The Philosophy of War

BY S. S. SURYANARAYANA SASTRI, M.A. (Oxon), Bar-at-Law

(Reader in Philosophy, University of Madras)

Never having been anything but C-3 physically, there was no possibility of my ever having been a combatant. I have, however, had some experience of war. I have lived through rationing days, and seen food-queues; I have slept through an air-raid and been torpedoed in mid-winter; and in John Bull’s Other Island I made acquaintance with barbed wire, dead horses, and dead men. The horrors of war, physical and mental, are in some measure matters of experience to me, not mere hearsay; so that I may be presumed to have a little more right to speak of them than the arm-chair philosopher of tradition. There is perhaps another appropriateness in a Hindu speaking now about the philosophy of war; and this is the first day of the Navaratri, the nine-days’ glorification of the Mother of the World battling with the demon-hosts.

We may start with certain incontestable facts about the present war. Whether war is desirable or not, we are in a state of war; and whoever may have willed its commencement, no one seems anxious to continue with it. Germany desires peace because she thinks she has obtained what she wants for the moment; the Allied Powers desire peace, since they would seem to have desired nothing but that all along; both sides would like to terminate the war, though, as to when and under what conditions, there is considerable difference of opinion. There is no belief that fighting in itself is good, whether for the whole community or for a class of it. It may be inevitable in the present condition of humanity, but it is none the less an evil, and one which we hope, at least progressively, to eliminate. We respect the men who die for their country, but we have learnt to respect, at least as much, those who live for their country, a task far more taxing to the spirit in many circumstances. And a live dog any day is better than a dead lion. Though there is a willingness to fight and to suffer, there is no Jubliation. It is like a surgical operation; the patient suffers it and the surgeon performs it, both under a sense of necessity and to subserve a higher need. No self-respecting surgeon would operate merely to demonstrate his skill, irrespective of the patient’s chances of cure; no patient would submit to an operation merely to demonstrate his fortitude. Both parties believe in the possibility of success, the restoration of the patient to normal health or a near approximation to it, by the elimination of the adventitious circumstance; health is normal, disease abnormal, because of the intrusion of what is alien; extrude the intruder and you have a restoration of normal conditions. And war is surgery on a large scale, with this difference, that human nature is itself both operator and patient, and the latter comes to the test in a spirit of defiance, not submission. The lower elements of human nature, greed, passion, malice, envy, ever seek to establish themselves; baulked in their endeavour by the restraints of civilisation, they feed on themselves, gaining increased explosive strength with the repression; realising the weakness of their nakedness, they clothe themselves in the trappings of civilisation; they invent kulturs and mask themselves under ideologies; earth-hunger masquerades as the legitimate need for expansion; the attempt to spread culture is a pretext for annexation; an inferiority feeling due to prior defeat becomes a complex, and manifests itself as bluster and persecution; where the usual gallery of gods is thought inadequate, new gods are added to the pantheon, and there are fictions like that of the Aryan race. And it is not that such evil forces are to be found on one side alone. The present sins of one party clash often with the past sins of another. Imperialism clashes with imperialism as often as with democracy. One way of sizing up such a situation is to say that there will always be wars in the world, just as there will always be good people and bad. No nation is likely to be perfect; and the failures of one will ever provide pretexts for the aggressions of another. Conflict will bring about a re-arrangement of powers and possibilities for evil, not the extinction of evil. The world in its finitude cannot guarantee perpetual peace; men fight men; the gods too, in our mythology, have to fight demons; even if we could imagine perfection on earth, what about the Martians who may be very martial, judging by their name? Conflict is the law of life. To strive and to conquer, these are supreme necessities. There may be peace perhaps when the struggle has eliminated all the weak and the strongest alone survive. And even these, for aught we know, may eventually destroy one another, like the legendary Sunda and Upasunda.

Such a crude view hardly commends itself to us today. It is now a commonplace to say that the endeavour of civilisation is not to eliminate the unfit, but to fit as many as possible to survive. We may have attempted in the past with little success to achieve collective security; but not even our failure can justify the conclusion that the only alternative is individual brigandage. In the last war there was execration not merely of the Kaiser, but also of the Hun; today we decry Hitler but try to convert the German people by leaflets; and Hitler’s choicest anathemas are reserved for the Churchills, Duff Coopers and Edens. Not all this change of mentality can be set down to mere diplomacy. We have come to believe that, even though evil is actual, it is not a necessary feature of humanity or of large sections of it; wrong-doing is individual; the masses are misled; if their ignorance can be removed they will both see and do what is right. The present war seems appreciably nearer the ideal of being a war to end war, And it is not without significance that the new Napoleon, Gamelin, is reputed to be a student of the philosophy of Bergson, the doctrine of surging life-force, the elan vital. A far cry from the fire-eating generals of former days! What I would impress on you is the transition from the faith in good and evil as parallel forces, either triumphing by turns, to the faith that good is fundamental, while evil is a sporadic, though frequent occurrence, due to the disease of ignorance, a disease which one may legitimately hope to cure by wisdom.

