by Arne Naess

Gandhi’s attitude toward atheists and atheism has seemed to many people both paradoxical and incon­sistent. What are we to say of his oft-repeated assertion that atheism could be part of the truth, so long as the atheist was as committed to his atheism as the theist to his theism? This from a man who not only regarded himself as an orthodox Hindu but also professed Godlessness to be nothing less than an abomination? It is of vital importance to be clear on this matter, since Gan­dhi’s attitude toward atheism can provide a key to our understanding of his position on theoretical issues in general.

We can gain a sense of this position partly in his tran­sition from one to the other of the affirmations, “God is Truth” and “Truth is God,” partly in his attitude to other religions, and partly in the great weight he put on individual religiosity. His own statements indicate just how embracing his views of religion were, and these views enable us also to understand how it was that he could work together with atheists; for he conceived the aggressive morality of atheism as a genuinely religious attitude. Gandhi wrote in one of his more obscure sources, Yeravada Mandir, in a passage, which goes far to explain as well as demonstrate Gandhi’s tolerance for other religions: “As a tree has a single trunk, but many branches and leaves, so there is one true and perfect Religion, but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium. The one Religion is beyond all speech. Imperfect men put it into such language as they command, and their words are interpreted by other men equally imperfect.”

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by Arne Naess

How did Gandhi set about realizing his principle: “The essence of nonviolent technique is that it seeks to liquidate antagonisms but not the antagonists”?

It has long been the custom to speak of nonviolent as contrasted to military methods and techniques. But it should be noted that the distinguishing feature of a method or technique, as such, is that it is a mere instrument; the goal or aim toward which it works is something else. It is not necessary that the method or technique should have more than an instrumental value, only that it be employed unflinchingly toward the end in question. The kind of conduct Gandhi employed in group-conflict can, to some extent, be made into an organized system, but only to some extent. If the aspect of method is overstressed, we find ourselves interpreting Gandhi’s teaching as a kind of cookbook doctrine. One forgets his maxim: “Means and ends are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.”

In any campaign, according to Gandhi, moral principles must be observed. Such principles concern a man’s purity of intention, his respect for other individuals, and the absence in him of any tendency to look upon his fellow beings as means to an end. During campaigns, therefore, virtuous actions are to be performed, in part, because it is one’s duty to perform them, not merely because of advantages one hopes to reap from performing them.

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by Arne Naess

“Satyagraha” is a word which connotes the typically Gandhian approach in political and social conflicts. Writing of the South African days Gandhi says that the expression ”passive resistance” was not an apt term for the action of the Indians in that country. Gandhi also rejected “pacifism.” He said that “We had to invent a new term clearly to denote the movement of the Indians in the Transvaal and to prevent its being confused with passive resistance generally so called.” (1) Satya means “truth” not in the purely theoretical sense of the way in which assertions correspond to reality, but rather in the sense in which we speak of someone as a true friend, in which we think of reality as a form of genuineness. Agraha means “grasp,” “firmness” or “fixity,” and Gandhi says, “Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance,’ in connection with it.” (2) These and other general statements by Gandhi, of course, tell us almost nothing. They are too vague and it has become necessary, therefore, to distinguish various meanings of the new word satyagraha. According to one interpretation, satyagraha is the collective name for just those practical methods used by Gandhi in his campaigns. According to another, satyagraha designates the principles underlying Gandhi’s action; used in this sense, the word is practically a synonym for the concept of “power lying at the base of nonviolent means,” or simply for ahimsa. Thirdly, it is used as the common name for all the possible methods of action, whether exemplified by Gandhi or not, which are in agreement with the teachings of nonviolence; Gandhi’s methods, then, would be a subspecies of satyagraha—adapted to the special situations in which he worked. It is unfortunate that these three different meanings have been conflated, for considerable confusion inevitably arises in any discussion of satyagraha.

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by Arne Naess

It was Gandhi’s claim that the greater the efficiency he acquired in the use of nonviolence, the greater the im­pression nonviolence made on his opponents. This claim he held to be a legacy of his experiences in South Africa. Was he right in this? Did his claim follow, ac­cording to inductive principles, as a valid conclusion from what he saw?

