Well, thank you, sir, we thank you for this very kind introduction, generous introduction, and of course, for the invitation.
I should start by acknowledging that when I first received the invitation,
I was a little surprised, surprised because I'm not a South Asian intellectual historian.
And while I learnt a lot from it, and as you'll see,
I'm more or less taking on what Faisal and others have said and kind of organising it in new ways.
I do not see myself as advancing our understanding of that project.
Instead, I see myself as bringing Gandhi into a different debate that until now, he has not been seriously considered him.
And so my contributions today are more in the form of questions that I would sort of want to present to you and
to your audience to try and understand how best to make use of Gandhi in order to address these larger questions.
But I'll come to that in a moment. I do it sort of start by saying that this project on Gandhi and Dignity is a new project for me,
and it's something that I had to show on the way of writing the book.
Because although shame and dignity are somewhat, you know, parallel to each other, they are actually very different concepts.
And so early on, I thought maybe I could sort of talk about it and I couldn't. And so dignity became kind of the unthought.
Sort of background assumption for the book, which I'm only now, just now, you know, getting started with.
So what I'm presenting today is I'm kind of trying to immunise myself from any criticism.
Plenty of deserved here, but this project is a new one.
So what I'm going to try and do is I'm going to try to present to you very briefly what the project is.
And then in a moment with your permission, I'm going to read the paper and my my choice of reading.
The paper is dictated by the fact that many of the parts of the argument are still new to me,
and I would much rather present the version of the paper that I'm most confident with, rather than try and sort of muddle through.
But very briefly, in order to sort of help people track. But the argument is going to be, I'm going to make the following claim.
I'm going to say that the concept of dignity, as it has been received in the canon of Western political and philosophical thought,
can best be described as having a certain grammar and the grammar.
I'm going to call the grammar of hierarchy, and it'll become very clear to you what I mean by this.
Things like, you know, standing up for your rights and, you know,
having the courage of men and all these sort of cognate sort of conceptual positions,
I'm going to say, implicitly smuggle in an affinity to the to the two to hierarchy.
But underneath that hierarchy is a certain logic and the logic that has been articulated beautifully,
I think, by Jeremy Waldron, which is what he calls quote, the upward equalisation of right.
So you will see where the title of my talk comes from the dominant position and I'll explain what that is as we go along.
But beneath that logic is a certain affinity to the ontology of power.
And what I'm going to say is that Gandhi retains, in some ways, the grammar of hierarchy.
In some ways, but he inverts the the.
The normative flowed from an upward equalisation to a dominant position, I think Fresnel calls this it typically Gandhian reversal.
I think he reverses things here and he's able to reverse the logic from an upward to a downward logic because
he is able to what he wants to try and replace the ontology of power with an ontology of vulnerability.
And so godly and dignity is oriented towards vulnerability and addressing.
It's it's very sort of real claims upon us, rather than trying to elevate everybody to the position where they have equal amounts of power.
I will say that while this is the story that I'm going to tell, I am not entirely persuaded by the lesson that we can draw from Gandhi.
And I'll come to that in a moment to why that's the case.
But the concept of dignity, as it has been received in the West into historical political canon,
finds its articulation or has had to find its articulation through the logic of the state.
In some ways, the dignity, rights and state sovereignty have formed this very, you know,
deep nexus with each other that has given political reality to the concept of dignity.
At least that's one version of it. I think Jamie Walden would largely agree with it.
And Gandhi, of course, rejects the state.
And so what are the mechanisms to which he thinks his downward equalisation, his ontology of vulnerability could be articulated?
And here I'm going to say that his ashrams, his village communities and the practises of everyday life that a lot of Canadian interpreters have
drawn attention to provide the mechanism by which dignity can become part of everyday existence.
I will say, though, that I find myself troubled and I'll explain what I mean by that I just came across should this book,
which I sort of jumped ahead to the Gandhi chapter to see what she had to say about it.
