4.1. Epistemic nonviolence

What would it be, then, to engage epistemic interactions with the methods of Gandhian nonviolence—adherence to Truth, noncooperation with injustice, self-suffering, ahimsa, and self-purification—where by talk of “epistemic interactions,” I will have in mind any communicative interaction with other persons in which information is exchanged, verbally or otherwise, and credences updated in light of that exchange. (This could no doubt be put more carefully, but the basic idea is, I take it, serviceable.)

I shall distinguish between two sorts of epistemic nonviolence: second-personal and third-personal nonviolence. Second-personal nonviolence is application of the methods of nonviolence to your direct conversation partner, the one(s) with whom you are directly speaking, where the noncooperation you seek to practice is directed at harmful or potentially harmful epistemic dynamics between you and your conversation partner. Third-personal nonviolence is the application of the methods of nonviolence to resist epistemic injustices, imposed or threatened, against a third-party, who may or may not be party to the conversation. We’ll treat these seriatim.

Ahimsa. Start with ahimsa (in the second-personal context until further notice), and begin by thinking about what it would be to engage epistemic interaction un-ahimsically: himsically , as it were. Well, a main kind of himsic interaction that comes ready to mind is the kind I have witnessed at philosophy conferences and seminar rooms, online chat boards, New York Times comments sections, and sorry to report, in words emanating from my own mouth: the kind of interaction aimed at rhetorical domination, winning the exchange, being right,Footnote ⁵ making the other see and admit that they are wrong. This kind of exchange is on offer most anytime one is having an argument with someone. Argument—in the having-an-argument sense, not the construction-of-a-sequence-of-premises-in-support-of-a-conclusion sense—is a paradigmatically himsic mode of dominative discourse, in which the primary goal is to win the exchange. In ahimsic interactions, as we’ll think of things, there is no argument; winning and being right are not among the goals of these interactions.

Other main kinds of himsic epistemic interaction that come to mind are interactions in which one seeks

• • to embarrass one’s conversation partner—by sarcasm, ridicule, and the like,

• • to criticize—to fault-find in a condemnatory way, and

• • to retaliate—by returning insult for insult, harshness for harshness.

The main features of ahimsic, not-harming discourse, on our model, will be discourse that eschews each of the above, discourse characterized by thoroughgoing practice of non-argument, non-embarrassment, non-criticism,Footnote ⁶ and non-retaliation.

The practice of ahimsa, we saw above, has both a negative and a positive side: not doing harm but also doing good. We have just been noting the negative side of ahimsic epistemic interaction: non-argument, and so forth. How about the positive side? What goods does one seek to effect in ahimsic discourse? These three, I suggest, would be central:

First, understanding: The main good pursued in ahimsic (second-personal) discourse is understanding.

There is the good of my understanding my interlocutor’s position. As I shall think of things, to understand someone’s position is to attain a detailed grasp of not only the specific claim they are defending or the arguments they are putting forward in defense of that claim, but their entire position, which following Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2013, 105), I think of as the large web of beliefs, emotions, affections, feelings, and values subtending their discourse. The goal in ahimsic discourse is to deeply understand not just the claim and the arguments put forward in its defense, but the noetic structure in which it is situated.

This, I say, is a good. A good for whom? It is a great good for my interlocutor. I do not know how to argue for this with any precision, but I take it to be a great good to be known, to be seen, to be understood by others. I have friends for whom this is a value, who take time and make effort to understand me, who take an interest in who I am, what I value, what I think, feel, and need. This practice of theirs does me enormous good.

I say it is a great good for my interlocutor to be deeply understood by me. It is also a great good for me to understand my interlocutor. If the bits of our model to the effect that every human (with mature and well-functioning faculties) is so constructed as to be in touch with important truths in their situation—moral, spiritual, aesthetic—and that every human is in the grip of important errors about the good, true, and beautiful in their situation, then it is very likely, a certainty I would say, that in understanding my interlocutor’s position, I will come into contact with pieces of the truth I had previously overlooked, paid insufficient attention to, forgotten, or ignored. This is a good for me.

