The history of the twentieth century was marked by a number of attempts to implement various utopias in practice - from the extreme left to the ultra-right projects of an ideal society. This is an experiment in the realization of the Marxist ideal in Russia, and an attempt to implement the extremely nationalistic project of the "millennial reich" in Germany, etc.This trend has also not been spared in Asia, as exemplified by the Polpotovian Kampuchea or the current efforts to create a "truly Islamic state" in the Middle East. In India, among a number of such projects of an ideal society, a special place is occupied by the teachings of Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, which are distinguished, firstly, by their exceptional influence on the political processes that took place in the country in the first half of the twentieth century and after the death of the Mahatma and the country's independence, and secondly, by the exceptional role that It was devoted to the principle of nonviolence - after all, in most utopian projects of the recent past, the creation of an ideal society is preceded either by open social upheavals, or by barely noticeable to an inattentive observer, but even more effective violence.

The difference between Gandhi's utopia and the utopian projects that appeared at different times in the West is primarily determined by the difference in the historical and social conditions of their origin, as well as the differences (and to some extent the polarity) of the ideologies that feed them.

In the constructions of Western utopians, we think of a society that has outlived its internal, immanent vices - those negative aspects of social existence that ultimately are a continuation of its positive aspects, those properties that helped it survive and take a dominant position in the modern world. Indeed, the dream of a perfectly organized society, as conceived by Maure, Campanella, Utopian socialists, and even Marx, is a dream of a society that is absolutely organized. What is chaotic and irrational in a person-what makes his behavior unpredictable and potentially threatening to another person - was seen by European utopians as the main evil, first of all to be eradicated. Personal security and personal happiness were understood by them, if not as complete synonyms, then at least as closely related concepts that denote the highest goal of human aspirations, for the sake of which freedom can not only be limited, but also necessary. The worlds depicted by Orwell, Zamyatin, and Huxley are the most striking examples of the results that consistent and zealous implementation of this idea can lead to.

In these projects, freedom and security are antagonistic concepts, because security requires maintaining order, which requires limiting freedom. At the same time, both concepts are considered only in relation to the individual

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an individual who is seen as an inherently violent creature, capable of living only on the principle of homo homini lupus est, if the " Big Brother "does not keep him"on a short leash".

For Gandhi, the problem of personal, individual freedom was not at all as acute as in the West. A much bigger problem for him was political freedom - or rather, the lack of freedom of India, so Gandhi's utopian world is primarily a world of India without Europeans, built according to the norms and customs of the traditional Indian peasant community, which with the arrival of European civilization to the East began to rapidly and steadily collapse. In fact, what the Europeans gave India, Gandhi did not consider civilization at all: "Civilization in the true sense of the word does not consist in multiplying desires, but in their conscious and volitional suppression. This alone contributes to true happiness and contentment, increasing opportunities to serve others" [Wit and Wisdom..., 1960, p. 54.]. Western culture, according to his ideas, requires not limiting desires, but more and more complete and easy satisfaction of them, which forces a person to forget even about himself - about what the true needs of a person are. And the true need, according to Gandhi, is essentially only one-it is God. Only its full comprehension can satisfy all imaginable human desires, because God and truth are one for Gandhi: these concepts are equal in scope, and therefore the expression "God is truth" can easily be translated into the expression " truth is God "(Datta, 1972, p. 37). "Western civilization, according to Gandhi, rejected spiritual values, entangled people in a network of false relationships, deprived them of their primitive simplicity and ingenuousness, made them slaves of money and the excesses they gave, forced them to forget about God in the pursuit of temporary benefits. This is enough to declare an entire stage of human history a "black age" and a " Satanic civilization." Gandhi attacks all its attributes: railways, cars, doctors, lawyers, parliaments, governments, and art that celebrates the outwardly beautiful" (Martyshin 1970, pp. 100-101).

In other words, according to Gandhi, God is contained in a certain way of life, in patterns of behavior, and it is natural that Europeans who follow other behavioral strategies appear to him as people who have completely forgotten God. Such criticism of the West, sometimes harsh to the point of injustice, had a very specific goal in Gandhian political discourse - to mobilize Indians for political struggle, and for this to arouse in them a whole range of negative emotions towards the West.

It is impossible not to notice that Gandhi, unlike the utopians of the West, had a clear and well-understood mass audience ideal of a perfect society, which seemed not only worthy of realization, but also practically feasible, because as such it was a peasant community, well known to his listeners and readers from everyday life. In it, according to Gandhi's plan, everyone who is physically capable of working should work, and all its members should be equal, for which it is necessary to introduce the principle of equal pay for all types of work. It is interesting that intellectual labor, in his understanding, is not actually considered labor and is not subject to payment, because it should not be an obligation, but a need [Martyshin 1970, p. 136].

The peasant community as a social ideal has specific features in Gandhi that allow us to understand it as a system that ensures the ideal interaction of individuals, each of whom perceives himself first of all as a part of the whole and only then as an individual. The field of intersubjectivity is not defined here by the subject himself, as neo-Vedantists believe is the case in the individualistic civilization of the West; on the contrary, the subject in the process of socialization is included in pre-defined communicative structures that assign him a strictly defined and unchangeable role fixed in the concept of caste. A person must perform the following tasks:-

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It is not up to the individual to decide what he or she should do, what social role he or she should assume, or how to perform the duties associated with it. In other words, the Gandhian ideal society is a kind of matrix with a structure in which each element, firstly, has once and for all set functions, and secondly, it does not have any "human" content and is purely symbolic.

