Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment

This chapter examines Gandhi’s critique of the Enlightenment. It expounds Gandhi’s view that certain attitudes that emerged around the new science in the modern West (not the science itself) stressed a form of detachment towards the world that disenchants the world and transforms the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources, a mere tool for our own ends. It argues that this transformation contributed to the rationalizations of colonial exploitation, since the colonizers infantilized conquered people as needing to be brought up to speed in acquiring the scientific rationality that would allow them to see nature and the world, generally, as a source of extraction and gain.