Presentation of the internet edition
of
(by Bithika Mukerji)
Pr Bithika Mukerji taught philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University. She
wrote the present book as a research work at McMaster University in Canada in
1973-77. She insists in it on the need not to reduce Vedanta to a rationalistic
and intellectual ontology, but to see it fully as connected to Bliss and the
spiritual experience per se. This is also the difference between the
western philosophical approach and the Indian one. In fact, herself a
Bengali, she was disciple of the great Bengali woman sage, Ma Anandamayi whom
she met as far back as in the thirties. This name “Anandamayi” means
"permeated with bliss", so it is not so astonishing that
Bithika develops this subject in the present book. Her reflections on modernity
are well documented and deep, they will stimulate a renewed point of view with
the readers, both Westerners and Indians.
There are three forms of Vedanta which spread in the West:
- The Neo-Vedanta inspired by Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission, and also
developed by Aldous Huxley in the last twenty years of his life before his
passing away in 1963.
- The recent Vedanta teachers which are keen to come back to the essentials and
to speak very simply to the western audience. In this endeavour, they may
end up far away from the Indian roots of Advaita; still, they communicate a
message important for the West still recovering of two thousand years of a
forcible dualist religion.
- the Vedanta of academicians, more interested in comparative philosophy and
Sanskrit.
In Indian Universities during the 20th century, a Neo-Vedanta of its own has
developed. It wanted to express the traditional Vedanta within the
Western notions of ontology and epistemology. It was also an apology to defend
this tradition against the accusations of missionaries and western indologists,
who were criticizing it as being out of the word, without ethical preoccupation
and not really rational, since the base of it was direct spiritual experience.
Unfortunately, this Neo-Vedanta failed to change in a noticeable way either the
western philosophy or the traditional Vedanta. Bithika Mukerji explains why,
and restore the timelessness of Vedanta beyond these quarrels which came in a
very particular historical context. May her message first be
understood, and then meditated upon by the reader!
The retyping of this book for internet has been possible thanks to the
financial contributions of the readers of the French quarterly on Ma
Anandamayi, Jay Ma. Dipu Banwal, a student from Ma Anandamayi Ashram in Almora
did this painstaking work in its entirety, May he and the readers of Jay Ma be
thanked for their help in the transmission to the world of the best of the
Indian tradition.
Dr Jacques Vigne , hermitage of Dhaulchina,
Almora, Himalayas 11-1-2005
I am ignorant;
out to my ignorance I ask the seers for enlightenment. (Rig-Véda 1-164-6)
NEO-VEDANTA
AND MODERNITY
DEDICATION
IN MEMORY OF MY TEACHER AND GUIDE IN PHILOSOPHY
Ankul
Chandra Mukhopadhyaya (A.C.Mukerji)
Part-1
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter One: The Framework for modernity:
The Western
tradition
Chapter two: Science, Technology and Automation
Chapter Three: the Indian Response to the Western
Tradition
Chapter Four: English neo-Hegelianism and Indian
Scholarship
Chapter Six: intuition as a Category of thought in
Vedanta: A.C. Mukerji
Chapter Seven: The World as real in Vedanta:,
Chapter Eight: Neo-Vedanta as a Rational Philosophy and a
‘Gospel of Life’
Chapter Nine: the Lack of Soteriological Awareness in
neo-Vedanta
Chapter Ten: Renunciation and Bliss
Chapter Eleven: The Ontology of Bliss
Chapter Twelve: Renunciation as the Precondition of
Realisation
Chapter thirteen: Being as Bliss
Chapter Fourteen: On Ananda (Bliss)
Conclusion:
The translation of the Taittiriyaka-vidya-prakash with an
Introduction, verse analyses and notes
Bibliography
Index of words and names
List of Abbreviations
Preface and acknowledgements
As College students we were reared on Neo-Vedanta and the Indian brand of Neo-Kantianism. Kant was the most important philosopher of the West for us because he seemed to have stated clearly the limitations of reason, vis-a-vis the region of the transcendent. As the Indian philosophical heritage was preoccupied with the effort of delimiting the scope of rationality in the sphere of ontology, Kant was hailed as a kindred spirit. We were not to know that Kant was one of the most important turning points in the history of Western philosophy and that he in fact, was perhaps, nowhere near the thoughts the Indians ascribed to him.
A.C. Mukerji, a leading exponent of the critical philosophy of his time, was my teacher and guide. His lectures on Vedanta were extremely popular. We could not entertain the thought that his rendering of the western tradition as paralleling the quest for the ‘unmediated knower’ was anything but true to the facts. For him the only worthwhile question (with which he sought to inspire every generation of students) in philosophy worth meditating upon was “how to know the self or the ‘unmediated knower’?”
My understanding of philosophy as a ground on which all people seized with similar concerns may meet and help each other was undermined, when I went to Geneva in 1972 for one year, to lead a seminar on Hinduism and Christianity. For the first time I was made aware of the many dimensions which go into the makeup of the West. The student were from many countries and form many denominations and all of them very well trained in theology. It was an exacting task for me to understand their problems and deal with them meaningfully. A philosophical discourse on ‘The One Reality’ seemed out of place because the problem haunting the Graduate School at Bossey from the beginning was: how to enter into a dialogue with ‘the other’. I write all this because this was an occasion for me to live and work together with people of dedication, who made me feel very welcome, although my presence called into question, for, many of them, much of what they stood for.
I learnt much more about the western tradition from Prof. George P. Grant at McMaster during the years1973-77. Whatever is right and perceptive about the West, in this book, I have gathered from him and what is partial or wrong is my own interpretation of it.
It is a strange fact but I also came to a greater understanding of Advaita philosophy at McMaster. I can not say enough about the dedicated work being done there by Drs. J,S.Arapura and K. Sivaraman. My understanding of the ontology of Bliss owes very much to Dr. Agrapura’s writings on the subjects of maya and gnosis. The difficult subject of my thesis which is now being printed as a book, was made interesting and a worthwhile proposition for me by Dr. K. Sivaraman. Without the many discussions we have had on the topic I would not have been able to develop the theme at all. The problem that I chose for study is, therefore, my way of acknowledging all that I had the opportunity of learning at McMaster.
I have great pleasure in recording my appreciation of the sustained encouragement extended to me by Dr. Peter George, during my absence from McMaster and also Dr. Chauncy Wood, who made it possible for me to return and defend the thesis.
I take this opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to my friends in Canada Ms Grace Gorden, Mc Marftha Frohlinger, Dr. Ivan Kocmarek and Wayne Barody who made this work not only possible but also enjoyable.
My grateful thanks are due to Dr. Sudhakar Malaviya who assumed the responsibility of printing the book and also Sri Rajendra Tiwari for this help in publishing it.
It is both an honour and a pleasure to write a foreword to Dr, Bithika Mukerji’s book. But it is more than that, because the central issue which is always present in this book is of such great importance for the West: What is the relation between modernity (call it if you will “technology”) and the great truths of the religious and philosophical traditions from before the age of progress? Dr. Mukerji looks at this issue in terms of India, but it is clearly of equal importance in Europe, China, Russia and the Arab world. Perhaps it is most pressing in North America (from where I write) because we are the only civilization that has no history from before the age of progress.
Many people in the world believe that technology is an instrument which human beings can use for their own purpose. Technology is believed to be external to the human purpose which are given in philosophic and religious traditions. It is believed that these traditions are not radically put into question by technology. This is contradicted by the fact that such countries as Russia and China have used Marxist forms of government to technologies their societies quickly. Of course, Marxism is not a philosophy which stands above technology, but a system of thought which is but an aspect of what was given in that great western emergence which we call “modernity” or “technology”. Also of course that capitalist “liberalism”, or which is an alternative system of government for the modernizing of societies, is also but part what came forth form the primal affirmation of the modern West. The difference between capitalism and communism is a subsidiary difference to that between modern and pre-modern civilizations. As Heidegger, the greatest western philosopher of our era, has written; communism are both predicates of the subject technology. It is a vain delusion to believe that technology is an instrument that human beings can use as they choose. It is an affirmation about being and as such penetrates every aspect of a civilization. In the light of that oblivion of eternity which so characterizes the dynamic civilization of the West, it is well for Dr. Mukerji to ask what happens to the apprehension of the ontology of the Vedanta in the context of modernity.
Dr. Mukerji has made herself enormously qualified to write about such a subject. She had taught the truth of the Vedanta for many years in India. She then came for a time to the West. She did not study western thought form the safe distance of India or form the pleasant confines of an Oxford college, as did Radhakrishnan. She first came to Geneva and then to a heartland of modernity, the great Lakes region of North America. She came to a steel town and worked in a university dominated by the computer. Steel and computers are after all two central substance of modernity; steel of an earlier era, computers of the latest region of cybernetics. She studied such great makers of modernity as Hobbes and Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. That is, she lived modernity in her daily flesh and bones, and thought it in her studies. She therefore has the right to speak of it not in some abstract way, but at it is in itself. She is greatly qualified to understand what it means in the context of the Vedantic ontology of bliss.
To a westerner such as myself, uneducated in the truth of the Vedanta but with knowledge of what has happened to Christianity in the face of the modern, Dr. Mukerji’s chapters on the thought of A.C. Mukerji and Kokileshvar Shstri are of the greatest interest. I am not qualified to speak with authority on Indian thought, but having read these chapters with close attention, I can affirm that Dr. Mukerji’s argument is beautifully expounded. The thesis of that argument is that the impact of westernization on Indian thought has resulted on obscuring what was meant by “bliss” in the Vedanta, and therefore distorting that philosophy. Certainly, ever since I listened to the lectures of Radhakrishnan, it has appeared to me that he greatly distorted the “idealism” of Kant and Hegel to make them seem to be at one with the Vedanta and at the expense of eliminating that mastering modernity which makes them both so revolutionary.
Indeed the English world “ideal” has had much influence in leading to that misunderstanding. It is a modern word and cannot well be used by anybody who takes the ancient traditions seriously. This is seen in the fact that its opposite is the modern world “real”. But to Plato—that western thinker who has most in common with the Vedanta, the distinction “ideal-real” would be a distortion. The “idea” was the true reality; idea was not ideal.
Above all, what is particularly wonderful in Dr. Mukerji’s book in her enucleation of the ontology of Ananda. This is breathtaking for any western listener. How right it is that the word “Ananda” be translated as bliss. The word “joy” would be too subjective and miss the knowledge that what is spoken of here concerns Being. What has come to be in the dynamic civilization of North America-indeed in all these societies which express in themselves the thoughts of Locke and Marx, Rousseau or Darwin or Hume—is the restless search for bliss which escape one because it cannot be know as being itself. Modern life has become the joyless pursuit of joy. One of the truly great stories of the English-speaking world is called “Bliss”. (It is also written by a woman). The story recognizes beautifully the crying need that bliss be more than the subjectivity of feeling but rooted in the Being of being. What is more pressing for us westerners than the understanding that there is an ontology of bliss? That this should be unthinkable is perhaps the greatest price that we have paid for modernity. For those of us who are Christians, it is the elimination of the understanding of the Trinity as bliss which leaves Christianity floundering in the midst of the modernity it so much made. What is sad in the western world is the deep desire to participate in bliss, for instance thought the detached pursuit of the orgasm which because it is outside any ontological understanding of bliss result in the good of the pursuit often being blackly negated.
Much silliness has been written in the modern world about the meeting of East and West, by both westerners and easterners. Such a meeting must note sacrifice the greatness of either side—Dr. Mukerji’s book understands that the true and authentic Vedanta must not be obscured (albeit temporarily) to make possible that meeting. Both westerners and easterners should read the book with close attention.
‘How shall I know the
supreme unspeakable Bliss which
they realize directly as “This”? Is it self-effulgent-
or it is seen to be shining
distinctly ?’
Katha ll. 2-14
It is said very often that Advaita philosophy reflects the general mood of the Indian people. Even when they do not intellectually subscribe to this school of thought, they are drawn into using its terminology as most expressive of all understanding regarding life in the world is formulated in the light of a dichotomy obtaining between what is merely pleasing (preyas) and what is good (śreyas).
This separation runs through all modes of thought, such as monistic or dualistic. The sense of distinction between ‘what should be preferred’ pervades the ethos of India and can be recognized immediately in the mood of detachment, or withdrawal, or renunciation, which characterizes it. It can be readily understood that a demand for discrimination comes with the built-in implication that one sphere is to be given up in order to appropriate the other.
The ideal of renunciation as a form of knowledge, has been thematized only in the Advaita philosophy of Samkaracarya, the well-known ascetic thinker and writer of the 8th/9th century A.D. All other schools of thought subscribe to it as a high ideal, but it is not integral to their philosophy. Samkaracarya, on the other hand, has placed it in the very heart of his writings on the unity of Self (ātman) with Ultimate Reality (Brahman). The sphere of the world, together with its knowing subject, the I-consciousness is, as if superimposed on this unity and needs to be ‘cancelled’ before Brahman as bliss may be realized as an existential experience.
This supreme discrimination between that which is the area of the not-self and that which leads towards true knowledge or self-realization, is called renunciation. It should not be an act of physical withdrawal from the world, which any way, is not perhaps the best mode of denying the world. The very demand of the world to be considered real and final is called māyā in Advaita philosophy; this dimension of non-reality or māyā can be offset only by an equally powerful process of meta-physical cancellation, a renouncing of layers of false identification, so that the veil may be sat at naught. The inspiration for this trans-natural way of understanding the human condition comes from the Upanishads which speak in the language of poetry to recall man’s attention dispersed in the world in search of happiness, to focus it on the quest for the very source of Bliss itself. This is how Samkaracarya has developed his exegeses on the Upanishads and his major work the Commentary on the Vedanta-Sūtra. {A collection of aphorisms beginning with, ‘Now commences the enquiry into Brahman’. This work is variously known as Bādarāyaņa sūtra, Brahma Sūtra or Śarīraka Sūtra.}
In neo-Vedanta, that is, contemporary interpretations of Samkaracarya’s thought, we meet with a very different understanding of ‘māyā’ as well as of the philosophical grounding of the Texts of the Upanishads. It will not be perhaps out of place, if Samkaracarya’s theory of māyā is explained a little here, since, I am going to develop the idea that this very concept has undergone almost a total transformation in the writing of modern thinkers.
The commonly known theory of māyā is presented by Samkaracarya in a short Preamble to the Commentary on the Vedanta Sūtra. Samkaracarya begins by delineating clearly two disparate spheres: consciousness and the object of consciousness. It is well-known, he writes, that the knower and the known which have for their spheres or contents the notions of ‘I’ and what is given to it from without, so to speak as ‘you’ (as the other) respectively, are totally opposed to each other, as light is to darkness. Yet in ordinary usage they are being constantly fused together, as for example, in the statements, ‘It is I’ or ‘It is mine’. That this coupling together is intelligible at all is due to the (unconscious) operation of a kind of superimposition of one on the other which obliterates, phenomenally speaking, the discontinuity altogether. The body and the I-consciousness, become one or even there is identification with persons in the world, like son etc. to take an obvious example of superimposition: a piece of rope is mistaken as a snake, evoking fear in the heart of the observer. This illusion, which will be known as error only upon its cancellation, is a case of superimposition of one thing on another. Thus is the Self hidden under the identity of the I-consciousness. This obscuration is not apparent but the identification of the I- consciousness with its body (‘It is I’) or with things in the world (‘It is mine’) are matters of common experience. It is an error which pervades all human experience. Samkaracarya’s definition of this error may be translated into these words.
The cognition into an object of something
Different which is of the nature of memory of
Something which has been seen elsewhere.
In other words, the real object is ‘falsely’ cognized in terms of something previously seen; this cognition is subsequently cancelled when recognition takes place of the real object. The nature off this error is thus indeterminable in the sense that it can be called neither real (because of the possibility of cancellation) nor unreal (because something as such is certainly cognized). Samkaracarya at this point in his writing makes a passing reference to other theories of error, as inadequate. The reason for grouping together very divergent theories regarding the nature of error is that the admission of this distinction itself is reason enough for stating that error is indeterminable. The aim of the author has been to underscore the presence of two levels within the cognitive structure, one real and the other unreal; this is sufficient reason for the argument in favour of a process of superimposition. The author suggests that it seems almost natural for the natural of the real to remain hidden because the unreal, as it were, makes it determinable in its own from of unreality. This figurative ascription (in the form of ‘as if’) may be called māyā which simultaneously hides the real and projects the unreal.
Samkaracarya’s intention here in the Preamble is to given an explanation of the experience of a diverse world since the Vedanta sūtra is going to propound Brahman as the one and only Reality. On Brahman is superimposed the dimension of the unreal world which appears as a reality by itself. On the cognitive scale, Brahman as the ever abiding Witness-Self remains hidden because the ‘I-consciousness’ is superimposed on it. The relevance of this entire discussion about the cognitive structure may be questioned by an opponent who ask: ‘If the Witness-Self is aloof from the entire range of the categories of thought as a non-object then how can it be superimposed upon? Moreover if you also say that the Witness-Self is self-evident then where is the possibility of confounding it with something else?’
Samkaracarya’s
resolution of this problem brings him to the core of his Preamble. He writes,
‘but, the Witness-Self (ātman) is not entirely a non-object. It is
the object of consciousness, but only in the sense that it is the ground, which
is given in immediate apprehension. Therefore the nature of superimposition or māyā,
the stuff of which it is, so to speak, made, is ignorance. Due to ignorance
a veiling takes place. The way to knowledge is by way of removing this veil of
ignorance which is called avidyā {For the purpose of a general
exposition of the intended views of Samkaracarya attempted here, the subtle
distinctions that are made by later Vedanta between māya and
avidyā or between avidyā or ajaña and
mithyājñāna are glossed over.}
We can now see the implication of the doctrine of superimposition. It stands as a prelude to the first aphorism of the Vedanta Sutra which states: ‘Now commences the enquiry into Brahman’. Superimposition is coeval with being-in-the-world, as natural and unquestioned as the statements ‘it is I’ which lies at the core of life-in the-world. It is completely simultaneous with it, yet it is not a necessary obstruction which then would so inhere in experience as not to be given to removal. It is a metaphysical predicament. Which in fact can be overcome. So the characteristic of superimposition is that it is natural but amenable to “cancellation’.
According to Samkaracarya, then, the self or ātman is the foundational self-luminous reality as opposed to such relational categories knowing, enjoying, etc. superimposition in the false attribution of the relational categories which are applicable only in the sphere of the not-self. Nescience or avidyā is primarily this principal of relationality which upholds the superstructure of superimposition created by māyā. Brahman, the non-relational ground of all relations is revealed only when the relational structure ceases to be operative. Thus there is a close connection between a metaphysical withdrawal on the part of the I-consciousness and the discovery of its ontological ground in immediate apprehension. This explains the Upanishadic statement that Brahman is to be known through knowledge only, because knowledge reveals that which is already there as Reality, by simply canceling the veil as veil. The dissipation of duality is simultaneous with the realization of the true nature of ātman as the Real, the Conscious, Infinite and Bliss Supreme. (Satyam, jñānam, anantam, ānandam brahma).
Samkaracarya’s Preamble to the Vedanta Sūtra Bhāşya sets the stage for demonstrating the non-reality of anything other than Brahman. Māyā, therefore, is integral to the Advaita of Samkaracarya because the concept of māyā holds together the ideals of renunciation and Bliss.
It is well known that Samkaracarya’s theory of māyā did not go to unchallenged. Severe criticisms came from the philosophical standpoint of dualism. The great Vaişņava teachers of the Middle ages emphasized the creature-hood of man, living in a world created by Good. Parallel traditions in Vedanta philosophy started by Ramanujacarya, Madhvacarya and other flourished along with the Advaita of Samkaracarya.
In the nineteenth century, India was brought very close to the Western world through the medium of English education which was welcomed by the leaders of society, Indian scholars were much influenced by the metaphysical speculations of the West, especially by Kant who seemed close to the philosophic position of Vedanta regarding Noumenon which lay behind the categories of thought.
Contemporary philosophical orientations in India show a resurgence of Advaita philosophy. The Advaita of Samkaracarya was presented to the world as the best philosophical achievement of India. The ‘modernisation’ of Indian thought lies in its being presented in terms of Western Philosophy. Many Indian scholars undertook to define Advaita philosophy in such language as could render it intelligible from the perspective of the Western world. The most popular method of doing this was to write on comparative philosophy. The idea behind this bran of writing seems to be that a familiarity with one dimension of thought would open up possibilities of understanding problems inhering in other modes of thinking. Comparative philosophy as methodology for neo-vedanta has come to stay in India.
The point of the present study is that the acceptance of comparative philosophy as a valid methodology is based on a disregard for the crucial and irreducible difference between two traditions, as shaped by philosophers in these traditions. There is yet another aspect which is still more crucial for an understanding of an ancient philosophical tradition such as Advaita Vedanta. Indian scholars in seeking to make their heritage commensurable with the Western outlook on life are already placed in a position of losing hold over it, because they have not first examined the ground on which such changes in their traditions could take place if at all.
This book is devoted to the problem of the westernization of Advaita Vedanta which as neo-Vedanta prevails as the philosophy of our own times in India. Neo-Vedanta seeks to give a realistic interpretation of Advaita and also to make it self-sufficient as a philosophy, without recourse to Scriptural texts. According to contemporary Indian thinkers, modernity can be appropriated easily to the universalism of Advaita. Without jettisoning the hard core of the tradition, Advaita could very well be re-stated in terms of modern demands for active participation in the ongoing concerns of the world.
Without calling
into question the right of any philosopher to interpret Advaita according to
his own understanding of it, this study seeks to establish that the process of
Westernization has obscured the core of this school of thought. The basic
correlation of renunciation and Bliss has been lost
slight of in the attempts to underscore the cognitive structure and the
realistic structure which according to Samkaracarya should both belong to, and
indeed constitute the realm of māyā.
An analysis of this process of obscuration forms the
subject matter of this book. The first three chapters are devoted to the study
of modernism as it is understood as such by Indian thinkers who seeks to
revitalize their heritage in the light of ‘modernity’. Consequently, all
attempts at approximating to the west are riddled by this basic confounding of
fundamental values. We can see this
very clearly in the fact that the concept of renunciation plays no part in the
writings of neo-Vedantins: and also that there is no awareness of the advent of
secularism as an inevitable corollary to the movement of thought from Kant to
Nietzsche in the West. Neo-Vedantins have emphasized concepts of Brahman as
Real (sat) and Brahman as Consciousness (cit), but not Brahman as bliss
(ananda) although the three terms together from the common definition of
Brahman, that is: Saccidānanda.
The influence of Western education on Indian scholars has
been profound. An attempt has been made to put this impact in perspective in
Chapters Four and Five. In the next three Chapters the writings of two eminent
scholars are taken up for detailed study to validate my point that added
emphasis has been laid by neo-Vedantins on the concept of Brahman as Reality
and consciousness to the exclusion of bliss. Both men, A.C. Mukerji and
Kokileshvar Bhattacharya were recognized in their own times as accredited
spokesmen for Advaita. Both were well-versed in western Philosophy as teachers
of it in the Universities of Allahabad and Calcutta respectively. Both fellow
in general the guidelines of traditional exegesis but individually develop
their own particular points of view. A.C. Mukerji favoured a rationalistic
approach to Advaita and Kokilesvar Bhattacharya a realistic’ approach. Their
relevance for this study lies in the fact that according to their own
understanding of Advaita it is quite commensurable with concepts to be found in
western thought. It is not that they thematized their exegeses as such but they
did attempt to relate Advaita ontology to modern thought.
The point I wish to develop is that the entire intellectual movement, was for contemporary Indian thought, a process of alienation rather than the recovery of an ancient heritage. The Ninth and Tenth Chapters take up the study of this process of transformation of Indian philosophy towards an integration of its understanding of reality with all the new values of our times. Renunciation is nowadays understood by Indian scholars to mean a physical withdrawal from the world, a turning away from involvement and thus leading to moral apathy. Their evaluation of a traditional Indian value can in no way be distinguished from the charge leveled against Indian thought by the indologists of the nineteenth century.
To demonstrate my point that a total reversal has taken
place of the fundamental standpoint of Advaita Vedanta, I have undertaken a
study of the Taittirīya Upanişad in the last Chapter
of the book. In this text, we meet with an understanding of man and his world.
The text also brings out the uniqueness of man as seeker of the supreme
knowledge of Brahman as Bliss. I have followed the Commentary of Samkaracarya
on this Text so that it mat be seen clearly how the neo-Vedantins have
traversed a different path altogether in staying away from the central teaching
of Advaita regarding the non-dual Brahman.
I have sought to reinforce my point by adding as Part ii of
this book the translation of a small text on Advaita written in the fourteenth
century by a well-known author in this field. I have write an introduction and
commentary on this work, which so far has not been translated into English or
into any of the Indian languages. This text, called the Taittirīyaka-vidya-prakāśah,
is a commentary on the Taittirīyake-Upanişad the Text examined in
the last two chapters of part I. A study of author’s time reveals the fact that
the main streams of exegeses were continuing to uphold the tradition as
enunciated by Samkaracarya. This may be seen to be in direct contrast to the
modern interpreters of Vedanta who seemed to have uncritically envisaged the
possibility of revitalizing their tradition by incorporating new ideas in order
to be in tune with the demands of the times.
It is a well known fact that attempts at re-interpreting
the Upanishadic tradition in the light of modern Western thought have not
resulted in any major contribution towards meaningful living in our contemporary
world. In the following pages an assessment of these attempts is given with a
view to clarifying the process of ‘modernization’ of Indian thought. The study
of these exegeses suggests that the emerging scene is of Westernized thought
rather than either modern or Indian. This would also explain the reason behind
the dearth of new philosophical schools in our country. This book, in effect,
seeks to highlight the question, namely, is it right to say that renunciation
has been central to the teaching of the Upanishads; and if so, in what way, or
if at all, this teaching can be related to the contemporary way of life in
India?
In Eastern countries and especially in India, the term ‘modernity’ in used very often to denote to progress-oriented ethos of our times. ‘Modernisation’ is accepted as integral to life at present and a matter of coming to terms with Western modes of thinking and living in the fact changing world of scientific and technological innovations. ‘Modernisation’, therefore is almost a synonym for Westernisation. The West is admired for its air of success in all aspects of human endeavour and its ideal of constant striving toward better achievements. The marvelous invention of science evoke nothing but a strong spirit of emulation and the desire to bring about such changes in the existing way of life as would make it possible for all viable cultural and social transformations to take place to accommodate them. In contrast with the very tangible ills which plague the lives of people elsewhere the progressive affluence of the West appears nothing but a good in itself. For a people who are fighting for sheer survival, or freedom, or human rights, the West could symbolize Utopia. ‘Modernisation’, in this sense merely means the free exercise of an option toward greater mechanisation for the sake of economic development. Its main sphere of influence, which admittedly is secular, is seen to lie only in the region of praxis. No anxiety is felt about a possible radicalization of the theories which sustain our tradition.
