

What does all this have to do with Gandhi's demand that the Government slaughter all stray dogs? The fact is, by 1926, everybody knew Tolstoy had been talking worthless garbage. Still, Stalin spared Tolstoy's buddy Chertkov who lived comfortably while lots of Old Bolsheviks died in the Gulags.

Tolstoy was more immediately influenced by the Stoics. He had in his library a book about the Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and other Greek moralists, and had marked a translation of Marcus Aurelius with numerous underlinings.

Tolstoy, poor fellow, had a genuine psychiatric disorder. He kept wanting to kill himself. That's the sort of thing modern medication can do wonders for.

One of Tolstoy’s remarks in The Kingdom of God is Within You is reminiscent of Epictetus on freedom as an inviolability of the rightly directed will, when he says: ‘It is impossible for a man to be placed against his will in a situation repugnant to his conscience.’

Yup. And a virtuous woman can't be raped. Nor can the sort of politician who says this be sodomized in prison so let us send him there immediately. God knows he has embezzled enough.  

Gandhi’s own remark in 1926 seems to echo this when he says: ‘No power on Earth can make a person do a thing against his will.’

Which is why India didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got four years previously. Viceroy Sahib was not willing it. Naughty Viceroy Sahib! Still, if you are determined to stay on, could you kindly get busy killing bow wows? 

In both views, the will cannot be forced, although Epictetus had said this only of the rightly directed will. Gandhi’s comment is presumably not meant to deny that one can act reluctantly, as in his example above, in which non-violence is seen as even worse than violent action.

Coz killing stray dogs is cool y'all! 

As early as 1909, Gandhi wrote about freedom in Hind Swaraj, translated into English as Indian Home Rule (1910). Anyone who wants to engage in his resistance movement for the service of the country has to observe perfect chastity,

so not his sons then 

adopt poverty,

but take big bucks from any dog killing tycoon who rates you as a Mahatma 

follow truth, and cultivate fearlessness, he wrote. Chastity is the greatest discipline, and is necessary for the requisite firmness;

Gandhi's novel argument for celibacy was that having sex makes you impotent. Don't have sex. Then you will be virile.  

it excludes not marriage, but sexual relations within marriage. This meant that, as with Epictetus’ free agent, Gandhi felt that he had nothing to lose when the British put him in prison.

Why then did he fast till let out once again? Clearly, he did have something to lose in Jail and had figured out a way to get out before his sentence was up. 

Since the Brits had discovered, as Smuts had, that Gandhi was the ideal interlocutor because he always destroyed his own negotiating position, they needed to keep the guy alive. 

When he faced imprisonment or death through voluntary fasting in prison, it was the British who were afraid.

Because he, single handedly, had destroyed Hindu-Muslim unity not once but twice- first in 1922, when the Empire was militarily at its most vulnerable and had to let go of Ireland, Egypt, Afghanistan and admit defeat in Turkey, and the second time at the Second Round Table Conference, with the Great Depression in the background, when Gandhi managed to unite all the minorities and depressed classes of India against his own party. 

Gandhi wrote that this inner freedom was a prerequisite for home rule,

Which Ireland and Egypt got but India didn't in 1922 

and was the real self-rule (swaraj), as he had also said even earlier in 1908 in his loose paraphrase and comment on John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860), about the worker who arrived late getting the same wages as those who arrived on time.

WTF? Is Sorabji thinking of the parable of the toilers in the vineyard? There is no worker 'arriving late' in Ruskin.  

Real self-rule, Gandhi argued, consists of restraint, and requires a moral life, not cheating, not forsaking the truth, doing one’s duty to parents, wife, children, servants and neighbour.

But really real self-rule, everybody else argued, did not consist of any such bollocks. 'Doing one's duty to servants' forsooth!  

Without such reforms, the departure of the British from India would not supply the country with true self-rule.

Fake self-rule suited Nehru just fine. Why? Coz it was self-rule. That's all that matters.  

I remember an occasion when Dad had promised me to take to see Dr. No at the drive-in. But Dad was tired when he came home and anyway it was raining. But I made him stick to his promise. Mum said 'you think you will enjoy the film, but you won't really.' I fucking loved that film. So did Dad. Arsulla Undress was stunning. Poor Mum. What she must have suffered when he got home!

Gandhi published his Discourses on the Gita from February to November 1926. He then wrote a Gujarati translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1927, and a Gujarati introduction to it in 1929, and an English translation just of the introduction after that. His secretary Desai translated Gandhi’s Gujarati translation into English, with a learned commentary, and this was published after Desai’s death as The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi (1946). Some of the verses advocate an attitude of detachment or detached indifference to opposite outcomes in life, although only one English verse uses the word ‘indifferent’, and it is always the person who is indifferent to opposite outcomes, not, as with the Stoics, the outcomes that are called indifferent. Detachment, as opposed to attachment, might therefore be the clearer description, and indeed the Gita repeatedly requires action without attachment, including attachment to the fruits of action.