And then she uses this phrase the Marxists are reduced to what she calls quote, incoherent and inarticulate frustration with Gandhi.
I'm not a Marxist, but I can see what that is, where that frustration comes from,
and I think the question of dignity kind of brings that to the fore in Gandhi's
thought in ways that I'm hoping to be able to talk more about with your audience.
So that's the general kind of claim that I'll be talking about. And so with your indulgence, I'm going to now sort of shift to reading my paper.
Today, we have said the dignity of all sorts of people and things, certainly the dignity of democratic citizenship,
of legislation of the human person of cultural traditions, of animals and of nature,
either framed debates about the ambit of rights and obligations or serves as a Trump that
transforms an intellectual defence of a political position into an incontestable moral ultimatum.
Judging by its wide usage, the term to dignity is not without significant benefits.
By underwriting the system of rights claims to dignity,
create moral obligations to frame coercion in the context of rights claims to an essential dignity often ground historical struggles for recognition,
dignity, esteem and its quarterly honour. So as civic glue, that sustained freedom is not diminished or as the catalysts for moral revolutions,
even the Frankfurt School, operating broadly in a Marxist vein,
sometimes identify as the revolutionary programme as devoted to as the philosopher Ernst Bloch once called it,
quote the orthopaedist of the upright church, unquote. Together with the claims to dignity that are often at the foreground of many social movements,
the bedrock of international conventions on human rights and of constitutionalism.
It is not surprising that political science and international law show sustained interest in passing the content and scope of the concept.
Dignity has become.
To quote Reinhard Faust quote in radical context, transcending reference point and quote in a variety of social and political struggles.
The earliest claims of dignity were also grounded explicitly in hereditary office based or aesthetic assessments.
This is latent in the Latin roots of the term dignity, dignity and here to the office one held the connotation should be,
you know, somewhat familiar to us, even if only in a colloquial sense.
We often hear, for example, this version of dignity invoked when someone accuses a leader of having besmirched the dignity of their office.
Whether in this act, the dignity of the person themselves or of the office has been diminished is often historically unsettled.
For example, in the context of the mediaeval poverty,
the official of the state or the person of the noblemen were accorded dignity because because of the particular social role that person occupies.
At the same time, the subject of where dignity resided or where the power it possessed emerged from
was a topic of considerable debate and careful passing by mediaeval scholars.
Regardless, the hierarchical claims made to dignity were quite explicit.
To be dignified was to partake of the same power that orders a hierarchical system
of social status and values such that the closer one is to the source of power,
the greater one's corresponding dignity. If the origins of dignity are explicitly enmeshed in hierarchical social systems,
then the democratic and egalitarian adoptions of the term are often oriented around an explicit rejection of this connexion.
This is because egalitarian adoptions are the language of dignity, usually rely on some metric by which to accord to everyone and equally dignified
status such that the essential dignity of individuals remains inviolate.
This often moralistic conception of dignity is at the heart of many contract given accounts of political rights.
Now let me just make a quick aside here before I continue.
If you talk about the contractor and adoption of the language of dignity, then the big outlier is, as LaVar hopes,
Dupont's pointedly with this moralistic version of placing the relationship to power explicitly at the centre of this account of dignity.
Although a contractor, I would suggest that when looked at from the perspective of what dignity means to us today,
the scandal of Jobs's vision is precisely that he departs from the moralistic
mission that he owns up so directly to a hierarchy oriented around power,
as he puts it in Chapter 10 of the Leviathan. Dignity is quote the public work of a man, which is the value set on him by the Commonwealth, unquote.
Unless we think that the term value here is any deep normative implications,
Hodges already reminded us that quote the value or worth of man is as if all of the things his price.
That is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power quote.
But returning back to the moralistic account, the big name that we have to deal with is obviously Emmanuel can't,
in fact can't be read as a direct refutation intended or not of the Hobbesian formula.
This is because Conte famously defines dignity in the groundwork for the metaphysics and morals as a value quote raised above all price.
