What I take to be another core element of Gandhi’s concept of truth, or perhaps the same element viewed from another angle, is found in the source that Gandhi credits with having inspired his concept of Satyagraha, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. Tolstoy wrote:

“The condition of men is the result of their disunion. Their disunion results from their not following the truth which is one, but falsehoods which are many. The sole means of uniting men is their union with the truth. And therefore the more sincerely men strive toward the truth, the nearer they get to unity.

“But how can men be united in the truth or even approximate to it, if they do not even express the truth they know, but hold that there is no need to do so, and pretend to regard as truth what they believe to be false?

“And therefore no improvement is possible so long as men are hypocritical and hide the truth from themselves, so long as they do not realize that their union and therefore their welfare is only possible in the truth, and do not put the recognition and profession of the truth revealed to them higher than everything else.” (14)

 

Truth, conceived as Gandhi conceived it, is about religion, since for him God is Truth and Truth is God. Although Gandhi says that both of these convertible terms are so rich in meaning that a lifetime is not long enough to plumb the depths of what they mean, at the core of the meanings that Gandhi does succeed in plumbing there are human relationships which are functional and not dysfunctional. People respect each other and work together for the common good. Gandhi’s is a scientifically respectable view of religion. For him religion works, as it works to bind society together in Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion, and as it works according to the many scholarly accounts of religious phenomena which focus on what religion does. (15)