It requires nothing at all. It says 'do what you like'. I have explained all this elsewhere.  

It could well be from the Gita that Gandhi absorbed analogues to the Stoic theory of the indifference of outcomes and the importance of good character.

It could well be that Gandhi did not know he was a Hindu. Reading the Stoics, it could well be that he discovered he was not a pussy cat as he may well have previously believed. Then he started demanding that stray dogs be killed. This shows that Stoicism rocks. Sorabji hasn't wasted his life. Perish the thought! 

Gandhi was interested in another quite different kind of freedom, moksha, in the traditional Indian sense of escape from rebirth, which is also discussed by Plato. He said he would like to escape after this life, or after one more rebirth, but if he was to be reborn, he would like to be reborn as one of the group then called ‘untouchables’, now Dalits or the oppressed, to share their sorrows and endeavour to free himself and them.

The Dalits had the last laugh. India now venerates Dr. Ambedkar who went one up on the Mahatma by becoming a Boddhisattva.  

It has been pointed out that this contrasts with the more common route to escaping rebirth by retreat from the world.

Or the even more common route to escape from death by changing your name and lying about your age and running away if you see a tall skeletal figure holding a scythe.  

Instead, Gandhi found a glimpse of God in being among the suffering millions.

While they got to glimpse his bandy knees.  

At one point, he also said that the truest self-rule, the path of moral restraint in the world, was synonymous with moksha, although self-rule is not so obviously connected with escape from the world.

This is a guy who said everything was synonymous with everything else at some point or other. Killing dogs, then, is synonymous with moksha which is synonymous with loksha and poksha and goksha.  

But it has been pointed out that self-rule too would once have been seen as requiring retreat from the world of rule by princely rulers, whereas for Gandhi self-rule involved, as we saw above, a moral life, involving one’s duties to others.

Sorabji is not aware that self-rule meant only one thing in Gandhi's time. Viceroy & Co should kindly pack their bags and fuck off, innit? The trouble was that India needed the Royal Navy to protect its shores. Only when it became clear that Brittania no longer ruled the Seas did 'Self-Rule' become inevitable. Why? The Brits had borrowed the very money they used to defend India from India itself. That trick could not be played twice coz Uncle Sam was the only money-bags in town. America refused to finance the Raj, believing it would pick up some valuable scraps after the Brits left. Then it realized India wasn't just as poor as shit. It was a fucking shithole. But only so long as it clung to the Gandhian soul that was the hole in its begging bowl. 

The philosophical themes central to Gandhi – non-violence and freedom – are full of surprises.

Buying stuff with money is non-violent and represents one type of freedom. Guys like dog-killer Sarabhai paid Gandhi to organize an 'Independence' movement which directly profited Indian textile tycoons. This is because Gandhi's big shtick was 'burn foreign cloth'! It was a crude but effective way of getting rid of the competition. It was money which kept Gandhi in business, not Tolstoy or Ruskin or the fucking Stoics.  

His thinking is never conventional. But there are surprises in other themes too. Gandhi said to the English writer H G Wells that he would prefer a Charter of the Duties of Man to a Charter of the Rights of Man.

And we would prefer a Calendar of naked Beauties to either.  

This would have appealed to the Stoics,

Guys, is it just me or are any of you getting the feeling that what would have appealed to the Stoics would have been as dull as shit?  

who thought character alone to be very important, but the ordinary needs of life to be merely preferred indifferents.

Yup, that's what I will tell She-Hulk when (with Bilgrami's assistance) I finally get her in the sack. Babe, can I stick it in your unpreffered indifferent? Only if I can do the same, She-Hulk replies. Then I see the  size of her strap-on. Fuck, maybe Sorabji was right. 

That seems to suggest that if the just man or woman had acted to meet others’ needs but, through no fault of theirs, the intended needs were not met, the important thing would nonetheless have happened.

Important to whom? Anybody we give a fuck about? 

Gandhi’s reason was different: talk of rights tends to lead to violence.

So does talk of stray dogs, it seems. Gandhi starts foaming at the mouth and demanding that all such creatures be slaughtered by the Government in defiance of Islamic Law. Somebody should have pointed this out to him. He'd have very quickly retracted, for fear of a fatwa. 

He still connected rights with duties, but in a quite unexpected way.

Rights without remedies are useless. Duties without rewards equally so. Gandhi, obviously, would conceive of Rights and Duties in the most useless way possible. 

The point familiar to us is the linguistic one, that if I have rights, that very claim implies that some others will have duties not to interfere with them. Gandhi makes instead a point that is not linguistic, but rather a substantive value judgment: I will have no rights over my family, unless I first perform my duties towards them.