A person is born in a family belonging to a certain caste, and thus automatically receives a set of rights and obligations, that is, a set of prescriptions concerning his behavior, and if he does not fulfill them, he violates the expectations of other people in relation to himself, as a result of which intersubjective interaction becomes disharmonious. The very fact that a given individual belongs to a particular varna* and caste gives him not only reasons to adopt certain behavioral strategies regardless of what his own desires are, but also reasons to want to implement a certain behavioral strategy. The refusal to accept a birth-given social role as such a basis is understood by Gandhi as violence, and that is why he accuses Western civilization of being all built on violence: a Western person can, regardless of what family he was born into, claim any role in society; it is, figuratively speaking, impossible for him to point out the role of the West. "his place", for there is no "place" that is" his " from birth. In an initially structured society, there can be no serious social conflicts, because they arise only from the unregulated position of a person in society: when two people claim the same role, a clash of interests is inevitable. In an ideal Gandhian society, this is impossible.

If you compare the Gandhian utopia, for example, with J. Orwell's 1984, you can see a number of similarities between them. Unfortunately, Orwell does not specify in his novel whether a person is considered a "prole" or a higher caste by birthright, but this, in fact, is not so important. Much more important is the fact that in Orwellian Oceania, each person, regardless of his own desires, is assigned a clearly defined set of behavioral dispositions, a system of rights and obligations (for example, a party member does not have the right to communicate with proletarians without special need). Here, a person is placed in a society, each element of which requires certain reactions and actions from a person, if they are not fulfilled, they are subject to punitive sanctions. What is important here is that a person's conscious failure to meet the expectations of his environment is perceived as a deliberate violation of the well-coordinated work of the social mechanism.

Of course, in Oceania, at first glance, there is much more violence than in the Gandhian" Satyagrahi State "("State of Nonviolence"), much closer and stricter surveillance of each member of society, but it is interesting that in both cases the main overseer of a person is himself. In Oceania, there is not as much cruelty as it seems (no less than it, for example, in the novels of Jean Genet, whose characters live in a completely normal world for us). Moreover, O'Brien's seemingly ruthless actions towards the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, cannot be called cruelty in the proper sense of the word, it is not sadism or even violence. This is therapy. O'Brien doesn't punish Smith for his "thoughtcrime," but tries to heal him.

We find the same algorithm of social behavior in Gandhi: "In the fight against crime, Satyagrahi State will use coercion to a minimum extent. Goal

* Varna (skt. varna, literally, "color") - a social group in traditional Indian society, belonging to which was determined only by birth, as opposed to caste (Skt. jati), belonging to which was determined, in addition to birth, also by profession, place of residence, ethnic affiliation, etc. Traditional Indian society was divided into four varnas-brahmins (priests; skt. brahmana), kshatriyas (rulers, warriors, administrators; skt. ksatriya), vaishyas (free members of the community; skt. vaisya) and sudras (incomplete members of the community; skt. sudra).

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It will not be retribution and intimidation, which, as the widespread phenomenon of recidivism shows, only reduce the ability of the criminal to socialize and bring no less harm to society than to the offender himself. A State of nonviolence will aim to transform the criminal. Nonviolent therapy will put an end to the anxiety and humiliation, constant torment and fear that the criminal is doomed to these days. Obviously, then there will be no place for the death penalty, which clearly contradicts the ahimsa principle 1 "(Dhawan, 1957, p. 305). This is probably the only difference between the Nonviolent State and Oceania: in the latter, thoughtcriminals are shot (although they themselves, after realizing their sin and returning to the right path, beg for it [Orwell, 2004, p. 257]). In other words, what we readers of Orwell perceive as violence is not violence from the point of view of an Oceanian, or at least, to use Gandhi's terms, such violence not only does not contradict the principle of nonviolence, but it is also quite consistent with it, because violence in exceptional cases is an expression of ahimsa" [Martyshin 1970, p. 171].

Further, violence, coercion and restriction can be directed at a person of their own free will (at least theoretically). In R. Sheckley's utopian society of Joenice's Walk, those who would like to join a community but do not feel confident in their ability to live in a very primitively organized society undergo a simple neurosurgical operation that erases their memory of the world outside the community, and these people go to it voluntarily [Sheckley, 1991, p. 394 - 395]. They deliberately consent to the most severe and severe restrictions on their freedom and are deprived of the opportunity to live anywhere other than in a utopian community. Can we say that they are being abused?

However, some features of Gandhi's utopia distinguish it from the dystopias of the last century and, rather, make it similar to the works of Western utopian socialists of the XVII-XIX centuries. First of all, there is a difference in the ideas about human nature: with the general postulate for these utopian constructions about the existence of an eternal and unchangeable human nature, which is understood as a complex of characteristics and behavioral dispositions peculiar to any person due to the very fact of his belonging to the species Homo sapiens, Gandhi (like the utopian socialists) believes that man it is good by nature, and all the evil that can come from it is the result of the distortion of its nature by society. Therefore, Gandhi's social ideal is a "minimal" society, which controls the person to the least extent and does not exert pressure on him as much as possible, giving him the prospect not of material well-being, but of spiritual improvement and final merging with the deity. Mahatma starts here from the idea that human nature itself is moral and can ensure the construction of a harmonious and just society, if only it is allowed to manifest itself in its entirety.

