a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

It has been my privilege to be the first biographer for two of the 20th century’s exemplary people, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. For a biographer, the significance of being the first is that no textual image or collection of images of the subject precedes the one you create. Your view is clear, no one before you has mapped the whole lifestory, from birth to death. Setting out relatively free of preconceptions, you find –with a certain ‘aha!’ wonder—that the lifestory has a theme. Or perhaps you find the theme just because the lifestory is becoming a story, and a story must organize or have an organizing principle, like any fabricated thing. Probably it is more accurate to say the story has many themes, but one comes to seem essential, the lead organizing principle, the masterplan. A similar surfacing of a theme happens when you are the first teller of your own story, when you are your one-and-only autobiographer, or when you create or co-create your story with your psychoanalyst. But you, then, would not be the one to judge the story or the theme exemplary; such a judgment comes from those who take the story as exemplary once it has been told.

Hannah Arendt was a person who could not think without examining the words and concepts in which she was thinking. She thought as though following a maxim: the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. A drive to understand and to contain in thought shaped her life –and I think it had since she was a child, trying to understand what happened to her father, who had tertiary syphilis and died insane, thought disordered. The important people in her life were thinkers, each with a particular and compelling depth and originality to his or her thought. As her biographer, I tried to tell her story as a story of her thinking finding its characteristic operation: delving into the origins of ideas and then tracking their histories as they became disordered and misused, indistinct or without necessary distinction-making. She offered cures for misconceived concepts; for example, for the concept “politics,” or “power,” which had become tangled up with “violence” (as discussed in my last post). ‘How shall we think about this?’ was her consistent discipline, and she conducted her life to sustain this constant inquiry. She was not an activist, but a supplier of clarity for activists, a compelling example of how clarifying stopping to think can be.

While I was reading Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography this week, I found myself going into my biographer’s mode and commenting to myself constantly ‘What a different kind of a person is this than Hannah Arendt or Anna Freud!’ ‘How would I tell this story, after so many have told it for their purposes? What is its theme?’ Even though there are so many Gandhis already in the library, the theme question is not difficult, because Gandhi himself was unusually conscious of his own guiding theme, and he was unusually bold about announcing it. It is the title of his autobiography: my experiments with truth. He was his own activist, applying the results of his experiments directly and immediately to the political realm, and exemplary for his ceaseless effort and his truthfulness.

The nub of his book, it seems to me is Chapter VIII, on Brahmacharya. There Gandhi tells how, having been practicing self-control of his senses in thought, word, and deed in various ways since 1901, he reached his decision in 1906 to take the brahmacharya vow, refraining from any “carnal relation” with his wife. “I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of taking the vow. She had no objection. But I had great difficulty in making the final resolve. I had not the necessary strength. How was I to control my passions?” Controlling his passions became Gandhi’s life-project. And he was lucidly clear that self-transformation was his precondition for political action and for promoting the political transformation he envisioned. He described himself to himself as a person totally in service to India’s poor, and to be that person his passions had to be totally in his service. He set himself up as an example, but not of a finished experiment; rather, of a continual work in progress. So he did not say to his followers ‘do as I do’ –the formula of the perfectly self-righteous, moralistic authoritarian—but ‘do what you conclude you must try to do after we talk about why the brahmacharya vow was the only possible personally liberating vow for me.’

Practically, Gandhi’s answer to his question about how to control his passions was to starve them: “So overpowering are the senses that they can be kept under control only when they are completely hedged in on all sides, from above and from beneath. It is common knowledge that they are powerless without food…” So, in addition to further refining his diet of fruit and nuts only, which he had been keeping for six years, Gandhi began to fast periodically, to help himself “cultivate a distaste for the objects that are denied to the body.” Aversion for the objects of passions is necessary for one who would be a humble servant and who would realize Brahman, that is, be perfectly “open to the glories of God”(a state Gandhi did not claim to have achieved). He tried to banish temptation. (To me, this seems an impossible goal, because it entails the temptation to be perfectly untemptable and to set yourself up as exemplary –when the judgment ‘this person is exemplary’ must come from others, from the world.)