You can see the contrast here between Hodges says dignity is simply the price you have to pay to get someone to use their power on your behalf.
Whereas condos say you cannot put a price to what dignity it is, a separate question of where comes thanks to Stanley resides.
It is a subject of several books whose complexity I'm unable to address in this talk, but I will make a brief mention of at least one.
But the product of this moralistic vision is evident in some of our most cherished democratic documents,
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bases its claims and dignity.
The German, South African and Indian constitutions all enshrine it at the core or very near it of their respective political bodies.
In the U.S., where such constitutional language is lacking,
dignity sometimes appears in the constellation of values that can be predictably read into its framework.
In fact, in one of the most important recent constitutional developments that have granting same-sex couples the right to marry the
majority opinion explicitly identifies the right of equal dignity as the basis for the equal protection under the law.
The constitutional adoption of the language of dignity has therefore performed an important function within the modern democratic state,
not just the noblemen but communist who can exercise their rights.
And you can see, therefore why dignity has forced, says it is says it has quote context transcending appeal.
And yet, although this way of thinking about dignity is appealing,
it is difficult to uncouple the grammar of even this version of dignity from its connexion to hierarchy.
Different accounts of dignity in this one moralistic mode highlight to varying degrees of explicitness the relationship to hierarchy.
At the same time, these accounts also share a basic, convoluted.
To borrow from Michelle for that, we might say that hierarchy is still the discourse that organises the discourses of dignity.
Now, the logic underlying this master discourse, this grammar of hierarchy is evident in how dignity operates.
In nearly every case, the discursive grammar of hierarchy placed dignity at a remove from the sorts of claims that can be put forth against it,
either by tyrannical or democratic pouch. Dignity alchemical trick converts the vulnerability of the body into a philosophical
or religious or political or legal invulnerability by marking a distinction between
those who are merely subjects and therefore vulnerable to oppression and domination
from those who have the right and sometimes the power to resist the oppressed.
This is why we so often see the aesthetic moment of resistance as mocking someone's dignity if someone meekly accepts their oppression.
Then we do not see this behaviour as dignified.
We might even label such people as the Romans apparently did as obnoxiously, which is the source of the word obnoxious,
which, as Quentin Skinner tells us, was used with people who are perpetually subject or liable to cruel punishment.
This is why the dignity of the mode of resistance or even resistance itself sustains an essential difference between subjection and subject to it.
Now, I know I've spent quite a bit of time explaining dignities history,
and I did so to help draw a sharper contrast with the version of Gandhi, the indignity that I will turn to next.
Let me make one last point by emphasising dignity, political space and liberal regimes politically.
Developments in the legal sphere have made dignity.
The foundational basis for the recognition, extension and protection of rights within liberal societies and rights in turn,
are often grounded in the dignity of individuals. In cases of political oppression, this way of thinking about dignity, as I just said,
both draws attention to vulnerabilities that are violated by an attack on dignity and in the near simultaneous identifies a basis for redress.
But because dignity is located in the post, it does not depend on concrete circumstances or roles within which it is actually to.
This is, in some ways, dignities, tremendous appeal,
atomised individuals become rights holders and a position horizontally beside each other and their enjoyment of rights.
Everyone is accorded dignity because everyone is accorded the same position with respect to each other in this fashion.
Liberal regimes clothe vulnerability in the armour of dignity and on the individual with rights that are backed by the threat of state violence.
There is a second step that is also operative here modern liberal states protect dignity to the armament of constitutional rights and in so doing,
entrench their own claims to legitimacy. I'm reminded here of Bernard Williams's argument that liberal justifications of state legitimacy are
rooted in the concept of modernity because they give a normative importance to democratic participation.
Hence, it is not only that performance of claims to dignity ultimately transform vulnerabilities into invulnerability inherent in this outcome.
A transformation is a second step wherein the provision and guarantee of rights
endows the state with the legitimacy it needs in order to protect those rights.