At the same time, human nature still remains ambivalent, because, in addition to the spirit, a person has a body, which by its very nature should be the servant of the spirit, but can sometimes turn out to be its master, as happened, for example, with Western civilization, for representatives of which the measure of civilization of society is the physical comfort provided to them by their members. The main reproach that Gandhi addresses to the West is that in the pursuit of bodily comfort, people have forgotten God and therefore lost the ability and desire to understand each other. Mutual understanding and mutual recognition in society can only be based on the fact that all people have a common, divine nature - the only basis on which communication is possible. In culture, this foundation manifests itself in the form of religion, and in

1 Nonviolence, non-harm (Skt. himsa) to living beings.

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if religion is forgotten, all opportunities for effective communication disappear, because at the same time a person perceives people around him not as similar to him and having the same divine soul as him, but only as objects whose animateness can be doubted. At the same time, the own value of other people, which is a priori inherent in them and does not depend on what benefits they can bring, undoubtedly tends to zero in his eyes.

These, according to Gandhi, are the main features of modern Western civilization. "This civilization does not take into account either morality or religion. Its adherents calmly declare that religion is a product of superstition. Others dress up in religious garb and chatter about morality. However, as a result of twenty years of experience, I have come to the conclusion that immorality is often taught under the name of morality. [...] This civilization is a denial of religion, and it has so captured the peoples of Europe that they seem half - mad. They lost their real physical strength and courage. They maintain their energy through intoxication. They can hardly be happy alone. [ ... ] This civilization is such that it will collapse by itself, you just need to have patience" [Gandhi, 1969(2), p. 443.].

Civilization, in Gandhi's view, is thus full of suffering that people inflict on others and on themselves, and makes people forget about their divinity. This disease in modern conditions affects not only the Western, but any civilization, including the Indian one; in the West, it only took the most pronounced form, which is why the West became the center from which lack of spirituality began to spread everywhere. However, the advantage of India is that it still retains the most essential features of the ancient way of life, which has long disappeared in other cultural regions, so it is the Indians, or rather the carriers of traditional Indian culture, who can act as the elite that can show humanity a way out of the impasse.

What is important in Gandhi's words is that he speaks of civilization as a special form of behavior: "Civilization is a behavior that shows a person the path of duty. The fulfillment of duty and the observance of morals are interchangeable concepts. To follow the rules of morality means to dominate your thoughts and passions. By doing so, we know ourselves" (Gandhi, 1969(2), p. 446). In other words, Gandhi is talking about behavior that corresponds to a certain ideal, which is necessary for any person who wants to be accepted into a certain community to adhere to and measure their actions against.

Criticism of Europeans and Western civilization in general is based on a maxim that is not explicitly stated anywhere, but is always implied: "Europeans are bad because they are not Indians, and the only good thing about Western civilization is what makes it similar to Indian civilization." Gandhi's attitude towards the West is influenced by the well-known "Durkheim principle" in sociology, according to which the most severe persecution by society is not those forms of behavior of individual members that pose the greatest objective danger to others or to society as a whole, but those that deviate most from the accepted standards of behavior in society. however, it should be noted that Gandhi transfers this principle from its usual scope - the field of everyday life and related behavioral practices - to the sphere of behavioral dispositions determined by the culture as a whole, and applies it to this culture itself, assuming that it is in it that the principle is located that authorizes some forms of behavior and determines them motivations and suppressing others. From this point of view, it is possible to compare different motivational systems, evaluating the actual observed behaviors generated by them and keeping in mind the ideal form of behavior on which an ideally organized society should be based.

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As such, Gandhi describes the society organized by the ancient Indians: "They decided that we should only do what we can do with our hands and feet. They understood that our true happiness and health lies in the proper use of our hands and feet. They reasoned further that the great cities were a trap and a useless burden, and that people would not be happy in them, for there would be bands of thieves and robbers, prostitution and vice would flourish, and the rich would rob the poor. Therefore, our ancestors were satisfied with small villages. They knew that the power of weapons is sometimes inferior to the power of morality, and therefore they put earthly monarchs below sages and ascetics "(Gandhi, 1969(2), p. 447). Gandhi undoubtedly distorted history in a very significant way-it is enough to recall the ancient cities of both pre-Aryan and Aryan civilizations with their advanced technology and very large populations. But this is not even the point, but the fact that in this way he tried to build a model of an ideal society, the value of which would be based not only on the authority of its builder, but also on historical data and, above all, on the authority of antiquity, and also to prove that this model can be easily implemented in practice, for then specify where, when, and how it was implemented earlier. Consciously or unconsciously, guided by the idea of history as a policy tipped into the past, Gandhi painted a picture in which only this past was clearly painted in bright colors, while the present was almost exclusively dark, and the future was very uncertain and depended on how the masses would behave in the struggle against the Europeans.