The railway-strike episode and others of a similar kind did, in fact, provide Gandhi with an empirical basis for the hypothesis that the more he applied, even to fanatical extremes, the principle of nonviolence, the greater was its effect, and that every increase, no matter how slight, in the purity of the application of the principle meant an increase in the chances of success. Thus we can see what was meant by Gandhi’s seemingly ex­treme claim that if one man were able to achieve an entirely perfect, nonviolent method, all the opposition in the world would vanish. Yet we must be careful to note that Gandhi explicitly stated that we are all more or less imperfect, not least himself, and that therefore we can talk only in terms of degrees of success and not per­fection.

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by Arne Naess

Some of Gandhi’s fellow-workers, just as some of Nehru’s in a later day, were Socialists and Marxists. Though critical of their views, Gandhi was far from negatively disposed toward their aims. He believed, however, that it could not be in the employer’s interests to behave badly toward the workers, and that the employer could be persuaded to make radical reforms. On the basis of psychological and social interests common to both sides, he believed it impossible, in the long run, for one group to profit at the expense of the other. Exploitation and oppression amounted to violence, in Gandhi’s terms, and could only drive participants apart.

Today we might well admit that the acceptance of Gandhi’s view could have spared us Lenin’s uncritical acceptance of means and also the kind of laissez-faire liberalism we find in Western Europe, a liberalism which rejects all measures of economic control to remedy the undeserved suffering of the poor. We have seen in our time how both of the political philosophies from which these economic views are derived have led to violence and oppression.

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by Arne Naess

This is not my title! Why did my friends insist on that title? Because of many conversations of this kind:

NN: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
AN: An optimist!
NN: (Astonished) Really?
AN: Yes, a convinced optimist; that is, when it comes to the twenty-second century.
NN: You mean of course the twenty-first?
AN: No, I mean the twenty-second; the life of the grandchildren of our grandchildren! Are you not interested in the world of those children?
NN: In other words, we can relax because we have a lot of time available to overcome the ecological crisis?
AN: Not at all; every week counts. How terrible and shamefully bad conditions will be in the twenty-first century, or how far down we have to start on the way up, depends on what you, and others do today and tomorrow. There is not a single day to be lost. We need the highest levels of activism immediately.

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by Arne Naess

The combination of humility and militancy in emotionally charged social conflicts has always been rare. It is easy to succumb either to passivity or to verbal or nonverbal violence. Humility in confronting a human being, respect for the status of being a human being, whether that being is a torturer or a holy person, is essential.

People may be trained in nonviolent communication through sessions where they confront others with different attitudes and opinions. In schools and universities such sessions in the form of seminars, or otherwise, are easy to schedule. At the university level proposals of norms or principles of nonviolent communication help students to master conflict situations. From 1941 to around 1993, the set of principles formulated in this article has been used by about ninety thousand working in small groups at Norwegian universities. An emotionally charged topic is often selected, and the students asked to discuss it. Or they receive a written dialogue and are asked to analyze violations of the principles that will be outlined below.

Gandhi, the man, his deeds, and his writings have made such a profound impact on millions of people that it is felt all their lives, even if it does not always show up in social conflict activism. People’s veneration is serious and honest, but few have had, or even try to get, training to face opponents or “antagonists” in a Gandhian way.

The way Gandhi at times described the views of people who opposed him and his influence has made a lasting impression. One deed that struck me as glorious belongs to the area of the practice of communication. Instead of giving a broad historical account I shall describe one series of communications.

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by Alan Drengson

 Tore Juell. “Portrait of Arne Naess;”
courtesy of the artist.

