Gandhi, Simondon and the question of how to live, on 2 October

Two men born on the same October day, fifty-five years apart, left the twentieth century a pair of questions it is still unable to put down. Mohandas Gandhi, born on 2 October 1869, asked whether a person can act in politics without doing harm, and whether the means a movement uses can be kept clean of the end it seeks. Gilbert Simondon, born on 2 October 1924, asked what a machine actually is, and whether a culture that treats its technology as either a threat or a slave has understood itself at all. The first question is about power and the second about technique, and the odd thing is how quickly they meet: both are versions of a single older question, which is how a human being ought to live with forces larger than himself.

The day carries other names. It is the birthday of Swami Abhedananda, among the first to carry Vedanta into American lecture halls and argue it in the vocabulary of Western philosophy, and of Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive who wrote the most philosophical poetry in American English. It is the anniversary of the death of Marcel Duchamp, who asked, with a plumbing fixture, where art begins. And because of Gandhi it is, by resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, the International Day of Non-Violence. The crowd is large, but it is not random; most of these people spent their lives on the question of what a life is for.

Gandhi: the means are the end in the making#

Gandhi was born at Porbandar on the western coast of India, read law in London, and found his vocation not there but in South Africa, where he practised for more than two decades and where, in 1906, resisting a law that required Indians to be registered and fingerprinted, he arrived at the method that would make him. He called it satyagraha, which he glossed as 'holding firmly to truth' or 'truth-force', and he was careful to distinguish it from passive resistance, which he thought a weapon of the weak. Satyagraha was to be a discipline of the strong, who refuse to cooperate with injustice and accept the suffering that refusal brings rather than inflict it on anyone else.

To read Gandhi only as a tactician of independence is to miss the philosophy under the tactics. Three ideas hold it up. Ahimsa, non-violence or, more exactly, the refusal to harm, he took from the Jain and Hindu traditions of his childhood and fed with his reading of the Sermon on the Mount, of Tolstoy's Christian anarchism and of Thoreau on civil disobedience. Satya, truth, was for him the name of the ultimate reality; and in the 1920s he reversed his own formula, 'God is Truth', into 'Truth is God', a phrase he thought even an atheist could accept, since it asked for fidelity to what is rather than belief in a being. Satyagraha was the method by which the first was to serve the second in public life.

The deepest claim is about means and ends, and it cuts against the grain of modern political thought. Since Machiavelli, the dominant answer has been that politics has its own logic, that the statesman may have to do evil that good may come, and that the end can justify the means; our account of Machiavelli on virtue and fortune sets out that case at its most unapologetic. Gandhi denied it flatly. In Hind Swaraj, the short dialogue he wrote in 1909 on a voyage between London and South Africa, he put the point in a figure his readers would remember: the means are the seed, the end is the tree, and the connection between them is as unbreakable as that between seed and tree. A violent means cannot grow a peaceful end, because the means is the end in miniature, the future arriving early. This turns consequentialism inside out, and arrives, by a road Kant never travelled, at something close to a politics of duty: act rightly now, and let the rightness of the means be the only guarantee of the end you are allowed.

His legacy is genuinely contested, and the piece would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist, judged that Gandhi wished to reform the caste system where it needed abolishing, and that his reverence for the dignity of manual labour left the hierarchy standing. George Orwell granted the courage and doubted the method, observing that non-violent resistance presupposes an adversary who allows a free press and shrinks from massacre, and that it has no answer to a regime willing to make its victims disappear. Gandhi's private experiments in celibacy, which involved young women, are now read as a serious abuse of his authority. And yet the method travelled and worked: the Montgomery of Martin Luther King, the early Mandela, the velvet revolutions of 1989 are its descendants, and Gene Sharp's studies of civil resistance turned it into a subject political scientists teach. The General Assembly made 2 October the International Day of Non-Violence by a resolution of 15 June 2007, so that one man's moral principle now anchors a day of international instruction. Gandhi himself was shot dead on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who thought him too soft toward India's Muslims — killed, that is, by exactly the logic of redemptive violence he had spent his life refusing.

Abhedananda, and Vedanta in a Western idiom#

The second of October 1866 gave Calcutta the boy named Kaliprasad Chandra, who became Swami Abhedananda, a direct disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna and a brother in the order to Swami Vivekananda. When Vivekananda's mission to the West needed carrying on, Abhedananda took it up; he reached London in 1896 and New York the following year, and for roughly a quarter of a century he led the Vedanta Society there, lecturing at Harvard, Columbia and Yale and meeting William James. His interest for a history of philosophy is that he was among the earliest to state the non-dualist Advaita teaching — that the innermost self and the ultimate reality are one — not as devotional mystery but in terms a Western audience trained in science and philosophy could argue with. Books such as Self-Knowledge belong to the first serious wave of comparative philosophy of religion, the moment when the traditions of Indian thought entered modern intellectual life on something like their own terms rather than as the objects of colonial curiosity. He returned to India, travelled in Kashmir and Tibet, and died in Calcutta in 1939. His presence on this day is a reminder that the question of the self, which Gandhi answered in action, was being pressed in the lecture hall as well.

