The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth by Bindu Puri

Author:Bindu Puri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer India, New Delhi

Professor Bilgrami has made all these points in connection with his reconstruction of Gandhi. I argue that there are some serious problems with that philosophical reconstruction. One of course directly pertains to the subject matter of the present book—the Gandhi–Tagore debate. To agree that Gandhi was primarily a relativist about the truth and rejected both objective moral truths and a certain view of moral judgement as entailing the role of moral criticism in individual life would lead to a deep philosophical myopia regarding that debate. For the debate was mostly about the truth, of what Gandhi thought were fundamental moral “principles”/truths and Tagore’s insistence on the individual’s freedom to reject them. This debate involved a public exchange of letters in national dailies for over 26 years. It is difficult to agree with the interpretation that the fact that Gandhi accepted moral criticism of himself as valuable, or argued about moral truths during this debate, only showed an inconsistency in his practice and not in his thinking. Gandhi showed a persistent belief in the possibility of arriving at the truth and thereby in the possibility of moral closure throughout this conflict. At no point did he show any sensitivity to relativism and subjectivism in the differences between himself and Tagore. Note that Bilgrami argues (about Gandhi) that “[f]ailing to live up to what one thinks one should and should not do is not to be inconsistent in one’s thinking” (Bilgrami 2011, p. 99). If Gandhi self-consciously argued about the truth of satyagraha, non-cooperation, and bread labour intermittently for 26 years, it is difficult to accept that this was just inconsistency between his thinking and his practice. One will have to examine the possibility that a philosophical reconstruction which cannot countenance the debate could itself be a spectacular misreading of Gandhi. This also incidentally brings out the fact that this long debate has considerable philosophical influence in interpreting positions which appear very remote from its primary concerns; positions such as the following: what did Gandhi think about the connection between criticism and moral judgement? Did he believe in general moral rules or in any sort of objective moral truths?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.