To an outsider to Western Civilization therefore, the following question would sound merely rhetorical:
Why, in our time have societies well-endowed
with industrial plenty and scientific genius
turned uglier with totalitarian violence than
any barbarous people?…… Why do nihilism
and neuroses brood over what we please to
call the ‘developed’ societies, taking as great
a toll of human happiness as gross physical
privation in the third world ?{Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and transcendence in post industrial Society (London: Faber & Faber 1973), p xxviii.}
No such misgivings, regarding our own future in following the West is in evidence in the writings of Indian thinkers. No doubts regarding encounter with science from within the tradition to the contrary; science and religion are accepted as ‘complementary disciplines,’ which can be “combined harmoniously…………(for) an all-round expression of human genius and total fulfillment.”{Swami Ranganathananda, science and religion (Calcutta Advaita Ashram, 1978), p3. (Inaugural Address for the Lecture Series on “Science, Society and the Scientific Attitude,” University of Bangalore, August 5, 1976).
The two terms ‘Modernization’ and ‘Westernization’, are used interchangeably in India, but the different in meaning is so crucial that any slurring over could lead only to meaninglessness. At this point in time, Westernization is a global event, but Modernization so far is a Western experience. In order to understand what modernity means to people who are obliged to be modern, it is necessary to understand the paradox of a life of affluence overcast by the shadow of ‘nothingness’.
It would seem to the East that the rapidly proliferating advances of modern sciences are so many steps in the right direction. The technological discoveries which are the marvels of our day, are surely of great benefit to human society. It is true that some hazards are created by the growing techniques, but then, the technicians are never at a loss for adequate solutions to the problems. When such is our present situation, how should we understand a passage like this:
People everywhere trace, and record the decay,
the destruction, the imminent annihilation of
the world……The world, men find, is not just
out of joint but tumbling away into the
nothingness of absurdity. Nietzsche, who from
his supreme peak saw far ahead of it all, as
early as the eighteen-eighties had for it the
simple because thoughtful words : ‘The
Wasteland grows….’{Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, tr. J. Clenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p.29.}
There are many brilliant writers in the West who have in varied measure, made the theme of ‘nothingness’ their central concern. The poignant words of Nietzsche have been echoing and re-echoing in such writings as these:
………there is nothing to express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to
express, no power to express, no desire to
express, together with the obligation to
express……{Samuel Beckett, in Twentieth Century Views, ed. M. Esslin, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1965), p.17.}
or,
The greatest mystery is not that we have been
flung at random between the profusion of
matter and of the stars, but that within this
prison we can draw from ourselves images
powerful enough to deny our nothingness.{Andre Malraux, Anti-Memoirs(New York : The Modern Library), p. 21.}
The question arises why should a progressive civilization find itself facing ‘nothingness’ in the present age. This question becomes supremely significant for all such societies who are eagerly following in the footsteps of the West. The East would reject the idea outright that it is trying to inherit ‘a growing Wasteland’, but western contemporary literature is clearly held in a tension between an awareness of crisis which is overtaking their civilization and a fearful sense of responsibility that its last sweeping technological conquest of the world will be final and irrevocable. They can only watch helplessly, the eager march toward the same existential nausea {‘Existential nausea has always worried the rich; democracy has now put it within the reach of all’. Dennis Gabor, ‘Fighting Existential Nausea’, Technology and Human Values (California: Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1966), p.13.
John Wilkinson, in his introduction to the same book writes that in justice to American Students it must be pointed out that ‘the progressive assimilation to the machine of human values (and even of religion in the sense of a deus in machina) is a function of a decisive unforeseen and unforeseeable turn of western Culture in its successive passage through mercantilism, industrialism, automation, and cybernation, and that as these mutations take place elsewhere in the world the same pathology of value is manifested’on the part of the East from which the West is beginning to suffer now. ( Ibid., p. 3.)
The important with regard to modernity, therefore, is the kind of awareness it awakens in man by which he understands himself in relation to his world. The term implies an evaluation of the situation in which Western man finds himself today. The primary demand of modernity, then, is to provide meaning to living in the age which has destroyed the region of transcendence that had sustained man over the centuries. To a lot of people this contingency may sound immensely preferable to any kind of historicism (whether theological, philosophical or humanistic) as it seems to grant freedom to bring about such condition as are needed for the well-being of society and also for building the future of our dreams. The thinkers who are aware of the implications of modernity, however, understand that this prospect is likely to be an ever-receding horizon unless one is dreaming of a totally man-made world replacing the given natural one of today. The very nature of technology creates its own autonomous sphere of action. Decisions are necessarily a-moral in a situation where techniques and expertise have to be given preference. Modernity accepts the fact that a new state of affairs has come into being with technology, because ‘the moral discourse of ‘values’ and ‘freedom’ is not independent of the will to technology, but a language fashioned in the same forge together with the will to technology. To try to think them separately is to move more deeply into their common origin.’ {George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969(, p. 32.}
This would seem to mean that our future will be determined by technology which cannot but he indifferent to those qualities which we knew so far to be peculiarly ‘human’. Philosophy as a mode of questioning the beliefs which guide our life, requires a separation of man from his environment. Modernity spells out the end of philosophy because technology now is closing this crucial gap. Modernity is self-conscious about moving into this region of unification from whence no questioning may arise. Heidegger writes clearly:
Philosophy is ending in the present age. It has
found its place in the scientific attitude of
socially active humanity. But the fundamental
characteristic of this scientific attitude is its
cybernetic. That is, its technological character.
The need to ask about technological is presu-
mably dying out to the same extent that
technology more definitely characterizes and
regulates the appearance of the totality of the
world and the position of man in it. {Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being , tr. Joan Stambaugh (new York: Harper &Row, 1972), P. 58.}
Modernity means an awareness of technology as a mode of knowing which seems to be replacing familiar moulds of thought. These problems are not present in the East, because so far it has not progressed beyond asking first-order questions, regarding methodology and scientific procedure. We therefore, cannot understand what it is to be modern; or to be obliged to fact the possibility of the annihilation of man. We are at the stage of a commonsense understanding of technology as the latest development in the process of scientific discovery while the occasional opposition it evokes is dismissed as nothing but the natural tendency towards conservatism in us. Outcry against innovation is nothing new; the timid are always wary of radical changes, always convinced that nothing but disaster can result from total transformations. Against this negative attitude one hears the enthusiastic approval of those who hail every new breakthrough in technology as another landmark in human achievement. The question for us is not, whether to be cautioned by the first group or reassured by the second, but to realize that to enter this debate at all is already not to understand the nature of technology.
In this chapter, an attempt is made to enter into the concerns of Western philosophers who seek to bring home to us the implication of being obliged to live in the age of technology. In order to do so, we need to familiarize ourselves with the formative influences within the Western tradition which has culminated in the age of technology; only thus can we hope to realize what it means to be modern, or what Rene Guenon means when he writes:
….however far away the state of mind which has been
specifically designed as ‘Modern’ may have spread,
especially in recent years, and however strong
may be the hold which it has taken and which
it exercises ever more completely at least
externally, over the whole world, this state of
mind remains nevertheless purely Western in
origin: in the west it had its birth, and the
West was for a long time its exclusive domain.
In the East its influence will never be any thing
but a Westernization.{Réné Guénon, Writings tr. and ed, by Lord Northbourne (London: Luzac and Company, Ltd., 1952), p. 15}.
It is necessary for us to understand the Western tradition in order to begin to see how integral science and technology are to its culture, and may be also understand the reason why the East remained untouched by this form of quest for knowledge. This survey of the Western tradition is necessarily brief and therefore very partial. However, it is hoped that the simplified nature of the presentation highlights the point of departure which should be studied carefully by those thinkers in the East, who are interested in comparative studies.
B. Formative Factors
Influencing Western Civilization:
The cradle of Western tradition is ancient Greece {Frederick s. j. Copleston, A History of philosophy, Vol. I, part I (New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1962), p. 29.} which brought forth great men of noble deeds and brilliant thought. The understanding this ancient society had of itself cannot be recorded as part of the history of the times. {Karl Loewith Meaning in History (The University Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 4-5.} The ancient world had its own way of understanding the occurrences which commanded attention, such as events of great significance in the lives of heroic men. Their achievements were landmarks which served to inspire and encourage other men to emulation. Celebration of those deeds by recounting them in poetry and drama made them moral imponderables; imponderable, because nobility was closely allied to tragedy. The mystique of ‘man’s relationship with nature’s inscrutable way was perpetuated in the recounting of the tales of antiquity. This ‘history’ is almost a reliving of the past and a continuation of the order of nature in human affairs. Nature, according to tradition, was good and man, as the measure of all things was a natural event, albeit the most exalted one. The inheritors of the Greek heritage agree that:
Through and through, the ideal is unity. To
make the individual at one with the state, the
real with the ideal, the inner with the outer,
art with moral, finally to bring all phases of
life under the empire of a single idea, which
with Goethe, we may call, an we will, the good,
the beautiful, or the whole-this was the
aim, and, to a great extent, the achievement{ G. Lowes Dickinson The Greek View of life (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 155. }
The west has experienced many exhilarating moments of emancipation from its past, not the least among them is the overcoming of the religious mythology which had combined nature and man in a harmonious whole. Nature, as we now understand the world was ‘discovered’ by philosophers in ancient Greece. Nature was found not to be full of spirits and thus mysterious and inscrutable but rather, obedient to knowable and predictable laws. {The phrase ‘discovery of nature’ was used by F. M. Cornford, who explains it thus: “The Ionian cosmogonists assume…that the whole universe is natural and potentially within the reach of knowledge as ordinary and rational as our knowledge that fire burns and water drowns. That is what I meant by the discovery of Nature….The Supernatural, as fashioned by mythology, simply disappears; all that really exists is natural.” Before and After Socrates (Cambridge: The University Press, 1964), p. 15.} This was the beginning of that separation of man and nature which subsequently divided them completely into the two orders of the knower and the known and later of the maker and the made.
The spirit of scientific inquiry did not develop unimpeded; the quest for the ever-fading region of transcendence sometimes eclipsed it. The platonic separation of the regions of appearance and reality, inaugurated a new line of enquiry which continues to parallel the tradition of questioning nature to its furthest limits. In other words, Plato’s line of separation was drawn differently from that of the nature cosmogonists preceding him. Man, for Plato, was possessed of that reason which could lead him to the vision of the Real and the Good. Nature, therefore, was not exhausted in discovering causes for events, it remained grounded in the eternal order of Forms. The soul of man was activated by the same principle which activated nature. Nature was not merely a neutral object of enquiry but necessarily related to the well-being of man. By focusing on the unchanging ground behind the changing order of existence, the platonic tradition had acted as a break on the process of alienation between man and nature. {Benjamin Jowett writes: “nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be added and the unconscious influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they appeared to the Greek.” Introduction: Timaeus, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. Iii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 38}.
The other source of western civilization is held to be Hebraism, specifically in the form of Christianity. According to Mathew Arnold, in some ways Hellenism and Hebraism were rival forces, ‘diving the empire of the world between them.’ He writes that ‘between these two points of influence moves our world. {Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Doyer Wilson (Cambridge: The University Press, 1935), p. 12}.They remained rivals because reason and faith were never quite reconciled in the history of succeeding generations. The advent of Christianity in the West changed the understanding of nature in relation to man. The dimension of historical consciousness replaced the idea of the manifestations of the natural order in recurring cycles. The ‘Christian reversal’ as Hannah Aredt calls it, introduced a new quality of self-centeredness.
……….in Christianity neither the world nor the
recurring cycle of life is immortal, only the single
living individual. It is the world which will to pass
away; men will live forever. {Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 52}.
Inevitably, perhaps, the eschatological dimension of life minimized the importance of nature. The emphasis was now on man, not only as the measure of all things but as one to whom in effect, is given the world to world to enjoy and also to inherit the Kingdom of God, {E. Troeltsh, Protestantism and progress (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 160-163}. The fast rise and spared of Western powers strengthened the sense of density and an unquestioning faith in the goodness of Providence. This new quality of self-centredness introduced by Christianity created a suitable atmosphere for questioning the workings of nature. Answers could be wrested from nature for the betterment of mankind. Quite paradoxically, therefore, it was Christianity which created a milieu for the conquest of nature although apparently it was opposed to the scientific spirit of inquiry into the working of nature. The paradox may be explained if we consider, opposition came from reverence for dogma rather than for nature. The ancient philosophers who had asked the first questions and who had remained eclipsed by the Platonic tradition, now stood vindicated. It can be said further that the opposition between science and religion was resolved in a strange way by philosophy. It may be a simplification, but not entirely farfetched, to say that the two great philosophers, Kant and Hegel, mediated between science and religion in a fashion which has definitively affected the course of Western thought science their time.
The first major step in the coming of the Age of Reason could be said to be the refutation of the traditional proofs of God’s existence by Kant and the establishment of the supremacy of the moral law as the only object of reverence. According to Kant, man alone, amongst all other creatures, prescribes for himself a law of conduct which is good; it is good not only because it is obeyed out to reverence for the law itself, but because it is the only law which can act as a safeguard against the evil propensities inherent in the nature of man. If man were devoid of reason, he would not be in conflict regarding the “ought”. If on the other hand he were purely a rational being, them the “ought” would resolve itself into the “must” of natural laws. Virtue lies in becoming so attuned to the command of moral law that obedience becomes akin to an upholding of the law in one’s behaviour. In other words, man’s disposition is to be changed by the moral law. This alone can make men worthy of happiness. This law, it is true, commands without promise of reward, but it is unthinkable, indeed irrational, to suppose that virtue will not bring out a state of happiness, the union of virtue and happiness is the highest good envisaged by reason and the demand for this comes from the moral law itself. Nature is indifferent to this concomitance; therefore, the sole source of this happiness is God. In the worlds of Kant “…….It is morally necessary to assume the existence of God” {The Critique of practical Reason, Book ii Chapter ii, tr. by L. Beck (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1956), p. 130}.
Kant has here reversed the traditional relation between morality and religion. The result of this re-orientation of the argument for God’s existence has been far reaching in Western tradition. {After Kant” the proud name of an ontology which presumed to give in a systematic doctrine, synthetic knowledge a priori of things in general, must give place to the modest name of a mere analysis of pure understanding.” Ernst Cassirer, Roussean, Kant and Goethe (New York: Harper Torch books. 1963), p. 95}. E. L. Fackenheim writes that the peaceful co-existence of reason and Revelation was upset by Kant’s revolutionary theory. Moral autonomy is brought at a price. “This same act which appropriates the God-given moral law reduces its God-givenness to irrelevance”. {E. L. Fackenheim, “The Reveled Morality of Judaism and Modern Thought: A Confrontation with Kant. Quest for past and future(London and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 215}. In other words, in a world made vulnerable to secularity by scientific discoveries, Kant provided the clue to moral independence. By granting him a self-legislating will, he made possible the phenomenon of man, master of his own destiny and standing alone at the crossroads of history.
Kant had upset the balance between reason and Revelation. Hegel by combining them, in an unprecedented way finally ushered in that age of secularity, which has come to stay in Western tradition. I the wonderful architectonic of Hegelian philosophy, the eschatological fulfillment of Christianity is transformed into the dialectical movement of the world-spirit, moving inevitable toward self-realization in the future. History itself is divinised and made to lead up to the historical situation in which Hegel found himself, and which, for him was the peak of cultural advancement.{Karl Loewith, form Hegel to Nietzsche, tr. David E. Green (New York: Doubleday &Co., Inc., 1967), pp.32-33}. “In this last stage of the history of the European spirit pure free will, is finally produced, which itself both will, knows what it wills,” writes Karl Loewith.{Ibid., p. 32}.
Hegel’s understanding of history is of the greatest importance because for almost one century it was he who set the tone for European philosophy either through his followers or his critics. In him was completed the substitution of Christianity by an overriding faith in the historical destiny of European man. History, therefore, was not entirely what has happened but what could be made to happen. This secularization of the religious vision of salvation, brought into vogue the many philosophies of history which supplanted Biblical faith. Western civilization for centuries had been sustained by faith in the past; the message of charity towards all fellow man as we hope for mercy from God; and a hope for the further in which was promised salvation. For religion to be meaningful, a teleological setting was necessary. By conferring fluidity to the dimension of truth {H. H. Berger, progressive and Conservative Man (Pittsburgh Duquesne University Press, 1971), p. 34}, Hegel guaranteed that a quality of religiosity would pervade all theories of progress which became current since his time.{Quoting Prof. Bury, Carl Becker writes‘……however formulated with whatever apparatus of philosophic or scientific terminology defended, the doctrine (of progress) was in essence an emotional conviction, a species of religion-a religion which according to Prof. Bury, served as a substitute for the declining faith in the Christian doctrine of Salvation.’ Progress and Power (New York: Random House, 1965), p.7}.
The nineteenth century saw the dislodgement of religion from its pivotal role in human life, and an upsurge of confidence in progressive involvement in life of the world. Man, for the first time, knew himself to be the creator and maker of the future. The material well being made possible by scientific discoveries and actualized by the Industrial Revolution was not unwelcome to the men of an age of expanding horizons. This manner of good life could be easily aligned to a life of obedience to the Divine Will because men saw themselves as the chosen liberators of the entire would. According to Carl Becker:
The long treasured vision of a Golden Age
once identified with the creation of the world
by capricious, inscrutable gods, and then
transferred to the beatific life after death in
the Heavenly City, is at last identified with
the progressive amelioration of man’s earthly
state by the application of his intelligence
to the mastery of the outer world of things
and to the conscious and rational direction of
social activities. { Carl Becker, The Heavenly City (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1947), p. 85}.
The nineteenth century, flew by on the wings of a great enthusiasm in the various fields of human enterprise. It is recognized as the age of progress; {The idea of progress, first explicitly stated by Condorcet in the eighteenth century, viewed material well-being as essential to individual liberty and peace. “In the course of the nineteenth century, when man could see about them concrete evidence of advance in liberty and material goods, the idea of progress became an accepted part of our value system.”
Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and Human Values,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XL, No.4, 1964, p. 589}.as the age when Utopia was felt to be within grasp; {Herbert J. Mueller writes: “In our civilization the idea of progress led to a novel utopianism, the conviction that the ideal society was positively going to be established on earth.
The Children of Frankenstein (Bloomington and London, Indiana University Press, 1971), p. 369.}as the age of reason which set man free from the tyranny of religious dogma; and as the age of humanism, when for the first time man knew himself to be the measure of all things, not because he was given this position by nature or God but because he had discovered it for himself and had accepted the full responsibility of such an exalted state.
The dissipation of this self-reliance marks the advent of the present century. The crucial fact of contemporary Western would is a loss of faith in the ideals which had guided previous generations. Christopher Dawson writes:
Of all the changes that the twentieth century
has brought, none goes deeper than the dis-
appearance of that unquestioning faith in the
future and the absolute value of our civili-
zation which has the dominant note of the
nineteenth century. {Caristopher Dawson, The Dynamics of world History (London:Sheed and Ward, 1957), p. 54.}
Those who seek to understand Nietzsche are not puzzled by the quick dissipation of the euphoric optimism of the nineteenth century. The inherent contradiction in holding together A belief in God as the supreme dispenser of Grace and an over-riding confidence in one’s will to conquer, had been foreseen clearly by Nietzsche. He knew that in due course the will to create would replace a ‘waiting upon’; that the divinising of history as the progressive destiny of mankind would lead to the jettisoning of God as irrelevant to this process. Just as the spreading wasteland swallows up definitive paths, so must the human will overcome that region of knowing which forms a part of receiving from the ‘Other’. The philosopher who had given this power to human will, was of course, Immanuel Kant. {Contrasting the placid outward life of Kant with “his world destroying thought”, the poet Heine wrote “Of a truth, if the citizens of Konigsberg had had any inkling of the meaning of that thought, they would have shuddered before him as before an executioner.”
Quoted by E. W. F. Tomlin. The Western philosophers (London: Hutchinson& Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1968) p. 202.}
How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the
man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundle-
gung, who confronted even with Christ, turns
away to consider the judgment of his own
conscience and to hear the voice of his own
reason…this man is with us still, free, indepen-
dent, lonely, powerfull, Rational, responsible,
brave, the hero of so many novels and books
of moral philosophy. {Iris Murdoch. The Sovereignity of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 80.}.
The question which demands attention here is why should living in the twentieth century be an experience of alienation for Western man when paradoxically, he has all the means for increasing affluence and power, as well as a strongly institutionalized religion which can act as a unifying force for the entire Christian World?
As stated earlier, it is important for us to understand this question because we now are a part of Western civilization. An attempt to answer this question is made in the next Chapter.
CHAPTER TWO
The crucial factor which separates this century from the previous one, in the West is the failure of history. During the years when science was bringing in more and more mechanisation, man knew himself to be alienated from nature. After the world wars man felt alienated from history as well.
The failure of history in the West is to be understood as an experience of the greatest moment. A belief in history meant the possibility of sustenance from a region which the beyond human fallibility, a faith in Providence which ordained events for mankind, ensured the continuity of moral values and added to the meaningfulness of striving for the goal of establishing prefect justice on earth. The two world wars, in their total irrationality, destroyed, in a most dramatic fashion, all the expectations which had been built up over the previous centuries. An expression of this post-war mood can be read in the following lines:
Our Godhead, History ha stilled a tomb for us,
From which there is no resurrection. {Ingeborg Bachmann, “Message” tr. M. L. Mandelson, Modern Eruopean Potery (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 175.}
The dissipation of the dimension of transcendence which had sustained man after he had separated from nature and had alienated himself from religion, is described as the “over-coming of chance” by Leo Strauss. By chance is meant the possibility of an interference which remains beyond human control. We may call it, Fate, Providence, Grace or by any other name. The future remains shrouded in mystery if chance reigns supreme, otherwise past, present and future become linked together by necessity. Strauss identifies the quality of ‘chanceless existence’ with the reality of modernity. Specifically, modernity is understood as the secularization of Christian eschatology. According to Strauss this was accomplished in three stages, which he calls the three waves of modernity. In classical thought justice is compliance with the natural order. Later the element of chance is provided for in the benign inscrutability of Providence. The complete overcoming of chance came with Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant. The fallibility of human order could be transformed by (i) judicious manipulations, (ii) exercise of the rights of self-preservation, and (iii) complete obedience to the moral law. The dependence on Divine Grace is totally suspended as unnecessary; man’s creativity supersedes inspiration; nature is conquered by science and human efforts are enough to bring about perfectibility:
………eventually we arrive at the view that uni-
versal affluence and peace is the necessary and
sufficent condition of perfect justice.{ Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity”. Political Philosophy, ed Hilail Gildin (New York : The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1975), pp. 88-89.)
The perfectibility of man and the establishment of peace and justice on earth continued to suffice as ideals (as they still do) for those humanists of the twentieth century who had not reckoned with the means for the attainment of this end.
A new factor was
introduced by the advent of science which started to created an ‘unnatural’
order of existence. There is, therefore, in the West now a brand of literature
devoted to propounding the problem of the means of achieving felicity as being
sufficient ends in themselves. This brings us to a possible of anxiety in the
present century in the West. The modern era is the subject of many kinds of
analyses but all agree on the important of technology as the most commanding
influence at work in all societies. Although we are familiar with the
phenomenon of technology, it is always understood in its full significance. Jacques Ellul writes :
No social, human or spiritual fact is so impor-
tant as the fact of technique in the modern
world. And yet no subject is so little under-
stood. {Jacque Sllul, The Technological Society (New York : knopf, 1964), p. 3}.
Ellul’s judgement is only too true because technology is so complex and vast a subject that a comprehensive understanding of its ramifications would be a formidable task. A brief account is undertaken here only with a view to highlighting certain notions which are important for the thesis being presented here.
It is a generally felt impression that technology is the newest development in the growth of scientific knowledge. It is only a tendency toward conservatism which make us look askance at the sudden spate of new inventions. This reactionary attitude is common both to the East as well as to the West and E. G. Mesthene describes it very clearly in these terms :
Why not stop it all ? Stop automation : Stop
tampering with life and heredity : Stop the
senseless race into space : The cry is an old
one. It was heard no doubt when the wheel
was invented. The technologies of the bomb,
the automobile, the spinning jenny, gun-
powder, printing, all provoked social disloca-
tions accompanied by similar cries of ‘Stop’….{E. G. Mesthene, “Technology and Wisdom;” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. C. Mitcham and R. Mackey (New York : The Free Press, 1972) p. 113}.
The author E. G. Mesthene compares the twentieth century with the early time of Greek civilization. The scientific exploration of the first Cosmologists had not been developed properly because they had lacked courage to follow up the sudden glimpses into the unknown which had rewarded their efforts. Gilbert Murray wrote that it was a failure of nerve on the part of the early Greeks which prevented them from pushing ahead with their study of nature. {Gilbert Murray, The Five Stage of Greek Religion (New York : Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1951), pp. 119-165}.
Mesthene cites the phrase, “the failure of nerve,’ used by Gilbert Murray in order to warn the twentieth century against becoming open to the same charge. He thinks, we are now given the same choice of either proceeding with the quest for greater knowledge or to stop midway from a want of courage to face the unknown.
We are convinced again, for the first time since
the Greeks of the essential intelligibility of the
universe : there is nothing in it that in principle
is unknowable. {E. G. Mesthene, “Technology and Wisdom,” in Philosophy and Technology, op cit., p. 114}.
Mesthene voices the opinion of many who think that with proper control and good management toward beneficial ends, technology may be used for the betterment of society; that, it is a-moral neutral power, which can be used to good purpose by a responsible government.
According to Bertrand de Jouvenal, membership in a technologically advanced and advancing society is a privilege. It is characteristic of all privileges that they may be put to good use or bad use. {Bertrand de Jouvenal “Some Musings,” Technology and Human Values (California : Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1966), p. 23.}.
