Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand byname Mahatma (“Great-Souled”) Gandhi, leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule, considered to be the father of his country. He is internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest to achieve political and social progress.

Gandhi was reared by a deeply religious mother in a household that practiced vaisnavism. He hewed to his mother's vegetarianism when he began law studies in England in 1888. In quest of clerical work he went to South Africa (1893-1914) and was shocked at the racial discrimination there. He became an advocate for his fellow Indians in South Africa and undertook a series of challenges to the government that led to jail. He entered politics in India in 1919 to protest British sedition laws. He emerged as the head of the Indian National Congress and advocated a poli­cy of noncooperation to achieve Indian independence under the general rubric of ahimsa ("nonviolence"). In 1930 he led a march to the sea to protest the British-imposed tax on salt, and by the following spring the making of salt for per­sonal use was permitted. Imprisoned throughout much of World War II, he negotiated with the British in August 1947 for an autonomous Indian state. In January 1948, however, he was assassinated by a right-wing Hindu fanatic.

The religious dimensions of Gandhi's life and thought are many. Gandhi's religious quest dated back to his childhood, but it received a great impetus after his arrival in South Africa. His Quaker friends in Pretoria failed to convert him to Christianity, but they quickened his ap­petite for religious studies. He was fascinated by Tolstoy's writings on Christianity, read the Qur'an in translation, and delved into Hindu scriptures and philosophy. The study of comparative religion, talks with scholars, and his own reading of theological works brought him to the con­clusion that all religions were true and yet every one of them was imperfect because they were “interpreted with poor intellects, sometimes with poor hearts, and more often misinterpreted”. Rajchandra, Gandhi's friend and spiritual mentor, convinced him of "the subtlety and profundity" of Hinduism, the religion of Gandhi's birth. And it was the Bhagavad Gita that became his "spiritual dictionary" and exercised probably the greatest single influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words in the Gita particularly fascinated him. One was aparigraha (nonpossession), which implied that man had to jettison the material goods that cramped the life of the spirit and to shake off the bonds of money and property. The other was samabhava (equability), which enjoined him to remain unruffled by pain or pleasure, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or fear of failure.

Georg w. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831)

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1770. He was educated at the Tiibinger Stift, where he became close friends with Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Holderlin. During their time in Tubingen, they were inspired by the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789-1799) but horrified by the Reign of Terror that took place during it, in which ideological struggles between rival political factions led to mass executions. After serving as a private tutor in Switzerland, Hegel went first to Frankfurt where Holderlin lived, and then in 1801 assumed a lectureship in Jena where Schelling was teaching. Together Hegel and Schelling edited the Critical Journal of Philosophy, an organ for their new speculative philosophy. While in Jena, Hegel also wrote his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). With the closure of the university following the battle of Jena on Octo­ber 14, 1806, Hegel became a newspaper editor in Bamberg and then the head of a college preparatory school in Nurem­berg. After publishing Science of Logic in 1816, he obtained a professorial position at the University of Heidelberg and published his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1818). During the same year, Hegel was called to Berlin where he taught until his death in 1831. While in Berlin, he published the Philosophy of Right (1822) and delivered lectures on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy - all published after his death. At the time of his death, he was considered one of the most influential philosophers in Europe and exercised a profound influence on many of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Hegel is best known for the development of a dialectical philosophy that combines a Kantian notion of consciousness with a notion of historical development derived from French political thinker Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, and others. In the Phenomenology, Hegel traces the development of consciousness as a historical phenomenon, demonstrating that the human intellectual project came to its end in his own time with the realisation and reconciliation of everything that had previously been considered dichotomous - subject and object, individual and society, human and nature, and human and divine. This was achieved through what Hegel called absolute knowledge or science. He spelled out the conceptual foundations for this science in his Logic, which constituted the basis for his practical philosophy.

Hegel's political philosophy is laid out in his Philosophy of Right, which combines a theory of natural or abstract (property) rights, a modified Kantian moral theory, a communitarian notion of the family, a Smithian notion of economic life or civil society, and a bureaucratic model of a rational state that resembles the constitutional monarchy of England. In his Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel attempts to show that history is a dialectic of freedom beginning with the master and slave relationship and ending with universal citizenship; it passes from oriental despotism to Greek democracy, and Roman aristocracy to the monarchical world of modern Europe. A human's historical task, in Hegel's view, comes to its practical end in the realisation of such rational states, and to its spiritual end in the completion and perfection of knowledge as the systematic science of all that is.