Next, there is the good of my coming to understand my own position more deeply. (I will comment below on how ahimsic discourse might be expected to effect this and the other goods of understanding discussed here; for now I am just describing the goods.) This is a good for me because it is good to be psychically integrated, to be such that one’s beliefs and desires regarding the good, the true, and the beautiful are not in conflict with one another. Disintegration of the intellect and will around the good, true, and beautiful can inhibit one’s ability to share oneself with others and thus hinder one of the greatest goods of human life, loving communion with others.Footnote ⁷ In coming to more deeply understand one’s own position, one becomes aware of areas of discord in one’s belief-desire structures. That can facilitate psychic integration and is thereby a good.

And finally, there is the good of my interlocutor’s coming to understand her own position more deeply, which is a good for her for the same reasons understanding my position is a good for me.

So far forth, the goods of understanding sought by ahimsic discourse. The primary method for pursuing these goods of understanding, on our model, is deep listening, which I think of as a two-fold practice comprising paying attention to what the other is saying and posing exploratory questions aimed at deepening understanding of what’s being said.

Paying attention, in the operative sense here, is a matter of focused, non-interruptive, fully engaged, curious uptake of what is being said. It means full presence in the moment, affection for one’s conversation partner, trying to know them without your mind pressing up against theirs, without arguing with them, or changing the subject.Footnote ⁸ It does enormous good to someone to pay attention to them in this way.

The posing of exploratory questions is a kind of art form: it requires life experience, wisdom. The main forms of exploratory question, I think, are these:

• • questions that check for understanding: is this the view?

• • questions that probe for grounds: is x your reason for y?

• • questions that investigate resources in the view for handling objections: how does your view handle the worry that x?

• • questions aimed at strengthening: would it strengthen the view to include x?

The art here is knowing how to intersperse such questions with periods of paying attention, knowing when it’s right to ask them or better to be silent, and knowing how to ask them in accordance with the negative practices of ahimsic discourse: non-argument, non-embarrassment, non-criticism, and non-retaliation. It’s all too easy for questioning to transmute into thinly disguised argumentation, sarcasm, ridicule, and so forth. Ahimsic questioning avoids this.

The practice of deep listening—paying sustained attention, posing exploratory questions—facilitates the types of understanding mentioned above. It means your and my coming to deepened understanding of your position, and if things go well, your and my coming to deepened understanding of my position. (I will say more below about how this might work.)

I’d said that ahimsic (second-personal) discourse aims at three goods, the first, understanding. The second is empathy.

It is a great good to be the subject of empathic attention—for someone to rejoice and sorrow with you about that for which you rejoice and sorrow. In ahimsic discourse, one seeks not merely to form true beliefs about the position of the other, but to cultivate an empathic connection with them: to feel some of the joy, pain, awe, delight, and sorrow in their position, and to feel compassionate nonjudgment at the wicked or otherwise wrongheaded in their position. (This last element, a form of compassion—pity or pain at your or another’s plight—is not strictly speaking the same thing as empathy, the mirroring of the feelings of another. What I am calling empathic connection is a blend of empathy and compassion.)

The sort of understanding of your conversation partner’s position facilitated by deep listening well positions one for empathic engagement with her. As you come to understand not only the claims she is defending and arguments therefor, but the large, underlying structure of beliefs, affects, experiences, and values in which those claims are situated, there will be much there to engage the affections of a sensitive listener.

Third and finally, there is the good I will call mutuality. It is a great good to be mutually helpful to another: to share with them what of one’s own is a good for them and for them to do the same for you. By listening well and deeply to you and asking careful exploratory questions, as per our model, I grow in understanding and empathic engagement with your position; thereby I provide you a great good. And because I have approached you in a nonviolent posture, listening and questioning from a place of generosity, warmth, and genuine desire for your good, this can trigger a reciprocity psychology in you, with the result that you might well find it attractive to return the favor of deep listening to me, thereby offering me the good of understanding and empathic engagement. In successful ahimsic discourse, I and my conversation partner bestow these goods on one another, and thereby participate in the good of mutuality.