The trouble, however, is that the same faith may be and is held by both parties, so that there seems no way of settling which is the good side, except by results. And though there is nothing intrinsically wrong in judging by results, it is a notoriously defective criterion. Should we judge by success immediately, or in the long run? On which side was the right in the last war? With the Allies who survived the war or with Germany which survived the peace and is rearing its head again in opposition? Questions like these are as genuine as they are difficult. They may tend to show the possibility of a legitimate conflict between differing ideologies, each commanding fervent loyalty from its adherents without any showing itself patently worthy of universal acceptance. So long as men are finite and their vision limited, conflicting ideologies will be the rule rather than the exception. Truth is one, but truths are many, and no truth is true for all.

You may think that this would justify difference at best, not conflict. Why not live and let live? Even if absolute laissez-faire is impossible, why should not ideologies co-operate rather than conflict? The Rotarian symbol is a toothed wheel; its teeth are meant not to bite or to destroy but to engage in co-operative effort with suitable cogs in other wheels; the teeth may break when the machine is out of gear, but that is not the normal condition of the machine. But neither of the policies advocated seems feasible. Indifference is impossible, for where is one to draw the line? With one’s village or professional group or household or members of one’s family or strictly with oneself? Logically, each man’s ideas should be good for himself alone; and thus all corporate life, all that makes life worth living, becomes impossible. On the other hand, once you extend the applicability of an ideal, where can you stop? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; what is good for me cannot but be good for my neighbour. If not there is something wrong, and we shall both have to arrive at a higher good which will satisfy both; and this means conflict. As for co-operation, can you conceive of Nazism and Communism co-operating? The Non-aggression Pact between Germany and Russia was itself such a monstrosity that it begot the present war. Co-operation in better and more fruitful ways is unthinkable. One ideology or the other will have to yield, if both are not supplanted by a third. The finitude of man, his proneness to form ideals and be loyal to them, these seem to indicate that conflict is a necessary feature of all corporate life. If all of us turned ascetics there would be no war. But so long as we respect, maintain and cherish social institutions, we are bound sooner or later to come into conflict with those who stand for different ideals and institutions. We shall be less than men if we shirk this conflict, this dharma-yuddha, when it comes. Our clear duty is neither to fall flat nor to retreat but to march breast forward, to survive with our ideals or to perish for their maintenance.

So much seems commonsense. But we are not wholly satisfied. From very early times we have been taught, at least in precept, to turn the other cheek and to return good for evil. It is true that such counsel is sought to be reinforced in its appeal by the promise of the kingdom of heaven; the surest way to chastise the evil-doer is to do him good in return; so that even these counsels of perfection seem to fall short of the highest ethical standard of disinterested goodness. Nevertheless, even as expedients, the courses suggested seem eminently worthy of consideration. Both in the physical and the psychical realms, action produces opposite re-action. If you vanquish your enemy in battle he will cherish rancour against you and await an early opportunity of avenging himself. If you repress your impulses, they will revenge themselves on you by occasioning obscure neuroses undermining your health. The cure in psychical cases is to bring up the impulses from the depths of the sub-conscious and the unconscious, ventilate them and sublimate them. Is it not likely that the same process should apply in the social world too? War can at best lead to repression of one party or the other and subsequent re-action. Should we not rather provide machinery for the aeration of grievances and the sublimation of the primarily disruptive forces? This, you may feel, belongs to the philosophy, not of war, but of the peace to succeed it. But surely if such machinery could be created and made to function successfully, there would be no need for war at all. Without abandoning one’s own loyalties, it is permissible for one to have the vision that such loyalties are finite and imperfect, that they are capable of being superseded by others, that where conflict seems inevitable the path of persuasion and passive resistance may yet be the nobler one.

I am not unaware of the numerous difficulties in the way. Are there any occasions when violence is justified? What are the limits of non-violence? Such questions have not been answered satisfactorily in the past. The question of defending woman’s honour is not to Gandhiji the poser that it was to many conscientious objectors in the last war; but Gandhiji’s answer cannot claim to be final. Rather than let myself be killed, perhaps ineffectually to save the woman, and with the possibility of causing relentless remorse to the aggressor, may I not, as a friend suggests, disable the would-be violator, maiming him in the arm or leg? My intention is good; the consequences are good for the person protected, and not as bad as they might have been for the aggressor, who is given an opportunity to repent and reform. Would such an act of self-defence constitute violence? The difficulty may be due to the fact that abstract solutions of concrete problems can never satisfy; they must be solved by each individual, as and when they occur. This, however, is not of much help to us who seek a widely general, if not universal, principle for guidance.

