Abstract
Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, clearly one of the early modern doyens of Indian Philosophy, remained much enamored of Western thought—of which he took the ancient to classical tradition as his model—and he spent a good part of his speculative life attempting to reconfigure Indian thought to fit the vesture, maybe the toga, of his Greek heroes, namely Plato and Plotinus, and to an extent of Hegelianism that came across via F. H. Bradley: Occidental in form, and Indian in content. (Incidentally, an adage or motto that was also used to ground modernism in Indian art.) It was as if this ‘fusion’ or ‘harmonization’ was easy of making without compromising what since Max Müller has come to be called ‘Indian Philosophy’ (a trope coined to mimic the dominant movement of Western or Occidental Philosophy). The paper intends to demonstrate this worrisome yet compelling motif by advancing an analysis of certain representative texts and arguments from Radhakrishnan’s prolific writing on Indian Philosophy and East-West Thinking; particularly as these relate to the question of the ‘appearances’ (māyā/avidyā), their alignment with Platonic ‘shadows,’ while finding their redemption in the realism propelled by modern empirical science (that was taken to be coterminous with scientific realism). The paper traces the justification for Radhakrishnan’s variegated moves to ‘save the appearances’ through his strained reading of the Upaniṣadic texts and under-standing of Śaṅkara’s nondualism, leading to the argument that although the world is brought about by māyā, it is not an illusion or nonexistent, or unhinged from the Absolute, but rather naïvely real. There may have been a supplementary political motivation as well inspired by the burgeoning nationalist spirit, after Gandhi, and the need for India to become culturally and morally strong in its own terms (svadeshi svarāj).
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Notes
The Bhagavad Gītā, ‘Introductory Essay’ by S. Radhakrishnan 1970, p. 22.
Ibid., See also Prin Up. 1968. Introduction by S. Radhakrishnan p. 22.
We have scarcely gone past p. 25 of this ‘Introductory Essay’ (ibid.) and already there are scattered references, though mostly in the notes, to Lao Tze, Plotinus, Jesus, St. John of Damascus, Areopagite, Eckhart, Rūmī, Augustine, Jacob Boehme, et al., all with a view to bolstering a kind of mysticism that crudely relates to the Upaniṣadic idealism.
See S. Radhakrishnan (1955): pp. 18–19, especially notes 3 and 4, and pp. 56–61; much of the ideas here seem to bounce off from a short ‘Introduction’ by Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad (but I wonder who really authored it), to S. Radhakrishnan 1952 (ed.), History of Philosophy Eastern and Western, London: George Allen & Unwin, esp. p. 21ff. There is reinforcement in recent scholarship with the finding that the Greek culture did not develop in a vacuum, but rather was both nurtured and influenced by cultures and regions to the southeast of Europe, from Asia Minor to Iran and India (Burkert 2004; Bhattacharjee 2015).
S. Radhakrishnan (1955) p. 60. Alexander had carried the Hellenic culture to the banks of the Indus, and this culture was kept alive for three centuries in Afghanistan and the Punjab.
Ibid., p. 46, p. 60. Such similarities extended to the names as well of their respective gods, e.g., Jupiter, Zeus vs pitā, devas, Varuṇa vs Ouranos, Eos vs Uṣās ... these ‘similarities suggest that the two peoples . . . must have been in communication with each other...’ p. 46.
Ibid., pp. 53–54.
Ibid., p. 51.
Although these are the words of Maulana Azad (‘Introduction,’ p. 25), they do reflect similar sentiments in Radhakrishnan’s ‘Preface’ to the same History of Philosophy East and West (1952) and in his East and West (1955).
S. Radhakrishnan (1955), p. 53.
Ibid., p. 25.
The Bhagavad Gītā, ‘Introduction,’ p. 38.
Charles A. Moore (1952), p. 303.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 299.
Ibid.
The Principal Upaniṣads, pp. 61–62. ‘The androgynous other half of ātman splitting himself into two.’ Bṛh Up I 4 6, cf. Plato’s Symposium 189; in Prin Up, p. 164.
S. Radhakrishnan (1955), p. 57.
The Bhagavad Gītā, comment on p. 40.
S. Radhakrishnan (1980, 1962, 1923), pp. 289ff. See also, J N Mohanty’s ‘Introduction’ to the second edition.
Ibid., p. 47; and taken over apparently by Śrīharṣa, Madhūsadana Sarasvatī, et al.
Radhakrishnan is quite frightened at the specter of nihilism infecting Indian thought more than it did Western thought (he had obviously not read Nietzsche or Heidegger). This would be even more embarrassing for him. Thus, he would have both the material and the mental to be equally objective, against the grain of, say, the Vijṅānavādins.
S. Radhakrishnan (1980, 1962, 1923), pp. 497–499.
Ibid., p. 498.
This is a misleading use of the term apauruṣeya and its superhumanness is not what, nor necessarily just that, is implied by this Mīmāṃsā term, for which see Bilimoria (1989).
S. Radhakrishnan (1980, 1962, 1923), p. 582, Śāṅkarabhāṣya on Māṇḍ. Up. II. 7 is quoted, but this in itself is probably a Gāuḍapādian tact.
Ibid., p. 508.
Ibid., p. 509.
J N Mohanty has an interesting if critical discussion of Radhakrishnan giving primacy to ‘intuition’ in Indian philosophy and among intuitionists in the West (the list includes) ‘Bradley, Bergson, Croce, not to speak of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Pascal. The only Indian philosopher he [R] discusses, in this context, is Śaṁkara’ (Mohanty 1993, p. 322–3). There is even the dubious move to claim a special mode called ‘intellectual intuition’ (the closest to which we get is Descartes’ ‘clearness and distinctness,’ or ‘the clear light of mind’; which Kant had got rid of, keeping ‘intuition’ for sensory experience presented to the intellect to organize through concepts). Some might speak, after Plato, of ‘insight’ as in mathematical constructions; but that is a different sense from Radhakrishnan’s, which seems more of a spiritual and non-constitutive mode of apprehending consciousness and the world (and hence falling outside the standard definition of pramāṇa, where ‘justification according to principles’ is still called for). (Ibid.) Anand Vaidya and I have researched other possible understanding and uses of intuition in comparative philosophy which is yet different from Radhakrishnan’s spiritually nuanced notion, for which see Vaidya and Bilimoria (2018).
The reference is to Phaedrus (exact location not given), ibid., p. 512 fn. 2.
Ibid., p. 513.
Ibid., p. 515.
Ibid.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for Sophia whose constructive comments have helped improve the current reworking over the earlier (rather defective) version; and of course, more literature has come to light since then on Radhakrishnan, philosophy in colonial India, imperial idealism, and the ‘Scientific Temper.’ I also thank my colleague and co-editor of Sophia, Mr Patrick Hutchings Esquire, with whom I have had hearty conversations about Hegel, Neoplatonism, and Radhakrishnan; indeed, Mr Hutchings during a visit to (then dry) India a good while back happened to be a guest at the abode of the then President, who personally saw to it that Mr Hutchings, no tea-tootler himself, got served the best vodka from Moscow—by none other than Dr Radhakrishnan himself: “Thank you, Shri President Sahib; you must have known this Irishman was thirsty!”
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The present paper is a revised and updated version of an earlier publication: ‘Saving the Appearance in Plato’s Academy.’ In Rama Rao Pappu (ed.). New Essays in the Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Delhi: Indian Books Centre, 1995, pp. 327–344.
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Bilimoria, P. S. Radhakrishnan: ‘Saving the Appearances’ in East-West Academy. SOPHIA 58, 31–47 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0691-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0691-4