In short, if we return to the question formulated above, we can say that the elite, the aristocracy of the spirit, which is destined to build an ideal society, are the Indians themselves, but not all of them, but only those who correspond to the image of the "perfect Indian" created by Gandhi, that is, they obey the requirements imposed on them by caste status, do not cause suffering living beings and is a religious person. All this requires nonviolence as the main way to change the world around us. Gandhi was counting on the natural human tendency to imitate: if Indians behave virtuously and do not resort to violence in response to violence on the part of the British, then they may well be "ashamed" of their behavior, that is, make sure that the principle of "an eye for an eye" does not always work, because ethical principles,such as self-determination, and self-determination, are not always effective. formulated in the form of statements according to the "you must..." scheme, they can be refuted not only by other statements, but also by the practice itself - behavior that can be observed by any member of society.

Gandhi assumed that Europeans are so self-centered, utilitarian, and so dismissive of all other peoples and cultures only because they are motivated to do so by their own culture, that is, by a set of imperatives regarding behavioral patterns in certain intersubjective situations, and that all other sources of motivation do not play a significant role in comparison with culture. Therefore, to change interpersonal relations and the social structure as a whole, it is enough to change only the normative (prescriptive) discourse. You can change it in two ways, and one of them is your own behavior. In the process of socialization and adaptation to culture, a Westerner learns certain norms, behavioral patterns, and propositions that make them mandatory for all of humanity. Those who do not follow them, he sees as deviating to a greater or lesser extent from the image of man; they must either be forced to be "people", or exterminate, or, if all this is impossible, at least keep them away from himself. However, Gandhi still does not consider Europeans so primitive, otherwise any highly moral behavior and nonviolence would not be effective in communicating with them. The European, according to Gandhi, is sufficiently developed that, having seen that other people, being undoubtedly human, nevertheless follow other principles.

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cultural norms, to doubt the truth of absolutely all propositions included in his own ethical discourse, and, possibly, to begin to revise this discourse. In other words, Gandhi tried to force Europeans to "philosophize a little with a hammer", testing the usual ideals for strength.

Numerous articles and letters from Gandhi were sent to the same end. One of his goals was to provide Westerners with alternative cultures, alternative ethics, and religious ideals to encourage them to reconsider their own.

All this, however, did not imply that genuine norms and ideals had yet to be found, and we do not yet know which of them will be absolutely true, that is, such that a person will follow them regardless of what culture he belongs to, solely by virtue of his nature. These ideals are already known, and the task of a person trying to realize the Gandhian ideal society is not to construct ideal behavioral strategies and related motivational forms of discourse as something completely new, but to clear them of the layers introduced by various circumstances of the everyday, profane, material world. In his ethical discourse, Gandhi reproduced the Vedantic concept of a God who permeates the entire universe and is present at any point in it. "The Ghanaian theory of ethical absolutism goes back to the Vedic concept of rta-the doctrine of all-pervading cosmic and moral laws, to which both men and gods are subject" (Varma, 1959, p. 81 - 82]. Western culture, from Gandhi's point of view, is characterized by a break with the sacred order, which is identical to the order of the universe established by God the creator, and the Indians, who have not yet moved away from this order as far as the Europeans, should show them by their nonviolence what the true structure of human society is and the true way of inter-human interaction, it is enough just to show a person what the truth is, so that he immediately rushes to it.

Obviously, the assumption that a person can't help but strive for the truth, and delusions arise from the fact that he has lost the path to it or, even if he sees it, cannot recognize it, is based both on the conditio sine qua and on the assumption that such a truth exists. Gandhi's assumption was based on his commitment to the Advaita philosophy as the ideological basis of his political activity. In his understanding, the salvation of the individual human person, which consists in removing all obstacles (and illusory obstacles) between her and God and realizing her true divine nature, and political independence, the goal of which is to return society to its once lost ideal structure and remove all obstacles that prevent this (these include and the enslavement of one people by another, and both the enslavers and the enslaved are equally far removed from the divine truth), - isomorphic.

Religious salvation requires the elimination of all boundaries between individuals, so that one person does not feel the other as just Another, as an autonomous and different person, independent in all respects, but sees in him a part of himself, so in such a society the individual is not psychologically able to be an egoist simply because he does not have an " ego"there is no core that separates it from others and prevents the implementation of altruistic behavior. The " ego "that each person possesses is the divine" ego " that is common to all things (in any case, to all animate beings), so the realization of the highest religious ideal means for him the loss of his own separateness from others. In general, when speaking about Hindu ethics, the terms "altruism" and" egoism "can only be used with a reservation, because egoism implies the desire to satisfy one's own interests at the expense of the interests of others, and for Hindu metaphysics, "others" exist

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only as objects of relative knowledge; at the level of true knowledge, there are no "others", there is only God, who cannot be - because of his complete ontological" loneliness " - either an egoist or an altruist.

Unlike Gandhi, European and American utopians do not see man as a "dream of the deity." Their world, in contrast to the ontologically illusory world of Advaita, is quite real and created by no less real God, and it does not depend on God in most utopian teachings of Modern times: there is no creatio continua like that of Augustine, God created the world, put laws in it, and no longer interferes with its existence further, the universe exists completely independently. It is the same with man: he was created by God, but has in his being no support coming from him, except that which is given to him by the laws of nature given by God. However, according to these laws, a person is inherently virtuous, that is, he is disposed to take into account the interests of other people, without losing sight of the boundaries between them and himself and without losing his own identity. Nor are the boundaries between man and God lost, which in this case appears as a distant goal, to achieve which a person must travel a long way and change not only himself, but also society.