Such are three main goods sought by ahimsic, second-personal discourse and its constitutive practices of deep listening, non-argument, nonembarrassment, noncriticism, and nonretaliation: understanding, empathy, and mutuality. To reiterate, among the goals not pursued in such discourse is winning an argument, being right, or even, I would say, persuading the other. The goal here is not to cause one’s conversation partner to change his views about anything. It is more invitational: the things at which I directly aim are deep, empathic listening and practice of nonargument, nonembarrassment, noncriticism, and nonretaliation. I do these in order that I might invite my conversation partner into practice of the same, recognizing that a happy outcome would be his taking up my invitation and movement for each of us into deeper apprehension of important truths. But, importantly, that is not my aim; it is a welcome side effect of my aim, which is ahimsic listening and invitation to the same. (Why abjure the goal of changing my conversation partner’s view? What could be wrong with that? More on this shortly.)

For many of us, adopting as a matter of deep-seated habit the posture I describe above would mean dramatic changes in epistemic business as usual. In my experience anyway, it is a matter of deep-seated habit that discourse veers into the dominative. There is that hard-to-describe sense of panic, rage, indignance when I know that I am right and that my conversation partner is badly and stubbornly confused, which is often followed by that hard-to-describe switch into fight mode, with its attendant anger and desire to win the exchange, both of which are often dramatically out of proportion to the importance of what’s under dispute. For I and many I know, this is the stuff of deep habit. Rehabituation unto nonviolent modes of interaction, in which apparent wrongheadedness is met with compassionate curiosity, deep listening, and the energy of ahimsa, requires deep spiritual formation, more on which below.

First though, some commentary on the other parts of satyagraha in the epistemic domain. I’ve been discussing ahimsa, but there’s also noncooperation, self-suffering, self-purification, and adherence to Truth.

Noncooperation. Noncooperation in the second-personal context will mainly take the form of not cooperating with a conversation partner’s attempts to practice himsic discourse—not cooperating with his attempts to dominate, belittle, win, embarrass, ridicule, and criticize. To withdraw cooperation from these conversational moves is to refuse to be drawn into himsic exchange by them—to refuse to shift into fight mode, to refuse to return dominative for dominative discourse, insult for insult, tit for tat. It’s to stay focused on deep listening—to keep paying attention, posing expositive questions, seeking empathic connection to the other’s position. Thereby one noncooperates with the conversation partner’s attempt to steer conversation in himsic directions.

Self-suffering. A basic dynamic of nonviolent resistance is that noncooperation brings suffering for the noncooperator. In political contexts, noncooperation with unjust laws brings suffering in the form of arrest, imprisonment, state and non-state partisan violence, and the like. The courting and willing endurance of suffering is a crucial component of the process of Gandhian, nonviolent political resistance; done correctly, in a spirit of ahimsa, thought Gandhi, it can soften hearts and bring comity into situations of conflict.

So too in the epistemic domain. Noncooperation with a conversation partner’s forays into himsic discourse—his pursuit of rhetorical domination over you, uncharitable, straw-man characterizations of your position, interruptions and speaking over you, failure to hear you out, and the like—entails an unwillingness on your part to follow him into that style of discourse and dogged stubbornness in staying with your practice of ahimsic discourse, deep listening, charitable, exploratory questions, empathy, and so forth. This can hurt: it’s painful to be interrupted, mischaracterized, talked over, all the while denying oneself the satisfaction of retaliatory verbal attack, proving your point, showing your opponent wrong.

But as in the political context, self-suffering, born in a posture of ahimsa, of genuine good-will and non-anger toward your attacker, can be transformative. When your opponent senses your ahimsic energy and receives no fighting energy in return for their fighting energy, this will very often deactivate their fight psychology and open them to the possibility of non-defensive interchange, in which they are able to hear you and to speak honestly about the contours of their own position (so, e.g., Itzchakov et al., Reference Itzchakov, Weinstein, Leary, Saluk and Amar2023). Suffering, endured ahimsically, can be a doorway to this.

Self-purification. Ahimsic discourse is difficult and does not come naturally to most of us. Deep-seated habit unto this style of communication requires spiritual formation. It would take us too far afield to explore in any detail the sorts of formation one could pursue to cultivate these habits, but I’ll mention one practice I suspect to be of central importance: meditation. There are a variety forms of meditation, some versions of prayer, others not, but the key thing is the regular practice of mindfulness—the cultivation of awareness of one’s current experience in a posture of curiosity, openness, acceptance, and nonjudgment. Such a practice, with consistency and over long periods of time, can rewire the brain, leading to calm in the face of antagonism and ability to forestall the onset of fight psychology.Footnote ⁹ Learning to defuse the emotions contributory to the onset of fight psychology is key to staying ahimsic in the face of himsic discourse.