Stevens, and belief without a believer#

Wallace Stevens was born at Reading, Pennsylvania, on 2 October 1879, worked all his adult life as a Hartford insurance executive, and wrote poetry that reads like epistemology set to music. His recurring idea, the Supreme Fiction, asks whether, in a world from which the old gods have withdrawn, a fiction known to be a fiction might do the work that belief once did — whether poetry can be the thing we believe in while knowing we have made it. It is an inheritance from Nietzsche and from George Santayana, his teacher at Harvard, and it sits very close to the problems the philosophers on this page were working. Simon Critchley's Things Merely Are (2005) made the case that Stevens can be read as a philosopher outright, a poet of the bare fact of things and of the mind's part in how they appear. He died in 1955, and the question he leaves — whether meaning survives the loss of the beliefs that once secured it — is the one Gandhi answered with 'Truth is God' and Abhedananda with the identity of self and absolute.

Simondon: the machine is not a slave#

Gilbert Simondon was born at Saint-Etienne on 2 October 1924, studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem, and was by temperament as much engineer as philosopher — a man who repaired machines in his own workshop and taught his students to strip a television set down and rebuild it. In 1958 he defended two theses that between them form one of the most original bodies of French philosophy of the century, and both took decades to find their audience.

The main thesis, on individuation, inverted a habit as old as Aristotle. Western metaphysics had tended to take the individual as given and then ask what principle made it this individual rather than another. Simondon argued that the individual is not a starting point but a result: it crystallises out of a 'pre-individual' field charged with tensions, the way a crystal forms in a saturated solution, and the process is never finished, since a reserve of the pre-individual remains and makes further individuation possible. He extended the idea to the psychic and the collective, where the transindividual names the way a person and a community come into being together rather than one from the other. Deleuze saluted the thesis as a new conception of being, and Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler built on it; the complete text appeared in French only in 2005.

The complementary thesis, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, is the one with the sharpest contemporary edge. Simondon thought modern culture was sick in its relation to technology, which it could see only as a menace to be feared or a set of tools to be used, and so refused technical objects any place in culture at all. Against this he proposed studying how such objects actually come to be — a process he called concretisation, by which the parts of a machine, at first assembled from separate functions, grow into one another until each part serves several purposes and the object approaches the coherence of a living thing. The machine, on his account, is not the human being's slave and not its rival; it is something the human accompanies, interprets and comes to exist alongside. Where Heidegger saw in modern technology a 'standing-reserve' that reduces everything, ourselves included, to stock on call — the view we set out in reporting on Gestell and standing-reserve — Simondon offered the rarer thing, a humanism argued from inside the machine rather than against it.

That is why he is read now more than in his lifetime. The debates over artificial intelligence, automation and the digital turn have returned to his central question, which the work on postphenomenology and technology and on Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics both inherit: is technology only an instrument the human picks up and puts down, or is it a mode of existence that remakes the human who takes it up? Simondon died at Palaiseau on 7 February 1989, most of his work still unpublished, and the English translations that carried him to a wide readership arrived only between 2017 and 2020.

Duchamp, and where art begins#

Marcel Duchamp died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 2 October 1968, and earns his place in a philosophical calendar because he turned the central question of aesthetics into an object. In 1917 he submitted a standard porcelain urinal, signed 'R. Mutt' and titled Fountain, to an exhibition in New York that had promised to hang anything sent in, and in doing so he detached the question 'what is a work of art?' from any list of beautiful properties and attached it to something institutional and conceptual instead. Arthur Danto's theory of the 'artworld' and George Dickie's institutional definition of art were both written, in effect, as answers to Duchamp's readymades; Danto went so far as to say that after Duchamp art had become, as Hegel had foretold, a kind of philosophy, an enquiry into its own nature conducted in its own materials. The argument runs straight into the present, where machine-made images force the same question again, as we found in surveying the theories that AI art exposes. Duchamp, characteristically, had by the 1920s half-abandoned art for competitive chess, remarking that while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists, and his last major work, the tableau Etant donnes, was assembled in secret over twenty years and revealed only after his death, so that the last word of a man who kept asking questions was itself another question.

The one question underneath#

Line these figures up and a single concern runs through them, held at different angles. Gandhi asks whether we can exercise power without doing harm. Simondon asks what we become as our technical power grows. Abhedananda asks where the self ends, Stevens whether meaning can outlast belief, Duchamp where art begins. These look like separate enquiries and are versions of one: how a human being is to live well among forces, political, technical, spiritual and aesthetic, that are not simply under human control. To remember Gandhi on 2 October is not only to mark a birthday, and to remember Simondon is not only to date a thesis; it is to be handed the two questions their lives pose together. How shall we use the power we have, and what kind of being shall we become as that power increases? The season's wider programme is in our October conference diary.