NEHRU AS A PHILOSOPHER
DR. A. D. LITMAN
Nehru was an original humanist thinker whose
views constitute a bright chapter in the history of Indian social and
philosophic thought. Nehru was a scholar who always sought to go deep into the
matter and investigate the inherent connections between phenomena and the laws
of their development. Philosophy provided the most adequate channel for
Nehru’s intellectual quests.
Nehru himself
never sought to work out a system of
views. According to him, life is too complex and our views about it can in no
way be reduced to a doctrine.
Nehru believed that he had long favoured action that was connected with thought, indeed,
that proceeded from and followed thought. There must be a “complete harmony”
between thought and action. Translating this principle into philosophy, he
believed that philosophy should be wholly in line with the needs of “action”,
it should be related to practice.
This called for Nehru to determine his
attitude to religion. He showed considerable civic courage when he subjected
religion to vigorous criticism. He pointed out that religion was at odds with
reason and intellect. He saw it as a force that led man astray from the
rationalistic study of real-life problems into the realm of groundless dogmas,
mysticism and rituals. Nehru wrote conclusively: “We have to get rid of that
narrowing religious outlook, that obsession with the supernatural and
metaphysical speculations, that loosening of the mind’s discipline in religious
ceremonial and mystical emotionalism, which come in the way of our
understanding ourselves and the world, We have to come to grips with the
present, this life, this world, this nature which surrounds us in its infinite
variety ... India must therefore lessen her religiosity and turn to science.”
Such statements clearly
show Nehru to have been a supporter of rationalism and science. It was this
belief in the creative force of science that led him to a convinced optimism in
questions of cognition. He was categorically opposed to scepticism
and agnosticism. Recognising man’s natural wish to
perceive reality, Nehru emphasised that this wish
could well be fulfilled, provided there was a scientific approach to the very
process of cognition. To comprehend the facts, to arrive at conclusions and to
test the conclusions in practice–such was the triad of basic elements in
Nehru’s approach.
Man was central to
Nehru’s philosophy. The new political thinking adds another dimension to some
of Nehru’s views on human problems, and they need to be re-assessed. One cannot
but recognise the fact that he formulated the
question of human values and their importance for the formation of the
personality as a great service of his. He predicted that these values would
take priority in today’s life and in the development of the entire body of
man’s socio-historical links.
Nehru had a profound
respect for man, and he was bitter and anguished over the moral corruption that
was caused by social conditions. He addressed the problem of man from two
angles: the external, material aspect and the internal, spiritual one. Harmony
of the two makes for a harmonious development of the personality. According to
Nehru, there were parallel trends in external life and man’s inner world in any
culture and any nation. Balance is observed where the two meet or keep close to each other.
But if the two diverge, there is conflict and crisis.
Nehru saw harmony of the
personality as an ideal which though unattainable, should be sought after. He
wrote: “Perfection is beyond us, for it means the end, and we are always
journeying, trying to approach something that is ever receding.” This profound
dialectic thought was not developed until after
Nehru saw the moral,
spiritual side as the core of man. But this core, with scientific, material and
technological progress, and he described this schism as a tragic paradox of
our age. With this in mind, Nehru maintained that, no civilisation
might be regarded as fully developed if a certain spiritual level was not
attained in it as material progress might prove a catastrophe without a balance
of spirit.
But how could a balance
of spirit, even if a precarious one be attained to prevent a global
catastrophe? Nehru’s concept of scientific humanism was to solve this problem.
He defined the source of this concept in his work Glimpses of World History in the early 1930s:
Humanism should not see its object in an abstract individual,
it should concentrate on the tens of millions of oppressed, poor, hungry people
whom ideologists dismissed as
In Nehru’s view, this
genuine humanism had to embody the epoch’s supreme ideals. He classified these
ideals into two groups: respect for the personality, the improvement of man,
and care for humanity on the one hand, and the scientific spirit on the other.
“Between these two,” says Nehru, “there has been an apparent conflict but the
great upheaval of thought today, with its questioning of all values, is
removing the old boundaries between these two approaches, as well as between
the external world of science and the internal world of introspection. There
is a growing synthesis between humanism and the scientific spirit, resulting in
a kind of scientific humanism.”
As a profound thinker,
Nehru sought to find ways of putting the principles of scientific humanism into
practice, which is clear from his interpretation of the category of equality·
He realised that being one of the vital humanistic
precepts, the principle of equality, a universal value, could not belong to an
individual or even a single nation. In his opinion, until there wasn’t any more
exploitation of a country or a class, we would not have a genuine civilisation or culture based on equality. Such a society
would be creative, progressive and based on cooperation between its members. In
the end, it would spread over the whole world.
Humanity’s progress to
the ideal of universal equality, said Nehru, was accompanied by a bitter fight
on the part of progressive forces against those of conservatism and reaction.
Essentially, he saw these reactionary forces in capitalism and imperialism. He
wrote a full year before the beginning of the World War II that such equality
was totally incompatible with imperialism and capitalism, social systems based
on the exploitation of nations and classes. Therefore, those who derived
benefits from such an exploitation resisted the
revolution, and in so much as conflict spread, also rejected political equality
and parliamentary democracy.
It was quite natural that
Nehru’s ideas of scientific humanism led him to attempt to incorporate
socialist ideas into this concept. He saw a philosophy of life of sorts in
socialism. As is known, he came out with the initiative of proclaiming the
construction of a society on a socialist model in
Marking the 100th anniversary
of Nehru’s birth, we pay tribute to the prominent political and State leader
and great humanist thinker whose lofty ideas have been admired by people of
goodwill throughout the world.