This means that state legitimacy depends on its ability to manage social contradictions through democratic
channels and provide protection either from external threats or indeed from itself in the form of civil liberties.
Dignity through his connexion to a liberal articulation of rights becomes yoked to the power of the sovereign state.
Now, this is, broadly speaking,
the philosophical framework of the grammar hierarchy and the logic of upward equalisation about which I will say one more thing momentarily.
It is also the political framework within which dignity has come to be entrenched into
the very heart of modern constitutionalism and liberal articulation of the state.
All of these strands come together beautifully in Jeremy Waldron's understanding of the legal transformation in the concept of dignity,
Waldron's articulation is perhaps the most unabashed about all of the alchemy that I referred to just now.
And of its grammar. The warden's dignity today bestows upon its subjects the right to practise what he calls quote a horizontal hotness.
That is premised on an upward equalisation of rock.
According to Walden, although in the past only the noblemen could claim the claim and access rights,
today those same rights are available to everyone.
This is the result of a gradual expansion of democratic power and the legal language used to have in the state.
This connexion is especially meaningful to me, because for Waldron, I want you to listen to this.
The democratic transformation in law has bestowed on everyone the legal recognition,
legal recognition of equal rank, which in turn has made quote every man a Brahmin.
And. There we have the clearest articulation of the programme of dignity in its European guys,
combining two organs, considerable erudition, development and legal, political and philosophical spheres.
Having developed it, I think we can now turn to gun. Now, I said earlier that Gandhi inverts this logic, this grammar is ontology.
Let me unpack this claim slowly. Like any good inversion,
the fulcrum on which this inversion takes place must remain the same or else
the significance the startling nature of the inversion vanishes from view.
In the case of dignity, this fulcrum is the fact that Gandhi isn't is himself not immune from the draw of this crime.
The language of standing up, showing the courage of men and other cognate conceptual positions occur repeatedly throughout Gandhi's writings.
These are perhaps a product of Gandhi's legal training, or at the very least, the vernacular he must engage, refuse to persuade his interlocutors.
Even so, I think he's doing something beneath the surface of his appropriation of this grammar.
And I suspect this depth because a similar appropriations, for example, of the figure of the shuttle will yield some very unusual results.
But having acknowledged this indisputable fact of this terminology that he
does speak in ways that sound like the European story that Warren constructs,
let us start moving away from the immediate connexion between the grammar of hierarchy and
the logic of upward equalisation that Walden discovers in the broad European tradition.
In other words, let us remember why. Although it shares the language of the kind that Walden employs,
the purely abstract concept of upward equalisation could not possibly map onto guardian ethics.
And the main reason for that is a dignity could never in a guardian frame become what it is in
the liberals the possession of abstract rights between distance horizontally equal individuals.
I think it was Fasel who says at one point that Gandhi's arm Raja is not the rule of Ramos King, but Rahm is husband, brother, father.
I really like this insight because it speaks to concrete responsibilities, not abstract rules, as a framework regarding ethics.
We should pause here for a moment. Earlier, I drew a contrast between an explicitly hierarchical conception of dignity,
the one that we get from the Romans and one that explicitly rejects hierarchies, even though, as I showed it sustains an attachment to it.
In that earlier version, the Roman version Dignity was also attached to particular social norms.
Does this mean that Gandhian dignity, by focussing on specific social rules, mirrors that hierarchical framing?
I think not. I'm inclined to believe that in this respect, whenever he says in his writings that while he, for example,
and excuse me, believes in the caste system, he deems the idea of heinous and loners to be perversions.
Mm-Hmm. From my understanding of the very complicated mediaeval renderings of the concept of dignity in its European form.
I do not think that even the most egalitarian versions of this older form of dignity
would ever deny the hierarchical distinctions dignity is supposed to demarcate.
So while Gandhian dignity is attached to specific rules, it is not explicitly committed to a hierarchical Audrey.
