REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEconcern is something more like an ‘‘internal’’ situation, that is, a relation to the self that
evaluates present ways of life in order to form what Cavell calls an unattained but attain-
able self. This is a process of constant experimentation, coping with recurrent difficulties,
the central topic, for instance, of Gandhi’s autobiography,My Experiments with Truth,
rather than the finalism of a prespecified end or a goal (this book is not, for example,
called ‘‘How I Finally Found the Truth’’). Though historically Gandhi appears as the
leader of a nationalist movement, when India was declared an independent nation-state
in August 1947, he was nowhere near the official celebrations in Delhi, and he didn’t send
the leaders of the new state so much as a congratulatory note. Instead, he was in Noakhali,
near Calcutta, employing his signature technique of fasting in an effort to stem the tre-
mendous inter-religious violence that had broken out in various parts of the subcontinent
as a result of the partition of India and Pakistan. ‘‘No virtue is final, all are initial,’’ as
Emerson puts it in ‘‘The Conduct of Life.’’^17
To put it another way, this is an impulse to the perfectibility of the self that is at the
same time a call for the transformation of the world as a whole, not a lament for a world
gone by but a summons to one still to be borne, witnessed. ‘‘The transformation of the
world as a whole,’’ a world ‘‘still to be borne,’’ phrases of such ambition that more often
than not they are apt to lose their force entirely. In any case, does anyone still have such
hopes? It depends on where we look. For the last few years, people from very diverse
backgrounds, from a hundred and fifty countries, have been meeting in large numbers in
what has come to be called the World Social Forum (WSF), an outgrowth of what was
earlier called the antiglobalization movement, held together for the moment in a fragile
coalition, united by very little except the slogan ‘‘Another world is possible.’’
Let us take the philosophical relations we have been building closer to a more familiar
set of questions, through which philosophy opens out to the problem of associations,
politics, or ethics. Our point of departure here is the relation between the individual and
the community on the question of obedience or consent (the ‘‘social contract’’), and the
distinct but related problem ‘‘Why ought I obey the State?’’ and the Kantian formulation
‘‘Morality takes the form of Law.’’ On a weak reading of either series, Nietzsche and
Emerson would be said to celebrate the individual as a continuation of Romanticism,
while Gandhi would be said to set forth a communitarian ethics. But listen to Gandhi
respond to the question of ‘‘socialism and communism’’ in India: ‘‘Their one aim is
material progress.... I want freedom for full expression of my personality. I must be free
to build a staircase to Sirius if I want to.’’^18 In his response, Gandhi invokes ‘‘the viewpoint
of Sirius,’’ a version of the ‘‘view from above,’’ a crucial problematic of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, found, for instance, in Goethe’s understanding of poetry as an
exercise consisting in spiritually elevating oneself high above the earth, or, as with Ernest
Renan, writing in 1880: ‘‘Viewed from the solar system, our revolutions have scarcely the
extent of the movement of atoms. Considered from Sirius, they are even smaller still.’’^19
At the outset we asked about the difference between religion and philosophy. Now we are
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