It is worth while, however, to re-affirm the ideal of non-violence and insist on its soundness, despite disagreements, actual or possible, as to the methods. If war is not merely selfish or brutal, it is waged for the establishment of what is good and claimed to be so. War is necessary because good is opposed by evil. If evil were ultimate, either evil may be the ultimate victor or there will be a perpetual see-saw, and establishing the good will be a task of Sisyphus. There may be exceptional heroes who will wage war in such conditions, but these may be one in a million or in a hundred millions. The average prudent man fights because he believes not merely in the justness of his cause but also in the final prevalence of justice. Evil is a fact, but not ultimately real; it is dispellable by good, just as ignorance is a fact, dispellable by wisdom. And the war against evil is only a war against ignorance. The story of Durga’s battle with Mahisha is variously described in many Puranas; but as Vishnu says in the Varaha Purana, the central theme is everywhere the same, intelligence warring with inertness, spirit with matter, wisdom with ignorance. And the final victory of spirit is possible, because spirit is fundamental; it is the real, of which the finite, the material, the discordant are appearances. We see only the discord; but we have faith in the basic harmony; else we would not either suffer the discord or seek to harmonise it. If that much is true, is it not legitimate to claim that the method of resolving the discord should be inspired and guided by the sense of the harmony? Should we not, in plain words, oppose hate with love rather than hate? The latter course may leave us with no survivor or with a triumphant hate as survivors; in neither possibility is there much cheer. Health is normal, disease abnormal; love is normal, hate abnormal; goodness is normal, violence abnormal; wisdom is normal, ignorance abnormal. Except on the ground of such beliefs, no human activity for the betterment of oneself or neighbour is intelligible. And granted those beliefs, the resolution of conflicts, which are actual, would seem achievable, not through the perpetuation but through the abolition of conflict.

The practical difficulties and problems are, as I have said, many. And even in theory, non-violence as a method cannot claim the last word. If it is true that non-violence is fundmental, that it is the one reality, that all else are appearances thereof, it should be possible to experience that reality, what-ever be our mode of approach, conflict or co-operation. Even hatred, our Scriptures say, is a mode of devotion to the Highest. It is not outside of us, an ideal remote from us in space or time or both. It is our very nature in whatever we do. The man of wrath must be saved as much as the man of peace, the sinner as much as the saint. Non-violence can claim to be a quicker, easier, less wasteful method; but that is its maximum valid claim. Again, we are not unfamiliar with poison counteracting poison, leaving the human system whole. Whitehead speaks of "a species of microbes which kills the forest" and "also exterminates itself." And such drastic methods become necessary in quite a few cases. We would prefer to keep our bodies intact, avoid injections and excisions, preserve our health with normal diet and exercise, shun doctors and treatments except perhaps mild and beneficial stimulations like those from ultra-violet rays. Not being models of discretion, however, we err from the straight and narrow path; we become subject to troubles which defy ‘natural’ treatments; we may develop cancers, growths which have to be eliminated by destructive deep X-rays; we may, like Gandhiji himself, develop a diseased appendix requiring removal by the surgeon’s knife. The opposition of one disruptive force by another seems in such cases both necessary and beneficial. It seems therefore unsafe to dogmatise about non-violence as the sole, supreme method.

We cannot, however, afford to forget the end in view. Whatever the means employed voluntarily or of necessity, the result aimed at is peace, not fresh discord. ^l And to this end we must seek to conserve, not to destroy; to sublimate, not annihilate. For nothing that exists can become a mere nothing. Not the phoenix alone, but even demons can rise out of their own ashes. Hitler may be destroyed by force of arms, but Hitlerism which grew out of the Treaty of Versailles can be conquered only by the spirit of love. Here again I shall give you an example from Hindu mythology. The Field-Marshal par excellence of the Hindu pantheon is Subrahmanya, whose vehicle, the peacock, is the object of nearly as much veneration as the god himself. The arch-enemy of the divine hosts was one Surapadma whom Subrahmanya vanquished and killed; but Surapadma would not stay killed; he came up again and again, as a man, a demon, an elephant, a lion, finally he appeared simultaneously as a cock and a peacock; these, the legend runs, Subrahmanya did not kill; the former he raised aloft to serve as his banner and the latter he used as his vehicle for evermore. Evil was conquered in the end by loving-kindness, not the cruel spear And that, I venture to think, is a lesson which we may all take to heart, whatever be the mode that lies nearest to our hands or hearts, in our strife with evil.

l We may sympathise with the Archbishop of Canterbury in his desire to mass might "on the side of the right" but cannot afford to follow him in his dictum that "there are some things that are more sacred even than peace."