The idea of "changing society by changing oneself" is equally inherent in both the Gandhian utopia and Western theories of the ideal social structure, but the ways in which Gandhi and Western utopians implement it are completely different. Gandhi completely rejects any violent means of reorganizing society, because violence is always violence primarily against oneself, and the distinction between people that allows violence to be committed is illusory, and although Gandhi called himself a "socialist" and was very sympathetic to Marxism [Goyal, 1964, p. 78], Nevertheless, he was not a socialist, much less a Marxist, in the meanings of these words that the Western adherents of these ideologies attached to them. He was very impressed with the thesis "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", but the economic structures of society that "fueled" Marxism in Europe were absent in India, and in the theory of socialism Gandhi "never went beyond the idea of social equality. He was simply talking about a certain minimum standard of living for workers and peasants. [... In reality, material prosperity and spiritual growth do not fit well together, and therefore Gandhi was a proponent of poverty rather than a spiritual vacuum" [Goyal, 1964, p. 78], which is quite natural in the light of the above, since material prosperity can never force a person to think about God, much less to measure their actions even less is it able to motivate a person to take actions aimed at achieving salvation.

Man, therefore, in the teachings of Gandhi (however, as in other religious thinkers of modern India) must constantly make efforts to eliminate the boundary between himself and the deity, the fundamental possibility of which is provided by the unity of the nature of God and the world created by him. However, the idea of an ontological connection between man and the upper world was expressed not only by Hindus: Even Leo Tolstoy, repeating the words of the Bible, spoke about the kingdom of God within man. "A few months before his death, Tolstoy, in a moment of prophetic insight, wrote in a letter addressed to Gandhi that Gandhi's nonviolent work in South Africa is a work in which both the Christian and non-Christian worlds will inevitably participate" [Pyarelal, 1958, p. 19-20], and this will become possible only because the" kingdom of God " is in the souls of not only Christians, but also in any human soul in general, and it is on these considerations that the very idea of preaching Christian teaching is based, since the preaching and conversion of pagans is possible due to the fact that in every soul there is something that can perceive the gospel message and, what's more, waiting

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it is this message that thus meets the deep and not always realized needs of a person.

Gandhi's teaching, like neo-Protestantism in general, only partially accepted this idea: human nature is divine, everything that hinders the realization of this and the insight of our own essence, which unites our personality with the entire Universe, should be eliminated, but Gandhi's preaching of these ideas is addressed only to Indians. As it was shown above, he considers Western civilization to be flawed, but does not show its representatives any way out of the crisis that has engulfed them - unlike, for example, Vivekananda, who addressed his teachings to everyone, regardless of race, citizenship, religious affiliation, etc.

So, Gandhi's utopian project developed in an ideological context, which included the following components: traditional Hindu ideas about society and human responsibilities in relation to it, which influenced Gandhi directly and were recognized by him as an immutable value that did not require reflection; Christianity and Islam, whose direct influence was insignificant; utopian socialism, from which Gandhi took his inspiration. quite a lot, but reinterpreting his ideas in a Hindu way; and finally, Marxism, from which Gandhi, despite the great respect for him, borrowed only certain ideas.

The Hindu social system is an example of a society that exists in accordance with the maxim "each person has his own place, each place has its own person": in a Hindu traditional society, each caste and varna occupy a strictly defined position, and their representatives perform a clearly defined, their own and only their own role (or a set of interrelated roles). Therefore, in this society (ideally, of course), everyone behaves in a certain, predetermined way and has the right to expect the same from others. The exchange of information in it always takes place taking into account what functions the addressee and addressee actually perform in it and what they should perform according to the rules fixed in officially adopted laws or in an unwritten tradition. In other words, the paradigm of practice in this society is set once and for all (ideally) and it has a sacred origin, which ensures that all members of society fulfill their roles.

It should be noted that in Hindu society (as in general in the so-called traditional societies), the implementation of this system of rules is guaranteed not by any official structures, but by the members of society themselves, which, thus, turns out not to be a collection of faceless individuals, but an organic whole with a clear internal structure. Everyone in it cares about everyone; everyone, in turn, knows that everyone around them cares about him, so if he does something inappropriate, he will be subject to universal condemnation, but if he finds himself in a difficult situation, then the members of society will support him. The principles of "one for all, all for one" and "one for all, all for one" apply here (we are talking about constant monitoring and making a verdict on the axiological status of actions performed). Something similar can be observed in a wide variety of groups - in the family, school class, bandit group, this is the essence of "chivalrous ethics" or "code of honor of a gentleman", etc. Here a person does not care how his behavior is evaluated by "not ours", the main thing is that "ours" is not condemned and not subjected ostracism.

It is interesting to compare this organization of society with the one depicted in the dystopias "1984", " We " or "Brave new world". It may seem that here and there society is organized in the same way, because in both cases a person is forced to follow a certain paradigm of behavior and not deviate from it under pain of punishment, which is typical of totalitarianism from the point of view of a European or American. However, this similarity is only apparent.