With a sense of collective responsibility, therefore, technology could be used in the best interests of mankind. Most people in the West and nearly all in the East could be convinced by Mesthene’s arguments against harboring any undue fear to change, and easily identify with the idea that the answer to the problem of the technological take-over does not lie in crying a halt to it but in getting better control of the world as a technological system. M. W. Thring writes :
We are well aware, now, that……..the wider
development of the nineteenth century In-
dustrial Revolution, has been a bolting horse
out of control, and that we are all on its
back. We know that we are all on its
grasp the reins and control the steed, and
make it trot, rather gallop, in the
direction we need to go.{ Man, Machines and Tomorrow (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 117-18}
This attitude easily aligns technology on the side of progress. And does not consider that man’s autonomy is threatened by it. It finds ready support with the majority of people because we are used to the idea of bettering ourselves in every possible way. As a matter of fact the need for a defense of technology itself would not have arisen had it not “created a battered landscape of eroded soil, broken bottles and automobile tires which tells another story of technology from that dream of a thriving industrial world set within a barely tamed wilderness that spurred on our ancestors.” {William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets (New York : Weybright and Tulley, 1971), p. 2.}
The problem of waste, pollution and devastation which comes as an aftermath to technological proliferation provides no doubt some urgency to the pleas and suggestions for greater control over new invention, but there is here a core of optimism in direct continuation with the nineteenth century belief in progress. Those who have so far “sustained by a profound belief in the doctrine of progress”. {Carl Beeker, Progress and Power (New York : Random House, 1965), p.6.} extend it to encompass technology as well. The idea of continuous innovation is so familiar, writes Demczynske, that we can hardly imagine life in a static society. We try to make every thing better, whether it is our industrial wares, standards of living or social institution. {S. Demczynske, Automation and the Future of man (London : George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), p. 162. This rush toward betterment is describe by Theodore Roszak from another perspective:” We have a name for the short of human activity that absorbs people in the orderly pursuit of arbitrary……….usually competitive…goals according to arbitrary rules. We call it a ‘game’. Why must an economy grow, Why must profit be maximized, Why must every bureaucracy expand and organizational efficiency and industrial productivity be ceaselessly elaborated?” Roszak writes that these questions have no rational explanation just as there are no logical reasons about the rules of games which must be accepted as ultimate in case the game is going to be played. “Forbidpen Games”, Technology and human Values. California: Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1966), p. 26} it is true that twentieth century optimism is very tempered as compared to that of the earlier century, yet it remains a force to be reckoned with, because it is a force which provides sustenance to developing countries and feeds the opinion which maintains the neutrality of technology. Since the time that Prometheus stole fire from the gods, any act of daring for the sake of knowledge and power has acquired an aura of nobility in the West. It is in this context that one can appreciate Mesthene’s urging us against a failure of nerves at this moment in history.
The question to be considered here is whether this commonly prevailing opinion regarding technology should be seen in the light of a different perspective altogether or not. In a way it is a reassuring theory that technology brings ability from society, in order that this tremendous force may be harnessed for the good of mankind. {A typical opinion would be: “ The transferred technology structure of countries everywhere. This has been so in the past, and it will continue to be true in the future. The problem is one of coming to terms with the new technology and of better organizing the world as a technological system. {Spencer, Daniel L. Technology Gap in Perspective :Strategy of International Technology Transfer (New York : Spartan Books, 1970), p. 162.} Yet this theory has been countered very pressingly by thinkers; who do not subscribe to the view that technology is just the practical aspect of science. Sociologists for one, have pointed out that man was a technician before he was a scientist. {Lewis Mumford, “Technics and the Nature of Man,” Philosophy and Technology, op cit., pp. 77-79} Man was aware of, and could work with techniques before he discovered the universal laws which governed them. In the fashioning of crude stone implements lay the seed of future technology; but this manipulative behaviour was a part of a natural struggle for existence, not radically different from the use of claws and tooth by an animal. Lewis Mumford distinguishes between the crude means of self-preservation fro sophisticated techniques which aim at greater comfort and are production-oriented rather than life-oriented :
At its point of origin, then, Technics was
related to the whole nature of man. Primitive
techniques were life-centred, not narrowly work-
centred, still less productive-centred. {Ibid., p. 81.}
Science came later and supplied greater power to the already existing technological pattern of man’s manipulative behaviour. Feibleman goes further to say that the preoccupation with technology has done a lot of harm to the development of science, because more often science gas to engage itself with matters arising out of the uses of machines. According to him the role of science has been to improve instruments and techniques and vastly accelerate efficiency, thus helping technology to become a branch of applied science; but this rapidly growing branch is hardly conductive to the progress of pure science. {J. K. Feibleman, ‘Pure Science, Applied Science and Technology,” Philosophy & Technology, op cit., pp. 36-39.}
The argument regarding the relation of
science to technology is of interest, because, not only is a wedge being driven
here between what is considered worthwhile in itself and what is of practical
use only, but it is being felt as an ever-widening gulf which is developing a
dynamics of its own. Pure science now seems as wary of technology as are the
humanities. The reason are not far to seek. The scientist looks upon himself as
an enquirer after truth. His methodology is distinct, but according to a few
scientists, not very different from the speculative, contemplative, or even
insightful ways of the humanities and is essentially an extension of the same
desire for knowledge which started the first philosophers on the path of
metaphysics. Andrew G. Van Melsen
writes:
…….knowing and making lie in the same line;
both mean man’s self-realization, one, in an
imminent way and the other in a transient
fashion. Both go out to the world but both
also revert to man. For in knowledge man
appropriates the world to himself immanently
as an enrichment of his spirit; in technological
making he appropriates the same world to
himself to humanize it, and at the same time
he learns to know himself in a new way….{Andrew G. Van Melsen, Science & Technology (Pittsburg : Duquesne University Press, 1961), p. 319.}
To take into consideration another view which says that “knowing and making” lie in the same line, we may cite from the writings of Friedrich Dessauer. According to Dessauer, the inventor mediates between two realms, one of man’s intellectual structure and conceptualities arising out of his needs and the other of the mysterious world of natural laws. The essence of invention lies in finding that which was not manifest before in the world of actuality, as for example like or a picture created by a poet or an artist.
The inventor does not view what has been
gained from his creation (thought not from it
alone) with the feeling “I have made you”….
But, rather with an “I have found you……..{Friedrich Dessauer, “Technology in the Proper Sphere,” Philosophy & technology, op cit., p. 323.}
There are other eminent architects and engineers who do not care for the distinction between the natural and the artificial ; R. Buckminster Fuller, writes in a poetic from on the subject of the new profiles of the universe where nature and artifice merge into each other. { R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God, (New York : Anchor Books, 1971).}
Taking the new image of the world into consideration some scientists plead for a closer relation {“knowledge is an integral entity and cannot be definitely divided without finally becoming meaningless and useless……..The balance between science and humanities must be maintained throughout,” S. Demczynski Automation & the Future of Man (London. George, Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), pp. 207-209.} between science and philosophy. P. W. Bridgman, in an oft-printed article. { P.W. Bridgman, “Quo Vadis,” Science and Ideas, ed. A. B. Arons and A. M. Bork (New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964).
Also in Science & the Modern Mind, ed G. Holton (New York : Books for Libraries Press, 1977), p. 323.} reject the view that there is a radical difference between science and the humanities, even going to the extent of maintaining that although values are not definitive for science, concern for values is as important to the scientist as to any philosopher. Bridgman thinks that science can save the humanities from much dissipation of energy in speculating about regions which clearly lie beyond the thinking power of man. {Ibid., p. 277.} It is time we learn to look to the future which will be dominated by technology rather than try to effort any “return” to the insights of the past, because,
The insight that there is any problem here at
all is devastatingly new in human history. The
science and the humanities find themselves
facing the problem together; it is too difficult
and too pressing to permit the luxury of a
division of force. { Ibid., p. 278.}
The exegetical value of following these interpretations add to our understanding that “knowing” and “making” lie in one line for science and technology, an interpretation which is being questioned by philosophers. Moreover, speaking specifically the call for a closing of ranks against technology, hardly means a new dimension of understanding because science would like to change the humanities into its own image before they could be made useful for modern students. Max Black considers such presuppositions as ‘man has an essential nature’, or that ‘this human essence is good’, outdated and other such maxims in need of substantial revision. He goes on to say that new perspectives have to be created before the two languages of science and the humanities can become commensurable, because “the personal equation’, which is crucial to the one is sought to be neutralized by the other. {Max Black, “Some Tasks for the Humanities, “Technology as Institutionally Related to Human Values, ed. Philip C. Rotterkush (Washington, D. C. : Acropolis Books, Ltd. 1974), pp. 84-85.} Further, for science, as Van Melsen pointed out “knowing” and “making” lie in the same line, and this would seem to be the crucial point of departure for philosophy.
Science which has made technology possible, cannot perhaps contemplate fruitfully its own effectiveness. We may however appreciate the point that the science being the study of the real and the natural are closer to the humanities than to technology which sets its sights, at least in a minimal sense, on creating the artificial. Our increasingly man-made environment, which is the devastatingly new situation facing man, demands a new orientation toward it because the familiar attitude of doing one’s utmost and hoping for the best, becomes irrelevant in a situation where all factors can be controlled and no element of uncertainty left to chance; we seem to have no option but to go forward in discovering greater powers for creating the artificial, which is automation, the central core of technology.
Let us now consider the nature of automation. Speaking on the subject, John Diebold said :
If automation means anything at all it means
something more than a mere extension of
mechanization…It implies a basic change in
our attitude toward the manner of performing
work……...though the systematic application
of the principle called feed back, machines can
be built which control their own operations,
so that productive process do not have
to be designed to take into account the
human limitations of a human worker. {Statement of John Diebold before the Joint Economic Committee, Sub-Committee, on Automation and Energy Resources, 86th Congress and Session, reported in The New Technology & Human Values, ed. John G. Burke (California : Wadsworth Publishing Co. Inc., 1966), pp. 109-110.}
From these reported it is for the lay person to understand that the new element of automation is far from being a neutral force for the use of man, and that in its essence it is different from the humanities. Automation is not an extension to human powers but a medium of replacement of human element. A great step was taken instantaneous changes in communications, overcoming the obstacles of mass, time and space. In the west the phenomenon of automation is being called the Cybernetic Revolution which, will eventually exercise greater power than the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. J. Rose explains :
While mechanical power of the First Industrial
Revolution formed an extension of man’s
muscles ….hence its description as the Age of
Mechanisation…...the computer is an extension
Of his mind and is the ‘brain’ of the automatic
System, hence the Cybernetic Revolution is also
known as the Age of Automation. {J. Rose, The Cybernetic Revolution (London : Elek Science, 1974), p. 16.}
To understand the nature of Cybernetics is to comprehend the grounds for apprehension of an end of the age of man. Machines had added to the power of man in bringing about man changes in his environment. Cybernetics is capable of changing man himself and putting him in the same electrical circuit as his surrounding.{Norbert Wiener writes : “This is an idea with which I have toyed before…..that it is conceptually possible for a human being to be sent over a telegraph line.” God & Golem Inc. (Cambridge : The M.I.T. Press, Inc. 1964), p. 36.} Technology is not a power which is handled by man but the very medium in which he lives. {Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York : Knopf, 1964), p. 6. Also Marshal Mcluhan’s definitive work Understanding Media (New York : McGraw-Hill, 1964.} By medium is meant that by which and in which we have our existence. Nature is now in the process of being completely made over into a man-made environment, which in turn can be seen as an extension of the central nervous system of human beings. It is an ironic fact that scientifically man has truly identified himself with his world and achieved a startling unity with it.
The technology era is therefore qualitatively different from the previous mechanical age. The discovery that mass can be changed into energy was a lesser radicalization of our standing of the world than the present total transformation of mass and energy into the region of electronics where all barriers of time, space and mass disappear. This situation could only be a-moral as all standards of living and behaviour must remain fluid; it is also ambivalent, science all technological projects create their own problems which need solutions. In this way a society could come into being which would be governed by technology and not by a value-system or an ideology. It is this situation which in interesting. No physical annihilation of man is envisaged here. The point is, that man may give up his choice for freedom in favour of scientific determinism. The inner dynamics of this mode of determinism creates a particular level of existence which can be called a state of computerized automation. Just as the human nervous system has sensory-motor nerves at one end and the brain at the other, so also automation is the feed back extremity of a continuum beginning with a computer. {Donald N. Michael, Cybernation : The Silent Conquest (California : Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962) pp. 5-6.} By hooking this on to other computers, a near-infinity of possibilities is obtained. It becomes a self-sustaining process almost like nature, but with no precise end in view. Set in this frame of reference, according to Ellul the question, ‘can man control his own techniques ?’ is meaningless, because a computer technique forestalls such an option. Here, that which was supposed to be instrumental is seen to be the master. It is an irreversible process but not an inevitable choice. Ellul refers to the ancient Greeks who did in fact refuse and a choice which was condemned by Gilbert Murray as a ‘failure of nerve’.
We have come now to the heart of the reason behind the pessimistic tone of the writing coming out of the West. Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, has called it, in effect, the magic wand which is capable of granting any wish but does not tell us what to wish for or whether the granting of the wish will be agreeable to the receiver. Humanity now is in the position of the sailor with the ‘monkey’s paw’, {An old soldier returned from India to visit a friend. He had with him a talisman that he said had the ability to grant three wishes to each of three people. The first owner of the talisman had taken the first set of three wishes, two unknown to the soldier, but the third one for death. That is how the soldier had become the owner. The soldier took the second set of wishes for himself, but declined to talk about them. His experiences were too terrible. One set of wishes remained. With considerable reluctance the soldier yields to his friend’s request for the talisman. The friend’s first wish is for £ 200. Soon after an official of the company where his son was employed came to tell him that his son had been crushed to death. As a solatium, but without any admission of responsibility, the company granted the father £ 200. His next wish was that the boy come back, and so his mutilated ghost came knocking at the door and so his last wish was that the ghost go away. W.W. Jacob’s well-known story retold by Norbert Wiener, “The monkey’s Paw”, The New Technology and Human Values. Ed. John G. Burke (California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1966) p. 132.} because it is now within the bonds of conceptual possibility that a machine may be set to “generate’ another machine or ‘learn” to play an ‘intelligent’ game of chess.{ Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc. (Cambridge : The M.I.T. Press, 1964), pp. 21 & 36. } What we may understand from this is that the power of technical programming is virtually limitless and the mystique of the barrier between life and matter is in the process of being exploded. {Dennis Gabor. Inaugural Lecture (Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, March 3, 1959), p. 47.} This technological future which seems inescapable to the West, is proving to be the ultimate catalyst precipitating all meaning from life and the ideals of hope and justice which were integral to it so far. Michael Harrington writes:
……(the) conscious revolutionists of the past
proposed visions which outstripped reality, the
unconscious revolutionists of the present create
realities which outstrip their vision. In the
first case, it is history that is sad, in the second
man. {Michael Harrington, The Accidental Century (Baltimor4: Penguin Books, Inc., 1969), p. 16.}
If we may restate the arguments we may say that the failure of history, not only alienated man from his past, but has suddenly catapulted him into the future totally neutralizing the quest for justice.{Marshall Mcluhan describe the difference between the previous mechanical age and our electric age as being that of exercising greater emphasis on process and transformation, rather than on the material that changes. Electricity is a single field of experience which is capable of co-ordinating every kind of diversity and multiplicity. This process takes place by remote control. The fact of speeded up change effects time barriers also. The past can be conserved and the present encapsulated. This requires new ways of thinking of the past, the present and the future. The Futurists, ed. With an Introduction by Alvin Toffler (New York: Random House, 1972) pp. 62-63.)} The future which by definition should be unknown to the present, has lost this quality for modern man. Technology now brings the entire range of actuality. The process of the overcoming of chance is well on its way to completion. It is true that there are as yet many unknown spheres of investigations which could engage the attention of scientists for years to come. The point about technology is that it is able to make its own solutions to questions; it brings into being that which was not in nature before and thereby transforms totally the ways of human adjustments in life. The new creation plays a definitive role by making it possible and therefore inevitable for other related techniques to come into existence which in their turn add to the proliferating process. Thus, it is said that, in principle, the future is already here, because technology is process of mechanical development, a growth which follows its own self-regulative compulsions. To look to the future in any form that is theological, philosophical or even humanistic would mean an acknowledgement to the possibility of reciprocity between the natural process and human activity. {John Baillie makes this distinction between development and progress. The Belief in Progress (The Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 122-132.} At present the future is at hand as programmed into machines and the past is dissociated because it has no formative role to play in this act. In modern terminology, therefore, the word ‘progress’ loses its meaning. Instead of “progress’, it is now suggested that we understand changes in terms of the Principle of Acceleration which is non-dialectical and non evaluative. In substantiation of his point, the author of the idea cites the example of an African student studying the most advanced course in Western Universities. The gap between the African bush and the modern city can be closed speedily with adequate facilities and proper methodology.{Folke Dovering, “The Principle of Acceleration: A non dialectical theory of progress,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (England: The Cambridge University Press, 1969), Vol. Ii, p. 95.}
The paradox of affluence and despair is precisely this fact, that given the future, man does not know how to relate himself to it. Just as the African student who, uprooted from the bush is not accepted by the West which taught him to differentiate himself from his background, Western man, experiences the same silence of indifference from the world which he has created and chosen for himself. He cannot see at present what exactly can save him from the swiftly growing phenomenon of technology becoming the last court of appeal in every sphere of life. There are no moral imponderables now to contemplate; one is only to keep abreast of the newest level of technical expertise in all matters requiring decisions. Freedom of action on cherished principles become irrelevant in a controlled situation where statistics, techniques and expertise override individual preference. The history of civilizations has been, so far, a history of the fight for freedom. To give up this freedom voluntarily in the name of establishing a just society, could only lead to a novel kind of self-annihilation. Moreover, this mode of self-annihilation is already prefigured in the manufacture of ‘Cyborgs’, creatures who combine in them qualities of the human being and the machine.
That this prospect of self-annihilation is very much within the bonds of possibility (in principle) has entered the consciousness of Western thinkers. Arthur C. Clarke writes ironically that the machine-animals. {The inventors of the machine-animals called ‘a Cyborg’ are Drs. Manfred Clyne and Nathan Cline of the Rockford State Hospital, New York.} which are being created today many even be an improvement on the race of man because they would be devoid of such crudities and hostilities as men are heir to. Consequently they would lead a more civilized and peaceful life. Then he writes almost an epitaph for man :
No individual exists forever, why should we
expect our species to be immortal. Man, said
Nietzsche, is a rope stretched between the
Animal and the Superman…a rope across the
Abyss….That will be a noble purpose to have
Served. {Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future ; An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Raw, 1973), p. 229.}
Reason has been the guiding start of the Western genius for very long. It has been its pride and its prerogative. In following the dictates of reason, it has discarded other ideals as of lesser importance, but this has resulted in a paradoxical situation :
……..the experience of the twentieth century
showed that an alliance could exist between
science and irrationality. This indeed was
something new. The general assumption had
been that a scientist was a rational man…..{The Environment of change, ed. A. W. Warner (New York : Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 9.}
The “terrifying alliance” {Ibid., p. 9.} between science and irrationality in the name of supreme felicity for mankind, grew out of a coupling together of knowability and mechanization, propounded so forcefully by Bacon, at the beginning of the modern era. Paolo Rossi writes :
What radically and primarily distinguishes
every “modern” ideal of knowledge is precisely
the renunciation of the concept of knowledge
as contemplation…….knowledge, according to
Bacon, is not the product of the intuitions of
solitaries, but the fruit of a through and
radical reform respecting man’s mode of
thinking and speaking and which concerns
the very structures of his societal co-existence. {Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (New York : Harper& Row, 1970), p. 181.}
With “the renunciation of the concept of knowledge as contemplation”, modern man understands that we do not live in a mechanical age because of technology; we live in a technological society because we are being thrust towards greater mechanization and automation everyday. Critics as well as technologists are agreed today that in effect :
……....automation (i.e., self correcting machines
that feed back information and adjust
themselves) and cybernation (i.e., making the
automated machine capable or responding to
a near infinity of contingencies, by hooking
them up to computers) possess the scientific
capacity to accomplish the ancient myth of
Daedalus.
The quotation refers to Homer’s story of Daedalus, a statue which of its own motion entered the conclave of gods on Olympus; the story is rejected outright by Aristotle who writes dismissingly : as if “the shuttle would weaves and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand which guides them…..{ Politica, 1253 b. 35. tr. by Benjamin Jowett.} ]
It seems Homer was right and Aristotle was wrong.
A. Science and Philosophical Thinking:
It was stated in the previous Chapter that modernity is closely related to the phenomenon of automation, toward which technology is headed inescapably, and it also seems, irrevocably. It should be made clear that all modern writers on this problem are not necessarily pessimistic; neither are they devoid of a sense of wonderment for the vast universe opening out in front of their fascinated gaze. It is also undeniable that expanding knowledge could be considered by some, to be its own reward. What then, is at stake here, which is so vital as to engage the attention of some of the best mind of the West?
The main point at issue now, it has always been, is the freedom of man. All traditions, in their own fashion, have nurtured ideals of personal freedom, social justice and reverence for God. The shadow of nothingness hangs over all these ideals because ‘thinking’ itself is being replace or forestalled by statistics and computerized planning in every aspect of human life. The right to make decisions, good, bad or indifferent, is an inalienable prerogative. Without this freedom there can be no morality, no quest for justice on earth or hope for the supreme fulfillment of human life in self-realization. No political system or economic pressure has so much power to take away freedom from man, as the scientific plannings being used by modernized disciplines. Technical know-how is a-moral. A society guided by the latest techniques in necessarily secular. In the modern age, faith in God endures in spite of science and not because science subscribes to it.
We have now come to the main issue between philosophers and scientists. The philosophical implication of separating the regions of ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ are profound. For the scientist ‘to know’ is ‘to create’. In this connection a point must be raised against the arguments that the inventions of science are akin to the creations of artists. {See Above p. 35} It can be seen easily that technological inventions add new dimensions to our world, thus transforming all existing structures of meaning by which life is sustained in society. This element of total radicalization does not belong with the creative arts of music and painting. These creations do not change what they seek to understand. A piece of brilliant music, or a masterpiece may be copied a hundred times without effecting the pristine purity of the original work. Repetition, here is only celebration of the uniqueness of the first vision. The mystery of the dialogue between the artist and nature is preserved in this way, for succeeding generations. With scientific invitations, we can proceed only by way of discarding the obsolete. The former conquers time, the latter is defeated by time. The future is ever possible with the arts and humanities, whereas for the sciences it is already nothing because any thematisation of problems, here, opens the way to discovery of the solution. The future in principle belongs to the present given in the form of plannings and programmings. To say that all plans are tentative, subject to the pressures of as yet unknown factors, is not to deny the knowability in principle, of all that may happen.
For the philosopher, therefore, to know is not to make but to be in readiness to receive. Philosophical thinking may operate only between a seeking for knowledge and an experience of receiving form, the other, which may be called “a waiting upon’. Freedom may survive only in this twilight zone of “a waiting upon’. For the philosopher, questions are more important than their answers, because, in formulating a question, he precludes himself from providing the answer and yet the asking of the question is crucial since it is the only form of preparedness which may bring about a vision of Truth. Philosophical Truth cannot be created but only received, seen, realized of experienced as immediate apprehension.
The question is, in a technological society how should the mystery of this twilight zone be preserved so that, philosophical thinking may sustain the relevancy of self-enquiry? Philosophers, in the West are fully aware of their predicament. Hans Jonas writes:
In any case, the idea of making over Man is
no longer fantastic, nor interdicted by an
inviolable taboo. If and when that
technological revolution occurs, reflection on
what is humanly desirable and what should
determine the choice-on “the image of
man,” in short-becomes an imperative
more urgent than any ever inflicted on the
understanding of moral man. Philosophy, it
must be confessed, is sadly unprepared for this,
its first cosmic task. {Hans Jonas, “The Scientific and Technological Society,’ Philosophy Today, Issue on Toward a philosophy of Technology, Vol. XV, No, 2/4 Summer 1971, p. 98.}
The inadequacy of philosophy belongs with the will toward the changing atmosphere of automation. Philosophical thinking can be merely irrelevant, where cognition is deployed totally into channels of expeditious maneuverability. This is to say that Philosophical thinking cannot be legitimate mode of knowability.
So far, in India, we are not called upon to evaluate the potential of contemporary scientific knowledge. The terms ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ are not interchangeable. Western civilization is modern, but the East as yet, is only in the process of becoming Westernised. We must now examine our own understanding of the demands of contemporary times.
B. ‘Modernisation’ of Indian Thought:
In India any thematisation of concerns regarding our past, present or future is necessarily done in Western terms at present. This era of developing economy makes us look at ourselves as belonging to the third world. The technological milieu is not an outcome of our own traditions; it is a foreign element in our midst. Any degree of appropriation or interiorization will make us Westernized and not modern. According to some Indian thinkers, this is an advantage we have over the West. {Vedanta and Modern science : Correspondence between Sir Julian Huxley and Swami Ranganathananda on “The Message of the Upanishads” (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1971).} India is in a position to take the technical know-how and make use of it in its own way, without falling a prey to the evils which have stalked its advance in the West. We can learn from their mistakes and not commit them. {M. S. Iyengar, “Can we Transform into a Post-Industrial Society ?” The Futurists, ed. With an Introduction by Alvin Toffler (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 190-192.
(Mr. Iyengar at that time was Director, Regional Research Lab. Jorhat, India, Incharge of Developing Micro-Technology for Village-Scale Industrialization.)} To take this attitude is to subscribe to the view that technology is a neutral factor and means nothing more than a viable option for the poorer countries. Its main sphere of influence is the area of practical projects and its encroachment on other aspects of human life can be contained if such is desired. It is a means towards an end and need not dictate what values are to be cherished as far as our moral and religious behaviour is concerned. That, in India “modernisation’ in another name for Westernization is made clear by such statements as these:
Modernization consists of a composite set of
processes each entwined with a variety of
contextual meanings in which elements of
history, cultural structures, and existential
factors each assume boundary maintaining
functions…….The autonomy of moral values
over the instrumental values (Modernity) can,
therefore, be logically postulated at all stages
of modernization in all societies. {Yogendra Sing, “Historicity of Modernization,’ Tradition and Modernization, ed. S. k. Srivastava (Allahabad, India: Indian International Publications, 1976), pp.54, 67.}
From this definition of ‘modernization’ it can be assumed that we in India are not yet open to the real significance of technology. At a seminar on The Concept of Progress, the consensus of opinion veered round to the point that with proper checks on the forces of secularization, technology could be made useful for Indian conditions. It was left for a Westerner living in India to see with clear eyes the ambiguity latent in the idea which tries to hold together the concepts of “progress’ and the non-secular dimension of reverence. Arthur Osborne said that in Nineteenth-century Europe, man become homocentric rather than theocentric, and this was the age of progress for him. He added:
The same process is now taking place in the
east and the same results will follow………...It
will be strange indeed if the time comes when
the mechanized materialistic East begins to talk
about the mystic West: {Arthur Osborne, “The Concept of Progress,” Indian Philosophical Annual, Vol. III (University of Madras 1967), p. 13.}
The question that is being raised is, whether the technological inadequacy of India is only a matter of time-lag, or is there something of fundamental difference here; whether the technological gap between the East and the West will lesson as time goes on, and if so will the present thrust toward scientific advancement in the East meet with the same fate as it has done in the West. The writings coming out of contemporary India show no apprehension regarding the overpowering role of technology. The underlying thought seems to be that the tradition which has withstood many other conquests is eminently suited to the task of appropriating modernity and thereby transcending it. We shall examine this understanding on the part of Indian thinkers who seek thus to interpret the bases of the tradition in Western terminology. In such writings no indications of an inner conflict between modernity and the religious consciousness of India are to be detected. First, an attempt is made here to bring the quality of this unawareness into focus, so that it may be seen in the light of Upanishadic thought which has its own dimension of involvement in the world. To be westernized is not to be “modern’. A modern man is a man made aware of his predicament in a society which provides him with no clue for the understanding of his own state of existence in the world. This itself is precisely the category of thought which relates him to his environment.
