Search For Absolute In Neo Vedanta

SR No.: 269279
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: George B Burch
Publisher: George B Burch
Total Pages: 57
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 6 MB

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transcendental reflection has its conclusion realized in the very consciousness of the reasoning (II 359). In such transcendental reflection "the free self alone is known to be real and the object is known to be phenomenal” (II 306). Kant's most important thesis, Bhattacharyya says, is "the transcendental ideality of time or the mental world, implying a distinction between self and mind” (II 304). By this, I take it he means: Kant's metaphysics is dissociated from the Augustinian-Cartesian dualism of mental self and material world as real substances and affiliated to non-dualist Vedanta, for which mind and matter are equally illusory as contrasted with the real self.
The three critiques, he insists, must be taken together, but the second is crucial. The conception of apriori knowledge in the first is connected with the moral apprehension of freedom in the second (II 303). Although space is known before time (II 324), the phenomenality of space is dependent on the phenomenality of time, and the latter is dependent on practical knowledge of the self as free causality (II 307). The object is known practically as "an emanation of the self as freedom" (II 305), but the spatio-temporal world is known theoretically as distinct from the self and so implying an unthinkable thing-in-itself, and this contradiction in the object as emanation of self yet not mere idea is resolved in aesthetic consciousness into a self-subsistent value (II 306). Causality, on the other hand, is inapplicable to mental phenomena; time is symbolized by space, and the permanent mind cannot be pictured but is only symbolized by the spatial world as gathered up in body24 ("a point which Kant did not bring out”), hence only the external, not the mental, world is "heur- . istically imagined or reflectively judged to be self-subsistent” (II 311). There is however a practical belief in mental causality bound up with the practical knowledge of free causality. Content of external object, emergence of mental object, and affection of the subject are one and the same fact, that is, sensation (II 315), which is the "conscious limit to free imagination” (II 313), something positively limit
says Kalidas Bhattacharyya (Memorial Volume, 227)—but he remarked to me that his father was always "going beyond," i.e., correcting, Kant. (The editor includes this among the original works in Volume II, not among the critical historical studies in Volume I.)
24 Cf.: "Perceived object necessarily refers to the body and implies distinction from it but the body does not imply distinction from the object but implies only distinction from I" (Studies in Sankhya, I 159). The external world is the projection as phenomenon, through the necessity of experience, of the self as identified with the body (1 160).