Nonsense! A newborn baby has 'rights over its family' as the Courts well recognize. In Hindu law, the rights of that baby may be superior to the rights of its mother or, if the father has converted to another religion or taken sanyaas, superior to its own father. But a baby has no duties. Incidentally, if you perform the 'sampratti' ritual transferring your rights to your son, then- if you don't die- you become his servant. Cool! 

I suppose Gandhi means 'I ought not to have rights if I don't fulfil my duties'. But this is not a view condoned by scripture or law or economics. It is simply silly. The link between right and remedy, duty and reward, is broken such that neither are justiciable or incentive compatible or useful in any other way.  

Gandhi’s political actions were also full of surprises.

Unless you admit the guy was paid by a bunch of tycoons to further their agenda while making sure the Brits didn't slyly fuck off leaving Indian undefended.  

To illustrate them, I must return to the relation between his philosophy and his politics.

Perhaps the most famous political surprise was Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930. The British had put a high tax on salt. This was lucrative because everyone needs salt, and so it put a burden on Indians of all faiths, but the heaviest burden was on the poor for whom it was hardest to pay.

But India still has that Salt tax. What the poor really wanted was a rent strike. But that would have hurt Gandhi's financiers. So Gandhi chose to indulge in a purely cosmetic type of protest. Still, because Labor was in power in Westminster and the Great Depression had set in, India was in a strong position. As usual, Gandhi managed to disappoint everybody while destroying Hindu-Muslim unity so that the Brits, with the Tories back in charge, could dictate the pace and scope of Constitutional progress. This meant they kept valuable 'residuary control rights' and were able to borrow from India to finance the War effort. This meant that Britain's debt to India was India's one big asset. India had to do what the Brits wanted or it might walk away from that debt. But the Brits needn't have bothered with this chicanery. The Indians voluntarily tied themselves to Britain so as to keep those vulgar Yanks out.  

On 2 March 1930, Gandhi sent a private and courteous letter with a list of 11 steep demands to the British Viceroy, including, among others, the abolition of the salt tax, and said that he would engage in civil disobedience if they were not met.

The letter was not made public for at least a week. Being refused, Gandhi prepared a march and announced on 5 March that the cause would be the salt tax. He chose non-violent marchers who would not resist assault nor even death, if attacked. The precautions in his instructions of how to remain non-violent, and his advance provisions for arrival in villages on the route, were a model of foresight and planning.

True enough. Gandhi planned his own defeat with great diligence and foresight. Everything that could be done to ensure the thing was a fiasco was indeed done and then some.  

The destination, on the Surat coast, was not announced until 9 March. The 240-mile march through villages began on 12 March, gaining Indian and international attention, and arriving 24 days later in Dandi on the coast on 5 April. Gandhi bathed in the sea and scooped up salt with his fingers from the natural salt deposits, without having paid tax, thereby breaking the law.
From there on, the salt-tax law and others were openly violated throughout India. Gandhi was arrested on 5 May before a second salt march, while still writing a letter to the Viceroy to forewarn him of it. At that second act of civil disobedience, iron-tipped staves were brought down on the skulls of unresisting protesters, who fell to the ground, although only four were reported to have died in that period. Gandhi was taken to Poona (now Pune) jail. Released on 26 January 1931, he thanked his jailers for their care and said that he felt he was leaving peace and quiet. The new confidence of the resistance movement took almost everybody by surprise, although it would be more than 16 years before India became independent.

Hilarious! There's a Labour Government. The Great Depression is on. And this nutter throws in the towel just when it looks as though the Brits can't hang on even a moment longer. Gandhi meekly goes off to the Second Round Table Conference all by himself and demands that the INC be put in charge of the Army! Immediately, everybody else unites against him. It's no good blaming the Muslims. Even the Sikhs and Christians and non-Brahmin Madrasis and Depressed Classes were against that toothless buffoon. Afterwards, Gandhi returns and is sent to jail along with his chums. The Brits pass an Act to their own liking and the INC is too demoralized to do anything but beg to be released so as to take part in elections and form Ministries. 

Viceroys had learned a lesson. It was pointless to talk to Gandhi. The guy had shit for brains. Just jail him and his chums anytime they wag their tail. Gandhi will fast and get out and stay quiet for a bit. Then he will wag his tail and back to jail he goes. After Independence, Gandhi went on a fast to get India to give money to Pakistan despite the fact that hostilities were ongoing. He prevailed but was promptly shot by a Hindu. It may be a good thing that Gandhi kept the Brits around when they might have left in 1924. It may not. What Hindu India was certain off, however, was that killing cunts with the surname Gandhi when they fuck up big-time- as Indira and Rajiv did- is really good for Democracy. That's why Rahul Baba refuses to step up to the plate. 