Adherence to Truth. A few comments finally about adherence to Truth in the epistemic context. I’d said that adherence to Truth, for Gandhi, was a matter of conforming the whole of one’s life to the moral grain of reality, to Truth, God, the One, the source of the moral law. This meant, for him, total commitment to truthful thought and speech, as well as humility, tolerance, and solidarity with the lowly.

To be a votary of Truth in the context of our model, on which, recall, (a) everyone has a piece of the truth—every human with mature and well-functioning faculties, anyway, is so constructed as to be in touch with important truths in their situation, moral, religious, aesthetic, and otherwise, and (b) everyone is in the grip of important errors about deep and important facts of their situation, would imply earnest commitment to the project of ahimsic listening to anyone willing and able to put up with one’s attempts at ahimsic discourse. Given our model, no matter who you are, it is highly likely that you have an important piece of the truth that I lack, and vice versa. If you are willing to share your piece of the truth, I am eager to listen. The votary of Truth on our model, therefore, will be a kind of Socratic gadfly, ready to engage anyone—not just intellectual elites, but anyone—who will put up with it, convinced that most any human engagement is an opportunity for growth in understanding.Footnote ¹⁰ Such, I suggest, is what the Gandhian themes of commitment to truthful thought, humility, and solidarity with the margins would look like in epistemic contexts.

5.1. Each comes away with a larger piece of the truth

If things go well, says our model, a main fruit of the above practice will be that each party to an ahimsic epistemic interaction comes away from the interaction with a fuller piece of the truth than they entered with. A few words about how that might work.

A key point about our approach is that, by my listening and question asking in the posture of a learner rather than someone intent on dialectical dominance, I thereby make less likely the activation of your fight-flight psychological scripts, rendering you more likely to honestly engage my exploratory questions and freely develop your thoughts without fear of being shamed or judged. Under these conditions, you are positioned to share a much larger part of your mind, a much larger part of your position, than had I provoked a defensive response in you. And because I am postured as a learner, convinced that you possess important parts of the truth that I lack, I am positioned to hear you and to take on board what you had seen but I had not.

Relatedly, because I have engaged you in a way less likely to trigger defensive response, you are more likely to be able to hear and honestly engage my exploratory questions—questions that, if well posed, will lead you into consideration of objections, new ways of framing things, connections between parts of your position you had not previously considered. You will thereby be helped into deeper understanding of your position, provided opportunity to make adjustments thereto, and can thereby emerge from our encounter with more of the truth than you had started with.Footnote ¹¹

Finally, there’s the above point that listening and questioning in an ahimsic posture—with generosity, warmth, and genuine desire for the good of my conversation partner—can trigger a reciprocity psychology in my conversation partner, with the result that she might well find it attractive to return the favor I have done her and engage me with ahimsic listening and questioning, helping me into nondefensive understanding and reconsideration of my own position and thereby an enlarged apprehension of the truth. If things go well, her listening and question asking will emanate from a nondefensive psychology, the upshot of which will be her arriving at a deepened understanding of my position and the parts of the truth therein she had previously overlooked, underappreciated, ignored, and so forth, thereby enlarging her apprehension of the truth.

So far forth, the ways we might expect nonviolence to yield a fuller picture of truth for participants in nonviolent epistemic exchange. The two final pieces: I say that, by way of such exchange, if things go well, participants emerge morally ennobled and deepened in friendship.

5.2. Morally ennobled

Why moral ennoblement? How does that work exactly? A few thoughts. First, the act of submitting oneself to another, letting them speak, shining the light of consciousness on their mind, staying quiet before them as they develop their thoughts, trying hard to understand their story, empathically engage their position, curb one’s desire to argue, be right, dominate, seeking thereby to do good to one’s neighbor: all of this confirms in one habits of ahimsa, habits of self-sacrificing other-regard, habits of love. Each ahimsic interaction in which I and my conversation partner have opportunity to do these things for one another confirms in us these habits. Thereby we are ennobled.