Fasting eventually became one of Gandhi’s most effective political actions. He discovered its efficacy when he became the advisor for a group of mill hands in Ahmedabad (Chapter XXII). The mill hands, unfairly treated by the mill owners, were considering a strike. Gandhi was their organizer, setting them a fourfold pledge: to non-violence; to not “molesting the blacklegs [scab labor]”; to not depending on alms but earning their bread by other means during the strike; and to not giving up on the strike. For the first two weeks, they marched daily with their ‘Ek Tek’ (‘keep the pledge’) banners, strong in their resolve. Then they began to waiver and became irascible with the blacklegs. That the mill hands might break the pledge they had made to him felt inconceivable, Gandhi confessed, wondering: “Was it pride or was it my love for the laborers and my passionate regard for truth that was at the back of this feeling? –Who can say?”

Gandhi did not know what to do, but suddenly a path opened before him: he found himself telling the assembled laborers that he would not take any food until they rededicated themselves to the strike and stayed with it to settlement. “The laborers were thunderstruck.” They wept, and wanted to fast themselves instead: “It would be monstrous if you were to fast,” they said to Gandhi, the beloved father of their action. While the strikers renewed their pledge, the mill owners, who were also “like family” to Gandhi, had their thunderstruck moment, too. Even though they had argued patronizingly that they were like parents to the mill-hand children and knew what was best for these poor, uneducated workers, the owners were moved by Gandhi’s fast: “The hearts of the mill-owners were touched, and they set about discovering some means for a settlement.”

Delighted as he was by the arbitration that followed, and the settlement, Gandhi was worried that his fast had a “grave defect.” Practitioners of non-violence, Satyagraphi, are not supposed to act against others, but only for their action’s goal. “With the mill-owners, I could only plead; to act against them would amount to coercion.” But, of course, the fast was an act against the mill-owners, and it did, of course, cause them “strain,” which “cut me, therefore, to the quick.”

Gandhi used his fasts like levers, prying people away from their fixed positions or away from their weaknesses. He was certainly correct that the fasts were not a form of persuasion; they were coercive; and they were not collective actions, not, in that sense, very political. “If you do not do this, I will die” they said. Although he was well aware of this “grave defect,” Gandhi went right ahead, on his own, not consulting or deliberating with others. You can see in the details of how he described what he was doing his awareness that he was, in effect, stirring up a family crisis, making all parties fearful that if they persisted in their benighted behavior, their lack of control over their passions, they would cause his death –the death of the leader they called Bapu (Papa). It is hardly a coincidence that Gandhi had admitted early in the autobiography –confessing a guilt that never ceased—his sense that he had caused his own father’s death by failing to keep the proper vigil at his deathbed. Instead he had been off having “carnal relation” with his wife. Everywhere in the autobiography the message is clear: if you do not control your passions every moment, Bapu will die –and you yourself will die unredeemed, unrealized. (For all its psychological subtlety, Gandhi’s autobiography nowhere entertains the possibility that commanding your self or your passions out of guilt is bound to lead you to commanding others as your atonement.)

Gandhi certainly proved with his life his point that no political actor is stronger than someone who is not held hostage by his investment in or his passions for objects and people in the world. Someone who has worked to have nothing to lose. Such a person has the possibility of being incorruptible; beyond bribes; beyond hypocrisy. Conversely, no political actor is more reprehensible than one who has taken an ascetic vow, or a vow of humble service and compassion, and then betrayed it. Gandhi understood this to be the story of all institutionalized religions, so thickly populated as they are with people who claim to follow the example of a humble ascetic –like Jesus, like Buddha, like Mohammed—and then do exactly as the ascetic did not do, arrogantly abusing other people or accumulating worldly goods for their own satisfaction. It is certainly one of the most depressing ironies of the contemporary world that so many people join religious institutions thinking that they will find there incorruptible people, moral leaders, when such are the least likely places for a truly moral leader to be found. Gandhi himself never had anything to do with institutionalized religion and his autobiography is full of lament that religious institutions offer their members such poor examples and such poor guidance.

Gandhi certainly did not share Hannah Arendt’s distinction –one of her many carefully drawn distinctions, clarifications—between the moral domain where the integrity of the self, “the standard of the self,” is crucial and the political domain, where concern for the world all share should be the paramount concern. This distinction would have made no sense to him. And that is, I think, because he was exceptional in his capacity to make every moment of self-concern a moment of concern for the world. But he was not exemplary for prioritizing concern for the world. But it seems to me that he nonetheless made his greatest contributions to the world when he was least concerned with the purity of his practice and most concerned with articulating principles he believed he shared with all –not just with fellow ascetics–who act in the world with worldly integrity. Such a principle was that non-violence can be stronger than violence when there is a widespread consciousness that violence is ultimately powerless, and ultimately self-defeating. That it always has been thus, and always will be.

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