I have already given an example to show why I think Gandhi’s philosophy needs to be studied if his politics are to be understood.

But Sorabji knows shit about Indian politics. Thus he says silly things about Gandhi.  

It is not opportunism that he sometimes allows violence yet often forbids it too.

It is stupidity of a type which, it must be said, his financiers did well by. Look what happens when one of his backers kills 60 dogs. Gandhi immediately decides that killing stray dogs is a very high type of duty. Thankfully, Sarabhai didn't start killing cows. Actually, if he had done that, some Hindu or Sikh would have chopped his head off and Gandhi would have started bleating about how cutting off heads is the highest form of ahimsa.  

His belief is subtle (and, to my mind, correct) that, although violence is always wrong, it does not give us exceptionless laws of how to act.

Violence isn't always wrong. No Religion or Legal regime has ever said so. 

As already mentioned, he did not think of himself as a philosopher. But neither, for that matter, did he care for politics, which he once called a ‘botheration’, even though he was a great tactician.

No he wasn't.  

He put politics below spiritual values, and would give up political objectives if they clashed with spiritual ones.

No. He just gave up. Anyway, he was killed the moment his utterly stupid spiritual values clashed with Hindu India's political objectives.  

Nonetheless, his conclusions about non-violence were to have an enormous impact on India, and not only there.

Gandhi ensured the Brits stayed till the Muslims came to hate Hindus so that the country could be partitioned and Muslims in India could be rendered a marginalized, always vulnerable, community. Of course, Gandhi did not intend this outcome. His aim was always to glorify himself and collect money for his vainglorious, crackpot, schemes. But once he wagged his tail in Independent India, Hindus were queuing up to kill him. The Government does not seem to have been particularly keen on preventing this benign outcome.

It was partly because he had won worldwide admiration that Britain, weakened by the Second World War, had no choice but to leave India.

Nonsense! Uncle Sam pulled the plug on the money side of things while the administration had collapsed in much of the countryside. The hope was that the Brits would stick around in the Cities till the Commies could come to power in the countryside by killing the landlords and priests and so forth. Sadly, it was not to be. Congress reasserted itself in the countryside. The 'Gandhi cap' became a great money making machine.  

By the count of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, which is dedicated to advancing the study of non-violent action, there have been 23 non-violent resistance movements influenced by Gandhi in the 20th century and beyond, up to 2005; Martin Luther King, Jr’s was only one.

But African Americans were a minority. Hindus in India were the vast majority. 

Some have used Sharp’s analysis of Gandhi’s techniques as a handbook.

They have failed. 

Sharp regards about half of these resistance movements as having succeeded.

The man is deluded. 

I think one further effect of Gandhi’s non-violent approach was that there was so little bitterness among first-generation Indians towards the British once they had left, although later generations could well be much more upset when they read the history of British occupation.

written by liars and fantasists. 

Gandhi’s politics were not always so successful. The Dalits complained that he failed to support their leader B R Ambedkar on the plight of ‘untouchability’, as it was called. Gandhi himself realised that he could not prevent the massacres involved in the Partition of India in 1947 into India and Pakistan, when people did not know until the last moment where the boundary would be, and whether they would have to lose their family homes through being on the wrong side of the border. With the massacres, Gandhi lost his earlier wish to live to 123 years of age. But his ability to surprise never left him. When the British asked him

The British? Burrows, the Governor, was doing what both the outgoing and incoming Premier wanted. The Brits hadn't stopped Shurawardy starting the violence. Now Shurawardy needed Gandhi to get it to stop because his own future was uncertain. Since the Marwaris had financed the anti-Muslim backlash and since they wanted peace now that they had secured Calcutta for India, Gandhi's tamasha succeeded.  

to quell the pre-Partition massacres in Calcutta (Kolkata), he came and converted one of the massacre’s leaders to non-violence. When the Indian National Congress (which was due to rule India but which he had left) asked Gandhi how to persuade Muhammad Ali Jinnah to give up his project of founding Pakistan, Gandhi replied: ‘Offer him the prime ministership of a united India, and swear to support the decisions of the cabinet that he chooses.’

Sorabji doesn't understand that under the Cabinet Mission Plan, the offer was worthless. The P.M would have no power. The Premiers of the States would do as they pleased. Jinnah wasn't an utter fool. Anyway, he had long experience of Congress perfidy.  

To read Gandhi, then, is to read a great spiritualist who inspired new ideals across the world – and a great tactician.

Gandhi may have inspired people who were ignorant or who pretended to be ignorant of his utter failure in Indian politics. He was a terrible tactician. He should have spent his time chasing dogs and trying to kill them by slobbering all over them.  

But my point has been that it is also to read someone who provides a model for philosophical thinking.

Because philosophical thinking is shit. Fair point, Sorabji dude. I guess you win- but yours is a Gandhian victory.