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In Orwell's Oceania, a person is watched not so much by other people themselves, but-through their eyes-by an anonymous force embodied in the state and personified by the Big Brother, whose existence (as a living being) is problematic, but as a personification of the Party - apodictic, and the person himself is not afraid of being ostracized by specific people he knows well and can therefore predict their behavior, and incomprehensible, sudden and, as a rule, secret, invisible to other people retribution, coming as if "out of nowhere".

In a traditional society, in a community, a person knows not only what he is being punished for, but also who is carrying out the punishment, who has passed the sentence, he can turn to the judges and beg for himself, if not forgiveness, then at least mitigation of his fate, and the judges can listen to his pleas simply because he is not a judge. they are not strangers ("Well, how not to please your own little man!", this may mean not only related, but also other connections - "grew up in the same yard", "served the same prince", etc.). In other words, there is communication here, in which all participants in the process are able to influence at each other. If a person is confronted by the impersonal machine of the state, no communication is possible: it is useless to plead for something in the Criminal Code, and therefore, a plea addressed to judges is useless, because in this situation they are no longer people, but tools of the law, deprived of their own will. In such a situation, a person can only adapt himself to the current state of affairs, because he can neither change the laws nor persuade Big Brother. Even if the laws are changed, this happens regardless of the will of the people who obey them, who are not able to conduct a dialogue with those who determine their existence, but only have to listen to the will of Big Brother and implement it. Zeal in this case is caused by the fear of being in the clutches of the Ministry of Love (Orwell), and universal surveillance - the desire to curry favor with the higher ones and, again, to avoid punishment.

By the way, here it is appropriate to say more about punishments. In" traditional " societies (more precisely, societies that have not yet become widespread and permeated by the state), punishments are usually carried out publicly, and not only can the punished person appeal to his comrades, but they themselves - witnesses to the picture of retribution - see that the sin has been punished. It is important that even if the judge was, for example, the king, and the executor-the executioner appointed by the king, they are still only tools for interaction between society and the individual. In those societies where the growth of the masses has led to the depersonalization of communication, the person is no longer opposed by society, but by the state. The society itself becomes only a conduit for transmitting information about its members to the state, and then the crime committed by any of them concerns the state, and not society. When the state receives information about a crime, it and only it decides what to do with the criminal, but this does not concern society (So what happens in Orwell's book with Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love is done secretly, in rooms without windows.)

Thus, neither the Gandhian utopian project, nor, for example, Plato's ideal society can be considered in a true sense totalitarian, because, although control over the individual is really total, it is carried out publicly (simply because the person in them is always visible, the sphere of his privacy is limited, although, of course, he is not and not by the state, that is, by laws through the bureaucratic apparatus and related tools of coercion designed to monitor their compliance, but by the society itself, which in this case turns out to be built according to the "family model".

Hence the special role of the principle of nonviolence in Gandhi's utopia, since violence is possible and excusable only in relation to "strangers", to those who are not members of the family, but in relation to "their" it is almost always evil (with the exception of those who do not belong to the family).-

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extreme cases are put when the behavior of one of the" friends " deviates so much from the standards accepted in the "family", and their persistence in implementing such behavior is so great that there are no other ways to return them "to the right path", except for physical or moral coercion, or when as a result of behavioral deviations "own" ceases to be perceived as such and begins to be considered "alien" - with all the consequences that follow from this).

Society as a whole, according to Gandhi, differs from the family only in size, but the fundamental organization of these institutions and the laws under which they exist are the same. The members of such a society are essentially equal and do not compete with each other, but, on the contrary, try to cooperate, strive for mutual assistance and mutual support. Therefore, Gandhi's appeals to the rich were an attempt to appeal to the inner and authentic nature of man and make it manifest in social practice. Gandhi was not trying to create a new, special person and a new, hitherto nonexistent society - he was trying to return India to what it once was, and man to his true nature, identical with the nature of the deity. Figuratively speaking, Gandhi acted as an archaeologist and restorer in relation to contemporary society, trying not only to restore the most complete and accurate picture of the past, but also to make this past functional in modern conditions.

This is what mainly distinguishes Gandhi's constructions from Marxism. Using the terms and concepts of K. Mannheim, we can say that Marxism and Gandhism are two completely different types of utopia. Marxism is a utopia of the socialist-communist type, which does not imply a return to the past historical stages. The economic formations and associated ways of organizing society that have remained in the past must remain there, because there is practically nothing worth restoring. The course of history in Marxism is directed towards an ideal classless society, which must inevitably arise by virtue of the laws of social development. Thus, in the Marxist utopia, the concept of time plays a significant role: the existence of a person as an element of a social system is historical, it depends on the current situation in society, which, in turn, is determined by the socio-economic formation, which, of course, does not determine individual human existence in any strict and unambiguous way, but sets the boundaries of possible behavioral strategies, intersubjective interactions, ways of self-identification, in general, all forms of human social life in which only an individual can exist. It is the activity of individual individuals within this framework that pushes them apart and leads to a change of formations, but the very result of the collapse of the formation is predetermined in advance: only a feudal society can follow a slave-owning society. In the same way, the disintegration of class society is also predetermined, and it will be replaced by a classless one, which will be the highest, the final state of society, which completes the process of changing formations.

