Some small thoughts on the "Great Soul".

The brief look that we have taken so far of Gandhi has made me realize how little I knew about him. Of course I knew that he was Indian and wore a loincloth all the time, but I don't think that I could have said much else about him. After watching the Gandhi feature film and reading his DK biography, I have a good sense of why he is such an amazing historical figure. It seems like he was the first person to practice non-violent resistance on a large scale or for a massive revolution and did so with profound success. So it is no wonder that Martin Luther King revered Gandhi's philosophy.

In the introduction to his Selected Political Writings, Dennis Dalton tells the reader how Gandhi thought that "the supreme aim of human experience is knowledge of what Gandhi calls 'the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives'" (6). Hegel reverberates this notion in that he believes that all of existence is inseparably connected and that the pursuit of knowledge is to see humanity to have order, or to know that all of reality is united by an Absolute essence that embodies ideas like love, truth, reason, and virtue and works for justice, peace, and goodwill for all mankind. Because Gandhi believed that all living things are interconnected and therefore interdependent, he determined violence to be an act of hatred towards all life forms, something that must be annuled or corrected by its opposite, non-violence, in order for them to be reconnected (or shown to having been connected the entire time). There is no doubt that we find this message in the work of Martin Luther King.