Neither is he, as I want to argue, unproblematic be committed to the moralistic version of dignity that is so much in vogue today.
I will leave aside the famous remark refers to the representative of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
to whom he told he would prefer and elaboration of duties over rights.
That refusal itself points to Gandhi's attachment to a different vocation,
which he thought the principles of the the Universal Declaration could never quite capture
to get at that deeper voltage and to understand the logic of downward equalisation.
I want to get to Gandhi's distance from the moralistic version.
A few years prior to his fast unto death, two protests, separate electorates for Dalits, Gandhi made a seemingly strange equation.
He argued that quote Being under foreign domination, we are all slaves and hence less than shrewdest untouchables of the West unquote.
Well, this is a very strange thing to say, especially to cast Hindus who might militate against the equation of slavery,
a condition they might well detest with untouchability, with which most were quite comfortable.
This equation is bound to create some tension in interlocutors mind if he is committed
to maintaining caste hierarchy while at the same time imagining himself as being free.
We might read Gandhi's provocation as an attempt to channel the feelings
associated with the desire for freedom towards the eradication of untouchability.
Well, that is the case, there's also another plenary.
Donnelly is equating the work of freedom and the work of untouchability by writing by routeing it through what he sees as a simpler task.
He seems to be saying that we already have in the palms of our hands what freedom might mean.
It would not mean that we lift everyone to the status of a Brahmin. It is instead to become what we already are.
Should. Now, although Gandhi had already expressed this assessment several times,
we can pick up one other piece of correspondence that explicitly expresses this reality.
Writing in 1933, a few months before his father sent death in order to protest separate electorates for untouchables,
Gandhi responded to a troubled Brahmin correspondent who worried that the agitation against untouchability was feeding violent anti-communist.
In his response, Gandhi goes to great lengths, as he often did, to show tremendous sympathy to his opponent.
At the same time, Gandhi also hijacks the very language of governance. This is a very typical move.
It is true, he says, that Brahmin ism is the highest column, and it is true that Brahmins have everywhere suffered, but they have suffered.
Gandhi argues, because they have given up their call.
And this column is not merely to acquire knowledge and transmit it all the he things, that's the highest thing we can do.
That is not enough. What Brahmins must do is what Gandhi, which is all in this would do, he says, a quote.
I wish that all Hindus will voluntarily call themselves sugars, unquote.
And they should drahi means a life devoted to service. Now read together,
these moments three years apart might help us see why the version of dignity that Gandhi is offering is not quite moralistic in the content search for
can't a capacity for living by the moral law which we acquired through the
use of our sovereign reason is what becomes the basis for our having dignity.
That is one version of where dignity resides in the content scheme.
Gandhi is saying that practical and historical realities have already given us the means of acknowledging a true vocation, which is that of service.
The contrast is between potentiality of living by the moral law versus the actuality of living a life of service.
Far from being a moralist in this declaration, Gandhi becomes, as crooner Montana argues, he is a realist.
So Saddam wanted. Moralist, a realist, the sheer power of what Gandhi is saying here is undeniable,
and its contrast with the story that Warren tells could not be starker.
The aim is not to make every man Brahmin, as has been the programme of much of Western political or philosophical thought.
But to make everything a shoot, well, this reversal has tremendous symbolic power,
and a lot of what Gandhi did was involved in sort of inverting symbols and trying to move them in a different direction.
But I think the transformation here does not stop simply at the symbolic reversal.
I want to think through what it would mean to move it from a symbolic refusal of the logic of
upward equalisation towards a politics oriented around the logic of downward equalisation.
Before I get there, I want to focus once more on the invasion that got the pitfalls for Waldron, the lock,
the logic of upward equalisation is possible because what's in the past the noblemen could do with impunity is today not possible for at least,
the pride that justified the noble man's impunity is today shared by everyone in the form of foot horizontal haughtiness.
Is again Waldron's words to my mind. A Gandhian conception of dignity unseats the ontological rule of power,
not the upright gait, but the bent shape of one ministering to the needs of the other.