However, it should be noted that the utopian socialism of pre-Marxist times was also not, as a rule, characterized by the idea of a" Golden Age " that existed once, during it. The classics of utopian socialism placed the ideal society either on remote islands (Mor, Campanella) or in the future ("The golden Age, which blind tradition has hitherto attributed to the past, is ahead of us," Saint - Simon said [cit. in: Utopian Socialism..., 1982, p. 213]).

It is interesting to compare the Marxist picture of the future with Christian eschatology. Both here and there, a person appears imperfect: he "remains in sin" or "suffers from exploitation", which must be overcome and, moreover, sooner or later all this will necessarily be overcome. The only difference is that in Christianity, the driving force of history is a non - historical and generally non-worldly beginning-God, who, being free to choose the lines of development for his own creation, is the most important person in the world.-

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He preordained the coming Last Judgment, the salvation of the righteous, and the punishment of all others - those who rejected the atoning sacrifice of Christ. And if a person can take care of his own personal salvation, then the very act of future salvation does not depend on humanity as a whole. Moreover, it does not depend on people when exactly the Last Judgment will take place. In Marxism, however, we can trace a clear correlation between the activities of people and the advent of a classless society. According to Marx, the driving force of history is humanity itself - more precisely, the relationship of its constituent individuals to ownership of the means of production. Of course, the speed of progress does not depend on a single individual, but a large group of people united by common interests is already a real force that can change the course of history.

We do not find this in Gandhi. Of course, in order to realize the project of an ideal society, a person must act and change the world; it is not without reason that for Gandhi and for most other Indian thinkers of our time, the Gita was the ideological support. "The Bhagavad-gita has always been addressed to the man of action, just as the Upanishads have always been closer to the heart of the contemplative intellectual," notes one of the modern researchers [Sen, 1981, p.111]. In this respect, Gandhism can indeed be called akin to Marxism. However, this is where their similarities end. The Gandhian utopia can be realized if we move backward rather than forward from the current state. It is much closer to the type of utopia that Mannheim called conservative.

Conservatism itself, according to Mannheim, does not problematize social reality. Conservative thinking "tends [ ... ] to accept the environment in its random concreteness as a part of the general world order that does not contain any problems" [Mannheim, 1991, p.143]. The world order itself is beautiful, so any more or less radical change in the status quo becomes an opponent of conservatism, and only in this case reality becomes problematic for the conservative, and as one of the means of maintaining the existing order of things, a utopia is formed, which in this case identifies the ideal order with the existing order and is completely immersed in real social which here appears as the highest embodiment of the full meaning of human existence [Mannheim, 1991, p. 145-146]. "Something, precisely because it exists, already has the highest value" (Mannheim, 1991, p. 147).

However, the Gandhian utopia is still different from the conservative social project. Conservatism requires the preservation of the status quo, whatever it may be, but Gandhi sought to restore a well-defined and well-defined past. His social project was not so much conservative (in Mannheim's terminology) as fundamentalist. In fact, the very logic of neo-Vedantist discourse, which was characterized precisely by a fundamentalist attitude, pushed us to such a solution of social issues: the desire to read ancient texts, bypassing the commentary tradition, and evaluate them in relation to today's realities, to recreate those forms of communication, intersubjective and intergroup, that were characteristic of ancient society - that is, the features characteristic, for example, of, for the teachings of Martin Luther with his search for ways to revive the atmosphere of the original Christianity and characteristic of some ideological trends in modern Islam.

Of course, it is impossible for human beings to recreate everything exactly as it was, and even if it were possible, the result of these efforts would seem as unsightly to those who dreamed of it as the surrounding reality. However, Gandhi, strictly speaking, did not seek to do this. It was important for him to portray the ideal society and strengthen this image by linking it to the distant past, which is mostly everyday.-

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It is almost always associated with high morals, creative forces, power, material abundance, and many other benefits.

The role of the concept of God in the formation of this ideal image is crucial, because the task of a person is to create a society that is not just prosperous and comfortable for life, but above all divine and true. Gandhi equated the concepts of God and truth. All human practices, from everyday life to abstract scientific, philosophical and religious ones, are aimed at achieving the state of truth - not knowledge, but rather the state, because knowledge presupposes the existence of a boundary between subject and object, their separation and, consequently, the incompleteness of each of them, which in itself already makes realization possible the impossible truth. The truth becomes comprehensible only through one's own personality. This can be seen from the fact that Gandhi gave truth its main practical role - the role of a tool that helps a person to carry out unhindered and most effective communication with others. "Gandhi's very approach to the problem of truth shows that he used this concept mainly as a moral principle that does not have strictly defined boundaries of application, as a religious and ethical category that contains only a certain element of knowledge" [Komarov and Litman, 1969, pp. 148-149].