The term “modernity” then, is being used in this book to mean the self-awareness of philosophical thought since the days that mechanization became a category of cognition. The question which should impinge itself upon the consciousness of people belonging to other traditions, at this point in time, is whether they fully understand the mode of this grasp on the world, and whether it is consonant with their own tradition, which, so far, has not know “the renunciation of the concept of knowledge as contemplation,” Knowledge in India has been nothing but the “product of the intuitions of solitaries” who have thought not only of man’s “societal co-existence” but also of the very essence of his being. {See above p. 45.} In order to bring out the nature of the difference between the two modes of thinking, a brief account of the Indian tradition is given below.
The separation between the changing world-order and that which remains hidden and unchanging, is very crucial to Indian thought. Everything which changes is a presentation of that which does not change. The whole range of Indian thought, it may be said, is an accounting for the unchanging which underlies the given changing order of existence. This idea of ‘separation’ pervades the ethos of India. A demand for discrimination between that which is of the nature of transience and its opposite is implied in this separation; and inevitably, one is urged to strive toward a progressive disengagement from involvements which are pleasing but ultimately unsatisfying in order that attention may focus on the veil of truth.
The unavoidable usage of negative terms in this context, unfortunately creates a wrong impression, but the reference here is to ontology and it is a legitimate way of calling attention to that essential discontinuity which precisely is the mode of relating to the ground of all existence. In the Upanishads, renunciation and the Bliss of fulfillment are held together in an unique unity. {Iśāvāsyamidam sarvam yatkimcajagatyām jagat tena tyaktena bhunjīthā māgŗdhah kasyasviddhanam. (know that) all this, whatever moves in this moving world, is enveloped by God. Therefore find enjoyment by renunciation. Do not covet what belongs to others. (Īśā. 1)}
It is usual to say that the main thrust of Upanishadic thought is toward establishing the unity of Brahman as the one ontological ground of all that there is. It would be appropriate to say that together with this an equally major effort can be detected toward engaging man’s attention to the enquiry into the reality of this unitive ground.
The sacred texts are considered indispensable to the enquiry; they awaken the questioning spirit. The enquiry into the ground of our bring does not follow naturally from man’s given in experience. Without the texts, there would be no indication of knowledge of any other thing than our experience in the world. The texts, therefore, are the sole indicators toward an enquiry into a region which is said to be of supreme significance for man.
The tradition does not primarily speak of the reality of the world and all that it means for a successful adjustment therein, because, this involvement is inescapable. The world is our only known sphere of activity, and there is here no need to underscore the obvious. It is man’s nature to take delight in the world and to feel all the emotions which keep him involved with his fellow man. The environment of nature is an extension of his field of concerns. In the tradition, the forest is an important as the city, but life in the city is a preparation for life in the forest.
Indian thought has seen no separation of religious mythology, and questionings into the factual nature of things. It has been preoccupied with keeping the possibility open for a more crucial discrimination. It is, therefore, not an accident that science did not arise in India. Science needs that focusing on the material world which was of limited use only for traditional thought. In India thinking was kept mobilized toward understanding the human condition within the parameters of rationality and morality. It is to be remembered here that time belongs with the world and therefore the viability of the quest for truth may always remain a living issue for man. That is to say, that the tradition is not a perpetuation of meaningless reiterations of aging principle. The tradition seeks to preserve the purity of the indicators toward a life which while being lived in this world may become capable of that blessedness which is the receiving of truth.
At this point in time of our world-history we do not have much choice in the matter of industrialization, but this is not to say that India can be technicised with no loss to her tradition; the very nature of technology precludes such an eventuality. If culture is the means by which is preserved a people’s grasp of the essence of the meaning of life then to try and hold together technology and Indian thought is to do less than justice to either the tradition or to technology.
The impact of the Western tradition was felt by India thought the medium of education in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. The well wishers of India, native-born, as well as foreigners worked toward bringing about an age of enlightenment to dispel “the darkness of ages”. Those who wished not to bring about changes in their tradition, did not know how to deal with the overwhelming forces of radicalizations of the time; they took refuge is an aggressive form of fundamentalism, which was not effective in stemming the tide.
In the field of academic philosophy, the encounter between Western thought and Eastern heritage, has not yielded any fruitful results. The attempts at reinterpreting Upanishadic teachings, in the light of Western philosophy have not inaugurated any living schools of thought which may guide the intellectual questioning of contemporary India.
Before we undertake an analysis of this situation, we need put the encounter of two different traditions in perspective. The next Chapter seeks to bring out the formative factors of contemporary philosophical thought in India.
A. The Meeting of Horizons:
Early in the nineteenth century, the philosophical thought of India found a world audience thought the series of Essays on Hindu Philosophy published in the proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society of England and Ireland, by H. T. Colebrooke during the years 1824-32. {Hegel in his Lectures on Indian Philosophy referred to these essays as his main source of information. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, tr. E. S. Haldane, (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), vol. I, pp. 125-147.} Other Indologists did pioneer work in translating and editing Sanskrit texts into European languages. {For example: Text of the Rg Veda became available to scholars with the publication of the Sacred Books of the East series by Max Mueller from Oxford (1849-1875).
The Bibliotheca Indica series was started by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1847. The Society had been established on January 1, 1784, under the Presidentship of William Jones (1746-1794), generally regarded as the founder of European Indology.} It has been said that the nineteenth century saw the “flowering of Oriental Scholarship” {J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India. The Harford Lamson Lectures of 1913, (published by Munshiram Manoharal, New Delhi, 1967), p. 2.} and it did indeed prove to be a period of widening horizons, not only for the West, but the East as well. Many Colleges imparting Western education to Indian students were established in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The three Universities at these places came into existence in 1857 with the avowed policy of promoting secular learning only, as a change from the previous frankly evangelical method of teaching. {Macaulay, the chief architect of the educational policy in India, wrote to his farther, ‘It is my firm belief that it our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence; and this will be effected without efforts to proselytize, without the smallest interference with religious liberty merely by the material operation of knowledge and reflection. Quoted by K. M. Panikkar, Hinduism and the West, (Chandigarh, Panjab University Publication Bureau. 1964), p.24.}
These Colleges and Universities became for Indian students the gateway to the wider would of Western civilization. The teachers who came from Scotland and England were greatly admired for their learning, simplicity and piety. Generations of young academicians cherished grateful memories of their pupilage with these kindly men who sought to inspire their students with their own ideals of education. {‘………The greatest academic influence on me,’ writes Haridas Bhattacharya, ‘came from the saintly Professor Henry Stephen who taught three generations of young men in Bengal Successively in the Duff College, the Scottish Churches College and the Calcutta University.’ Contemporary Indian Philosophy, eds, S. Radhakrishnan and J. H. Muirhead, (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., (1936), 3 rd impr4ession 1958), p. 68.
Many other contributors to the volume, express similar sentiments: A. K. Wadia mentions Fr. Devine of the St. Xavier’s High School and J. R. Cuthbert at Wilson College; V. Subrahmanya Iyer, who was taught at the Madras Christian College, writes, ‘I commenced my studies under Dr. Charles Cooper………….who kindled in me a passionate love for metaphysics.’ Ibid., p. 593.} Many students at this time were able to go to England and thus came in direct contact with eminent scholars Oxford and Cambridge, such as John Mctaggart (1866-1925), C. C. J. Webb, (b. 1865), A. S. Pringle-Pattison, (1856-1931), F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), H. H. Joachim (b. 1868), and James Ward (1843-1925). {G. C. Chatterji (p.129), S. N. Dasgupta (p.252), A. R. Wadia (p.624), etc. Contemporary Indian Philosophy, op. cit. Nearly all of them at one time or another came under the influence of neo-Hegelianism. Hiralal Haldar writes (p. 216), “The philosophical movement known as Neo-Hegelianism was in my student days gathering strength in Great Britain and I was one of the very few, not improbably the only one, who then felt its power in India.”}
The British University in the last years of the previous century, came under the influence of Idealism imported from Germany. The flowering of German philosophy on the insular soil of England was more of an enigma than its subsequent invasion of Indian Universities. It cannot be said that it was more congenital to the English mind than the utilitarianism it supplanted; neither had there been any opportunities for pursuing how “without adequate training in Kant, England acquired such a firm grasp of the new problems’, because, “it is not a matter of a few isolated thinkers, but a whole host’ and further, this movement was not imitative but “stamped unmistakably with the seal of the English intellect’. {A. Ruggiero, Modern Philosophy, (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1920); p. 261.} Rudolf Metz highlights four contributing factors which may have brought about this renaissance of Idealism in England:
(a) The prevalence of romantic literature pioneered by Coleridge and Carlyle. Carlyle’s writings were greatly influenced by German idealism.
(b) A few isolated works by individual philosophers (such as Hamilton and Ferrier) created the right atmosphere for bringing about a change.
(c) Theological interests were sustained by Hegel’s divinization of history at a time when evolutionists were to be contended with at home.
(d) Benjamin Jowett’ s (1817-93) careful husbanding of classical literature and his translations of Plato brought the idealistic tradition in the Greek heritage within the grasp of all English-speaking centers of learning.
{Rudolf Metz, A hundred Years of British Philosophy, (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.) p. 249. ff.}
Anglo–Hegelianism was frankly eschatological in nature. Max Mueller, then a new-comer to Oxford, (1846) expressed his great astonishment at the theological atmosphere prevailing in England at a time when Germany and France were adopting an historical approach to textual exegeses. {He writes, “I had been at a German University and the historical study of Christianity was to me as familiar as the study of Roman history. Professor whom I had looked up to as great authorities, implicitly to be trusted, such as Lotze and Weisse at Leipsic, Schelling and Michelet at Berlin,……….left me with the firm conviction that the Old and New Testament were historical books, and to be treated according to the critical principles as any other ancient books, particularly the Sacred Books of the East of which so little was then known….a belief that these books had been verbally communicated by the deity or that what seemed miraculous in them was to be accepted as historically real, simply because it was recorded in these sacred books, was to me a standpoint long left behind.” My Autobiography, (Delhi, Hind Pocket Books (P) Ltd., 1976), pp. 164-165.}
The British University at this time were engaged in holding together the demands of the new science, and the philosophical thoughts arising out of them, with their own heritage of an institutionalized religion. British philosophers felt themselves hedged in, on the one hand, by Darwinists who emphasized the animalism in man and, on the other, by Hume, who exclaims, “I am affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society has been expelled all human converse and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate………… .” This uncompromising skeptical spirit of David Hume still brooded over the philosophical world of the Universities. Kant, to a certain extent had dispelled this intellectual despair, but his expulsion of reverence from the cognitive structure was not fully acceptable to English philosophers.
The coming of Hegel opened a new dimension in the understanding of the fast changing world of the nineteenth century. Hegel was presented in a language which brought theology and naturalism together and Anglo-Hegelianism continued to be a movement toward such a synthesis. We may gauge the power of this synthesis from the following two statements, which were written not at the same time, but almost half a century apart:
Hegel’s views conciliate themselves admirably
with the revelation of the New Testament. {J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, (1865) p. 100.}
and—
I have never disguised it from myself that when
I speak of the ‘Absolute’ I mean by the world
Precisely that simple absolutely transcendent,
source of all things which the great Christian
scholastics call God. {A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, (7th ed., Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1924), p. xiii.}
The first quotation is from J. H. Stirling, who pioneered the study of Hegel in England and the second is from A. E. Taylor’s popular work on Metaphysics. Hegel convinced a generation of scholars that the Absolute synthesized within it Thouught and Being, Logos and Metaphysics, and therefore that ‘an unthinkable reality’ is a contradiction in terms. The identification of causal evolution with the deductive processes of logic led to the inexorable development of pulling together science, philosophy and religion. It was perhaps inevitable that his triadic eschatology in which were reconciled thought and reality, history and evolution determinism and the freedom of the world-spirit reaching full self-awareness in the Absolute Idea, should carry within it the seeds of its dissolution. The exclusive choices of Marx and Kierkegaard, writes Karl Loewith, “separates precisely what Hegel had unified.” {Karl Loewith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, tr., David E. Green, (New York, Doubleday and co. Inc., 1967), p. 135.} For Marx the choice to revolution was necessary for the making of history and for Kierkegaard the choice to existential despair which alone could lead to authentic living. Yet another note of dissension came from a new generation of philologists who attempted to divest history of its epic aspect, making it much less mysterious and much more similar to the present.” {Emile Brehier, Contemporary Philosophy, The History Philosophy, vol. VIII, tr. Wade Bashin. (The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 5.} They believed that philology also had a crucial role to play in the understanding of the world process.
England, due perhaps to its theological bias, remained relatively untouched by these reactions which were overtaking Hegelianism on the Continent. English scholars concerned themselves with the concrete ‘other’ of thought rather than its assimilation within thought. T. H. Green (1836-82) attempted to recover the Kantian notion of a synthetic unity of apperception from that of an ideal totality as postulated by Hegel, in which it had become one with its ‘other’ and hence was no longer transcendent. Green accepted the Hegelian position that the highest knowledge was mediated knowledge but did not in effect give up the Kantian thesis of an ultimate unity of apperception which as constitutive of nature and as eternal consciousness is both impersonal and universal. Green was appreciated in India as a critic of the dualism inherent in Kant. According to Green, man is primarily a knower; he is a self-conscious being—perhaps much more else but that at least, and that genuinely—conscious of himself always over against a not-self, which is co-existent and co-real and always simultaneous with self-consciousness.
F. H. Bradley’s ontological distinction between appearance and reality was studied eagerly in India and appreciated as an improvement upon Green’s idealistic position. In Bradley’s absolution anti-intellectualism had reached its zenith. Hegel’s position seemed to have been totally reversed. The unthinkable is a contradiction according to Hegel. Bradley states that reality is unapproachable by thought or rather, that thought is transmuted in entering the whole of reality. Every particular is an integral part of the whole. Knowledge, according to Bradley, is an immediate experience of the coherent whole. Fragmentation of this concrete universal in individual experience is the inescapable outcome of discursive reason. This uneasy partnership of coherence and immediacy was a philosophical problem of considerable interest and held the attention of Indian scholars for a long time. Bradley was hailed as a philosopher who could envisage the possibility of superseding a cognitive approach to the problem of reality.
It is an acknowledged fact that the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel was of primary importance for England and that Kant was viewed thought Hegelian spectacles. {R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, op. cit., p. 253.}Oxford and Cambridge imparted to Hegelianism a religious aura and made it peculiarly their own. The wholeness of the Universal was centrally quartered by the horizontal line of terrestrial existence and the vertical line of divine intervention, so that,
Within the circle of the Absolute, it is “the
dove descending”…that by its vertical decent
into and intersection with, the linear order
of times establishes the cross as at that centre
of all absoluteness. { Anne C. Bolgan, “The Philosophy of Bradley and the Mind and Art of Eliot”, English Literature and British Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971).}
All this was of great interest to Indian scholars. The rise and fall of Anglo-Hegelianism in all its phases continued to influence the philosophical thinking of India.
It is true that much of Kant and Hegel remained alien to Indians. The secularity inherent in the Hegelian system remained hidden in its British version and therefore, was not understood by its Indian inheritors who gave it a metaphysical colouring which could not and did not endure for long in India. The situation prevailing in India Universities was radically different from that of the British Universities. Indian Universities were innocent of any theological need to come to terms with theories of evolutions. For this reason, although Western philosophy came to India in the garb of neo-Hegelianism, it can be said that the major difference between Anglo-Hegelianism and Indian Hegelianism lay in the importance given to Kant rather than to Hegel in the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel.
Modern scholars tend to deprecate the flowering of neo-Hegelianism of Indian soil especially as Hegel had nothing but abuse and contempt for Indian philosophy, and because historically it remains a fact that Indian scholarship did not influence or add to the pool of English works on Kant and Hegel.
In order to understand the foundations of contemporary neo-Vedantism, it is necessary to enter into the philosophic mood of India at the beginning of the century. At this point in time it should be possible to gain a perspective on the situation obtaining at the Universities then the formulate an explanation for this strange phenomenon.
The outstanding students who were selected for higher studies at that time came from cultured families where they had received an adequate grounding in their own tradition. Many of them had the good fortune to study with Pandits who were active in their own sphere of Sanskrit learning. {The following scholars can be considered as exercising a formative influence on future teachers at Indian Universities : Mahamahopadhyaya Vamacharan Bhattacharya, MM. Ananta Krishna Shastri (Varanasi) MM. Kalivara Vedantavagisha (Calcutta, who edited and published the Brahma Sutra with Bhamti in 1887), MM. Lakshman Shastri Dravid, (who initiated a generation of dedicated scholars notably Jogendra N. Bagchi), MM Panchanan Takaratna (Varanasi), MM. Chandrakanta Tarkalankar (Calcutta, who delivered the Ist Sree Gopal Basu-Mullick Lectures), also Jagadguru Sri Shankaracharya of Sringeri. (From the biographical notes given in Contemporary Indian Philosophy, op. cit).}Due to this background in traditional philosophy, which in effect was their religion as well, they found nothing exciting in Christian theology, which was the first concern of missionary schools imparting the basic of Western education to Indian students.{ Even so it is true that Western influence had triggered off what has been called “the Indian Reformation Movement’ and ‘the Age of Renaissance.’ (D. S. Sarma: Hinduism Though the Ages, Bombay, Bharatiya Vidya Bhawam, 1956, p. 64.
The Reformists sought to jettison the Pauranic tradition as an exegesis of the Vedic Texts, while the fundamentalists adhered to it strictly. A few scholars continued to maintain the tradition of interpretative exegeses which was all the more remarkable because they were now doing it in an alien language which did not readily lend itself to the translation of Sanskrit terms.}
Their interest, however, was quickened by Kant and Hegel. Christianity held no special appeal for the scholarly Indian who shied away from even a hint of an exclusive claim to truth which for him was contrary to the spirit of philosophy; whereas they felt that they could easily enter into the metaphysical and epistemological concerns of like-minded philosophers. Epistemology had always played a crucial role in the formulation of Indian philosophical thought. The opponent’s view was important in the development of one’s own thesis. A high standard was maintained in the tradition regarding the fair apprehension and presentation of the critic’s point of view. {See the Preface to Sarva Darśan Samgraha: Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy, E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (Delhi, Cosmo Publications, 1976). They could, in the same strain, welcome a confrontation with a philosophical position which at once challenged then presuppositions of their tradition and yet, as it seemed to them, fall far short of the many insights which enriched it.
For Indian Philosophy, if one may generalize, the crux of the matter has always been to know the transcendent from within the dimension of the world; to grasp the unrelational through that which is relational, to thematise that which reveals itself as transcendent as well as immanent; in other words, to make possible the intelligibility of Pure Being, ‘beyond all duality and difference”.
Hegel, therefore, was perceived as a challenge, but Kant’s transcendental deduction of categories seemed at once close and yet removed from the heart of the problem. The limit set upon the categories by Kant was acceptable but not the unknowability of noumenon because the problem of the knowability of the unmediated knower-the ‘noumenon’ according to the Vedanta had long been debated in the Indian tradition. Thus they welcomed the Kantian epistemology as the meeting ground for a common enterprise. Pre-Kantian and post-Hegelian theology never acquired relevance in the Indian context; but Kant and Hegel were greeted as metaphysicians, the former as a kindred spirit and the latter as a challenge and both were treated as such. It was felt that an exchange of thoughts on this level was possible. K. C. Bhattacharya’s crucial article “The Concept of Philosophy” brings this out very clearly. He writes :
With regard to the knowability of the self
as a metaphysical entity Kant holds that the
self is a necessity of thought and is the object
of moral faith, but is not in-itself knowable.
My position is, on the one hand, that the self
is unthinkable and on the other that while
actually is not known…we have to admit the
possibility of knowing it without thinking….{ K. C. Bhattacharya: “The concept of Philosophy” (in Contemporary Indian philosophy, op. cit.) pp. 105-125.}
Other eminent scholars continued to write, pulling together such terms as seemed commensurable to them :
Vedantism sets it face against all forms of
ontological argument, the Rationalist’s device
of deriving existence from a specific concept-
Perfect Being (Descartes & others), or
from a system of concept-Reason (Hegel).
Existence is not conceivable; we can only intuit
it. If Hegel’s is a logic of ideas or concepts,
the
Vedanta’s is a logic of existence. {T. R. V. Murti, “The Two Definitions of
Brahman in the Advaita”. (K. C. Bhattacharya Memorial Volume, Amalner,
Indian institute of Philosophy, 1958),
pp. 135-150.}
From these reference it can be seen how Kant and Hegel were situated in the scheme of philosophical speculation in India. Other thinkers continued to compare and contrast both systems of thought, while developing their own thinking with regard to their own tradition.
B. The Beginning of
Comparative Studies.
The first outcome of this intellectual encounter took the form of a series of comparative studies. {Hiralal Haldar. Neo- Hegelianism, Health Cranston, 1927. D. M. Datta. The Chief Currents of contemporary Philosophy (European, American and Indian), Calcutta, Art Press, n. d.
R. V. Das. The Philosophy of Whitehead, James Clarke & Co., 1937.
U. C. Bhattacharya. “Space, Time and Brahma”, Jha Commemorative Volume, Poona Oriental Book Agency, 1937.}
Haridas Bhattacharya inaugurated at the Calcutta University, the prestigious Stephanos Nirmalendu Ghosh Lectures in Comparative Religion in 1933-34. (Published by the Calcutta University in 1938 entitled Foundation of living Faiths).} Swami Abhedananda, one of the first Indians to interpret Vedanta Philosophy for the West, writes that he was impressed by the lectures on Hindu Philosophy delivered by Pundit Sasadhar Takacudamani in 1883 at the Albert Hall, in which he dealt with the ancient Greek Philosophers as well as modern theories of evolution. {Contemporary Indian Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 49-50.} Studies in comparative philosophy continued to be the main concern of academicians for the greater part of the present century. Probably the first public acknowledgement of the demands of the time was the inauguration of the Sree Gopal Basu-Mallick Lectures on Vedanta Philosophy by Calcutta University in 1898. The aim was to state the relevance of Vedanta Philosophy in the fast changing world of the nineteenth century. The first speaker was the highly respected M. M. Chandrakanta Tarkalankar who devoted himself to this undertaking form five years between 1898 and 1905. Other speakers who addressed themselves to the task were variously required to indicate the place of Vedanta in the economy of Modern Western thought and to “estimate its value” {Pramatha Nath Mukhopadhyaya. Introduction to Vedanta Philosophy. (Lecture of 1927, published by the Book Co. Ltd., Calcutta, 1928).} or to speak on “the place occupied by the Vedanta in the Philosophical systems of the civilized world and of its merits as compared with Western Schools of Thought”. {S. K. Belvalkar. Vedanta Philosophy (Lecture of 1925, published by Bilvakunja Publishing House, Poona, 1929).
Other speakers in the Series are:
N. K. Datta. The Vedanta: Its Place as a System of Metaphysics (Lecture of 1926, Calcutta University, 1931).
R. D. Ranade. Vedanta, the Culmination of Indian Thought (Lecture of 1928).
S. K. Das. A Study of the Vedanta, (Lecture of 1929, Calcutta University, 1937).
Kokileshwar Bhattacharya Sree Gopal Basu-Mullick Lectures on the Vedanta (Lectures of 1930-31).}
At about this time{The Indian Philosophical Review was first Published from Baroda in July, 1917 under the joint editorship of A. G. Widgery and R. D. Ranade. This journal was discontinued after about four years. It was resuscitated again as the Journal of the Academy of Philosophy and Religion, an Institution Founded by Ranade in 1924, under the name of Review of Philosophy and Religion.
Vedanta Kesari was first Published in 1913 from Madras. The Journal of the Indian institute of philosophy, Amalner was inaugurated in January 1918.
The philosophic Quarterly was first published from Calcutta in April, 1925.
Kalyan Kalpataru in 1934 from Gorakhpur.} Some Journals were founded with the same ideals in mind. The Indian institute of Philosophy at Amalner (1916) became a centre for study and research in Vedanta Philosophy and a place where many eminent scholars developed their own philosophies.
From the writings of this period, it can be seen clearly that Indian philosophers saw themselves undertaking a double task: along with the appropriation of the best thoughts of the paramount quality of the Upanishadic heritage for the contemporary philosophical scene in India. They learnt to look at their own tradition objectively and thematise it in the language of Western metaphysics. Parallels were drawn and similarities emphasized with a view to establishing a common platform for philosophical debate. Pre-war writing abounds in such passages as these:
……….We might note the great resemblance
between the ancient metaphysical system of
India and the present metaphysical system of
The West. The absolute of Bradley has numer-
ous points of contact with the Advaitism of
Samkaracarya. Both suppose that the
Absolute is the only ultimate real. With both,
God is different from the Absolute…...{R. D. Rande, quoted by the author from an earlier paper, ‘Contemporary Indian Philosophy’ op cit., p. 545. Rande goes on to compare Ramanuja and James Ward and Mctaggart’ s non-theistic idealism with the Sāmkhya nirīśvaravāda.
Or
According to the Vedanta, Brahman is not only
the first but also the highest reality. According
to Alexander, the first and ultimate reality is
Space-Time, out of which eventually the
quality of deity will emerge. For the Vedanta,
Brahma is the beginning and the end of the
World - its Alpha and its Omega. But according
Alexander, Brahma, if that one could stand
for the highest reality, would only be the
unattained end of the world - its Omega, but not
its beginning which was only Space-Time. {U. C. Bhattacharya, “Space Time and Brahma”, Jha Commemorative Volume, (Poona, Oriental Book Agency, 1937), p. 83.}.