What Gandhi thinks is emblematic of the figure of the shooter is Gandhian dignity.
If so, then the kernel that replaces the seat occupied by power is vulnerability.
Now, at its heart, vulnerability is to borrow lots of famous formulation that's coming from one could go, I guess, with with Butler as well.
But to borrow from Martha Fineman, vulnerability is quote a universal, inevitable and enduring aspect of the human condition, unquote.
Rather than think of ourselves as autonomous and rational beings capable of making contractual relations,
Fineman invites us to begin from a position that regards with circumspection.
These sorts of claims about human capability. Indeed, humility regarding what human beings are capable of and a deeper appreciation
for the networks that make our capacities possible is a fundamental insight.
Feminist scholars.
For Fineman herself, the state ought to act as an off a PDA that protects individuals from the debilitating effects of vulnerability.
Fineman is saying in effect for the state ought to acknowledge my vulnerability and guard me against its worst effects.
Only in this way to a social democratic state can achieve dignity.
Fineman This installs vulnerability at the heart of a programme which legitimates the modern state.
Not rights alone. But rights that protect us in a vulnerable state is refinement the proper business of government.
And we know that Gandhi would not subscribe to this dignity, rights, state sovereignty nexus.
I wouldn't see it, said Read Gandhi as agreeing about the vulnerability of the body.
But unlike some, he would insist that we remember that each attempt to immunise it against this
unavoidable fact depends on relying on the state and its instruments of violence.
In place of the state, we need some other mechanism that makes the vulnerability, you know, takes it as an ideological fact.
This mechanism is also, in my view, the process that tries to transform the symbolic reversal of Brahman intruder onto a political plate.
And it begins from, like with, Simon, an acknowledgement of the role of humility in a letter he wrote in 1930.
Gandhi develops a definition of the attitude of humility.
Gandhi's first gesture in this letter is to distance humility from the cultured behaviour of the aristocratic classes.
This, he says, is not true humility. Gandhi insists that to gain humility quote, one has to forget the sense of I and become a cipher.
He goes on. One who has realised the body's transitory ness and has in some measure become aware of the self soon becomes humble and quote.
Such humility, Gandhi says quote comes only when you have learnt true self respect, unquote,
the self that is deserving of respect is thus not a creature capable of winning the moral law.
True self-respect means rejecting the illusory traps of identifying with the body and in its stead,
respecting the element of Brahman in when relieved of such egotism,
Gandhi argued quote We melt into the ocean of humanity and share its dignity unquote.
If the body and its needs are not central to the programme of true civilisation, then the practises of spinning on which so much has been bred.
Labour and scavenging become mechanisms for relieving the self its egotism, but differently.
These activities are linked to dignity because in enacting them, one recognises the mortality of the body.
Dignity then becomes not about achieving greatness, but by becoming a cipher, a nothingness,
a particle of dust, as he once called it, engaged in service to the most vulnerable and weakest.
Not for me, the institutionalisation of these practises occurs in the US, the ashram, rather than the state, becomes the site for dignity.
The broadly ashrams serves three political functions.
First, I think Gandhi deemed such locales necessary for sustaining the capacity for peaceful cohabitation with diverse others.
This is what I discovered has hopefully identified as a quality of neighbourliness.
Second, these communities model relation knowledge is a proper way of conducting oneself again.
Think of Faisal's interpretation of dramaturgy for the purposes of my talk.
I think the most significant aspect of these actions emerges with this third political function.
They provided a locale where one might learn to undo one's attachment to prevailing forms of dignity in proximity with others.
To me, this is an important point in highlighting the importance of proximity.
I share the insights of Gandhi's interpreters who see in the phenomenology of everyday life the key that unlocks
many of Gandhi's most puzzling positions for the ashram to become the site where vulnerability is practised.
It was not enough to arm everyone with abstract rights, although these obviously had a place.