“Self-realization is not a maximal realization of the coercive powers of the ego. The self, in the kinds of philosophy I am alluding to, is something expansive, and the environmental crisis may turn out to be of immense value for the further expansion of human consciousness.” Arne Naess (In Drengson and Devall 2008, p. 132)

From his earliest major work, Naess used a deep and comprehensive approach for studying languages and communication. (The work is, Interpretation and Preciseness: A Contribution to the Theory of Communication, 1953. Now SWAN Vol I in The Selected Works of Arne Naess, 2005.) He united disciplines to explore languages as part of diverse communication systems in the natural and human world. These systems are open ended, adaptive, creative and dynamic. They are constantly adjusting to changing conditions in unique communities and places. Communication between and within species involves meaningful variations of qualities (e.g. in sound, light, odor, heat, color, pattern, and texture,) with a wide range of frequencies, intensities and velocities. We now explore the communication ecology of languages with broad analytical and empirical methods, some pioneered by Naess. By studying whole systems, we appreciate the creative, place-based, knowledge skills of cultures woven into the other systems of the natural world. Diversity, complexity and creativity are important for environmental integrity, cultural richness, and personal freedom. Naess noted that when we know the ecological context, it helps us to understand one another without translation, even when from different cultures with unfamiliar languages. Knowing communication ecology helps us to resolve conflicts nonviolently. By having a sense for these whole systems, we are aware of the challenges to precise interpretation; this engenders positive cross-cultural and interspecies communication exchanges.

Naess loved diversity and appreciated the role of dialects in evolving systems of language families. He learned from empirical studies and by knowing many formal and vernacular languages (living and dead), that it is difficult to give precise (universal) definitions.  There are many ways to feel, see, say and write things. He used a descriptive approach to study linguistic communication. He remarked in The SWAN (see the Appendix below for excerpts) that his view contrasted with analytic philosophers in England and elsewhere, who used a prescriptive approach, suggesting there is one right meaning and that a single language reflects reality more precisely than others. Their views were more insular; they did not study dialects and the cross-cultural, natural context of language families (such as Indo-European) that we study in communication ecology. Communication ecology enabled Naess to reach a mature, whole understanding of human life in the evolving, changing Earth. The culture that he grew up in accepted multiple dialects, perhaps because there was no Norse king as authority for proper Norsk. For several centuries the rulers were not Norwegians but foreigners. In the English speaking world there was the authority of the “King’s English.”

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by Arne Naess

Gandhi: Merely a Man

We find two diametrically opposed views of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s moral stature. One states that, ethically speaking, he was nearly perfect. Albert Einstein said of him, for instance, that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a man actually walked this earth, and in a collection of essays that appeared under the title Gandhi Memorial Peace Number (Roy 1949), a large number of eminent persons accord Gandhi the highest of praise as a moral being.

We must also ask ourselves, however, what exactly is the nature of Gandhi’s contribution and what is the basis for the tremendous esteem and adulation in which he has been held. For with regard to his own moral achievement, we find a second opinion that is, perhaps, as near the truth as the first: the opinion that Gandhi was often mistaken and that it would be wrong to take him unreservedly as a moral example for everyone.

The best-known representative of this latter and more modest view happens to be Gandhi himself. “I claim no infallibility. I am conscious of having made Himalayan blunders . . .” (quoted in Pyarelal 1932: 133; also in Prabhu and Rao 1967: 9). There are other people also who firmly accept that he fell short of his own very high aims. The best collection of Gandhi’s teaching, The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, compiled by Ramachandra K.  Prabhu and U. R. Rao (1946, revised and enlarged in 1967), opens with two chapters in which Gandhi speaks of his own personal imperfection, his mistakes, their painful consequences, and his unrequited desire for support.

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by Arne Naess

Truth: Absence of Theology: Pragmatic and Agnostic Leanings

Any adequate account of Gandhi’s ethics and strategy of group conflict must take account not only his most general and abstract metaphysical ideas, but also the religious content of his sermons. His basic ideas and attitudes influenced his concrete norms and hypotheses and his conflict praxis. His numerous public prayers were part of his political campaigns, his political campaigns part of his dealings with God.

Gandhi considered himself a Hindu. He gives a condensed characterization of his belief in Hinduism and his relations to other religions in his article “Hinduism”(Young India 6.10.19 21).

Yet, Gandhi found Truth in many religions and faiths, and this explains why his teaching on group conflicts has no definite theological premises. This passage elaborates: “You believe in some principle, clothe it with life, and say it is your God, and you believe in it. . . . I should think it is enough.” (Harijan 17.6.1939).

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