It remains a historical fact that the comparative method advocated by Indian philosophers found no echo in the Western world which at best remained indifferent to the entire issue. {The more recent phenomenon of “East-centricism, of the West operates at a level of, and in answer to, a quest for trans-Western universalism. This has been taken up for discussion in a later Chapter.} No Sustained acadmic interest in contemporary Indian thought was evinced by the thinkers of other countries. {There were rare exceptions like B. Faddegon”s The Vaisesika System, (Amsterdam: 1918) wherein he maintained that there was no fundamental difference between Eastern and Western systems of thought from the point of view of comparative study.} Looking back at the first encounter between these two disparate tradition we find them talking, to a great extent, at cross-purpose. Although individual scholars on both sides expressed their admiration of each other, even so there was no confluence of philosophic thought, which could contribute to a greater understanding of either system.
CHAPTER FIVE
A.
The Lack of Mutuality between Indian Thought and Western Philosophy.
In trying to understand the abysmal lack of communication between Eastern thought and Western philosophy, a few factors reveal themselves as possible contributing conditions. The phenomenon must be approached from both sides if we are to appreciate the attitude of twentieth century philosophy on India, toward their own tradition.
The severest encounter was with regard to eschatology. Open could say that the central theme of the Western tradition, after the advent of Christianity, is time, time is the arena of God’s providential action which we must reconcile with the conception of time as history made by man. The present is such now because of how the beginning was, and the future will be as the present is modified to become, which means that, that which was not before, can be made to happen in the future. A high sense of responsibility for processes occurring in time characterises every mode of philosophical thought in the West from the most severely pragmatic and utilitarian to the seemingly opposite idealistic extreme. For Western thinkers the language of the will had expressed some of the loftiest thoughts about the great future of humanity-and ‘humanity’ was the watch word of the nineteenth century. Throughout Europe, the freedom of man from bondage to institutionalized religion or to oppressive political control, was the main theme engaging the attention of philosophers. Since religion was inextricably bound with the history of Europe, they could not readily appreciate a separation of the two in another tradition. From their point of view philosophical statements emptied of all historical content were limited in cognitive value. Their objection was that logos seemed to be still embedded in mythos in India. {“No where in ancient Near Eastern thought do we find the emancipation of the logos from the mythos which characterises the development in Greece.”
Joachim Wach. Types of Religious Experience, (The University of Chicago Press, 1951, 5th Impression, 1972),p. 70.}
Europe scholars were thus repelled as well as fascinated by the heterogeneous conglomeration (as it looked to them) of ideas which was made available to them by Indian Pundits as well as by conscientious Indologists. Situated in their own tradition, the Western scholars who were trying, at that time to unravel the tangled skeins of Indian thought, could not appreciate the philosophic significances of the concept of time studiedly kept in abeyance with regard to metaphysical questions. A religion which had no eschatology could only be primitively animistic or anthropomorphic, or at best pantheistic, and pantheism in the West was not a viable philosophical position. {Marvin Farber. Basic Issues of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1968), p, 179 ff. (For a standard criticism of the pantheism of Vedanta, see Kirtikar, Studies in Vedanta (Bombay: 1924) Ch. ii).}
This basic misunderstanding gave rise to many criticisms of Indian thought. The severest criticism fro the West centred around the trivialization of the world as a sphere of human endeavour for the betterment of the future of mankind. The ever recurring theme of world-negative, in the texts created the indelible impression in the Western mind that Indian thought was pessimistic in the extreme. Describing dissolution of karma and final deliverance, Barth Writes :
The practical consequence of such a doctrine
as this can be only a morality of renunciation,
and to underrate, if not to scorn, every
very little mention of positive duties in
the Upanishads. The essential matter is to
stifle desire, and the ideal of the devout life
is that led by the Sannyasin………{A. Barth, The Religions of Indian, tr. Rev. J. Wood (Varanasi), (The Chowkhambha Sanskrit Series, Vol. XXX, 1963, first published, 1921), p. 79.}
Some Western scholars, very soon found reasons for this attitude of “complete quiescence” to be an inferior type of heredity, and the hot climate which indisposed “the organization for active exertion” and predisposed it toward contemplative life. {A. E. Gough The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian Metaphysics (London : 1882), p. 6.}
The tragedy of nineteenth century Indology lay in the fact that sympathetic European scholars were embarrassed by the very same concept which the Indian tradition put forward as its highest achievement in the philosophical understanding of the texts. In monism, was seen the failure of thought to rise to the concept of one God as creator and redeemer of mankind. The Theistic West which gives high regard to ethical considerations could admire only “a clear summit” {“Hinduism as religion will remain theistic with the tendency persisting to view all theories and forms as aspects of one eternal truth and substance, even though Hindu religion has never yet disclosed within itself a cloudless summit to which its many paths may lead……” The author concludes optimistically that Hinduism may still achieve this in future ! John C. Archer (Yale), “Hinduism”. The Great Religions of Modern World ed., E. J. Jurji (New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 89.} rising uncompromisingly above many cloudy pinnacles. It felt that where everything is possible nothing can be predicated, and this position can only lead to the worst kind of relativising of good and evil. A few grieved over what they considered to be an arrestment in the development of Vedic religion. They surmised that had the mythology of Varuna been pursued to its logical end, Hinduism could have purged itself of its idolatry :
….From these comparisons we see, how near
Varuna came to being a Rigvedic Yahweh,
“full of compassion and gracious, slow to
anger and plenteous in mercy” (Exodus
XXXIV-6). The great catastrophe of the
Babylonian Exile (586 B. C.) alone cured Israel
of polytheism and idolatry……{The authors regret that the promising start made in the Vedas came to nothing as Varuna subsequently dwindled into oblivion. The Religious Quest of India, eds. J. N. Farquhar and H. D. Griswold (Oxford University Press, 1923) pp. 350-335.}
The theistic West could not be expected to be patient with a tradition which countenanced on open-ended dialogue, lasting centuries, between the theism advocated by certain schools of thought and the Absolutism of Advaita. From the perspective of the tradition itself, however, such a debate was necessary in order to understand the central theme of the Upanishads. The best opinion, therefore, of Indian thought in the West at that time, was that the Sanskritic tradition had at times reached sublime heights of spirituality, as had other classical or pagan cultures, but that it had essentially remained untouched by the dimension of charity and thus unaware that “the Grace of God is still available to our undeserving,” {Charles Morgan, “The word Serenity”, The Writer and his world (London : Macmillan & Co. Ltd.,), p. 44.
On the Indian side, because of their own traditional background, scholars were led to read such trends of thought into neo-Hegelianism or rather neo-Kantianism, which could not be sustained for long. The secularism inherent in German idealism was congenial neither to British theologians nor to Indian thinkers; yet the former attempted a compromise and the latter sought to build upon it as a means of communication in the realm of philosophical inquiry. The region of the sacred had proved to be divisive and recalcitrant material for philosophers to work on. Metaphysical speculations, on the other hand, were opening up undreamt of horizons so that every thinker could share in the same perspective and speak in a communicable language or so they thought.
The term ‘metaphysics’ in used here in the sense in which Kant was understood to have used it, that is to say, the region of the a priori which lies beyond the pale of any part of the constitutionality of human understanding. {Immarunel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by Norman Kemp Smith. Preface to Second Edition B XXX, ff.} The Critique of Pure Reason was understood in India to be a refutation of skepticism and not of metaphysics. The noumenon was the antithesis of the phenomenal series and could not be brought into the series. It remains the Unknown which spurs the intellect to greater efforts. Kant had said that the ideas of reason were regulative and therefore, the quest for the Unknown (but not the Unknowable) was not closed. The efforts toward circumventing Kant’s agnosticism (which British idealism had re-affirmed) seemed a legitimate occupation for philosophers; Kant had confined contradiction to the antinomies of reason. This was congenial to Indian thought. Hegel, on the other hand, needed to be denied because he broke open the antinomies and posited the contradiction within the heart of reality itself.
What the Indian thinkers failed to see, in which they were by no means alone, was overcoming of metaphysics which ay concealed in the core of German idealism. Once Kant had transferred ontology to the region of the will from the realm of knowability, the beginning of the end of metaphysics was stated. The well-known restrictions which Kant explained, conditioned reason, in order that a faith beyond reason may prevail, only created a gap which was filled by the will of man complying to the ‘categorical imperative’ of an ethical life, making faith superfluous. The results of the tremendous supremacy given to human will can be assessed by a review of the Kantian studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West. The West in a way, lived out the full explication of all that lay implicit in Kent’s critical philosophy and considered him to be the father of modern liberalism. As Kantian studies began to draw their own logical conclusions, Indian scholars came to a parting of the ways because the destruction of metaphysics, had neither been foreseen nor could be appropriated by them. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and also Existentialism and Phenomenology which followed in the wake of Kant and Hegel, were faithfully included in course of studied, but cannot be said to have acquired relevance in the Indian context.
B.
Neo-Vedanta as a Dimension of Apologetics.
A parting of the ways came about in more ways than one. The utter lack of understanding evinced in the West of the best thoughts of India, awakened the awareness of a closer connection between tradition and philosophy than had been so far allowed should have given rise to a new dimension in the understanding of their own text not in the context of Western metaphysics but in the context of the Westernization which was taking place. One cannot say that this happened in India. Instead what look place was in a sense a second phase in the development of comparative studies brought about by the realization that Indian philosophy was being misinterpreted by its Western exponents. S. Radhakrishnan pioneered the attitude of polemical defense which had the merit of bringing Eastern thought to the notice of Western Universities in an unprecedented manner. {C. E. M. Joad. Counter Attack from the East, A Philosophy of Radhakrishnan (London : George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1938). In this book the author described the immense popularity of Radhakrishnan’s lectures in England and how the halls where he delivered them were crowed to overflowing.} His vigorous self-analysis also commended itself to the younger generation of Indian scholars who without leaving the anchorage of the tradition wished to move with the times. Writing in the History of Philosophy, Eastern and Western, sponsored by Radhakrishnan as the Vice-President of India, P. T. Raju and K. A. Hakim maintained that :
India now is not merely reviving but reflecting
upon and re-interpreting its past, its religion,
its philosophy, its social and ethical forms;
some of which it is discarding, some it is
explaining away, and the rest it is reshaping.
It is thus showing its great potentialities for
progress, which is ultimately due to the plastic
nature of its spiritual culture capable of
change and adaptation. This is what Macnicol
calls the ‘omnivorous capacity’ of Hinduism,
which has eluded the grasp of most of its
Western critics, who try to identify it with
some of its external and accidental forms,
without understanding its essential spirituality
which has assumed divergent external forms
to suit changing circumstance. Many writes,
both historians and philosophers wonder how
Indian culture could have survived impacts,
attacks, conflicts and convulsions of more
than four thousand years. The reason lies in
the adaptable nature of its essentially plastic
Spiritual basis. {History of Philosophy, Eastern & Western, eds. S. Radhakrishnan, et al., (1952), 1967, pp. 526-545, p. 526.}
The quotation given at length above is fairly representative of what has come to stay as the philosophic mood of the era. A will to cut away the deadwood of the tree of tradition and allow it to flourish again in the changed milieu of contemporary India is evident from the writings which profess a hard core of spiritual grounding together with an ongoing concern for the needs of the time. {The Proceeding of the All-Indian Philosophical Congress reflect this will toward a re-orientation. Almost every speech and every paper situates itself in the framework of Western thought, the rare exception being K. C. Bhattacharya’s Presidential Address to the Ninth Congress, “Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms”, 1933-34, pp. 1-27.}
From the vantage point of the decades of the sixties and seventies, one can clearly see that although India did not consciously tread the path of the West’s experience of anguish and alienation foretold by Nietzsche, she did, by contrast, begin to take note of her own spiritual heritage and sought to incorporate it in her understanding of these increasingly secular times. Metaphysics came closer to religion. Many books promoting “The Contemporary Thought of India” included such figures as Swami Vivekananda, Shri Ramakrishna, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Ravindra Natha Tagore, etc., who had not previously affected the academic life of the Universities. {P. Nagaraga Rao, Contemporary Indian Philosophy (Bombay: Bharatiya Bhawan, 1970). (The author writes about Raja Rammohun Roy, Shri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, B. G. Tilak, R. Tagor, J. Nehru, S. Radhakrishnan, Vinoba Bhave and The Gita.)
Benoy Gopal Ray’s Contemporary Indian Philosophers (Allahabad, Kitabistan, 1947), mentions Raja Rammohun Roy, D. Tagore, K. C. Sen, Sri Ramakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Dayananda, R. Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo.
S. Radhakrishnan’s Great Indians (New Delhi: Kalyani Paperbacks, 1973) includes Maharishi Raman, Sri Paramhansa, Mahatma Gandhi and Ravindranath Tagore.} This could also be a response to the need for a new spiritual dimension in the West. We come across the phenomenon of a more broad-based enunciation of what philosophy is in India synchronizing with a loss of faith in its own tradition and religious philosophy in the West.
India’s conscious emulation of the British tradition, on the other hand, remained unbroken in the Universities. Without a Moore and a Russell to lend meaning to the over throw of idealism, Indian Universities loyally followed the trends set by them and engaged in the problem of linguistic analysis and logical positivism. In England, a logical sequence can be seen in the progression of thought from neo-Hegelianism, through Bradley to Moore and Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayer; but with Indian scholars it was more a matter of taste and opportunity to study these philosophers rather than a logical development of thought, thus isolating them in a coterie which necessarily subsisted on itself without affecting the mainstream of philosophical enterprise either at home or abroad. This is so, not because of any serious lack in the quality of Indian scholarship but because linguistic problems are also rooted in the language which is the voice of tradition and thus are not easily appropriated by philosophers used to a different language-structure. {See Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, ed., K. Satchidananda Murty and K. Ramakrishna Rao. (Waltair: Andhra University Press, 1971). (The editors offer this book as the sequel to the contemporary Indian Philosophy published in 1936 by S. Radhakrishnan and J. H. Muirhead.) The articles in this volume are on Structuralism, Phenomenology Scientific humanism, Axionotics and other current topics in philosophy. The single article on Advaita Vedanta is by N. V. Banerji, who writes:
“In a way it (the Advaita Vedanta) dismisses the world of nature; and as already indicated, it admits the expansion of the ghost in the machine to the extent of infinity in the name of reaching absolute Truth (Brahman). In consequence science is lost to its antithesis nescience and man with all his problem disappears into a state where he is a stranger to name and form (nāma-rūpa) and indeed non-human {p. 35. (“Foundation of Advaita Vedanta”, pp. 23-36).}
So it would not be grossly mistaken to say that, in general the twentieth century in India is a period marked by a singular lack of authentic philosophic enterprise. Various thinkers admit this with regret, as for example, the group of eminent scholars, writing on the occasion of the beginning of a new Journal, acknowledged that “our contributions to Philosophy in recent times, barring a very few exceptions, have not at all been very significant”. {Editorial, Jijñāsā: The Journal of the Indian Academy of Philosophy (Calcutta: July 1961), vol. I, no. 1, p. 1 ed. By N. V. Banerji, Kalidas Bhattacharya, J. N. Chubb, R. Das, T. M. P. Mahadevan, T. R. V. Murti and N. A. Nikam. (The Academy was in existence for about seven years. It was started in order to fulfill the need of contributing to the contemporary world of philosophical thinking. There is a preponderance of article on Nyaya, Logic, The meaning of Meaning.(vol. II, 1963) and critical expositions of the philosophies of the West, e.g., de Chardin Spinoza, Rousseau, Husserl and Wittgenstein. (vol. IV & V, 1966, 1967). The fact of its discontinuity is self-explanatory.}
The philosophical scene of modern India despite such avowals continues to be in disarray to say the least. The rich tradition of hermeneutical exegeses of Sanskrit philosophical texts remains with Sanskrit scholars without finding a significant place in the intellectual life of the people still being trained by a secularized system of education which is kept studiedly secular for political reason. No appropriate methodology has been evolved in this country for understanding the ancient heritage. The historical or philological methods in use are applied with no clear methodological circumspection yielding the same type of result as were obtained by European Indologists a century ago. The tragic overtone of this misadventure in self-understanding lies in the fact that, in effect, Indian scholars are to this day trying to answer the charges laid against their tradition by Indologists of the nineteenth century. All these charge are summarized in Radhakrishnan’s masterly parse:
It (Hinduism) is intellectually incoherent and
ethically unsound. {“The Spirit of man”, Contemporary Indian Philosophy, op. cit., p. 475. Resent publications from Indian Universities on subjects of philosophy and religion generally reflect this trend and a scrutiny of doctoral dissertations specifically from the Departments of Sanskrit and Philosophy recent decades will support the critique made here.}
The charge of intellectual incoherence arose largely out of unfamiliarity with the methodology of the treatises in Sanskrit and the meeting of it was a matter of making available to the English speaking world the details of the philosophical literature in its breadth and depth. Such a necessity for highlighting the epistemological core of Vedanta thought was felt keenly and many scholars, notably A. C. Mukerji of the Allahabad University, made it their life’s work to state it in a language not lacking in cognitive value for the understanding of those not belonging to the tradition. A. C. Mukerji and other like minded men, coming across the writings of the Western philosophers, saw no reason to fear that their rendering of their own thoughts would be considered less than adequate in Western Universities. It was his conviction that the epistemological base of Advaita philosophy would make it comprehensible to philosophers belonging to different traditions of other languages.
The second charge, viz., ethical unsoundness, was based upon a basic problem. Any philosophy extolling a separation of ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ must necessarily lead to a trivializing of the world and thus a lessening of the sense of involvement in it. The West could not but hold in abhorrence an ideal of renunciation in which they saw a syndrome of apathy, moral ineptitude and defeatism. Indian scholars with one voice contested this interpretation by illustrating that the world was not negated in Vedanta philosophy but only denied ontological priority. Kokileshvar Bhattacharya, of the Calcutta University, was one of the first Neo-Vedantins who made a systematic attempt to give a realistic interpretation to Advaita philosophy to contain such criticisms against the Vedanta Philosophy. This reversal of the classical theory of māyā made a great impact on other scholars, notably S. Radhakrishnan.
Thus we see that Neo-Vedanta came into existence almost as an apology for and a defense of classical Vedanta. Nowhere is to be found a voice asking for a disengagement of issues at this stage. All eminent scholars of the time set themselves to the task of interpreting Vedanta in Western terminology. A. C. Mukerji writes,
By Neo-Vedantism we mean here to character-
ize an important tendency in Indian thought
which has arisen for the attempt to re-interpret
Sankara’s absolute monism in the light of
modern idealistic or absolutist thought. It
consists essentially in so interpreting Sankara’s
thought as to make it less obnoxious to the
charge that Sankara’s absolutism is vitiated by
the fallacy of bare identity. {A. C. Mukerji, Self, thought and Reality (Allahabad: The Juvenile Press, 1933) p. 388.}
Thus we see that the necessity of defending Vedanta against the attack of Indologists who were interpreting it to the West brought into existence the school of thought known as Neo-Vedanta. The two major charges which implied other minor ones, were that Indian philosophy was akin to mysticism and that it was devoid of an ethical foundation, the best minds of the time became preoccupied with the task of setting aside these criticisms. It is apparent that they felt the need for a reevaluation of Vedanta in the light of the demands of reason and morality as stated by the West.
Chapter Six and Seven are devoted to detailed analyses of Neo-Vedantic presentations by A. C. Mukerji and Kokileshwar Bhattacharya. The former was reputed to have given a cogent rationalistic basis to Vedanta and the latter a very plausible realistic one. These Scholars although not as well known as for example, Radhakrishnan are nevertheless important as pioneering a new school of philosophy for contemporary India. A study of their writings is very rewarding because we may see now in perspective very clearly, that the freedom (mokşa)-oriented philosophy of Advaita was eclipsed under a vein of apologetics which added nothing to the traditional mode of understanding this school of thought. In trying to present Vedanta to the West in a form which would be acceptable to it, the best type of the scholarly mind in India was tempted into following a path which tragically lead nowhere, because the classical description of Brahman as Sat (Reality), Cit (Consciousness) and Ānanda (Bliss) was fragmented here. There were other such exegeses on Consciousness and Reality but no attempt to bring in Bliss as rounding off the soteriology of Vedanta. This step in self-forgetfulness was never retraced by Indian scholars.
Intuitions
as a Category of thought in Vedanta: A. C. Mukerji
Intuitions as a Category of thought in Vedanta: A. C. Mukerji {The following abbreviations are used in this Chapter for citing from the writings of A. C. Mukerji ;
Bl “British Idealism”, History of Philosophy, Eastern and Western, Vol. II, ed. S.
Radhakrishnan et al. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953) pp. 299-316.
CM “The Crux of Monism”, The Philosophical, Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1965, pp, 1-14.
HP “Human Personality,” Human Personality,” Presidential Address: The Twenty-Sixth
Indian Philosophical Congress Poona, 1951.
Idealistic Trends, “Idealistic Trends of Contemporary India,” The Philosophical Quarterly,
Vol. 33, No.2, 1960, pp. 111-12.
N of S The nature of Self, (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1938), 1943.
Some Aspects, “Some Aspect of the Absolutism of Shankaracharya (a comparison between
Shankara and Hegel)” The University of Allahabad Studies Vol. IV, 1928, pp. 375-429.}
S’S Theory, “Shankara’s Theory of Consciousness,” The University of Allahabad Studies,
Vol. XIII 1937, pp. 43-59.
STR Self, Thought and Reality (Allahabad: The Juvenile Press, 1933, 1957).
The U & PN “The Unconditioned and Pure Nothing,” The University of Allahabad Studies,
Vol. XXVII, 1951, pp. 1-21.}
A.C. Mukerji’s sensitivity to what was taking place in the academic field in India, is very apparent in his writings. Like many other men of his time and position, he was vulnerable to the numerous unthinking evaluations of Indian thought and yet he did not allow this to affect his openness to the Philosophical insights of men of other countries. {“I am fully aware of the general attitude of scorn and contempt, of distrust and discouragement, that has brought discredit upon the contemporary India thinkers from within and outside India ………” HP p. 1.} He had very deep appreciation of his own tradition which he sought to express in the contemporary language of academic philosophy. His main interests centred round the problem of the Self. He wrote:
In India specially where life and philosophy
were never separated from each other, the
attainment of the ultimate Purpose of
Existence was made conditional on a right
solution of this supreme problem, while all
other philosophical discussions owed their
value to the right they could throw on the
nature of self and the method of self-know-
ledge. {N of S, p. 5.}
A. C. Mukerji believed further that a critical appraisal of Vedanta philosophy was required for the modern age rather than a continuation of the tradition of exegeses. {Indian philosophy has only succeeded in rousing antiquarian interest, and, even when admired, the admiration is almost like what is excited by the mummies in a museum. Yet, like most of the Indian systems, Samkara’s analysis of experience if approached in the critical rather than the exegetic spirit, would throw a flood of light on some of the perennial issues of epistemology and metaphysics……..” N of S. p. viii (Preface to the 2nd edition, 1943).}
He was impatient of the ‘so called lovers of” the ancient indigenous wisdom of the forest sages “who deplored modern rendering of this wisdom” and thought that “(they) should be made aware of the similar insights of others outside their country,” {The U & PN, p. 8.}
It was his conviction that inspiration could be drawn from all such thinkers of the past, who had grappled with the problem of the Self. A modern reconstruction of the problem, as far as he was concerned, could not fail to take into account the contributions of past thinkers, Eastern, as well as Western. “I am not one of those” he wrote, “who believes that Indian Philosophy contain wisdom which is unsurpassed and unsurpassable.” {CM, p.1.}
On account of this independent approach to Advaita philosophy,,, it becomes rather difficult to define A. C. Mukerji’s philosophical standpoint because, firstly, although he did not object to the term ‘idealist’, {“Now idealism, as we understand it and shall try to defend here, is the belief or doctrine according to which thought is the medium of the self-expression of Reality; or, to put it from the other side, Reality is such as must necessarily express itself through the ideal or ideals that are organic to the knower’s intellectual equipment which may be called thought or reason.” STR, p. 35.} His critique of idealistic trends, Eastern as well as Western, remained very sustained over a period of more than forty years. Secondly, his most distinguishing contribution to the philosophy of contemporary India can be said to be his vindication of intuition as indispensable to knowledge. It is therefore, perhaps better to say that he followed a rather solitary course, going neither with the traditionalists, nor with those neo-Vedantins, who sought to give the kind of new image to Advaita philosophy which could be more in keeping with the realistic trends of the time. {STR, p.371.}
A. C. Mukerji’s distinctly polemical style of writing is without doubt the outcome of the demands of his age. He was caught up between two different types of contemporary interpretation of the Vedanta, and neither was acceptable to him. He could not agree with those, who following the lead of Paul Deussen understood Vedanta, in the light of neo-Kantianism; {“The Advaita Absolute, it is generally believed, is something unknowable and inconceivable, and falls entirely beyond the ambit of ordinary experience, and so far it is supposed to be analogous to the ‘thing-in itself’ of Kant. This agnostic interpretation of Samkra was started by no less an authority than Paul Deussen who did so much for the spread and appreciation of the Advaita speculations, and whose work on the Upanishads and the Advaita Vedanta are justly regarded as pioneer works in the field of Indian philosophy……Dr. S. N. Dasgupta remarks that ‘if we look at Greek philosophy in Parmenides and Plato, or at modern philosophy in Kant, we find the same tendency towards glorifying one unspeakable entity as the Reality or the Essence. N of S. pp. 370-371. Quote from S. N. Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy Vol. I, p. 42.} and he was totally out of sympathy with such Indian scholars who attempted, what to him, amounted to reconciliation with criticisms. { A. C. Mukerji refers to Radhakrishnan’s early views regarding māyā in Advaita. Some Aspects pp. 420-423. Also to Kokileshvar Bhattacharya’s realistic interpretation of Vedanta. STR, P. 371.}
A. The Aim and Method of A. c. Mukerji’s Philosophy
:
The things that he desired most was the development of a common platform where philosophical problems could be discussed with understanding and mutual benefit. At one stage of his philosophical development, he wrote with some optimism :
The days have certainly gone when a country
could profitable limit itself within its geogra-
phical frontiers even in the matter of philoso-
phical speculations. We have all to realize that
the physical boundaries and welded the nations
into one concrete whole in which every culture
has made and is still capable of making valuable
contribution. {Idealistic Trends, p. 11.}
This optimism, however, gradually gave way in the face of the total indifference to Indian thought he met with in his professional career. He came to feel almost a despair regarding philosophical understanding amongst reasonable man of disparate cultures. He has given expression to this awareness of isolation as far as Indian philosophy is concerned in one of his later papers. “The Crux of Monism”. {“The Crux of Monism,” Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 38, No.2 1965, pp. 1-14.}
He had also came to realize that he was pleading the cause of philosophical thought in a world which was fast becoming responsive only to anti-intellectualisms. He kept in touch wit European thought and kept his mind open to the new trends of Existentialism and Phenomenology. {“University, Genuine Versus Suppositious”, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4, 1966. And “The Empirical Legacy of British Idealism,” The Journal of the Indian Academy of Philosophy, Vol. V, 1966.}
This is reflected in his later writings which show an increasing awareness of the impossibility of the task he had set himself, namely, the establishment of a common pool of philosophical knowledge for the East and the west. It must be understood very clearly, however that he had not at any time advocated the comparative method in Philosophy. He was always very conscious of the dangers of facile comparisons between Eastern thought and Western philosophy. He wrote as early as in 1928 :
If he want to profit by thinking modern problems
of European philosophy in India terms, without
misrepresentation of either and yet with a consi-
derable clarification of both methods of thought,
we must give up the practice of finding Kant and
Hegel, for instance, in the Upanishads; there are
misrepresentations which do not clarify but con-
found problems……...The problems of epistemo-
logy and the methods of proof which came to
prominence with Kant and Hegel, was evolved
under the pressure of circumstance radically
different from any that could exist in India. { Some Aspects, p. 379.}
This opinion remained unchanged throughout his career and he continued to express his doubts regarding attempts at comparative studies. {Idealistic Trends, pp. 113-114 (See his criticisms of P. N. Srivastava and P.T. Raju).} It may seem surprising that A.C. Mukerji should have depreciated the comparative method, when he himself constantly drew parallels from the writings of Kant., Bradley, T. H. Green, and others, to illustrate various points of his own rendering of monistic thought. This seeming inconsistency, one may observe, is not quite un-amenable to an explanation. He thought he detected in the history of Western philosophy, which had reached its high-water mark, according to him, in the philosophy of Kant, the same quest for a knowledge of the Self (albeit not consciously) which was the activating principle for Indian philosophy. {N of S, p. 328} What he attempted to do was to look at the history of Western metaphysics from the perspective peculiar to Vedanta philosophy, which, obviously was not how Western philosophy understood itself. It was his conviction that many thinkers of the West in pursuing the demands of coherent thought had come close to the awareness of the non-relational Self; but this position according to him, had never come to be stabilized as it were, due to an initial distrust of the “Unknown” which was supposed to be identical with “Unknowable” and Hegel’s insistence that all meaning was mediated. It was his modest ambition to make explicit this implication in Western thought. In T. H. Green’s “unconditioned conscious principle” he saw a shadow of the concept of Self as described in Indian texts. {Ibid., p. 323.} Similarly, according to him Caird by admitting that the correlativity of the object and subject is a correlativity for the subject, pointed to the over-reaching Self beyond this duality. {N of S, p.332.} He interpreted the thoughts of Haldane also in this manner. {Ibid., p. 326.} It must not be supposed however that A. C. Mukerji was arguing for parallelism or a convergence of the two trends of thought. He was careful to point out the divergences inherent in either system. He wrote:
Problems of philosophy, it is important to
realize, are intimately connected with the spirit
of the age and the intellectual tradition of a
nation. {Some Aspects, p. 376.}
He also would not have subscribe to the claims of a Perennial Philosophy which according to him would have belonged more naturally to the region of mysticism. So he used the comparative method (with the above proviso in mind) because he did believe in “the essential identity of dialectical processes in different words of thought.” {Ibid., p. 376.} He did not doubt the unitary character of our contemporary world and on the Indian side pleaded for the recognition of the epistemology of Vedanta as epistemology in its own right. He took great pain to establish that it was neither a brand of agnosticism nor mysticism {Ibid., p. 377.} but that it was perfectly in accord with the demands of coherent thinking which would repay the study of contemplative minds. He did not doubt that knowledge of Vedanta philosophy could enrich the intellectual life of the West, just as Western metaphysics had stimulated the thinking of the East. He was aiming at reciprocity and mutual understanding, which he felt was justified under the circumstances. He wrote.