Moreover, the personal nature of the truth revealed in the soul of a person, regardless of the conditions of the surrounding socio-cultural environment, leads to one important and very "neo-protestant" in spirit consequence, namely, to the emergence of the idea that it is not necessary for a person to fully comply with the requirements of even his native culture and revise its fundamental principles, if these are the dictates of the truth revealed to him. If the inner divine voice tells a person to ignore the Hindu law on the treatment of untouchables or to abandon the practice of sacrifice, he must do as God commands, and this will be the realization of the true dharma, which consists in fulfilling the divine will, and not in following the traditions that have been rooted in society since ancient times. Gandhi puts it this way :" I have never been able to come to terms with untouchability. I always saw it as a painful growth. It is true that untouchability was inherited from our ancestors, but so are many other shortcomings that still exist today. [ ... ] There was a time when no one doubted the need to sacrifice animals in the name of religion. But such a religion is not a religion at all, and even less a religion of Hinduism" (Gandhi, 1969(1), pp. 479-480).

The true religion - and the true foundation of all society, according to Gandhi-is not a religion of traditions and patterns of behavior, but a religion of revelation, and a mystical and individual revelation addressed exclusively to this person. A society based on this revelation is made possible solely by the fact that human nature is one and that the revelation given to one is thus given to all.

Communication between people and groups of people, which, in fact, is the ontological foundation of society, becomes possible in the Gandhian project due to the commonality of human and divine nature and is primarily aimed at awakening the divine principle in a person and enabling him to become the basis for all individual actions. The Gandhian utopia is neither a monastery nor a commune of equals. This is a community whose goal of existence is the realization of the deity in our sublunary world, and everyday pragmatics is based on such philosophical principles that human life and work on earth are the road leading to the deity. It is for this reason that the basic law of such a society is nonviolence. Indeed, violence is possible only where social elements are fragmented and connected to each other in ways that are external to them, not immanent-

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my connections to them. In the Gandhian community, which is modeled on the family, the connection is organic, although this cardinal property has yet to be revealed in psychotechnical practice, which is also a labor discipline. This community cannot be large-precisely so that the communicative ties of its constituent individuals are not disrupted, and their equality turns out to be a secondary property, originating from the family-religious principle of building a community and serving as an ideological basis for nonviolence.

As can be seen from the above, Mahatma Gandhi's utopian project occupies a special place in the general context of world utopian thought. It differs significantly from Western utopias - more precisely, from dystopias, which depict not the society that one could aspire to, but the one that one would like to avoid-primarily by its positive character, since it depicts a truly ideal society, and also by the fact that it depicts social life as an ideal. an organization peculiar, according to Gandhi, to ancient societies. This is a fundamentalist utopia, the central ideological point of which is the desire to return to the social structure characteristic of the society of ancient India. This is also what distinguishes it from the European utopias of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, which have a kind of "timeless" character and, as a rule, do not fit into the historical context; they represent the ideal that European society could achieve in principle if its members could jointly and unanimously undertake its reconstruction. the Gandhian ideal society, on the other hand, is a type of social organization that existed quite realistically in a certain historical epoch in a certain region of the world, and this is what makes its practical implementation, at least in principle, possible in the eyes of the Indian to whom Gandhi's words were addressed.

According to Gandhi, such a society is ideal not only because it is of a non-Western type (although this point, as was shown above, is also extremely important for Gandhi), but first of all because the type of its social organization most closely corresponds to the world divine law, which is derived from non-Western values. only physical and social laws, but primarily moral and religious laws.

Thus, the social organization described by Gandhi creates optimal conditions for a moral (that is, free from violence) life, and therefore for the realization of the highest religious goal of Hinduism - salvation and finding unity with Brahman. Hence, another fundamental difference between Gandhian utopia and Western utopian thought is that in the latter, an ideal society is valuable in itself, regardless of its possible filling with religious meanings (and the same can be said about dystopias, in which the depicted structure of society - at least according to the authors ' ideas-is also disgusting in itself, regardless of what it was designed for by its creators), whereas Gandhi's ideal social organization is just a tool for achieving religious goals.

All these features make Gandhi's teaching about the ideal society a very peculiar phenomenon of spiritual life not only in modern India, but also in the entire modern world. This teaching organically combines the features and ideals of Western socio-philosophical thought with specific Indian social ideals, so that it is largely indicative of the processes of intercultural communication that were so characteristic of the XX century.

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list of literature

Gandhi M. K. Hinduism / / Gandhi M. K. My life. Moscow, 1969 (1).

Gandhi M. K. Hind swaraj / / Gandhi M. K. My life. Moscow, 1969(2).

Komarov E. N., Litman A.D. The worldview of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1969.

K. Mannheim Ideology and utopia // Utopia and Utopian Thinking, Moscow, 1991.

Martyshin O. V. Political views of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1970.

Orwell J. 1984. St. Petersburg: Azbuka Publ., 2004.

Utopian socialism. Khrestomatiya, Moscow: Publishing House of Political Literature, 1982.

Sheckley R. Joenis ' Walking // Utopia and Utopian Thinking, Moscow, 1991.

Datta D. The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

Dhawan G. The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan publishing house, 1957.

Goyal O.P. Studies in Modern Indian Political Thought. Delhi: Kitab Mahal, 1964.

Pyarelal. Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhiji. Calcutta: Benson's, 1958.

Sen K.M. Hinduism. N. Y.: Penguin Books, 1981.

Varma V.P. The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and Sarvodaya. Agra: Lakshmi Narain Agrawal, 1959.

Wit and Wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi / Ed. by S.N. Sen. New Delhi: New society of India, 1960.

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