Second, there is the point noted by psychologists that “empathy gaps”—gaps in our ability to empathize with moral reactions and emotions that differ from ours—often lead us to attribute to our interlocutors less-than-charitable explanations for our disagreements with them, to see in our interlocutors’ disagreement evidence of subpar intellectual skill or malevolent intent (Ditto & Koleva, Reference Ditto and Koleva2011). Ahimsic discourse, insofar as it enables us to cultivate empathetic engagement with the position of the other, helping us to mirror the feelings and emotions in her position, can undermine and deactivate the tendency to respond to empathy gaps with uncharitableness.Footnote ¹² Thereby it ennobles us.

A worry, though. Imagine long, engaged, patient, ahimsic listening, empathic engagement, expository questions—the whole package—with someone deeply indoctrinated in the mindset of Nazism. One can well imagine an ahimsic listener’s being traumatized by such interaction or sustaining moral injury (the psychological injury, common in war, befalling those who engage in or witness acts or states of affairs deeply repugnant to their moral code). There is darkness in the minds of some such that shining the sustained light of consciousness on that darkness might well be injurious. Ahimsic discourse with such a person perhaps would not ennoble; it might well do the opposite: it could damage or degrade one’s moral self.

What to say? Here, I would reiterate my above point that ahimsic discourse requires spiritual formation, which if sufficiently advanced could, I conjecture, enable one to confront profound moral darkness ahimsically without being traumatized by it. Perhaps the thing to say, though, is that ahimsic discourse can be ennobling if things go well—if you have the requisite spiritual formation or your interlocutor is like the vast majority of people, basically decent—but that this feature of the model is not guaranteed.

5.3. Deepened in friendship

Finally, there is the above point about ahimsic discourse and the deepening of friendship. Why think friendship a byproduct of the sort of discourse we have been discussing?

This is a big question, but roughly, if you think of friendship as something like mutual benevolence—pursuit of the other’s good for its own sake—conjoined with mutual attachment (emotional bonding due to the sharing of significant experiences), closeness, and attraction, then it is not hard to see why ahimsic discourse would tend toward the formation and deepening of friendship.

It is such a great and rare good to be deeply, patiently, earnestly, joyously listened to that one can’t help but feel drawn toward the one who bestows this good. The sense of having been the recipient of a deep good tends to create in us a desire to return good for good. And to the extent that the process of ahimsic listening is allowed to run its course, which can sometimes take a good while, there is the sharing of significant experience: to share with someone the details of one’s inner life—the web of beliefs, desires, feelings, and values that comprise one’s position—is to share in something that many experience as deeply meaningful. And insofar as an ahimsic listener does this with earnest joy and well-wishing and not coldly or clinically, closeness can quickly arise. We have all the makings here of friendship: mutual benevolence, attraction, attachment, and closeness.

I have relevant, first-hand experience of this. For several years, I was on the leadership team of a scholarly center at my university that hosted semester-long, residential fellowships. At the start of each year, we would retreat together in a mountain cabin, twelve or so of us, and spend several hours sharing at length our intellectual and spiritual stories. A person’s story could sometimes go on for hours, with others almost always listening in rapt attention, often in tears. The point of this exercise was to build community, on the hypothesis that round-table discussions of one another’s work over the course of the coming term would go better in a context of personal and intellectual friendship. (They did.) Of interest for present purposes is the extent and speed with which friendships formed in those story-sharing sessions. Year after year, it was our experience that we’d arrive at the retreat with a group of strangers, who in many cases were somewhat reluctant to be there, then leave three days later in the beginnings of real friendships. As the listening we did for one another resembled in many respects the model of ahimsic listening I have described above, I take my experience at these retreats over the years to be confirmatory of my Gandhian hypothesis that nonviolent epistemic interaction, done well, breeds friendship.

Pulling things together, here is what we have got to. The Gandhi-inspired idea we are exploring is that each of us has a piece of the truth that others lack, and that by nonviolent epistemic engagement with other knowers, parties to such engagement can come away with a larger piece of the truth, morally ennobled and deepened in friendship. The mode of nonviolent engagement claimed to produce this felicific outcome is satyagraha—adherence to Truth, noncooperation, self-suffering, ahimsa, and self-purification—applied to the epistemic domain. We have been exploring what it might look to practice epistemic satyagraha in second-personal contexts (contexts involving you and your conversation partner) and looking into reasons for thinking it would have the sorts of just-described benefits.Footnote ¹³