The object of comparative study in philosophy,
we believe, is to discover the dialectic
movements of universal thought; but this will
remain a far-off dream or a mere pious wish till
the different interpretations are dragged out of
their subjective seclusion in the enjoyment of an
oracular prestige {A reference, no doubt, to Hegel.}
into the region of objective criticism…….what is
wanted is a spirit of cooperation……..{Some Aspects, p. 375.}
His task as understood by himself, therefore, was twofold : firstly to creatively interpret the history of Western metaphysics as developing toward an uncovering of the Self as the ultimate knower and secondly, to interpret the methodology of the Vedanta in accordance with the demands of rational thought alone. He envisaged his enterprise as the lying bare of what lay implicit in Western as well as Eastern thought. The self as ultimate knower lay concealed in Western philosophical thought; similarly the crucial role of reason in India speculations was overlaid by constant reference to the sacred texts. The thematising of both possibilities, A. C. Mukerji felt could not but create a commensurable language adequate for an exchange of philosophical thought. When his task is thus understood the parallelisms with which his writings abound and which are disconcerting in their range and profusion {As, for example: William James and the Mādhyamikā philosophers. N of S., pp. 121 ff.
Ramanuja and Pringle-Pattison. Ibid., p.148.
Samkara, Kant, Green and Suresvara on Memory. Ibid, p. 209, etc.} begin to acquire some meaning and significance. His aim was to acquaint the Western reader with concepts in Eastern thought. He was in effect trying to follow a methodology which proceeded from the familiar to the less familiar. He did not wish to minimize the historical context of any of the thinkers, but only to highlight the insights of great philosophic minds so that a greater light may be thrown on the problem of Self-knowledge. If the aim of philosophy is to establish the ultimate, with the help of relational knowledge then all efforts toward it, he felt could not but be mutually profitable.
In the following pages, I shall attempt an account of his basic position regarding the lying of a secure epistemological foundation for a theory of the Self. {STR, p. 6.} Firstly, I shall summarize his evaluation of the Kantian position and then state his understanding of the Advaita philosophy.
B. A.C. Mukerji’s Understanding of the Critical
Philosophy:
A. C. Mukerji attached the greatest importance to the history of Western philosophy, especially the movement of thought from Hume to Kant. This epitomized for him a definitive answer to every kind of inductive procedure which sought to objectify the Self in order to explain the knowledge-situation. Hume’s critique of skepticism and Kant’s resolution of it, in his opinion, had established the irrepressible character of Self as knower. {STR, p. 20.} The naturalistic, empirical psychological or other realistic revivals of his day, he considered to be pale imitations of Hume who had touched the nadir of the matter, as it were, by reducing the Self to a series of impressions and causation to belief in the conjunction of events, Hume had developed to the full the methodology, according to him of arbitrary abstraction which did not do justice to the unitary character of our knowing process. It was his opinion that Hume in the West, had brought to a head the implications of all such theories which did not subscribe to the a priori nature of consciousness. A. C. Mukerji wrote:
His (Hume’s) method is everywhere the same.
He picks out the momentary aspects of the
concrete reality, considers them apart from
each other, and emphasizes them in their
obstruct character to such an extent as to
reduce their relation and unity into mere
illusion or words without meaning. Hence
his injunction that if in philosophy a word
in used without meaning, the best course to
expose it is to ask for the impression from
which the idea has been derived,. Nominalism,
solipsism, individualism, and scepticism,
which are so characteristic of Hume’s works
are but the natural results of this original
abstraction.{STR, pp. 16-22 Quoting Hume from Treatise, Sec. V, p. 222.}
According to A. C. Mukerji, all contemporary anti-idealistic tendencies derived their original inspiration (consciously or not) from Hume. All forms of presentationism which decentralized the knowing Self were variations of the basic Humean position. He maintained that nothing new was being said which was not to be found directly or by implication in Hume.{“The semblance of advance which they are generally supposed to have made is due to our not realizing the exact nature of Kant’s answer to Hume, the consequence being a repetition of the Humean fallacy,” STR, p. 13} To him it seemed amazing that, with the Critique of Pure Reason, staring them in the face, as it were, contemporary writers could hark back to imitations of Hume at best, because, nobody in the West in his opinion could improve upon Hume as a realist and a sceptic. He wrote:
The general impression that Hume’s was a
sensationalistic philosophy and that Kant
laid bare the fallacy of the philosophy of
abstract feeling has had its disastrous
consequence. Unconscious of the deeper
foundation of empiricism, and interpreting
Kant’s criticism as a mere intellectual retort
to sensationalistic exaggeration, contemporary
thinkers have fallen victim to the same realistic
dogma which Hume thought it beyond his power
to abandon and which Kant found it beyond his
power to accept.{STR, p. 15.}
Kant had pointed out that connections obtaining between atomic existence, entered into their intrinsic nature and were not external to them; “that each existence possessed a being not in its Self-seclusion or unrelatedness but in its Self-transcendence or relatedness to existence beyond itself,” {STR, p. 25.}
Kant had clearly distinguished the subject-object relation from all inter-objective relations. The subject is the ultimate presupposition of every object of knowledge. The spontaneity of Self-consciousness is established as a unity by the multiplicity of object which otherwise would be just chaos. The data of experience is sufficient to establish the a priori givenness of the Self as the knowing subject. The late appearance of Self-consciousness in a knowledge situation cannot take away form its logical priority. Self-consciousness is not a matter of temporal relation between one stage of development and another. {N of S, p. 56.} The truth is that no description can be made intelligible except in terms of these necessary principles of thought, i. e. categories. What he wished to stress here was (as Kant had pointed out) that there can be no comprehensible, recognizable or acceptable account of the presentations of facts of conscious knowledge without presupposing an extra-sensuous “unity of apperception”. Following Kant he agrees that there can be no knowledge without conceptual constructs, even if they are indefinite or obscure.
Kant’s account of the transcendental conditions of experience, must form, according to A. C. Mukerji, the only necessary conclusion of any theory of knowledge which begins with the separation of a subject and an object of knowledge. All genetic theories regarding the concepts of knowledge, therefore, should be considered refuted by Kant’s famous transcendental deduction of the categories. He totally endorsed the view that the categories are those constitutive principle of experience which necessarily make-up the frame work of human knowledge. {Some Aspects, p. 398.}
It must be clear that A. C. Mukerji continued to believe in the ultimately rational nature of man, despite all psychological, realistic and existential denouncements (of his day) to the country. He did not seek to avoid these challenges but devoted many pages to detailed analyses in refutation of all theories which sought thus to “decentralize” the Self from its position of the inescapable ultimate knower in any knowledge situation. His appreciation of the trends of his age are reflected in these words:
Our age in spite of its love of Catholicism and
humanitarianism is in many respects essentially
individualistic………. In politics, it leads to the
theory of “natural right’, which essentially
undermines the foundation of political
obligation; in ethics, it leads to individualistic
hedonism which ultimately dissolves morality
into selfish pursuit of pleasure; in religion it
leads to pietism which spurns all creeds and
insists on a non-ecclesiastical or private form
of religion; and finally, in philosophy, it leads
to skepticism and distrust of reason, thus
over-throwing the ultimate principle of
knowledge and experience. {STR, p. 11.}
He was also very conscious that these tendencies would not remain peculiar to the West for long. To him, the overthrow of the primary nature of thinking spelt a disaster could not be maximized because it would ultimately affect which the concept of human freedom. He wrote :
The only difference between the disaster which
is awaiting us in the near future and that of
an earlier age appears to be this that while
the latter affected Europe alone, the effects of
the present ‘Aufklarung’ are likely to be
coextensive with the world. {STR, p. 10.}
A. C. Mukerji, therefore quite openly subscribed to the so-called ‘Ego-centric Paradox’ and wrote that ego centricity was inescapable for men who must think their way through all that might befall them.{“Through man has, like every other thing of the world, a particular origin and history of his own, yet there is a sense in which all the barriers of time and space break down for him in so far as he is connected cognitively with the world as a whole which evidently includes and goes beyond the limited period and history of his earthly existence. In this sense, through historical through and through, he is the possessor of all eternity and of all reality.” N of S., p. 6.} His arguments against all experimental and inductive theories regarding the Self can be summarized in these words : All such theories must bring the Self forward as an object of study and interpretation. The Self must be substantiated in order to be studied. In other words the genesis of self-consciousness was post-experiential. Experience disclosed a subject and object and the awareness of the self as subject constituted self-consciousness. What was missed here was the fact, in his opinion, that self-consciousness was also a unity of thought, without which nothing would become intelligible. He wrote :
When, for instance, knowledge is reduced to a
peculiar characteristic of the total process from
stimulus to reaction, or when the self is
described as the causal nexus among a series of
events, it is entirely forgotten that the stimulus,
the reaction or the events are intelligible only
in so far as his own relation to them is not
reducible to any of the relations that may
be obtained between the stimulus and the reaction,
and in so far as he himself is not the causal
nexus of events. {N of S, p. 13.}
A. C. Mukerji till the last remained convinced that a fair analysis of the knowledge-situation could not leave any reasonable man under any doubts as to the “presence in man of an unconditioned conscious principle that militates against the basic assumptions of naturalistic explanations.” The inescapable priority of thought, according to him, rendered futile all anti-intellectual trends which were beginning to gain currency in his time. They, at the very least, must satisfy the condition of conceivability. For this all inter-objective relations must be viewed as differing from the object-subject relationship. A series of particulars could not be resolved into knowledge of and about something which was not known to a knower.
So far according to A. C. Mukerji, one could easily employ the critical philosophy in refuting subjectivistic analyses of the self but thereafter a question could be raised whether the unity of apperception was conscious of its own identity or not; in other words, self-consciousness must presuppose a consciousness which was foundational and which could never be objectified. Kant, however, did not raise this point and so post-Kantian philosophy veered away in different directions which according to A. C. Mukerji did not quite do justice to his thought in this matter. The problem can be stated in these words as understood by A. C. Mukerji: If the unity of apperception was to remain irrevocably correlated to the objects of knowledge then nothing beyond an irreducible polarity had been established; if it was said that self-identity was beyond all categories then the first step towards agnosticism at best or infinite regress at worst was taken. Either consequence, that is, self-consciousness as a mediated unity, or as an unmediated thing-in-itself according to A.C. Mukerji, was gratuitous and need not follow from the Kantian position.
A. C. Mukerji interpreted Kant’s statement that unity of consciousness was not the category of unity to mean that he was here indicating the presence of a foundational awareness not exhausted in the self-consciousness of “I think.” {Idealistic Trends, p. 117.} It is of course a matter of common knowledge that Kant did not do more than state the unity as a possibility. A. C. Mukerji chose to see it, as the presupposition of a ground for self-identity. It was his endeavour to show that this region of possibility in Kant was the point of greatest convergence as well as divergence from Vedanta philosophy. It was also the only point of such convergence, because no other philosopher in the West, according to him, had so clearly come close to the positing of the transcendental Self which was beyond the categories of thought. As interpreted by A. C. Mukerji, Kant’s greatest contribution lay in the establishment of the possibility of the unconditioned. Kant’s successor’s, according to him, instead of developing this aspect of the critical philosophy proceeded in directions which set at naught the real insight of the philosophers. He pin-pointed the problem of Self-identity in this way: the problem would seem to arise from the attempt to hold together the knowability here of all categories; otherwise the supreme subject would at once become objectified, abandoning its foundational character.
The main reason for the transformation of the Kantian position, as is well known, lay in the Hegelian criticism of abstract identity. In the opinion of A. C. Mukerji, therefore, Hegel stood as the greatest contrast. {In this respect A. C. Mukerji differed from other Indian scholars who were influenced by the Hegelian philosophy in their enunciation of the Vedanta philosophy.} from the Indian position of ‘knowing’ the unmediated ground of all knowing. {“The relation between Hegel and Shankara in respect of their philosophical views, it has been our endeavour to make clear, is one of irreconcilable opposition.” Some Aspects, p. 420.} According to Hegel, he wrote, pure being is “the isolation of an abstraction which result from Being and Nothing being placed out of touch with each other………and to speak of a thing which is essentially inconceivable, is for him an indirect admission that it is not within the universe of reality,” {Ibid., p. 412.}
It will not be perhaps quite improper to say that Hegel’s legacy to the history of metaphysics is the dictum that “the essentially inconceivable is absolutely non-existent, for that which cannot stand as the subject of a significant proposition is a mere naught or void, and so when we indulge in the agnostic’s talks about the Real, we only amuse ourselves with empty words,” {Ibid., p. 413. it was the aim of A. C. Mukerji to highlight Hegel’s total rejection of an unmediated pure being in order to suggest to his colleagues that any attempts at reconciliation as, for example, the theory of a restored unity, would be futile. Ibid., pp. 420-23.}
In order to clarify A. C. Mukerji position, it may be said that he agreed with Kant that the ultimate knower was beyond all relational categories but disagreed with what became a logical corollary to the Kantian position that such a knower could only be a thing-in itself and therefore at best an agnostic’s enigma. Agnosticism, according to A. C. Mukerji, was an unacceptable philosophical position because it set limits to thought and left open every kind of possibility for mysticism. { C M, p. 3.} A. C. Mukerji was very emphatic in his rejection of agnosticism and the mysticism which may follow in its wake. He wrote : “…………..a complete discontinuity between the knowable and the unknowable the thinkable and the unthinkable, is an impossible and unprofitable contrivance……...” {U & P N, p. 5.}
“The Role of Reasoning in Advaita Philosophy” {this is the title of a paper contributed to The Allahabad University Studies, Vol. XII, 1936, pp. 117-129.} In view of the fact agnosticism and mysticism are more naturally associated with Indian thought, A. C. Mukerji’s main aim was precisely to prepare the ground for an exposition of the place of reason in Advaita philosophy.
According to A. C. Mukerji, the most significant contribution of Indian epistemology was to the effect that “the unmediated is not in every case, an abstraction”, {C M, p. 8.} or rather, in one unique case, it is the ultimate reality. For him, the peculiarity of Upanishadic thought consisted in its offer of a “reasoned solution of an irrational problem”. {C M, p. 2.} He saw reasoned understanding as the inescapable propaedeutic toward the final vision of self-realization. He formulated the problem of Upanishadic thought in these words :
The problem of the Upanishads is…..of establishing
by means of reasoning of reasoning that which is
yet taken to be beyond the processes of
reasoning. How
can three be
reasoned know-
ledge of the supra-rational principle ? How is
philosophy of the unconditioned possible ?
The answer to this apparently paradoxical
question constitutes the Upanishadic contri-
bution of the world. {C M, p. 2.}
A. C. Mukerji saw the problem of epistemology as an attempt at establishing the ground of the possibility of all knowledge without polarizing it into a subject-object relationalship; to envisage a pure consciousness which is beyond self-consciousness. His understanding of the cognitive situation is mainly derived from an interpretative analysis of the following Upanishadic text : {N of S, p. 24.}
Yenedam
sarvam vijānati tam kena vijānīyāt;
Vijñātāram
are kena vijānīyāt.
Br. II. 4-14; III. 8. 11.
(who can know that, be which everything is known;
My dear, how should the Knower be known?)
This text, he held it to be the crux of the matter. The role of epistemology was to establish the cogency of the all-knowing, unknowable Self, a unity by which diversity was repelled and yet was made possible . The entire thrust of the Advaita epistemology, according to A. C. Mukerji, was directed toward establishing the foundational character of consciousness which was indirectly envisaged by the metaphysics ‘I’ or subject. The self, therefore, occupied a pivotal place “in as much as all objects owe their meaning and significance to the relations in which they stand to the Self that essentially is consciousness”. {.N of S, p.120.} Further, “the Self is consciousness,” {Ibid., p. 271.} so that the question of the bifurcation and yet undeniable {ibid., p. 270.} because it was the ultimate pre-supposition of all knowable objects. {ibid., p. 271.} A. C. Mukerji quoting from Samkaracarya’s commentary on Chhāndogya-Upanişad VIII, 12.5., wrote: The Self…….is not an agent of the activity of knowledge; on the country, it is essentially knowledge, knowledge, that is, is its very essence.” {ibid., p. 232.} he continues :
This whole passage, when literally translated,
would run as follow : The self’s agency of
knowledge is its mere existence, and not its
activity; just as the Sun’s agency of revelation
is its mere existence, and not a function. {ibid., p. 232.}
A. C. Mukerji emphasized the centrality of consciousness as the most important point of Advaita epistemology Consciousness was the prius of reality in as much as there could be no object of knowledge which remained unrelated to it. Quoting from the commentary of Samkaracarya on Praśñopişad VI. 2., he wrote that changes in the objects do not preclude the fact of an unchanging consciousness and even, that something is not known cannot be proved in the absence of knowledge. He cited the following passages : ‘None can prove something that is not known, and the attempt to prove it would be as absurd as to maintain that there is no eye though from is apprehended,’ Further, ‘Even when something is supposed to be non-existent, this very non-existent cannot be proved in the absence of knowledge.’{S, s Theory, pp. 44-45.}
The presence of an all-encompassing consciousness must, therefore, be carefully distinguished from the order of the known. The crux of monism was to hold together the centralitiy of consciousness together with its totally unobjectifiable nature. Referring to Samkaracarya’s commentary on Kenopanişad 12, A. C. Mukerji brought the two characteristics together and emphasized that they must always remain so. He wrote:
It is from this stand-point the Self is also
Describe as the Sākşi which witnesses all
objects
and all changes in the objects, it is sarva
pratyayadarśī and citsākşisvarūpamātra………
This is
excellently expressed by
Sureśvara
(Naişkarmyasiddhi IV. 3) when he remarks that
the self and the not-self are established in the
world through perception and other means of
knowledge but the not-self is in every case
established only on the presupposition of the
existence of the self. {S’s Theory, p. 46.}
A. C. Mukerji followed the lead of Samkaracarya in order to establish the cogency of the unobjectifiable Self, the supreme reality which was the ground of all knowledge. There was a continuity between coherent thought and its presupposition which was not an “other” but the very heart of the matter. The foundational reality, therefore, inseparable from thinking which flowed from it, could not be appended at the other end of the explanation. That which made all explanations possible, that itself could not be made the object of explanation. He wrote:
A Reality literally beyond all thought and
speech as the critics of agnosticism have
repeatedly urged, may be anything you please,
and therefore, nothing at all…………..It is not
through bifurcating the world into the rational
and superrational or the intellectual and the
ultra-intellectual that a philosophy of the
unconditioned can find a secure basis for its
construction………..{The U & PN, pp. 2-3.}
The ground of all knowledge was not related to the order of the known, as the objects were related to each other, {‘The unity of the whole is not dissipated or destructed through its manifestation in the parts. On the country, their plurality or internal difference is preserved through and on account of the unity of the whole.’ The U & PN, p. 12.} and therefore could not be brought under the jurisdiction of discursive thought (buddhi) which according to Samkaracarya was the category hiding the tripartite division of ‘knower, known and knowledge’. Knowledge was not a matter of comprehension between two entities, it was rather the unity within which inter-objective relations became meaningful.
Now the question which naturally arises here is how may discursive thinking overreach itself to disclose the ground on which it stands? A. C. Mukerji followed Samkaracarya’s commentary on Brahma Sūtra 1. 1. 12 and Chhāndogya Upanişad VII. 1. 3. {N of S, pp. 337-38.} to elucidate the method of adhyāropāpavāda of Vedanta literature. He wrote:
This method of aiding the discursive under-
standing to form a tolerably clear idea of the
unconditioned principle is known in the
Advaita literature as the method of adhyāropā
pavāda or that of figurative superimposition,
followed by subsequent negation. { N of S, p. 338.}
Samkaracarya gave the example of a king’s invisible presence, indicated by his visible insignia; so may the presence of the Self be indicated by attributing functions to it as ‘knowing’ etc. Only in the sense of ‘as if ’ {Ibid., p. 338.} The “knowing” is not really a function of the Self. The knowing by transforming itself into a discriminatory process may, by the negative method, become an indicator to the actual presence of the Self. The ‘knowledge” of self is an intuitive realization, rather than a matter of discursive reasoning.
Thought, for Samkaracarya, according to A. C. Mukerji is not an organ of Truth but is the indispensable and necessary generative condition of the ultimate intuition and consequently indispensable as a discipline which sets limits to itself. {Some Aspect, p. 389.}
It will not be out of place here, to cite, somewhat at length A. C. Mukerji’s own words as to what he considered to be the real core of the difference between Western philosophy and Upanishadic thought:
The conclusion then appears to be inevitable
that the real strength of the orthodox systems
of philosophy in general and that of Vedantism
in particular lies in certain types of
intuitional experiences which furnish the actual
foundation of knowledge and belief. And
here we come upon the most deep-lying
contrast between Indian philosophy and that
aspect of Western speculation which, inaugu-
rated by the anti-scholastic respect for reason
as the Supreme court of appeal in matters of
knowledge crystallized into the epistemological
doctrine of Kant, and Hegel and all other
subsequent philosophers of the West. Judged
from this standpoint, we must candidly admit
that the appeal to the Vedas does involve a
reference, to an extra-philosophical standard.
Of course, every man is free to define philo-
sophy in his own way, and we should not be
denied the right of so conceiving philosophy
as to place intuitional experience in the very
centre of our metaphysical adventures. But
then we must be careful not to impair the
centrality of these experience by the desire to
find for them a place in a rational scheme of
the universe. {Some Aspects, pp. 383-94.}
These words, in effect, summarize his own philosophical position. He was not attempting a rational justification of Advaita thought. He was trying to establish a continuity of thought between reason and intuition, and here he saw the possibility of mutual help deriving from Eastern and Western traditions. The West has a long history of the emergence of the Noumenon as the unknowable, culminating in Kant. The East according to him began with the givenness of the Unknown but not the unknowable, Noumenon which it subsequently sought to appropriate by reasoned understanding and contemplative intuition. He believed that the passage from self-consciousness to Consciousness, (which as he understood the matter, in the West was broken by agnosticism or blocked by phenomenology) was kept open in the Indian tradition by the Vedantic position of monism or complete identity of knowledge and experience. He demonstrated in detail, in his various writings that this position could be defended against criticism from the points of view which advocated some form or other of identity-in difference. Briefly, he saw Samkaracarya’s position as a reasoned justification of intuition as a necessary and unavoidable step toward the experience of Self-Knowledge. He believed that the epistemological foundation of idealistic thought in the West could open the way to a greater understanding of the Upanishadic heritage as a system of thought and not merely as a piece of mythological literature.
Re-Interpreting Samkara {It is to be noted that this author uses the shortened ‘Samkara’ rather than Samkaracarya. Since this name is used by very often, I have used it in this variation for this Chapter to avoid confusion.
