我们本周的话题是作为哲学家的甘地。那就是圣雄甘地，伟大的精神和政治领袖，印度独立运动之父。这位倡导和实践非暴力的人，激励了全世界数百万人——包括美国自己的非暴力倡导者马丁·路德·金。虽然人们通常不会认为甘地是哲学家，但事实上，他是一位深刻的哲学思想家。他不像我和约翰那样是个学院派的哲学家，但他写了很多可以被称为哲学的东西。

To be sure, academic philosophers would probably find his philosophical writings frustrating at times. But when you realize that Gandhi's spirituality, his approach to politics, and his philosophical outlook are interconnected, then you realize that if you really want to understand the phenomenon that was Gandhi, you have to also understand his philosophical outlook.

And we’re betting that a taste of Gandhi as philosopher and how it might help us better understand Gandhi the spiritual and political leader. Take, for example, Gandhi's views about morality. You might think that the leader of non-violent non-cooperation, as he liked to call it, would be big on moral condemnation of his opponent, and would be constantly claiming the moral high ground. After all, revolutionaries do tend to criticize the old order as morally problematic.

Just as an aside, though, I should point out that one could wonder whether it is completely fair to call Gandhi a revolutionary. He didn't lead an armed rebellion, like most revolutionaries. He and many of his followers were willing tobekilled, but they weren't willing to kill. And the term 'revolutionary' does tend to connote the violent, rather than the peaceful overthrow of the old order. So I'm not sure we have a good word for exactly what Gandhi was.

But let’s get back to Gandhi and morality. Most revolutionaries – or whatever exactly Gandhi was – are utterly and inalterably convinced that they have morality wholly on their side. Though Gandhi was a deeply principled man who constantly strove to be on the side of morality, he wasn't big on claiming to know the moral truth. And he actually thought that the ethical condemnation of one's opponent was itself a form of violence. And he rejectedallforms of violence.

这似乎有点令人费解。如果道德站在你这一边，声称自己有道德又有什么不好呢?那不就是陈述你认为是真的吗?但有两点值得我们注意。第一个是关于真相的。甘地对真理的看法非常复杂。He believed thereissuch a thing as absolute truth. And he felt he was on a quest to know the absolute truth. But he also thought that that quest for truth was unending and uncertain. Only God actually knows the absolute truth. Gandhi, in fact, took it to be a form of arrogance to claim to have the absolute truth on your side in disputes between humans. We, humans, only know what he calledrelativetruth.

That makes Gandhi a kind of relativist, in a way. One might reasonably suppose, then, that it must have been his relativism that led him to reject moral condemnation as a form of violence. Relativists, after all, promote tolerance of competing points of view and competing moral outlooks. Problem is that Gandhi can't really be called a straight-forward relativist. Relativists tend not to believe in absolute truth -- even as the elusive object of an unending quest. But that’s just what Gandhi did believe. Of course, Gandhi isn't straight-forward absolutist either. At least some absolutists think that they have a firm grip on the absolute truth. And under the illusion, at least as Gandhi would see it, that they alone know the absolute truth, they tend to lord it over those who disagree with them. Gandhi would never pretend to know the absolute truth and would never lord it over anyone.

I'm not sure, but Gandhi's attempt to sort of have it both ways makes things a little complicated. Suppose we follow Gandhi and say that lording it over others, under the illusion that you alone grasp the absolute truth, is a form of violence. Well then, aren’t we criticizing and morally condemning the other? But by Gandhi’s lights, moral condemnation is itself a form of violence. So don’t we have to reject even this moral condemnation? But that, it would seem, doesn’t make any sense. It prevents us from simply stating what we take to be the case -- that one shouldn't lord it over others under the illusion of having sole possession of the absolute truth. But the very rejection of that way of looking at things is built into Gandhi's own way of thinking. So it looks like Gandhi can't really declare hi sown principles, maybe.

也许我们应该扭转这一局面，站在对手的角度来看问题，看看甘地拒绝将正义的道德批评视为一种暴力的行为是什么。我想他很清楚地认为，如果你不断地批评对手，对手就会把你的谴责当成一种攻击。也许不是攻击他的肉体，而是攻击他的精神。这让你的对手处于守势。但如果你想赢得对手的支持，或至少降低他的抵抗，这是一个糟糕的策略。这是否在道德上是错误的还不清楚，但也许也许是战略上的错误。

You could, I suppose, think that Gandhi is really carrying this non-violence thing too far. Moral condemnation is an attack only in a metaphorical sense and not literally and truly a form of violence. But Gandhi would insist that violence takes many forms -- not just physical. There's economic violence, cultural violence. For Gandhi, moral condemnation is just another form of violence. And he insisted that all forms of violence are to be resisted. It is certainly true that violence takes many forms and that not all of them involve the infliction of direct physical harm to the body. But I'm still not completely convinced that freedom from violence of any kind would entail freedom from moral condemnation.

I haven't unravelled, by any means, the puzzle of Gandhi. He was clearly a complicated man. And he was a complicated thinker too. It’s not at all obvious that his views really add up to philosophically speaking. But fortunately, for this episode John and I were joined by a man who has thought long and hard about Gandhi: Akeel Bilgrami author of "Gandhi, the Philosopher".