Instead, Gandhi wished to experiment with practises that could class the underlying attachment
to existing forms of social domination in the context of Gandhi's political activism.
This meant developing political practises that could give up the appeal of what he called bodily welfare and hence Raj.
Proximity prevents any easy substitution of concrete duties with abstract rights on which the appeals to bodily welfare often rest.
Proximity exposes to us the needs of the vulnerable body.
It is in this sense that bred labour that is work done to sustain the communal body of the ashram becomes a form of sacrifice
yojana taken on behalf of the poor because it brought the ashram residents into proximity with that aspect of the divine,
which was, Gandhi says, Quote incarnated as the poor.
The leader in Iraq end quote. It is true that in other contexts, Gandhi offered an economic rationale for bread labour.
He suggests that productivity delinked from bodily exertion is the source of what, whether or not we can trust Gandhi's political economy.
We would miss something if we took his insistence on bread labour as just an economic rationale.
Indeed, just as we read spinning as disclosing a moral programme, we might read bread labour as highlighting a programme of moral transformation.
Indeed, Gandhi at one point says that bread labour is the highest form of sacrifice,
which is the title he otherwise tends to use for spinning, done, cutting.
Similarly, and in the absence of drainage facilities in his ashram, Gandhi insisted upon cleaning communal latrines himself.
Perhaps nothing drew the derision and anger of his upper caste critics more than his advocacy of this practise.
Gandhi's critics insisted that engaging in this activity was a sacrilegious violation of the caste principles,
despite trenchant criticism of this position, including from his own life. Gandhi did not share their views.
This is because for Gandhi, scavenging could quote help one to a true appreciation of the equality of man, unquote.
The mortal ordinary reality of our own bodies as a shrewd commander might remind us and its needs
proved the equality of albeit this equality ultimately is that we are all particles of dust.
No, I would not say more about Gandhi, because anything else that I have to say is probably already familiar to most of you,
so I'm going to go deeper into sort of going deeper into my reading of Gandhi.
I'm going to try and bring the story back to this western story of dignity whose grammar,
logic and ontology are all pointing in directions away from a in politics.
I also want to retain the space for my own discomfort with this kind of conception of dignity.
But let me start by sort of drawing three contrasts very briefly.
I'm going to start with the liberal framing of dignity. Specifically, I have in mind here the kind of dignity and its relationship as politics.
That is the one that is at the heart of John Stuart Miller's account. The upshot of contrasting this vision against Gandhi, it seems to me,
would be to theorise the epistemic importance of proximity in the place we give to dignity in the context of mass politics.
The million account dignity is premised on the idea that, as most famously put it quote,
it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than the full satisfied and quote.
The cultivation of the higher senses has the power to transform the way in which an individual relates to social demands
and the broadened franchise that had in time completely transformed the political and social landscape as no salt mill.
Of course, all these developments with resignation, meaning he was neither against it nor enthusiastic about it, is programmed to counter,
therefore was an attempt to both tame its worst excesses and to channel it towards an expansive view of human capabilities.
His ethology, as he called it, was therefore an integral part of the programme of developing a moral science that
could craft individuals capable of writing the transformative waves of modernity.
By doing so, they would release human creativity from the bondage of the erotic class system.
Dignity in this context is achieved in a capacity to undertake middle class quote experiments in living end quote in a vast, tumultuous public realm.
By contrast, Gandhian dignity is rooted in what I'm calling experiments in proximate living.
Gandhi's call to become should the shares with an acknowledgement of the transformative effects of civilisation and involving
resignation of its irreversibility and an attempt to create a counter anthology to tame the worst effects of modernity.
But the aim is not to create a cosmopolitan imagination that rose around the world, combining Bentham and Coleridge fields.
Instead, it seeks in service to that which is immediate and mere assuring guide to dignity.