Some of the works of Bhattacharya have been abbreviated in this and in the following Chapter as follows:
An Intro—an Introduction to Vedanta Philosophy (Calcutta: n. d.)
Divine Purpose—‘Divine Purpose in Samkara-Vedanta”, (Calcutta Oriental Journal, Vol. II, no. 9. 1935), pp. 205-214.
Interpretation— ‘An
Interpretation of Samkara’s Doctrine of Māyā, K. B. Pathak
Commemoration
Volume (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1934) pp. 159-165.
MSV—‘Maya in Samkara-Vedanta, its objectivity’, (Poona Oriental Society Journal, no. 37, 1939) pp.
336-342.
SVL—Sree Gopal Basu-Mallick Lectures (1930-31), (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1932).
Vidya—‘Vidya and Avidya’, (Calcutta Oriental Journal, Vol. I no. 12, 1934) pp. 351-358.
WSP—‘Was Samkara a
Pantheist?’ (Review of Philosophy and
Religion, Vol. III no., 1 1932) pp.
1-12.}
Kokileshwar Bhattacharya came to the study of Vedanta through Sanskrit. He belonged to an earlier generation of scholars and was one of those who felt called upon to face squarely the challenge to his own tradition. He sets forth the aim of his works in the clearest words:
Most of the writers on Samkara-Vedanta have
dwelt almost exclusively upon the traditional
illusory aspect and have tended to relegate its
realistic aspect to the background. I have
found it necessary to refuse to aspect the
traditional ascetic interpretation alone to the
entire neglect and inexcusable exclusion of the
realistic; because it seemed to me that the
realistic side was very prominent in Samkara’s
own mind and I have conceived it to be my
duty to try to present a concise account of
his philosophy in its realistic and objective
truthfulness with constant reference to the
original
sources. {SBL, p. 5.}
Bhattacharya states that his aim is to refute the charge that in the Advaita system, the world is treated as illusory, as mere appearance, {An Intro., p. 86.} that Brahma(n) is a ‘difference less pantheistic empty void ’; that it has nothing to contribute toward conduct of life in human society.
{Ibid., p. 127.} Elsewhere in this context he refers to Paul Deussen’ s opinion that Samkara’s exegesis of the following well-known text led to the theory of illusionism. ‘Just as, my dear by one clod of clay all that is made of clay becomes known, the modifications being only a name arising from speech while the truth is that it is just clay.’ (Chh. VI. 1. 4). He writes:
This at least is Deussen’ s interpretation and
he sees here in this celebrated passage the
germ of illusion-theory which has become the
basis through its adoption by Samkara, of the
orthodox Vedanta system. {Interpretation, p. 159.}
Bhattacharya agrees with Deussen in this opinion but seeks to show that Samkara’s writings on this Text as well as other like passages can be construed differently thereby doing greater justice to the acharya’s philosophy. According to him the reason for inaccuracy in modern interpretations of the great māyā-vāda, both in India as well as in Europe, lies in imperfect knowledge of the writings of Samkara. {SBL, p. 7.} He writes:
It
has also been held by some that the Māyā-
Vādaas is found in the Samkara System was
the creation of his own fertile brain and it
has no sanction and support in the most
ancient
Upanishads and in the Brahma-Sutra. {Ibid., p.3.}
it is the aim of Bhattacharya to establish the fact that although it is true that the idea of the ideality of the world could be derived from Samkara’s writings, careful scrutiny would reveal it not to be his intended meaning-“It is most erroneous to suppose as has been done my many,” he says, “that in order to retain the unity of Brahman, Samkara has abolished the world as false.” {Ibid., p. 198 ff.} It would be equally unfair to ascribe pantheism to his philosophy as has been done by many critics. {WSP. Pp. 2-4. (The quotations are not documented by the author.) } He quotes Dr. Galloway:
Even the distinction of worshipper and
worshipped dwindles and fades, till Hindu
thinker recognized that he was one with
All, with Brahman. The very appearance of
difference is explained away, it is the product
of illusion. The Vedanta is a strict Pantheism.
Also, Dr. Flint,
Along with he affirmation of an impersonal
God , there is the negative of the reality of
the worlds-both of sense and consciousness.
In other words, the issue of this kind of
pantheism is a-cosmism. But pantheism is
just as likely to issue in theism.
It becomes clear form reading such introductory remarks to his writings that his interpretation of Vedanta took shape out of the need to answer these criticisms. All exegeses written in his time, it may be said, were in fact answers to the charges of pantheism on the one hand and world-negation on the other. It is interesting to note in this context that Indian authors seemed to have accepted the criticisms as valid, since they chose to defend Vedanta. There is, for example, no attempt at understanding the implications of Vedanta in the light of these criticisms which perhaps could have yielded more fruitful results.
Brahman as ultimate reality.
The supreme reality of the Vedanta philosophy, writes Bhattacharya {All reference to Samkara’s works are incorporated in the text. Bhattacharya’s own writings are document in footnotes.} is Brahman which is the essence of all conscious and unconscious phenomena and “it abides independently of and transcends, the relation of subject and object.” (Br. Up. Bh. 5. 5. 2 ). {SBL, p. 9.}
Although
the ground of these manifestations, it remains unchanged and unaffected by the
change. The technical term employed for Brahman by Vedantins is ‘nirguņa’. Nirguņa.
According to Bhattacharya (lit. quality-less) does not mean an abstraction from
which naturally three could be no passage to the actual world of many. {Ibid.,
p. 15.} “Nirguņa means that anything phenomenal does not constitutively
belong to Brahma (n)”. (Gita Bh.
13.2). {Ibid., p. 9.}
Bhattacharya writes that Brahman, far from being an abstraction has a nature (svarūpa) which is Being-Consciousness-Bliss (Saccidānanda). These are not attributes but in their inseparable identity they are Brahman itself. Being of Brahman is presupposed in all forms of existence and we ourselves are witnesses to existence which is conscious and hence Being is identical with consciousness, (Mun. Up. Bh. 2.2.10). {Ibid., pp. 9-10.} According to Samkara, “consciousness which has no existence cannot be admitted”. (V.S. Bh. 3.2.21.). {Ibid., p. 10.} Bliss is inseparable from consciousness and existence and eternally belongs with them (Br. Up. Svabhāva of Brahman. {Ibid., p. 12, (emphasis in text). Brahman is also stated to be the highest good (kalyāņatama) in its positive aspect. {Vidya, p. 356.}.
The world, then, according to Bhattacharya, is the manifestation of this nature of Brahman. Brahman as Being, Consciousness and Bliss is present continuously through all transformations of names and forms in the world. Bhattacharya writes, that according to Samkara:
The ether the like are accompanied by the
being of Brahman (n) which is its charact-
eristic nature; and as knowledge is an accom-
paniment of all
objects everywhere, everything has knowledge
as its swarūpa (nature); further
The Bliss Divine is present behind all the
joys connected with the mutually exclusive
objects of the world.
brahmaņo’pi sattālakşaņah svabhāvah ākāśādişu
anuvartamāno
dŗśyate (V. S. Bh. 2. 1.6).
cinmātrānugamat
sarvatra citsvarūpata gamyate
(Br. Up. Bh. 2. 4. 7. ).
ānandena vyāvŗtta
vişayabuddhigamya ānandah
anugantum śakyte, (Samkarabhāşya on Tait. II.7.). {Ibid., p. 13.}
Brahman, in order to realize its own nature creates the world which is moving from the lowest to the highest stages. It is not that the world is logically deduced from Brahman, writes Bhattacharya, but it is to be taken as it is. (yathāprāpta. Br. Up. Bh. 2. 1. 20. ). He quotes the following passage to illustrate his point:
Already in existence as the Self is before
Creation, it causes itself to undergo
Modifications, as the Self of the modification.
pūrvasiddho’pihi sannātmā vīśeşeņa,
vikārātmanā parināmayamāsa
ātmānamiti.
( V. S. Bh. 1.4. 26.) {An Intro., p. 123.}
He writes further that this movement has become possible for the world because behind each stage, the eternal principle (pūrvasiddhah ātmā) is present, which is gradually expressing itself in and through these stages or changes. Brahman is not remote to the world but the very ground on which it stands. Creation moreover, is continuous. It is perpetually going on since its goal of diversification to this day is not exhausted. (nādyāpi bahubhāvanāmprayojanam nivŗttam, Chh. Up. Bh. VI. 3.2.) {Ibid., p. 17.}
Brahman,
according to him, therefore, is the material as well as efficient cause of the
world. (V. S. Bh. 1-4. 23-26).
{Ibid., pp. 4-5.}It cannot be separated from its manifestation, that is, the
world. It will be seen at once that a realistic diversification of Brahman may
not be distinguishable from pantheism. Bhattacharya is aware of this
possibility and refers to Samkara’s own refutation of the philosophy of one Vŗttikāra mentioned by him in his
commentaries, and who seems to have advocated a pantheistic position. The unity
that Samkara maintains is not affected by the multiplicity or it does not
become a composite in creation. The relation is not that of extension in space
or succession in time. The essential nature of Brahman as One only does not
change with its manifestations of the world. Bhattacharya quotes from the
following sources in support of this contention: “The one Brahman cannot be
support of many qualities.” (Br. Up. Bh. 2. 1. 14); “The One Reality cannot
become diversified.” (Samkarabhasya
on Tait. Bh. 1. 12.), etc.
Bhattacharya concludes, therefore, that the absurdity of holding together unity and multiplicity cannot arise. {WSP, p. 7.}. The One remains self-sufficient, independent and ever retains its own uniform nature. It takes upon itself the various forms of nāma-rūpa (name and form) to reveal the inexhaustible treasure which is its nature. {Ibid., p. 4. the author quotes the gloss of Anandagiri, ‘na hi srşta sŗaş : tasyaiva tena tena rūpeņa māyāvīvat avasthānam.’ Br. Up. Bh. 1.3.5. (There is no difference between the creation and the creator: (the creator) abides like a magician assuming other forms).}. Quoting form Br. Bh.2.1.20 in support of his statement, Bhattacharya writes:
His unity does not become composite by the
production of nāma-rūpa, like a tree composed
of its branches, flowers, etc., and a cloth dyed
with variegated colours. Then Brahman would
not have been described as of uniform nature. {ibid., p. 9. }.
The unique character of this relationship is brought out by Bhattacharya in his writings on vital energy (prāña) as the world-seed of creation. Brahman, in its undifferentiated stage is called unmanifest (avyakta) wherein resides the primordial energy in its latent forms as the seed of vital energy (prāna-bīja) and in this form it is also called māya. He writes:
Samkara informs us that the prāñabija exists
in pralaya dissolution of this world, and also
in suşupti deep slumber of finite self, in un-
developed or avyākŗta condition…..(pr. Up.
Bh. VI. 1.) {SBL, p. 7.}.
The vital energy (prāņa-śakti) in the unmanifest form is synonymous with māya. Brahman is the substrate for māya which cannot be explained without reference to the “Being of Brahman whose energy it is” (V. S. Bh. 1.4.3).{Ibid., p.71.}.The seed as vital energy remains undifferentiated but distinct in Brahman; it distributes itself gradually, at the time of creation, into three forms, the gross, the subtle and the causal. He quotes from Upadeśasāhasrī in corroboration of this statement:
That one seed, called Māyā, evolve into the
three states which come one after another again
Māya, through one only and immutable, appears
to be many like reflections of the sun in water.
(XVII. 27) { Upadeśasāhasrī. Tr. by Swami Jagadananda (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973).}.
There is thus, according to Bhattacharya a relation of identity between latent vital energy (avyākŗta-prāņa) and Brahman; the former is submerged in the latter, but not obliterated. {SBL, p. 73.} in all its successive form but in identity with Brahman. {Ibid., p. 73.}
Prāņa in its manifest from is called the sūtra (thread), because “it passes through all, it sustains all, it sustains all, as a piece of thread passes through and contains in it, all the flowers of a garland,” {Ibid., p. 75. The Text quoted is from Br. Up. Bh. 5. 5. 1.} Prāņa, then may be understood as the creative energy of Brahman. It has no distinct nature of its own and therefore cannot be linked to the Pradhāna or material principle of the Samkhya philosophy.{Ibid., p. 80.} All creative difference begin with the vibrations initiated in this vital energy:
It is the
vibration of Prāņa which is contained
in the Cosmic Fire etc., and in the Psychic
Speech etc. (Br. Up. Bh. I. 5. 23.) {Ibid., p. 81.}
The creation of the world, therefore, is a fulfillment of the purpose of Brahman itself. According to Bhattacharya, Samkara has stressed the fact that the created world—the emerging changes-always carry with them the idea of a purpose as yet unrealized. (V. S. Bh. 4.3.14). The creation, therefore, has a final purpose which is to realize the purpose of Brahman (V. S. Bh. 1. 1. 1.).{An Intro., p. 41.}Bhattacharya writes, citing from the Gīta-Bhāşya 13. 17 as well.
‘Jñeyameva jrātam sat
jñānaphalamiti
jñānagamyamucyate. Brahman is the phala,
i.e., the final End. Hence it is that in Vedanta,
it is called as paryantam i. e., the lost or final
End.
‘avagati
paryantam jñānam, nātahparam kimcit
jñātavyamasti’. When this end is realized,
three remains no-further end for realization
and our desires and aspirations get their
fulfillment. (V. S. Bh. 1. 1. 1. ).{Ibid ., p. 41, footnote 1.}.
Bhattacharya goes on to maintain that according to Samkara the entire creation is a graded dispersion of the creative force of Brahman, which always remains as the substrate for it. All individuals are interwoven in the Infinite Self realized unconsciously. “it is only in man that the Infinite is present and is being realized consciously.” {Ibid., p. 42-43}
The Supreme
Objective of Human Life.
Bhattacharya then undertakes to explain what is meant by the Supreme End of human life. This, he maintains, is to realize the Divine Purpose of Brahman. It is to be noted that in this context, Bhattacharya uses the term God for Brahman. He writes:
The manifested nāma-rpa are to be taken as
a means for the realization of the purpose
(Samkalpas) of God……...These Samkalpas are
but Divine Ideas existing as potential powers
in Brahman - but they realize themselves in
the particular individual objects which they
evolve and sustain. The phenomenal objects
are expressions in time of the Ideas which are
not in time and the ideas can express themselves
freely in time. (Br. Up. Bh. 2.4.10). {Divine Purpose, p. 206.}
Also,
On the production of the particular, the
universal ākrtis or Ideas are constantly present.
(Br. Up. Bh. 1-3.28). {Ibid., p, 207.}
Every individual thing, writes Bhattacharya therefore, in this system has a dual aspect, one Divine or infinite and the other finite. In so far as the conscious finite self can bring itself in tune with the Divine Purpose, it may transcend its limiting aspect. On the plane of the mundane, perfection remains an ideal only, and therefore the goal of human life is ever toward transcendence of the state of imperfection. Bhattacharya goes on to say that the purpose which activates the manifested world has been called ‘goes’ by Samkara:
The word ‘good’ signifying the cause extends
to the effects in the shape of to world just
as clay does to its modifications-jar and the
rest. Just as wherever we have a notion of the
jar, it is always accompanied by the notion of
clay, so in the same manner, the notion of the
world is always accompanied by the notion of
the “Good’.
(Chh. Up. Bh. 2.21). {Sādhuśabhavācya ‘rtho’ brahma vā
sarvathāpi lokādikārye anugatam: yathā ghatādidŗşţirmŗdādidŗşţyānygataiva……..sādhvārthasya
lokādikāryeşu kāranasya anugatatvāt, mŗdādivat
ghatādivikāreşu.}.
Since ‘good’ permeates the world, it is actually
attainable in the life of man. According to Bhattacharya, this exactly is the
teaching of the Gita, wherein God asks man to engage in good works for the
greater stability of ‘dharma’ and the eradication of evil. “We must identify
ourselves with the Good Purpose (sādhvartham) operating within the as well as in us.” {Ibid., p.
213}.
After emphasizing the indispensable role of good action
in the world, the takes up for consideration the more familiar repudiation of
karma as means of knowledge, known to have been enunciated by Samkara. He
writes that the prevalent opinion about Samkara’s system is that he has left no place for action in
it. He says “To our mind, this is an idea which cannot be accepted and which
must be condemned as erroneous, with all the emphasis which we can command,”
{An Intro., p. 147}. Bhattacharya adduces many arguments to substantiate his
point that Samkara made a gradation of the types of work which are necessary
for the purification of the mind and as such are indispensable to
self-realization. Samkara, as in evident from his commentary on the Gita,
rejected only the works performed with a view to selfish ends. He advocated the
performance of nitya-karmas and all such action which may lead to the
spiritual regeneration of the mind.
Works are meant
for the purification of the
mind . Selfish desires
and passions are
impediments
to self-realisation. Unselfish,
prescribed
duties when not done, with self-
seeking motives, remove these impediments,
effect purification of the mind, and thus help
the final realisation. {Ibid., p. 140}.
Bhattacharya then makes the point that action being
enjoined for the spiritual uplift of man it cannot be said that there is no
place for moral striving in the Vedanta
system. Man’s place is in society and he cannot escape his obligations
toward his fellow human being. Moreover, it is not also a case of blind
obedience to rituals that is advocated by Samkara, who writes:
Man chooses his end according to his
own
light. The Shastras only
present before him
the lower and higher lines of conduct, but do
not compel him to select a particular course
of action. (Br. Up. Bh. 2. 1. 20). {Ibid., p.
158}.
In this way the sphere of moral endeavour is given due
importance and cannot be said to have been neglected by the older Vedanta,
least of all by Samkara. Bhattacharya interprets Samkara’s statements about
action and knowledge, as referring to separate achievements; to mean a
gradation of higher and lower ends. Karma must be “superceded and included”. {Ibid.,
p. 150.} in the final aim of life which is knowledge of the Self. “All works”
he maintains, “are organic to this one central purpose.” {Ibid., p.
159}.
Pulling together all the threads of his arguments, we may
see that Bhattacharya combined various statements from difference books in
order to present his case of a realistic interpretation of Samkara-Vedanta. His
view can be summarised as follows: Brahman transcends the world but does not
exclude the world. The supreme aim of human life is to achieve an attunement to
the good which is immanent in the world, fulfilling thereby the Divine Purpose
of Realization.
Bhattacharya’s
refutation of the traditional mode of understanding Vedanta.
According to Bhattacharya māyā instead of being the principle of non-reality is the creative energy of Brahman, radiating into the diversities of forms and names but never leaving the anchorage of its groundedness in the ultimate Reality. This dispersion of the power of Brahman cannot be called false and Samkara is misunderstood when he is charged with saying so. The question then arises as to what does Samkara mean when he says, for example:
The objects perceived to exist in the waking
state are unreal for this reason also, that they
do not really exist either at the beginning or
at the end. Such objects (of experience) as
mirage, etc., do not really exist either at the
beginning or at the end. Therefore they do
not (really) exist in the middle either. This
is the decided opinion of the world. The
several objects perceived to exist really in
the waking state are also of the same nature.
Thought they (the objects of experience) are
of the same nature as illusory objects, such as
mirage, etc., on account of their non-existence
at the beginning and at the end, still they are
regarded as real by the ignorant, that is, the
persons that do not know Ātman. {Samkara’s commentary on Māndūkya-Kārika, II. 6 (tr. by Swami Nikhilananda).
According to Bhattacharya such passages have leant colour to the theory of illusionness which he is in effect trying to set aside. For his interpretation of māyā he boldly goes to the most crucial definition given by Samkara in this regard in his opening statements for the commentary on the Vedanta Sūtra. To bring out the point of Bhattacharya’s interpretation he may be quoted at length.
In the famous introduction appended to the
“Brahma-Sūtras”, Samkara has, at the very
commencement of his immortal work, discussed
and given us the sense in which he will use the
term avidyā throughout his system;…………..The
Introduction clearly points out in whatever
connection Samkara would use the world
Avidyā, he would always mean this that¾ ¾
under the influence of the Avidyā, the people
forget or
ignore the Svarūpa or the
distinct
nature of the Self or the causal reality, and it is
entirely resolved into or identified with
its emerging effects or states. And the states
or effect are erroneously looked upon as the
‘nature’ or Svarūpa of the Self. {An intro., p. 108. See Introduction to this book p. 2-5}.
Working with this interpretation, Bhattacharya writes that falsity may obtain in Samkara in two sense: firstly, if Brahman or Ātman is considered resolved entirely into its manifestations which would be a kind of pantheism; and secondly, if the diversification of the world is separated from its ground and looked upon as self-sufficient. This is to say that neither should the prior causal reality be made to lose its unity in the multiplicity of the world nor should the multiplicity be given independent status,
Samkara calls such a world (i. e., separated
from
Brahman) unreal, false, asatya.
Every-
where
he has held the world and the changes,
Only. {Ibid., pp. 103-104. (emphasis in text.)}.
Bhattacharya himself carefully adduces reasons for the prevalent mode of understanding the Vedanta of Samkara. He writes that Samkara’s frequent use of the terms ‘rabbit-horns’ (śaśa –vişāņa),
‘ barren woman’s son (vandhyā-putra), ‘sky-flower’ (akāśa-kusuma), etc., have created the impression that such is our world also.
……the critics…from the mere mention of the
terms in the Bhasyas, like Śaśa-Vişaņa (rabbit-
horn) maricika (mirage) etc., etc., jumped at
once at the conclusion that the world is false
in the Vedanta. {Ibid., p. 93}.
Another reason according to him, for adducing a mirage-like quality to the world, is Samkara’s usage of dream imagery, mainly in the context of the discourse between Ajātaśatru and bālāki occurring in the Brhadāraņyaka Upanişhad (II. 1. 15-18). It is his contention that Samkara’s lead to “the idea of the falsity of our world-experiences”. {Ibid., p. 96}. In substantiation of his interpretation, Sastri, firstly gives his own rending of Samkara’s commentaries on such crucial texts as ‘All this verily is Brahman’ (Sarvam Khalvidam brahma), {Ibid., p. 105-106}. ‘All this is Ātman alone’ (ātmaivedam Sarvam), {Ibid.,}. ‘There is no vestige of diversity here (neha nānā’ sti kimcana). {Ibid., p. 111}. Secondly, he comments upon the methodology involved in the ‘not this, not this’ (neti neti) texts. {Ibid., p. 337}.Thirdly, the author gives his own explanation of Samkara’s total rejection of action (Karma) as means for Self-realization. In his view Samkara neither repudiated the active life nor did he advocate a withdrawal from the world. {SBL, p. 145}. He emphasizes that nowhere has Samkara negated or abolished the world and its changing forms. {An Intro., p. 103-104}. The world is always to be known as grounded in Brahman and not existing by itself in which case alone, it will be false. Similarly, in the context of the Self, it is declared to be false only, when it is resolved entirely into its experiencing states, when these are taken to be of the nature of the Self. {Ibid., pp. 97-98}.
With this criterion of falsity, Bhattacharya construes the meanings of the texts mentioned above, such as ‘All this verily is Brahman’ (sarvam Khalvidam brahma) and ‘there is no vestige of diversity here’ (neha nānā’sti kimcana), to mean that Brahman is not to be totally reduced to its manifestations. Wherever the Upanishads deny the actuality of the world process, the meaning, according to Bhattacharya is that Brahman is stated to be a unity which deny in dependent status to the name-form structure of the world. They point to the fact that it is Brahman, which has dispersed itself into the manifestations, and therefore they are not real in themselves but in Brahman only. {Ibid., pp. 101-102}.
It is the same sense in which Samkara has denied the ultimate supremacy of action, then he is working with a falsehood. When action is subsumed to a life of religious endeavour, it becomes moral and uplifting and becomes capable of raising man to the highest pinnacle of Self-realization.
Bhattacharya’s interpretation of Samkara-Vedanta had a great impact on the educated people of India. His philosophy was hailed as a real contribution toward modernizing the ancient heritage; the editors, Vedānta Kesari wrote to him:
Your interpretation has shown that Advaita
is not simply a philosophy of asceticism but
a gospel of life that can form the basis of
dynamic activism……Advaita, as interpreted
by you, can again become a living force in
our national life, and form not only a matter
for the intellectual satisfaction of Pandits but
a gospel of life that can insprire and sustain
the youth of land in fields of life that are
open to them. { From a letter written to the author by the editors of Vadanta Kesri, Madras. (Quoted by the author, Sreegopal Basu Mallick Fellowship Lectures, Calcutta 1931, p. vii)}.
An evaluation of Bhattacharya’s contribution is given in the next Chapter following that of A. C. Mukerji. After the passage of nearly half a century, we are in a better position to see these efforts in a better perspective than was possible for the contemporaries of the philosophers themselves.
NEO-Vedanta
as ‘a Rational Philosophy’ and a ‘Gospel of Life’
A. A. C. Mukerji:
The importance of the two new orientations introduced in the previous two
Chapters may be now examined. First the contribution of A. C. Mukerji is taken
up for consideration and then that of Bhattacharya.
It is rather difficult to make a fair assessment of A. C. Mukerji’s
contribution to the philosophy of Advaita, because firstly he has not deviated
from the classical exegeses regarding Samkaracarya’s thought on intuition and
secondly his understanding of the bare essentials of the Kantian epistemology
also seems legitimate. What may be questioned here is the soundness of the
juxtaposition of the two.
A. C. Mukerji saw a common problem arising out of all knowledge
situations. If the object of thought is completely external to it then no
knowledge of it is possible; if on the other hand, it is already a part of the
process or if thought is constitutive of reality, then any inquiry regarding
reality becomes gratuitous. {Reality & Ideality, p. 216}. To say
that contemplative thinking is a process of progressive clarification of the
vague prefigurations given to us, is only to push the problem one step back,
because “philosophy does not represent a passage from ignorance to knowledge
nor does it stultify itself by aiming at what is already an accomplished fact.”
{Ibid.}.
A. C. Mukerji identified and accepted this paradox, enunciated in this
manner, as the almost intractable problem of revelation and reason, or
alternately, as being the initial step toward agnosticism leading the way to
mysticism, because the unknowable of the agnostic stood self-revealed only in
mystical experience. {CM, p.3}. According to A. C. Mukerji, the Upanishadic
formulation of man’s desire for knowledge and his eligibility for it, falls
outside this polarity of reason and mystical intuition{CM, p. 3}.
Reality, therefore, as understood by A. C. Mukerki, was neither
anti-rational nor altogether beyond reason. Yet rational analysis of experience
was indispensable to an enquiry regarding our knowledge situation. A. C.
Mukerji tended to use the words ‘reason’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘thought’ almost
interchangeably. He used these words as corresponding to the Sanskrit words ‘buddhi’,
{CM, p. 4.; N of S, p. 310.} and as signifying a mode of direct apprehension of
the object (of knowledge) carrying with it the inescapable possibility of an
indirect envisagement of the foundation which made all knowledge possible.