Now, with the Republican framing, I have it have in mind the idea of the famous contrast drawn by Quentin Skinner and Philip
Pettit between the Freemen and the Slave and this relationship Skinner and Pettit remind us,
is one of arbitrary domination in master, even a anyone can truly choose dominate the choices the slave makes.
Which forbid it means that the master can at any moment intervene into the slaves life and control the slaves will,
which means therefore that even with a kindly master slave is never truly free.
Anyone could attack the sleep with impunity and the fragility of the status this
tarnished dignity as a sleep should remind us of the precarious nature of their freedom.
Now, I understand the element of choice here is so deeply problematic in the way Gandhi talks about it,
but the Gandhi emphasis on becoming shoes makes for a startling contrast with neo room.
Ambitions in republicanism is ultimately about the question of how to manage the
inevitable presence of power and to channel it to its ends that sustained freedom.
Then the equation of freedom with a wilful service to the other can appear foolhardy.
At the same time, I think Gandhi is also offering a more nuanced psychological portrait of the power of,
you know, the imbalances between the slave and the Freeman.
I think Gandhi and Dignity could address structural inequalities in ways that perhaps the Republican account cannot without,
in some way tarnishing the complexity of a psychological portrait that it constructs.
But let me come to I want to jump to the last part, and I'm running out of time.
And I said earlier that I find myself sometimes reduced into an incoherent, inarticulate frustration, as Shruti calls it.
But I don't want to think alongside Gandhi.
I'm not a Ganiyu, I'm I'm not a Marxist, but I'm inclined to choose man as George Orwell once sort of, you know,
called this schematic difference between Marxists and anarchists on the one side and Gandhi on the other.
And here, rather than going through the route of Ambedkar, who obviously would be the real person, one could sort of opposed to Gandhi.
I'm going to go through Dubois, and this is what Dubois says in what I'm going to call Dubois at length.
Quote, We believe that at the bottom of organised human life,
there are unnecessary duties and services which no real human being ought to be compelled to do.
We push below this Munsil, the derelicts and Hoffman, whom we hate and despise and seek to build above it.
Democracy on such foundations is really a theory of exclusiveness,
a feeling that the world progresses by a process of excluding from the benefits of
culture the majority of men so that a gifted minority may blossom through this door.
The modern Democrat arrives to the place where he is willing to allot to able bodied men
and to fine horses to the task of helping one beldon to take the morning air unquote.
What is describing here, what is critiquing there is what he calls the manure theory of social organisation and Dubois.
His point is that there are some things we need to do that no one wants to do.
We compel others to complete these necessary tasks,
and the completion of these tasks destroys human bodies, corrupts minds and still defies the spirit.
How have we square this barbarism with our ideals? We have done so by pushing this task onto people whom we at the same time deprived
of any social reality people who we might today call along with Orlando Patterson,
Natalie alienated, in contrast,
those who benefit from this unequal division of labour and its fruits have bred into them a sense of their own, necessarily superiority.
What Dubois paints,
writing at the end of the First World War and of the particular condition of menial servants drawn entirely from the black working class,
might be the story of 20th century Democratic America. It might also be as Marxist would remind us the story of every civilisation.
Think of the sheer number of slaves responsible not only for autocratic Sparta, but democratic arms.
I think in his critique of modern civilisation, Gandhi will find much to agree with what Dubois is saying,
but I think they would also depart at the point in which Dubois offers a solution.
So according to Dubois, technology can liberate us from these tasks with the aid of washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves and ovens.
Can we not, as Dubois asks quote, look forward to a world of service without servants, unquote.
The world, in other words, in which vulnerability is still abolished, but in which it is not made a virtue.
Dignity would then become possible in the act of rescuing individuals from the drudgery of work that destroys them.
And not in service to the other, the voice to use Orwell's phrasing definitively chooses.
Now, for me, this is an appealing promise, and I think I can guess what the boys might say in response.
I'm not sure I'm at a place where I can prefer his answer to that of Dubois.
But this is something that I think I would like to discuss with all of you. Thank you.