Reason possesses the
power of a
kind of
introspective visualization which as universal
support of the
definable entities, cannot be
discursively apprehended in the
same way in
which a particular entity is known,
by
distinguishing it from
that by which
it is
limited. {CM, p. 3}.
With the distinction between direct apprehension and indirect
envisagement, we come to A. C. Mukerji’s own understanding of Upanishadic
thought. The quest for Truth demands that human thinking be transcended. In
order to envisage the region of this transcended, reason must see to the
breaking off of links between words and meaning by which our ordinary thinking
is controlled. The mind must cut loose from the memory of this chain of
terminology which is our anchorage to the world. This is what the Yoga tradition
calls the process of Śabdasanketasmŗtipari-śuddhi,
{Ibid., p. 4.} which literally means, cleansing of memory of the impurity of
linguistic conventionality.
The inner demand of thought takes the form of citing the Scriptures as an
indication for opening up an extralogical dimension of the search for Truth.
This special dimension of anti-intellectualism, he agrees, is integral to
Advaita thought, (which may not be different from all modes of Western
thinking) and he insists that this “is nothing short of an extra-philosophical criterion”
{Some Aspects, p. 383.} of Knowledge.
It is a kind of envisagement, intuition, extraordinary experience, direct
apprehension and so on, that is, a mode of understanding where meaning and
experience are one. Neither sense nor reason (each by itself) can reproduce the
content of this extraordinary experience. {Ibid., p. 388}. The identity
of the Self and Brahman, the goal of Vedanta philosophy, cannot be established
by perception, or reason, because these are inalienably subject-object
oriented. Thus we are inevitably and inescapably led toward that intuitive
experience of immediacy spoken of by the texts. A. C. Mukerji thinks : “This
intuition is then the ultimate criterion, of which reasoning, even when it is
supported by the sacred texts, is a subordinate auxiliary.” {Ibid., p. 389}.
In raising reason to the plane of mediation between experience and that by which all meaning is made possible, he has given it a new role which is quite different to the one it previously enjoyed. The place of reason in Vedanta philosophy was always considered to be indispensable but not a sufficient condition for the unveiling of Truth contained in the text. The aim of the traditional mode of exegesis was to hold together in a coherent unity, revelation, reason and experience. Revelation is unique to the Texts but it is to be appropriated by reason and realized and realized by direct experience. All philosophies must start and end in experience. The direct experience of the world can be cancelled only by another ‘direct experience’ or realization of Truth. The role of reason, therefore, is interpretative and never constitutive of values. Reason, as a matter of fact, in its inferential mode, is restricted by many systems because being experience-based, it cannot speak for the extra-mundane dimension which forms the subject matter of religious philosophy. Vedanta rejects analogy as well, as a method of demonstrating that which lies beyond worldly experience. The leap of intuitive reason, necessary for validating the argument can be useful only between similar objects, belonging to the same dimension for experience. Analogy, by virtue of this leap can yield a very high degree of probability but must always remain short of certainty. Reason, therefore is called “ ‘yukti’ or ‘tarka’, that is, of no independent logical value but as ancillary to scriptural testimony’ (V. S. II. i. ii.)”. {Ibid., p.16}. It may be added that the Texts also are sources of mediate knowledge (for the ordinary person) {An exception is always made for those seekers who may ‘receive’ enlightenment, not because they have qualified themselves, but because the dimension of Grace (kŗpā) is non-causal (ahetuka).} and like reason, necessary but not sufficient condition for the down of Knowledge. The task in front of the interpreter, therefore, is to press reason to the service of understanding the mystery of experience in the world, so that one may become desirous of ‘experiencing’ that ultimate felicity which texts indicate to be the supreme goal of human life.
In the Vedanta system, we find experience forming the parameters of the scale of knowability in the world. Reason seeks to make clear the enigmatic continuity, which obtain between everyday experience and the ‘experience’ which forms the subject matter of Śŗuti, Texts. Thus, reason is not given the role of unravelling the mystique of revelation; but to awaken the yearning; the initial movement toward Self-realization, or rather to help in understanding this movement as the stirrings of discrimination between what the scriputes talk about and experience held in a close unity, seek to preclude, dogma on the one hand and mysticism on the rather.
It is possible to say that reason is even superfluous where Truth is Self-revealed; but in the ‘absence’ of Grace (ahetukakŗpā), reason lends plausibility to the utterly unexampled, non-paralled message of the texts. Reason, therefore, in this view would seem to be indispensable, but not instrumental in revealing truth. {Naişkarmya Siddhi, III, ślokas 5 & 53}.
If the core of the tradition is understood in this fashion, then such attempts as A. C. Mukerji’s to bring the Kantian “What can I know?” alongside the Vedantic first premise, “Why should I know Brahman?” seems less than fruitful. Western idealism aimed at establishing the epistemic priority of reason. In the Indian context the focus had been on distinguishing between not the knower and the known (dŗasţŗ and dŗśya) but betwen knowledge and the known, (dŗk and dŗśya), that is the self and the not-self.
A. C. Mukerji and other such scholars who wanted to emphasize the traditional elements in Vedanta philosophy, did not allow for the crucial fact that epistemology in the west had developed as a retreat from ontology. In trying to compare reason in its triadic setting of revelation-reason-experience, with reason as an independent arbiter of meaning, they leant themselves to a blurring of issues. They did not realize that the West had long since broken with its Greek tradition and the Upanishadic “Know Thyself” had no parallel in the idealistic systems they were interested in. This is apparent in the use of the words “soul” and “self ” almost interchangeably by many and especially by A. C. Mukerji. {“The Natural of Soul”, The Cultural Heritage of India 2nd ed. Calcutta.The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Calcutta; 2nd ed., pp. 475-493. The word used by him for ‘soul’ is ātman in this essay}.
This slurring over the difference is basic to the understanding of Neo-Vedantic thought. If we understood ‘soul’ to mean ‘creaturehood’ than the counterpart of this concept could be connoted by the term ‘jīva’ of Indian philosophy. In Western thought it was the human dimension of being created by God and the soul’s destiny in fulfilling the divine promise of salvation, which was at stake. The epistemological inquiry centering around the Kantian position was primarily concerned not with containing reasons (as declared by Kant) but with legitimising its constitutionality so that a scientific grounding may be provided to our experience in the world and to the goodness of the moral will. If Kant had not proceeded beyond stating the unity of apperception, it was because this “beyond” did not arise from within the setting of his philosophic understanding. What appears ‘svayam-prakāśa’, ‘svayam-siddha’ (self-luminous, self-evident) to A. C. Mukerji, does so by virtue of the long heritage of Vedantic thought. Further, this self-evident self is the sole ‘unspoken’ but eminently “speakable’ topic of total concern for Vedanta. In appending it at the end of the scale of the cogitational framework, it becomes a pedagogical device only for overcoming agnosticism. Kant, being the great philosopher that he was could hardly have leant himself to it. For Indian thinkers to take up the question at this stage, in order to indicate the possibility of an analogy could only indicate a certain lack of appreciation of the task that Kant had set himself. Having entered the stream, they could only be carried forward on the waves of the idealistic-realistic debate, as can be seen from the present day studies in Departments of Philosophy.
A. C. Mukerji’s justification of Upanishadic thought as a system of philosophy, then, can be called, a step toward its Westernization because with the raising of epistemology to the primary position, a major transition towards the ‘secularisation’ of these studies was effected. A.C. Mukerji had sought to meet the charge of “intellectual incoherence” but the criterion for defence used by him namely the thematisation of the ‘unknown’ but not the ‘unknowable’ precisely had provided the bases for condemnation. He had realize that he had not been able to build the much cherished bridge between discursive knowing and intuitive knowing.
By pursuing the details of A. C. Mukerji’s philosophical thought, we can discover for ourselves the spirit of the times in which these scholars had lives and worked. The question at issue here, as elsewhere, is one of the adequacy of the method of estimating Vedanta in ways other than the given mode of its explication. Traditional exegeses held together the triad of revelation, reason and experience. By emphasizing reason in its epistemological setting, a shift in perspective was effected which was perhaps not seen its full implication by the author. Together with the demand for “intellectual coherence”, went the need to assert the reality of the world as the only sphere of morally responsible action. In Bhattacharya’s philosophy we encounter Advaita as a gospel of life. We cannot but raise the question whether this interpretation can be held together with Samkaracarya’s mokşa-orientated philosophy regarding the realization of ātman as Brahman.
B. Kokilesvar Bhattacharya :
By following Bhattacharya along the path of realistic interpretation it can be seen clearly that he has not given due importance to the structure of veiling, which forms the central core of Samkaracarya’s exegesis. Samkaracarya has raised the question of the necessity of the principle of unreality as basic to the understanding of the human condition. The predicament is precisely this, that the world is never questioned by us. Given the experience of this world, whence can comes the thought of its cancellation unless the possibility of it is made reasonable by analogical examples from experience itself. The “illusion” that Samkaracarya is propounding, does not obtain it is true, in respect simply of the world, but as to the meaning derives from the Ground. The world is real because the Base is real. The manifestations are, admittedly, not real-in-themselves.
The traditional Advaita point of view has been that the meaning given to the world is of pragamatic value only and must stand cancelled by the knowledge of the One Reality. Just as the directions of East, West, North and South do not obtain anywhere but in the realm of praxis, and as such they are intelligible as experiences inescapably vulnerable to cancellation; similarly the world is a necessary presence for us. Samkaracarya, therefore, propounds the reason for this mystery in experiencing the unreal as the real just as one may seek to explain why the limitless horizon should be quartered off as East West, South and North.
It would seem that Bhattacharya has confined himself to the description of Brahman as causal-seed without stating the further crucial Advaitic position that the causal manifestation itself is also at once eminently a case of concealment. In other words it belongs within the realm of māya. It is due to māyā that Brahman appears as the cause of the world.
Māyā
is the principle of holding together the revelation of Truth as one only, and
our experiences to the contrary. Bhattacharya evidently does not wish to join
with the theistic criticism of Samkaracarya and speak in the language of
religion which understands Brahman as creator and the world as created by him.
He seeks only to condition the reality of the world. Samkaracarya in fact, does
not demand any further concession that an acknowledgment of this conditional
reality of the world because his aim is to establish ātman as the
sole, unconditional reality. {Prtayojanam
cāsya brahma vidyāyā avidyānivŗttistata
atyantikah samsārābhavah. Samkaracarya on Tait. 2.11}.
Disregarding Samkaracarya’s clear lead in this matter, neo-Vedantins have relied heavily on the second aphorism of the Vedānta-Sūtras and as we saw with Bhattacharya on such passages in the Upanishads, which speak of Brahman as being the material cause of the world. {Chh. 6.1.4. Br. 1.1.7}. Kokileshvar Bhattacharya has repeatedly pointed out that since Brahman is real, the world is also real. It is only “unreal ’ to the extent that we think it to be self-sufficient and not deriving from Brahman. These is progressive development in the world and this is still in the process of being itself out in creation, sustaining it till the time it will reabsorb it in itself.
It may be said here that there could be no clearer example of the entry of time as history in Indian thought other than this realistic interpretation of Samkaracarya’s Vedanta as a philosophy which propounds creation. The question must arise as to the necessity or legitimacy of this realistic interpretation. In other words, we have to see why Samkarcarya did not construe the 2nd aphorism along the lines of a causal argument.
The 2nd aphorism {Janmādyasya Yatah, V. S. I.I.2. (Brahman is that) from which the origin, etc., (i. e., the origin, subsistence, and dissolution) of this (world proceed.)} states that Brahman is cause of the world. It, therefore, seems to endorse a theory of ‘creation in time’ but an expansion of its meaning brings out the basic tenet of Vedanta which is to affirm not only the reality of Brahman, but also Brahman as the One Reality.
Samkaracarya points out that the Vedanta aphorisms are not to be treated as the premises of an argument, but that they are like the co-ordinating thread which strings different blooms together into a garland of flowers. {Vedāntavākyakusumgrathanārthavātsūtrānām. (V. S. bh. 1.1.2)}. The flowers are the Texts and by tradition the Śruti Texts for the 2nd (janmādi) aphorism is stated to be from the Taittiriya Upanishad, 3.1.
Seek to know that from which all these beings
Take birth, that which they live after being
born, that towards which they move and into
which they
merge, that is Brahman. {yato vā imāni bhūtāni
jāyante yena jātāni īvanti yatpra-yānti abhisamviśanti tad vijijrāsasva; tad brahma.
(Tait. 3.1)}
Brahman, then is that
from which the world proceeds, in which it lives, by which it is sustained,
into which it dissolves. By gathering together the different aspects of the
coming into being of the world, the Text is understood to have stated ultimacy
of Brahman; in saying Brahman is the material as well as efficient cause of the
world, all dualities are in effect denied. The world cannot be said to have an
independent material existence or it cannot be said to have been brought into
existence by a creator. The causality that seems imputed to Brahman, therefore,
is of the nature of an appearance only. It seems as if the world proceeds from
Brahman. This interpretation is borne out by the usage of present participles
in the Text : take birth (jāyante), live (jivanti), move (prayānti)
and merge (abhisamviśanti).
The crucial point to be taken cognizance of in the passage is, therefore, the
absence of a activity of creation. This inseparability of the world from
Brahman, thus expounded in the Text by means of these concepts of continuity,
namely coming into existence living in it, finding sustenance from it and going
back to it in dissolution, is confirmed by the concluding phrases : “enquire
into that; that is Brahman” (tad vijijñāsasva; tad brahma). {This
interpretation is based mainly upon The Discourses on Brahma Sūtra
by Swami Akhandananda Saraswati; (Bombay : Satsahitya prakashan Trust, 1976),
Vol. II (in Hindi), pp. 203-327}.
The term ‘enquiry’ pertains to that which is close at hand, as distinguished from the injunction to seek, or to meditate upon, or even to aspire after realization. Enquiry leads to the removal of the veil which prevents discovery. In words vijijñāsasva is to be construed to mean ātmābhedena vijānīhi iti vijijñāsasva’, that is, “know Brahman to be not other than the Self,’ or ‘know Brahman to be the Self itself.’
In order to demonstrate further that no causal arguments are being resorted to here, the reference to the Text from the Taittirīya Upanişad is concluded by citing the passage describing the discovery of the nature of Brahman : “He knew bliss as Brahman; for from Bliss, indeed, all these beings originate; having been born, they are sustained by Bliss; they move towards and merge in Bliss”. (Tait. 3. 6.)
According to the tradition of Samkaracarya’s exop[sition of these passages, Brahman, therefore, may be described firstly as if, it is the material and efficient cause of the world. This description is to be subjected to enquiry because it cannot be a final description since these categories belong naturally with the world rather than with Brahman. Brahman being the One and Only Reality, is as if the material and efficient cause of the world; in reality it is of the nature of Bliss and only as such should be discovered in order to know its identity with the Self. Both the sūtra and the Text from the Upanishad are suggestive of Brahman, the first is in the nature of a quality which appears to belongs to it, and the latter as indicative of the very nature of Brahman. There is not the semblance of duality here.
If Samkaracarya had in principle allowed for the existence of any reality other than Brahman, then he would not stand in opposition to philosophies professing categories of dependent realities such as Viśişţādvaita or the Madhva system of Vedanta. The neo-Vedantins, however, seek to find in Samkaracarya a reversal of his own position by adducing a real status to the world. Samkaracarya did not aim at destroying the world which exactly is the sphere of māyā. One may, and is most likely to continue to dwell in the realm of māyā for all time to come. The ‘non-reality’ or ‘falsity’ that he talks about pertains to the semblances of reality which are actualities for us. Falsity resides in experiencing many when there is one Reality only; in experiencing matter where no material principle obtains; in ascribing transience to the Eternal; in missing the Unity behind the fragmentations and in being unaware of the Self hidden by the not-Self. The truth is that māyā is not only illusion but it is “the cosmic condition”, which makes illusion appear as inescapable reality. {J. G. Arapura, “Māyā and the Discourse about Brahman”, The Problem of Two Truth in Buddhism and Vedanta, ed Mervyn Sprung (Boston U. S. A.: Reidel publishing Company, 1973), pp. 109-121}.
We have seen that Indian scholars made sustained efforts at giving rationalistic interpretations to the Vedanta philosophy. The question which is indispensable here, is whether these points of view uncovered such meanings as were hidden in the philosophy or did they move away from the main sense of its inspiration? With A. C. Mukerji, it may be recalled, the bringing together of Kant and the Vedanta seemed not to have enhanced the significance of either. The realistic interpretation of Bhattacaharya, on the other hand, is a different proposition because it tends by its exaggeration of the de facto reality of the world in Samkaracarya, to distort the total vision or picture of Vedanta. The constructions that he has put on some of the texts are farfetched and cannot, indeed, be justified in the light of the well-known intention of the entire body of literature on this point. The “nonreality’ of the world obtains nowhere else in the corpus of Vedanta literature but in the Vedānta of Samkaracarya. The originality of the concept of mithyā in Samkaracarya’s formulation of Advaita Vedānta is in contradistinction to rival interpretations of Vedanta that preceded and succeeded him in the history of Vedanta tradition as such. It is, of course, well-known that Samkaracarya himself was not uninfluenced in arriving at the conceptualisation, as for example by Gaudapada, and Mahāyāna Schools of Buddhism, though he freely reconstructs it as the supreme implication of the Upanishadic understanding of Reality as ‘non-dual’. To say to the contrary is not to state Samkaracarya’s point of view but one’s own, regarding the classical Advaita philosophy.
We are
now in a position to assess the merits of neo-Vedantic contributions to Advaita
philosophy in general. Two points seem to emerge in this context, which draw
our attention to their importance. Firstly, in the quest for rehabilitating
Vedanta, as it were, its main thesis of renunciation of the involvements of the
I-consciousness is forgotten completely; secondly, and arising out of the first
point, we see that the quest for Self-realization also has lost its primary
place from within the scheme of things. The Upanishadic texts teach how to
appropriate bliss by renouncing activity at what is living and dynamic in the
tradition seems nothing but a reversal of the original position. In the next
chapters, the factors of this process of reversal will be stated so that we may
examine the long road which has been traversed by Indian scholars in their attempts
to held together Vedanta and the forces of Westernization. The philosophies of
A. C. Mukerji and Kokilesvar Bhattacharya can be regarded as two pointers
towards the general trend of neo-Vedanta.
The lack of Soteriological Awareness in neo-Vedanta
As stated by A. C. Mukerji, neo-Vedanta indicates that class of academic writing which sought to interpret Samkaracarya thought in the language of Western philosophy. {See above p. 83}. This body of literature, as we have seen in the last few chapters, arose out of the need of the times. One author wrote:
The main battle which the Vedanta had to
fight was against the forces released by the
secular English education sponsored by
“orthodox” Hindus. {Niranjan Dhar, Vedanta and the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta :
Minerva Associates, 1977), p. 169}.
In this connection the latter written by Raja Rammohun Roy, to Lord Amherst in 1823. protesting against the decision to set up Sanskrit college, in Calcutta, is very pertinent.
If it had been intended to keep the British
nation in ignorance of real knowledge, the
Baconian Philosophy would not have been
allowed to displace the system of the School-
man , which was the best calculated to
perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner the
Sanskrit System of education would be the best
calculated to keep this country in darkness, if
such had been the policy of the British
legislature. But as the improvement of the
native population is the object of the
Government, it will consequently promote
a more liberal and enlightened system of
instruction embracing Mathematics, Natural
Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other
useful science…….{S. D. Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, eds. D.
K. Bishwas and P. C. Ganguly, (Calcutta, 1962), Appendix II, pp. 457-458}.
It is the clear that the scholars of early nineteenth century wanted to enter the stream of Western education quickly and they also felt called upon the defend and justify their ancient philosophical heritage. What is not so clear is the fact that a century of such preoccupation shows no signs of yielding place to any other from of philosophic writing. Although dearth of creative writing is sometimes noted in India, by far the most usual form of research is still grounded in apologetics as worthwhile academic work. {The following two books have been written more than 50 years apart but they refute almost the same charge: V. J. Kirtikar, in his Studies in Vedanta (Bombay, 1924) answers the following criticisms against Vedanta: that it is revolting to common sense, and blasphemous; that is does violence to Christian ethics; that it is mystic and quietistic etc. R. G. Garg (Upanishadic Challenge to Science, Delhi: 1978). Pp. 241-280, covers almost the same ground in his eight-fold classification of the charges:
(a) pessimism (Urquhart: Upanishads and life, Calcutta 1916, pp. 69-70).
(b) abstractionism (A. E. Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads, London, 1882, p. 268, which
Hegel called a “region of unbridled madness”).
(c) Blasphemy (John Caird: An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion, pp. 74-75).
(d)
fictitiousness of the Individual Soul (Hertel’s Introduction to Kenopanishad
Schweitzer
Indian Thought, London, 1956, p. 47).
(e)
Pantheism (Monier-Willams, Indian Wisdom, 1963, p. 38). A. S.
Pringle-Pattison, The idea
of God, p. 219
(f ) a-Moralism (Farquhar Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1921, p. 24, Upton, Hibbert Lectures
for 1893 pp. 241-42).
(g) asceticism, escapism, inactivism ( Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol.
12, p. 548).
(h) mysticism (Urquhart, Indian Thought, p. 43)}. This phenomenon successfully hides the ground on which this particular type of literature takes its stand. In order to discover the reason for this continuing trend in defensive writing we may take up with profit the study of contemporary neo-Vedanta as a whole as background for the two typical points of view we considered in two previous chapters.
A very pertinent question may be raised here as to why should neo-Vedanta choose to situate itself within the framework of apologetics? Indian philosophy, has for long, developed on the lines of critical appraisals and clarifications. All systems of Indian philosophy are required to answer penetrating questionings raised from within as well as outside the tradition. Theories are, as is well known, propounded with a view to meeting the possible objections which may be raised against what is being stated. Such being the case, the conditions which precludes a continuation of this tradition of dialogical exegeses acquire some importance in the understanding of contemporary Indian philosophy.
The first point which
srikes one very forcibley is that the Indian scholars did not distinguish
between refutation and rejection of the very ground on which contemporary can
thrive. Vedanta in the twentieth century did not have to contend with
refutations, regarding the nature of ultimate truth as previously from the
Buddhistic or dualistic points of view; or meet the challenge of searching
questions from the orthodox system, or the charge of doctrinal radicality from
the orthodox system of pūrva-mīmāmsā. {All Histories
of Indian Philosophy have documented the arguments and counter-arguments
between various schools of thought down the centuries}. It had to contend only
against an external critique which came from the vantage point of a superior
developed culture or so they were told. The Indian scholars seem to have
accepted the judgment the Indian philosophy was suffering from arrested
“growth” and dynamism, whereas the West had progressed beyond to an age of
enlightenment. That the West is superior in all aspects of human life is a
conviction we meet with pulsating through the writings of the early
neo-Vedantins. The language of constant approximation of ideas to Western
concepts, leaves one in no doubt of the tacit acceptance of its criteria as
ultimate. That the Western world had forged ahead because of their dynamic
religion and India had been left behind because of its non-worldly orientation
was accepted by those who were educated by Western scholars. A genuine
dissatisfaction with their own tradition is apparent in the chain reaction set
off by the introduction of the Western mode of intellectual appraisal of all
past heritage. The ‘educated’ could fine no answer from within at this time
because the historical, philological and psychological methodologies applied to
the body of textual literature had found the guardians of this lore almost
totally at a loss. The Pundits learned in Sanskrit could do no better than take
up a fundamentalist position which further alienated those who wished to forge
ahead. The air of a rational emancipation from the trammels of dogma therefore,
was all the more pleasing to Indian scholars at this tone. {“By the beginning
of the nineteenth century the works of Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Tom Paine etc.
began to be imported to Calcutta. Advertisements of those books appeared in the
Calcutta Gazette, post, Calcutta Chronicle and other magazines.
Of these, the most popular were Tom Paine’s Age of Reason and Rights of Man.
Nemai Sadhan Bose : The Indian Awakening and Bengal (Calcutta : Firma K. K. Mukhopadhyaya, 1969) p. 65}. Unless due notice is taken of this historical background, one would fail to appreciate the importance of the overthrow (in effect) of the traditional mode of exegeses at this time and its replacement by Westernized criteria of hermeneutics.
From the perspective of the last quarter of the twentieth century, it becomes possible to delineate the almost imperceptible pathways of this transition. The body of literature under consideration, however seems to lend itself naturally to a four-fold scheme by which it sought to span the bridge between India’s ancient heritage and Western education. A convenient way of understanding this movement of thought, if it may be called that, therefore, could be by following the idea on rationality and morality. These may be considered as direct responses to the challenge of the West. The question of rationality belongs with the status of philosophy as being independent of religion; and morality, with the status of the empirical reality of the world.
A. The new Role of Reason in
Indian Philosophy
Indian thought, over the centuries had built up a careful distinction between the rational and that which seems ‘irrational’ but may be presented as reasonable. This distinction is necessary, irreplaceable and of supreme importance if one were to seek to understand the message of the Upanishads.
The Upanishads address themselves not to be rational principle in man but toward his power of appreciation of that which may be admitted as cogent, reasonable, worthy of further investigation etc. admittedly it is man who bust seek self-realization but how is he to be brought to the awareness of the desirability of this goal of human life? Man knows only the world in which he lives and the mode of this knowing is inescapably rational. To whatever limit this knowing may be pushed it will unavoidably carry the world along with it.
The Upanishads teach that it is possible to put a wedge in this mould of rationality not from outside but by an inwardisation of the same faculties which give the world to us. {The Kaţhopanişad (I. 3. 2-10) asks one to imagine the body to be a chariot driven by the intellect as its charioteer steeds. The Master (the Self or ātman) sits quietly watching the charioteer driving skillfully and purposefully, or wildly and erratically as the case may be. He could be seen if the charioteer were to turn around, otherwise the driver may continue to feel that it is he who is the Master}.
The Upanishads are neither substitutes for rational thought, nor are they are a contrast to it. Their authority lies in engendering conviction before any form of reference can be applied. This authority is a hidden authority because it may speak only to an openness for it.
It may be said, in other words, that the Vedanta, without its function as soteriology, must lose much of its relevance for the inquirer. The need felt for shrouding soteriology in order to answer an epistemological question inverts the order of priorities and distorts the meanings of epistemology and of the quest for Freedom as autonomous issue. At any rate the new role of reason created in response to such needs, by the Indian scholars at this time did not yield any results which could said to have depended our understanding of Vedanta. Even if it can be said